(bright music) (fingers tapping) (bell ringing) (ribbon whirring) - Hello, I'm here in the Mossback's den with my colleague Stephen Hegg for an episode we're calling "Upon Further Review."

We replay all or part of a previous episode, talk about viewer reaction, new information, sometimes further research.

(quirky music) Doing an episode on the Seattle Freeze, Seattle's antisocial streak, a couple of years ago, we traced the Freeze back in time to the 1920s and also to World War II.

Let's show that part of the episode.

Roll the video.

In 1942, a woman, Helen Markley Miller, moved to Seattle for wartime work.

What she found was a city full of new people, unaffordable housing, unfriendly people.

She blasted Seattle in her newspaper stories about how unfriendly and unhelpful the locals were.

Quote, "Seattle as a word may have a musical sound, a lilt of its own to all you elder residents, but to me it is an Indian word meaning pfui."

She said the city lacked affordable housing, the old timers were clubby, and the city was run by smug burghers.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

(quirky music continues) There's a huge spike in population, affordability goes out the window.

When lots of newcomers come to town, it is grumpy time.

We showed brief footage of downtown Seattle in the 1940s, and viewers noticed that the bunting over the street wasn't your normal American flags but featured a Confederate flag.

Viewers called us on it.

"Why did you run a picture of the Confederate flags, and what were they doing there?

Please explain."

- As producer, I was looking for archival footage of Seattle in the 1940s, street scenes, people coming and going, traffic, and I found great color footage of a great celebration on Fifth Avenue, and within all these flags, there happened to be a glimpse of a Confederate flag.

- Well, it turned out it wasn't just one Confederate flag.

It was a whole bunch of Confederate flags.

- And I thought there was just one very recognizable Confederate flag.

- And there is, except there's also the Confederate national flag, which is also red, white, and blue and frequently (laughing) confused with the American flag, so we began to track it down, the reader's question, why was it there?

And what we determined was this footage was from the winter of 1940.

We recognized it wasn't 4th of July.

People were wearing overcoats.

Well, it turns out that the Seattle premiere of (laughing) "Gone With the Wind" was at the Fifth Avenue Theater, and Fifth Avenue was festooned with (laughing) Confederate flags of all kinds.

- Why was that acceptable even in 1940 in Seattle?

- Well, something changed in the early 20th century.

There was a book, "The Clansman," by Thomas Dixon and turned into a play, played at the Moore Theater, incredibly racist play in which the Klan are the heroes of the South.

"The Seattle Times" was disgusted by this.

They refused to review it.

There were protests against it.

Go a little bit forward to 1915.

The film "Birth of a Nation" comes out.

It's the Klansmen but on the big screen.

People loved it.

"The Seattle Times" loved it.

There was a mainstreaming of the Southern version of history.

Reconstruction was evil.

The Klan in the Northwest flowered in the 1920s, so by the time you get to 1939 with "Gone With the Wind," the mood has changed.

There's nostalgia for the Old South.

People are dressing like Southern belles.

- What other examples of this racist nostalgia were expressed in the Northwest?

- Well, of course, you had the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and that was very strong in the Northwest.

But you had active civic groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy who were putting on balls celebrating Robert E. Lee's birthday, and groups like that also promoted things like Confederate statues.

Highway 99 was dubbed the Jefferson Davis Highway, so this is all happening in that same period of time.

- Let's bring it around again to the Seattle Freeze, which was our original subject in that segment.

What did that mean for Seattle and the Northwest's Black population?

- It was devastating.

I mean, you had a community that was relatively tolerant of the Black community at one point in the very beginning of the 20th century, and this steady exclusion, redlining, housing covenants that banned black Americans from neighborhoods.

And then, you had the white population beginning to really romanticize and embrace this kind of nostalgia for the South, which ignored the enslavement of people.

It ignored why the war was fought and who fought it.

(pensive music) If people expressed outrage at "The Clansman" at the Moore, fewer objected to "Birth of a Nation."

And by 1940 when the flags flew, the Confederacy was normalized and romanticized in the white population.

I discovered no objection to those banners then as there would be outrage now.

(pensive music continues) - [Narrator] Hear more about this episode on the "Mossback Podcast."

Just search Mossback wherever you listen.