On Sunday, Salon’s Jefferson Morley contended that the United States adopted the “Star Spangled Banner” as its national anthem due to an ascendant “neo-Confederate spirit” during the decades after the Civil War. Morley played up that “observing Memorial Day and singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ are uncontroversial patriotic gestures, yet there is no disputing that neo-Confederates developed these rituals.”
However, the author glossed over the military’s significant contribution to the popularization of the song, along with the role of a major veterans’ group that helped get the tune officially adopted as the national anthem.
Morley first outlined in his item, “It is time to examine the words and the origins of our national anthem, another neo-Confederate symbol,” that the ongoing controversy over Confederate monuments is part of a “the popular repudiation — and violent defense — of the neo-Confederate ideology that has shaped the symbols of American public life for the last 150 years. Some of these symbols now draw protests, while others are woven into public life.”
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