In 1892, Atlanta was caught in an ideological tug of war. If you believed Henry Grady, the city was a thriving business hub, the North’s gateway to the South and, equally, the South’s to the North. It was progressive, forward-thinking, willing to put its past behind and focus on a prosperous future. But if you believed Davis—and the crowd of admirers who cheered him on—Atlanta was far from finished with the Old South. Indeed, Atlantans had just begun reckoning with their city’s role in the Civil War. Like the rest of the region, they cushioned bitter memories with nostalgia, a longing for a past that never was and a present that never would be.
The Cyclorama shares Atlanta’s ambivalence. Its meaning has proved malleable. It is possible to see a Union rout or a Confederate victory, a narrative of glorious emancipation or of tragic Lost Cause, an appeal for reconciliation or an acknowledgement of division. The Cyclorama reflects either an Atlanta that longed for its past or an Atlanta where even monuments were ahead of their time.
The form is unstable, too: the Cyclorama is neither art nor monument nor commercial enterprise—and yet, it has been all three. The painting resists definition.
For that reason, the Cyclorama was, and still is, the perfect Atlanta monument. In the 1890s, a wave of commemoration and nostalgia made the Cyclorama a symbol of a Confederate victory that had never happened, a beacon for the Lost Cause, and a reminder of how Atlanta had almost changed the course of the War and saved the Old South. In the 1930s, Atlanta’s boosters and business leaders tried to use the Cyclorama to meld this Lost Cause ideology with a new “Atlanta Spirit” driven by commercial progressivism. What they got was less a melding, more a tacit agreement to disagree: Old and New South began to coexist. It took decades of gradual progress to rupture the dual nature, old and new, of 1930s Atlanta. And when that rupture occurred in the 1970s, the Cyclorama was once again swept into a debate about memory. This time, suburban whites clung to an Old South and clashed with Atlantans who wanted to re-appropriate the Cyclorama for an Atlanta remade by the Civil Rights Movement, no longer mired in myths of Confederate glory.
The Cyclorama depicts a battle; fitting, then, that it became a battleground—a longstanding site of contested memory. Examining its history helps us to see how Atlanta’s memory of the Civil War has evolved and changed. But it tells us even more about how Atlanta chose to imagine itself—and it shows that, as late as the 1970s, perhaps even today, it has not yet figured out just how southern it wants to be.