A change in the wind is also evident at battlefields like Shiloh in Tennessee, where I met Stacy Allen, now the park’s chief historian and ranger. In the early 2000s, he designed a new educational center at a unit of the park in nearby Corinth, Miss. It puts Civil War combat squarely in the context of slavery, secession and freedom.
“The park service spent too many years focusing on what happened on the battlefield,” rather than the war’s causes, he says. “We were the largest slave-owning society in the world and the only one to fight a war over the issue.”
Mr. Allen has heard some pushback from an “old guard” who feel “Uncle Sam is playing p.c. with our history.” But the vast majority of visitors respond positively, “and that old guard is dying out.”
He does worry about a newly militant armed fringe, as seen in Charlottesville and a week later in Corinth. An anonymous (and empty) internet threat against a Confederate statue there led armed men in rebel regalia to flock to its defense.
Such online mobilization wasn’t possible in the mid-1990s. Extremists I met then circulated information by word-of-mouth or obscure publications from groups with names like Confederate Underground. But hate groups were quick to move to online forums and websites—including the virulently racist Council of Conservative Citizens, or CCC, which Dylann Roof cited as a source of the rage that led him to kill nine black worshipers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
The CCC’s South Carolina chapter organized the flag rally at which I met Walt in 1995. At his home, he shared an Alexandrian library of racist literature, much of it crude, mail-order material. The internet “has made a difference of cosmic proportions,” Walt emailed this past week, and the links he sent me connected to a vast network of hate forums.
When we’d met in person, Walt—who didn’t want his last name printed, then or now—had been eager to engage, including with a black co-worker who challenged his views. Today, Walt seems locked in a cell of internet hate. “I have a keyboard. I have a world of knowledge at my fingertips,” he wrote, when I offered, as a Jew and a journalist, to answer questions about two tribes he despises. He replied, “Try your search engine and input ‘Jews The Enemy of Mankind.’ ”
Walt no longer attends rallies or cares about the flag he used to defend. “ ‘Southern Heritage’ has stood in the way far too long on the road to a National socialist USoA,” he wrote. “The sooner it is done with, the better.”