The Lost Cause

The myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy was a distortion of the history of the U.S. Civil War that’s still affecting the world today.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Holly, this
has been a weird year. What show that's a totally
normal I live in a closet. I mean, it's been

(00:25):
a weird year in general, has been a really weird
year to work on this podcast. We recorded an episode
back in March where we talked about some of that
and how just strange it was to be working on
the show and living in this moment that was clearly
historically significant, that moment being the pandemic at that time,
and that sense of strangeness has really continued. It also,

(00:47):
i think escalated with the other things that have also
happened since then. Yes, future historians will have quite a
lot of layers to peel on this onion that is. Yeah,
So like this whole sense of very surreal uh, stuff
like that went on through the widespread protests against police

(01:09):
brutality and racism that started in the late spring and summer,
and now as we're recording this, the truly bizarre afterlife
of the presidential election. For most of this year has
really felt like either we just wrote an episode that's
suddenly not relevant anymore, or we've been working on episodes

(01:31):
feeling like they're just gonna come out in this black hole.
If we don't know what the world is going to
be like, then is this gonna seem really tone deaf
when it publishes in a week and a half. Yeah, so, um,
we're recording this on December one. Who knows what the
world is going to be like when it actually gets
to people's feeds. In a way, with all this just bizarre, strange,

(01:53):
disorienting chaos that we have all been living through, the
election has felt uniquely disord orienting because there are clear
historical precedents for the pandemic and the protests and the
conditions that led to the protests, and we have talked
about a lot of those things on the show before.
But while there have been disputed elections in the United States,

(02:17):
we don't really have a one to one comparison to
a sitting president having clearly lost the election making all
kinds of baseless and often verifiably false claims about having
actually won it in all caps yes. However, another piece

(02:40):
of this very strange post election season is this attempt
to just promote the idea that the election was somehow
rigged in favor of President elect Joe Biden. And so
if we look at things more generally and we talk
about attempts to create a narrative to reframe a loss
so that it will be more favorable to the losing side,

(03:02):
there are definite precedents for that in history, and one
of them is the subject of today's episode, which is
the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which
was a distortion of the history of the US Civil
War that is still affecting the world today. Just a
heads up that we cannot possibly delve into every conceivable

(03:22):
nuance of this in an episode. UH. One of the
many books about how the Civil War is remembered is
called Race and Reunion The Civil War in American Memory.
That's by David W. Blight. And not counting the notes
and the index of that book, it is almost four
hundred pages long, and the author describes that as a

(03:46):
quote synthetic and selective work on a vast topic. So
we are kind of looking at the big picture overview
of this and not every conceivable facet of it. So
the Lost Cause was part ideology, part social movement. Since
its purpose was to promote an a historical interpretation of
the U. S. Civil War, we gotta start with a

(04:08):
recap of what exactly the Lost Cause was trying to undermine.
Although there were other factors that played a much smaller role,
the primary issue that drove the U. S. Civil War was,
of course slavery. You can certainly make the argument that
the North went toward to preserve the union, but under
that argument, the reason the Union was in jeopardy in
the first place was still slavery. And this was not

(04:31):
a new division. Disagreements over slavery and efforts to accommodate
slave states for the sake of keeping the union together.
Let's go all the way back to before the drafting
of the U. S. Constitution, and they're represented in the
Constitution itself. So all the language that we're about to
talk about still exists in the Constitution today, although the

(04:52):
thirteenth and fourteenth Amendments supersedes some of it. Article one,
Section two sets up the framework for the House of
Representatives and how members of that body will be apportioned.
It reads, in part quote, Representatives and directs taxes shall
be apportioned among the several states which may be included
within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall

(05:14):
be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons,
including those bound to service for a term of years,
and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.
So this is known as the three fifths Compromise. And
even though it doesn't specifically mention slavery, everyone understood that

(05:35):
other persons here met enslaved Africans. Southern states wanted their
enslaved population to count for the purpose of apportionment, and
that would give those states more legislative power and help
protect the institution of slavery. They did not want their
tax burden to increase by that amount, though, so this
solution was to count three fifths of the enslaved population.

