Why did the South feel the need to erect the massive mountain carving, the largest bas-relief in the world, honoring the Slave-Holders’ Rebellion sixty years after their military defeat? And why did the mayor of New York travel to South Mountain, Georgia (site of the rebirthed Klan in 1915) in 1928 to help unveil the finished head of Confederate general Robert E. Lee? An editorial from the Daily Workers gives some of the reasons.

‘A Monument to Slavery’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 5 No. 86. April 11, 1928.

Industrialization marches through Georgia along the trail that Sherman’s army blazed in 1864. This has something to do with the unveiling of a huge monument to the pro-slavery general, Robert E. Lee, carved in rock on the side of Stone Mountain.

The southern petty-bourgeois is scrambling into the new enterprises being opened up with the aid of northern capital.

The trump card for attracting investments is the cheap labor with no trade unions to interfere with profits. Southern newspapers teem with advertisements calling northern investors to cheap labor, good factory sites, the chance to build “company towns” without incorporation and therefore to be ruled directly from the mill offices. The labor of ruined farmers and their wives and children, forced into seeking work in the new factory system at wages sickening to contemplate from the working class point of view, constitute the pride of the upper class of the South. Wages on which it is necessary for every member of a family to enter the mills, down to the smallest children, lure the half-starved men and women of the rural districts who have never known of the existence of trade unions.

This is the new burst of slavery of the South. Fired with new enthusiasm, the ruling class resurrects its old traditions in the monument to the outstanding historical figure of reaction in the war in which “for the first time in history, Slavery was inscribed upon the banner of revolt.” The stone image of the military lord of blood and steel and human slavery–old General Lee, one of the vilest figures in all history–was unveiled by dapper Jimmie Walker, mayor of Wall Street from which the investments come!

The revitalization of the labor movement which is to come through the present struggles against the yellow trade union bureaucracy, must be made to start a wave of trade unionization of the slaves of the South who are being proletarianized by the industrial development.

The statue on the side of Stone Mountain will yet frown its helpless rage upon a new march through Georgia–the march of the labor movement, trade union and political, which will liberate these slaves, black and white. Old General Lee will suffer another, and final defeat.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1928/1928-ny/v05-n086-NY-apr-11-1928-DW-LOC.pdf