Opinion: Rebel Yell
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| Not the Deep South: The view from Virginia Sen. George Allen’s hometown |
There’s a new installment in the New Republic’s attempted takedown of Virginia Sen./prospective presidential candidate/Southern-Californian-in-denial George Allen. The son of former Rams coach George Herbert Allen, the first-term senator ‘has emerged as the principal conservative alternative to John McCain’ for the 2008 Republican nomination, according to TNR‘s Ryan Lizza. But how will Allen’s history of Confederate flag-waving, first displayed at Palos Verdes High School, affect his candidacy? Lizza quotes some of his former classmates:
In high school, Allen’s ‘Hee Haw’ persona made him a polarizing figure. ‘He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front,’ says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works Department in Manhattan Beach, California. ‘I mean, it was absurd-looking in our neighborhood.’ Hurt Germany, who now lives in Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen’s name. ‘The guy is horrible,’ she complains. ‘He drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can’t believe he’s going to run for president.’ Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also remembers Allen’s obsession with Dixie: ‘My impression is that he was a rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags.’
The articles cite a Times report during Allen’s successful 1993 Virginia gubernatorial run: ‘Though a product of Southern California, he enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1971, and within weeks, he was a Southern good ol’ boy. He wore boots, chewed tobacco and displayed a Confederate flag in his room, friends recalled. He also became a master of Thomas Jefferson trivia.’
Allen’s seeming self-invention as an unreconstructed Southerner has some conservatives rethinking, and some hitting back. At the Red State blog one anonymous poster finds the Confederate trappings ‘troubling.’ Another calls it ‘smoke and spin, hype and hate.’
Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker writes, ‘I’m not here to defend Allen or the Confederate flag,’ and then, well, sort of does both: ‘I know that the Confederate flag is a complicated symbol that means different things to different people. Racist to some, for sure, it is a symbol of history and family valor for others. I also know that if we’re going to scrutinize people’s high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run.’ She takes a broad swipe at the left coast: ‘In California in the early ‘70s, when everybody was smoking dope, protesting the Vietnam War and waging lovefests, slapping a Confederate flag sticker on your red Mustang and wearing a Confederate lapel pin was most likely the act of a rebel, not a racist.’
Allen responded last weekend to Hotline that the story was ‘erroneous’ and ‘vicious’: ‘It does not reflect my views, record or what I aim to do in the future.’ He said the Confederate flag ‘means different things to different people,’ including ‘valor’ and ‘lynching.’ ‘It means all these things,’ the senator said. Also on Monday, the Washington Post reported on Allen’s ‘journey of racial conciliation’ to a former segregationist stronghold and his semi-endorsement of a congressional apology for slavery.
Palos Verdes principal Chris Bowles told Opinion L.A. that he has approached the senator about speaking at his alma mater, but Allen has so far declined, citing scheduling conflicts. Bowles isn’t aware of any reaction to the New Republic story on campus, where racial conflict doesn’t resonate deeply. ‘It’s upper-class, upper-middle-class, it tends to be more on the conservative side, but it’s still California,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the Deep South.’