(05:58):
Article one, section nine address us the international slave trade,
though again without using that language, it reads quote, the
migration or importation of such persons as any of the
states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not
be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand,
eight hundred and eight, But attacks or duty may be

(06:19):
imposed on such importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person.
In other words, while the government could impose attacks or
a duty on enslaved people brought into the country, it
could not ban the international slave trade. Before eight and then,
Article four came to be known as the fugitive slave clause. Quote.

(06:40):
No person held to service or labor in one state
under the laws thereof escaping into another, shall, and consequence
of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such
service or labor, but shall be delivered up on the
claim of the party to whom such service or labor
maybe do Delegates from the slaveholding states would not have

(07:03):
accepted the Constitution without these provisions, each of which protected
slavery and the interests of enslavers and slave states, And
over time, the growth of anti slavery sentiments and abolition
movements in the northern states became increasingly threatening to the
slave states of the South. To be clear, there were
also abolitionists in the South, including enslaved people advocating for

(07:26):
their own liberation and liberating themselves, but the national balance
of power between North and South is what we're really
focused on here. Beginning in about eighteen twelve, the United
States started intentionally admitting new states into the Union in
pairs one slave and one free state to maintain this
purported balance, and this continued until eighteen fifty, when California

(07:51):
became the first free state admitted without a corresponding slave state.
The Compromise of eighteen fifty was a collection of laws
meant to diffuse some of the tension from this shift,
one of those being a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act.
In eighteen fifty four, the Republican Party was established to
try to resist the expansion of slavery into the western

(08:12):
territories of the United States. By the election of eighteen sixty,
it was widely believed that the election of a Republican
president would spell the end of slavery and would prompt
slave states to secede from the Union. This came to
pass after Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected as president on
November six, eighteen sixty. After Lincoln's election, Senator John J.

(08:35):
Crittenden of Kentucky proposed a collection of constitutional amendments and
Senate resolutions, some of which would make slavery permanent and
part of the country, to try to head off a
secession crisis. Unsurprisingly, this proposal was supported by the slave
states but denounced by the free states, so it failed.

(08:55):
And then on December eighteen sixty, South Carolina became the
first eight to announce that it was seceding from the Union.
South Carolina issued a declaration of the immediate Causes which
induce and justify the Secession of South Carolina from the
Federal Union. This document read, in part quote, an increasing
hostility on the part of the non slaveholding states to

(09:18):
the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of
their obligations, and the laws of the general Government have
ceased to affect the objects of the Constitution. Other states
issued similar documents when they succeeded. They're going to have
a couple of examples. This one's from Georgia. Quote. For
the last ten years, we have had numerous and serious

(09:39):
causes of complaint against our non slaveholding Confederate states with
reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored
to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility,
and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations
to us in reference to that property and by the

(10:01):
use of their power in the federal government have striven
to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common
territories of the Republic. This is from Mississippi quote. Our
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. The
greatest material interest in the world. Its labor supplies the
product which constitutes by far the largest and most important

(10:23):
portions of commerce on the earth. These products are peculiar
to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by
an imperious law of nature, none but the black race
can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have
become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery
is a blow at commerce and civilization. Texas and Virginia

(10:45):
issued similar documents containing similar sentiments as well, and while
some of these documents did also spend a significant amount
of space discussing states rights in general, the rights that
were being discussed all circled back to slavery. They included
things like the right to take enslaved people into free
states without there being freed as a consequence. So these

(11:07):
documents supported the slave states rights to maintain slavery, but
not really the free states rights to outlaw or restrict it.
A Constitution of the Confederate States was adopted on March eleventh,
nineteen one. Unlike the US Constitution, this one made several direct,
specific references to slavery and enslaved people. Ten days later,

(11:29):
Alexander Stephens, vice President of the Confederate States of America,
delivered what came to be known as the Cornerstone Speech.
It said that this new constitution had quote put at
rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution,
African slavery as it exists amongst us, the proper status

(11:50):
of the Negro in our form of civilization. This was
the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
So yeah, there were, of course cultural and economic differences
between the North and the South, and other issues that
you can cite as contributing factors in all of this,
but there is overwhelming documented evidence that the biggest issue,

(12:13):
and the one that was the most important, was slavery.
It seems unlikely that the Confederate States would have shied
away from that stance had they won the war. Slavery
was right there in the Confederate States Constitution, including the
clause quote no bill of attainder ex post facto law
or law denying or impairing the right of property in
negro slaves shall be passed. But instead the Confederacy suffered

