Okay, so I'm a few days late on these. But I'm still going.
Edward Sebesta's April 27 issue is another selection from the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine (Nov 1957), by former Florida governor Millard Caldwell. Yet another illustration of how the fans of the Confederacy are not honoring merely abstract qualities of Courage, Honor, Loyalty, or whatever benign face they try to put on it for the gullible. They This piece by Caldwell is a rant about the "judicial tyranny" of the Supreme Court ruling segregated public schools unconstitutional and the evil of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower enforcing it in Little Rock High School.
For my value-addition for this date, or at least a passing-something-else-on, I have a quote describing something about the historical development of the Lost Cause ideology and how it became intertwined with conservative white political perspectives in the states of the old Confederacy. It's from an essay called "The Immortal Confederacy" by history and religion professor Lloyd A. Hunter in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000). In that piece, Hunter is examining the specific celebrations and rituals through which the Lost Cause myth wa popularized and internalized in the post-Civil War years:
Two facts about those years [1865-1890] produced an atmosphere conducive to the growth of South-wide Confederate organizations: Reconciliation was proceeding resolutely and with much speed, and the Lost Cause had gained an important foothold in the mind of the South. The celebration of America's centennial in 1876 elevated reconciliation to a prime theme in the national arena, and in the next decasde significant events helped to weld the nation together. These included the rise of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency and his subsequent removal of federa troops from Southern soil; Hayes's tour of Dixie during which he participated in Southern [Confederate] Memorial Day exercises; the universal grief over the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881; and the appearance of ex-Confederates as pallbearers at Ulysses S. Grant's funeral in 1885.
The "reconciliation" of North and South spoken of here was in reality a reconciliation between the white North and the white South at the expense of the rights of African-American citizens. The recent PBS series Reconstruction: The Second Civil War gives a good general account of what the defeat of Reconstruction meant. The Web site has a useful set of links, including links to watch the program itself.
At the same time that Reconstruction was happily becoming a memory [again, happily for whites opposed to black citizens' rights], the Lost Cause was becoming myth. As W.J. Cash cogently demonstrates, the 1880s marked a period of Southern flight from reality. The war took on a nostalgic glow, and the Cause seemed in danger of "slipping into the past." White Southerners therefore joined it there - at least in spirit - and the symbols of its expression began to abound. Plans for united Confederate action got under way, the erection of monuments became ever more frequent, the oratory of the Lost Cause flowered beyond its previous bloom, and Confederate museums - even a Battle Abbey - began to do the landscape, taking on the aura of holy places.
The idolization of the Confederacy became part of the general political ideology of the conservative and segregated South, which by 1880 was largely denying the vote and basic civil rights to black citizens. The ideology of the Lost Cause served the pro-segregation cause in 1880 just as it did in 1957.
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