(12:38):
a humiliating defeat that left the question of how the
nation could possibly be whole again and how the South
could envision itself after this turn of events, And we're
going to talk about that after we pause for a
sponsor break. After the US of A War, there were

(13:01):
a lot of questions about how to reunite the country,
like what would states have to do to be readmitted
into the Union? What would former confederates have to do
to earn some kind of pardon, How could the places
that had suffered material damage as a result of the
war be rebuilt? And how could the social, economic, and

(13:21):
political injustice that had both enabled and grown from the
existence of slavery be addressed and rectified. We have talked
about a lot of this in previous episodes of the
show that relate to the period of U s history
known as Reconstruction, and those episodes include our two part
on Robert Small's that we put out as a Saturday
Classic this summer, and our two part on the Wilmington's

(13:43):
coup that came out in a lot of these questions
were practical, like would former Confederate leaders have to stand trial?
What kind of services would be provided for formerly enslaved people?
Where would the money come from to pay for those services?
But some of these questions were a little bit more abstract,
like what did this mean for white Southern identity? How

(14:06):
could the Southern States defend themselves from mockery, shame, and
accusations of treason from the white Southern point of view.
Answers to a lot of these more nebulous questions rested
on a set of ideas that came to be known
as the Lost Cause. That's a term that was popularized
by the eighteen sixties six book of the same name
by Edward Pollard of Virginia. The biggest and most important

(14:30):
piece of the Lost Cause myth was that the Civil
War had not been about slavery. Southern States had succeeded
over the issue of states rights, and that had been
the cause of the war. According to this idea, still
here it on occasion. I don't know if on occasion
is even strong enough. And being super polite, even though

(14:50):
the Lost Cause narrative claimed that the Civil War was
not about slavery. It also reimagined slavery itself. According to
Lost Cause proponents, slavery was not an evil institution. Enslavers
in this version of the story are benevolent. They looked
after their enslaved workforce, providing housing, clothing, and food, and
generally giving enslaved people a better life than they would

(15:13):
have had otherwise. Also, according to this narrative, enslaved people
were happy, grateful, loyal, dedicated to their enslavers. Folded into
all of this was the idea that people of African
descent weren't capable of handling their own affairs, that they
somehow needed the guidance and supervision of their enslavers. Even

(15:34):
though the Lost Cause took great pains to minimize the
documented horrors of slavery, it also contended that slavery was
well on its way to dying out on its own.
Sort of a corollary to this reimagining of slavery was
the myth of the Black Confederate, which became way more
popular later on, uh in the nineteen seventies in particular,

(15:58):
like it had kind of a heyday. This was the
idea that enslaved black people were so loyal and cared
for that they willingly volunteered to fight for the Confederacy,
and enormous numbers estimates for how many Black Confederates they're
supposedly were are all over the place. There anywhere from
five hundred to a hundred thousands such soldiers, depending on

(16:19):
who you read. The reality is that enslaved Africans were
a massive source of labor within the Confederate army. They
worked as body servants, cooks, and manual laborers. But they
weren't soldiers and they were not volunteers. They were enslaved.
Confederate forces also captured and enslaved free black people in
the places they moved through or occupied during the war.

(16:43):
Historian Kevin m Levin has written a whole book about
this called Searching for Black Confederates. The Civil Wars most
persistent myths. Yeah, people like to use photos of soldiers
posing with their enslaved servants as like some kind of
evidence that there were a whole lot of soldiers and
that the person the picture is really depicting is enslaving.

(17:05):
The person next to them like that is not a
volunteer soldier who went with him. So the lost cause
ideology also framed the South's defeat as something that was inevitable.
Under this ideology, Confederate generals were brilliant, they were gifted
in their strategy and their tactics, and the South was
defeated only because the North had superior numbers and resources.

(17:28):
So the ideas the South was just overwhelmed. So it
wasn't that Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders failed
to develop an effective strategy to offset the fact that
the Northern states were more industrialized and more densely populated.
It was just that there was no strategy that ever
would have been enough. This idea that the Confederate war

(17:49):
effort was doomed from the beginning is the source of
that lost cause Moniker. Within this reframing, Confederate generals were
universally gentlemen. All of the soldiers were noble and gallant.
White women were also perfect examples of Southern femininity. They
had sacrificed for the cause of freedom and had borne

(18:11):
up under immense struggle. More broadly, Antebellum life in the
South was described as universally genteel and refined, with plantations
romanticized as idyllic, expansive homes and fields rather than the reality,
which was that they were slave labor camps. Yes, so
I want to take a minute for like a more
personal note. I understand that for a lot of people

(18:32):
this this history is very personally important to them and
their families. If you're about to write us an angry
email about your second or third great grandfather who served
for the South, I have second and third great grandfathers too,
So I get it. Like you want to think that
your ancestors were on the right side of history, but
they really just were not in this case. Eventually, proponents

(18:57):
of the Lost Cause ideology started to read frame the
period of reconstruction as well, and under this idea, reconstruction
was not an attempt to repair the damage of the
war and to address injustice. It was an effort to
just punish the South and exact retribution. And Northerners who
came to the South to assist with this whole process,

(19:18):
We're not, according to Lost Cause proponents, motivated by altruism
or philanthropy. According to the Lost Cause, they were unscrupulous,
corrupt carpetbaggers who were only in it for the money,
money that they were going to get illegitimately. So we
referenced Edward Pollard's book The Lost Cause earlier, and while
that book did popularize this term, the movement itself is

(19:41):
not something that just started and ended with one book.
It was much bigger. Glimmers of the Lost Cause ideology
were present at least as early as General Robert Elie's
farewell address, also called General Order Number nine, delivered the
day before he surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, and that
began quote, after four years of arduous service, marked by

(20:02):
unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has
been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. I
need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard
fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that
I have consented to this result from no distrust of them,
but feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that

(20:24):
would compensate for the loss that would have attended the
continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless
sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to
their countrymen. After the war was over. White Southern women's
groups that had been focused on providing aid during the
war started instead focusing on memorializing the fallen and honoring

(20:47):
returning soldiers. And some of this certainly included absolutely legitimate
work like burying the dead and holding funerals and helping
to care for women and children who had lost their
husbands and fathers. But running alongside all of that work
were efforts to reinforce the idea of the Southern War
Effort as this noble, doomed endeavor that was not about slavery.

(21:12):
In the late eighteen sixties, men's veterans groups became part
of this effort as well. The Southern Historical Society was
established in April of eighteen sixty nine to ensure that
this version of Civil War history would be remembered. Former
Confederate General Jubil A. Early was the Southern Historical Society's
first president and was a major proponent of the Lost Cause.

(21:36):
Although many Confederate memorials were built much later, which we
will talk about, some were raised in the years immediately
after the war was over. In April of eighteen sixty six,
Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederate States
went on a tour to dedicate memorials and multiple cities,
including Montgomery, Alabama, in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia. Prominent Confederate

(22:00):
years were also lionized after their death, depicted as noble,
nearly flawless heroes and eulogies and early biographies. This included
Robert E. Lee, who died on October twelfth, eighteen seventy.
Biographies written shortly after his death characterized him as a
devout Christian who hated slavery, even though his cruelty to

(22:22):
his own enslaved workforce, including breaking up their families in
either ordering or carrying out the whipping of people who escaped,
was documented. His opinions on the supremacy of the white
race were also very well documented. Yeah, he was definitely
a Christian, but that did not somehow undo the other part.
Jefferson Davis was similarly eulogized after his death on December

(22:46):
six nine. More than a hundred thousand mourners paid their
respects as his body lay in state in New Orleans, Louisiana,
and then from there his remains were taken by train
to their final resting place in Richmond, Virginia, and in
the train made stops along the way, with the crowds
honoring his passing by laying magnolia blossoms on the tracks

(23:07):
and firing their guns into the air. At Sometimes these
crowds were so large the train had to stop so
they could be cleared away. Not every former Confederate figure
was similarly treated, though. For example, after the war, former
Confederate General William Mahone became one of the leaders of
the Readjuster Party in Virginia. This party was a coalition

(23:29):
of black and white political leaders that dominated Virginia politics
from eighteen seventy nine to eighty three, with many black
members of the coalition being elected into state and federal office.
Mahones presence at Confederate reunions had to be sort of
explained away, with organizers stressing that everyone should remember his
wartime service rather than focusing on his political career. By

(23:53):
the eighteen nineties, the Lost Cause ideology was immensely popular
in the South, and it was gaining traction else are.
The magazine Confederate Veteran was launched in eighteen ninety three,
and by nineteen hundred it had more than twenty thousand subscribers,
and it was by far the most popular and widely
read journal in the South. The United Daughters of the

(24:14):
Confederacy was established in eighteen ninety four and was heavily
involved in promoting the Lost Cause myth. In eighteen ninety six,
the Confederate Museum, which was initially focused on a Lost
Cause interpretation of the war, was opened in Richmond, Virginia.
Historians and commentators criticized the Lost Cause ideology. Throughout all

(24:34):
of this, there were grains of truth to it, such
as that there were white women who had made huge
sacrifices during the war and soldiers who had volunteered out
of a sense of patriotic duty, but a lot of
it was just flatly false. Critics pointed out that the
Lost Cause narrative tried to erase all kinds of horrors,
including the existence of the Ku Klux Klan and the

(24:56):
practice of lynching, while also leaning on racist depictions of
black people that allowed the clan and lynching to flourish.
Black leaders and their white allies also noted that accepting
the false tenets of the Lost Cause meant abandoning Black
Americans in the work of reconstruction and erasing the horrors
and ongoing destructive legacy of slavery. Abolitionists and other reformers

(25:20):
called for the rejection of this entire narrative. At the
same time, though in a lot of the North and
at the federal level, there was also this sense that
accepting the Lost Cause narrative, or at least not pushing
back against it too hard, might help unify the nation
and allow it to heal from the war. However, this

(25:41):
purported reunification but the emotional healing of white people ahead
of everyone else, particularly black Americans. So in terms of
national politics, the Northern States were complicit and allowing this
fiction to stand for the sake of the Union at
the expense of some of the Union's most marginalized citizens.
I see this as a continuation of all those earlier

(26:03):
concessions and appeasements that go all the way back to
the drafting of the Constitution, and the Lost Cause was
still being reinforced well into the twentieth century. And we're
going to get into that after a sponsor break. Much

(26:24):
of the national dialogue following the US Civil War had
been about reunification and reconciliation and coming together, and eventually
this included soldiers who had been on opposite sides of
the war. Although there had been smaller events earlier on,
the first major Civil War reunion involving soldiers from both

(26:45):
sides was the Manassas Piece Jubilee in July of nineteen eleven.
This happened at the start of a series of fiftieth
anniversary remembrances that would go on until nineteen fifteen. About
ten thousand people attended this event, including about three hundred
Confederate and about a hundred and twenty five United States veterans.

(27:06):
A much larger event took place in nineteen thirteen, with
more than fifty three thousand veterans assembling at Gettysburg. This
was a massive event, with states in the federal government
providing funding for everything from getting veterans to Gettysburg to
feeding them and providing emergency medical care while they were there.
Most of the veterans attending this were very elderly, and

(27:27):
the weather was brutally hot, so that medical care was
a vital part of the plan. Yeah, and even with it,
there were there were people who died on the scene
at the reunion because they were in their advanced years
and the weather was just punishing again. The theme with
all this was reconciliation and healing, but again for white
people at the expense of black people who had been

(27:50):
harmed by slavery in the war and their descendants who
were still being harmed by ongoing racism and violence. And
the words of the Washington b which is a newspaper
with a pre dominantly black readership based in Washington, d c. Quote,
the occasion is to be called a reunion, a reunion
of whom only those who fought for the preservation of

(28:10):
the Union and the extinction of human slavery. Is it
to be an assemblage of those who fought to destroy
the Union and perpetuate slavery, and who are now employing
every artifice and argument known to deceit and sophistry to
propagate a national sentiment in favor of their nefarious contention
that emancipation, reconstruction, and enfranchisement are dismal failures. Some of

(28:35):
the most visible remnants of the Lost Cause ideology came
about during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. He came into
office in n The first film screening at the White
House happened during his presidency. It was the film Birth
of a Nation, originally known as The Klansman, which included
quotes from one of Wilson's history books, A History of

(28:56):
the American People. Wilson was a proponent of the Lost
Cause and the Dunning School, named for historian William A. Dunning,
who interpreted reconstruction as a failure. Birth of a Nation
embraced the Lost Cause ideology, using racist depictions of black
Americans to frame reconstruction as deeply damaging to white people.

(29:17):
It is also credited with a resurgence in the Ku
Klux Klan, which is depicted in the film, saving the
South from the horrors of reconstruction. By the time Wilson
became president, Reconstruction was long over and many of the
gains and civil rights for black Americans that had been
implemented during that time had already been lost. Wilson was

(29:38):
the first Southern president elected since Reconstruction, and he continued
that trend of rolling back civil rights, including segregating or
allowing his cabinet to segregate a number of federal bureaus
and offices, as well as the U. S. Navy. Wilson
ran for a second term as president on a platform
that included keeping the United States out of World War One,

(30:02):
but after he was elected, he began preparing to go
to war, including constructing new camps for training newly recruited
military personnel. This is when U. S. Military bases started
to be named after Confederate leaders, even though those leaders
fought against the U. S. Military during the Civil War.
So after the end of the Civil War, the U. S.

(30:24):
Army had occupied eleven Southern states, with troops being removed
after the state had met with requirements to rejoin the Union.
The last of these troops were removed after the eighteen
seventy six presidential election, and that was one of the
disputed elections that we nodded to at the start of
the show. The candidates in this election were Democrat Samuel

(30:46):
Tilden and Republican Rutherford be Hayes. Tilden had won the
popular vote, but didn't have enough votes to be declared
the winner, and the Electoral College and then the electoral
College votes from three states were disputed. There were result
was the Compromise of eighteen seventy seven. Hayes would become president,
and in exchange, among other concessions, he agreed to place

(31:09):
a Democrat in his cabinet and to withdraw the federal
troops that were still occupying parts of the South. This
is generally seen as the end of Reconstruction, and for
decades there wasn't a large military presence in the South.
Because of the legacy of Reconstruction, the idea of sending
troops to the South had become something of a taboo.
But less than forty years later, the expansion of the

(31:32):
military and preparation for World War One meant that camps
had to be built in the South. We needed a
lot of camps. We had to put them somewhere. So
as part of the effort to make these encampments more
palatable in the places where they were being built, they
were named for former Confederate generals and other Confederate military figures,

(31:53):
including camps named for Robert E. Lee and Pierre G. T. Beauregard, which,
along with others, were built in nineteen seventeen. Encampment's name
for General Braxton Bragg and General Henry Lewis Benning followed
in nineteen eighteen. It really became a standard practice for
new encampments and forts built in the South to be

(32:14):
named after Confederate military leaders, even though again these were
the enemy of the U. S. Army during the Civil War.
As these bases were being built, another trend was developing,
that of erecting statues to honor Confederate soldiers, many of
which were arranged and funded by the United Daughters of
the Confederacy. Although as we said earlier, some memorials were

(32:38):
built just after the Civil War, their number really started
to grow after about eighteen ninety, with the first Surgeon
statues peaking between nineteen ten and nineteen thirty. As we've
talked about in our previous episodes on the Harlem hell
Fighters and read Summer, there was an intense backlash against
the great migration of Black Americans to more northern states

(33:00):
and against Black Americans advocacy for equal rights. These newly
erected statues were part of that backlash by the white majority,
and another smaller surge in their installations happened during the
civil rights movement of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. YEA,
they were sort of part reminder of who's in charge

(33:20):
here and part ongoing whitewashing of the Civil War. Although
some cities could afford to hire a professional sculptor to
create the monument. A lot of these were mass produced
and ordered through the mail. One major supplier was Monumental
Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, whose US and Confederate soldier

(33:43):
statues were almost identical except for whether they had a
US or a CS on the belt buckle. Meanwhile, one
of the most widely popular pieces of Lost Cause fiction
came into print, and then to the screen, Gone with
the Wind, which debuted in nineteenth d nine and was
based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell that came out

(34:03):
three years earlier. So, as we have alluded to, we
still see glimpses of the city. But in the post
World War two era, more historians started returning to the
subject of the Civil War and the Lost Cause, which
by this point had made its way into history textbooks
all over the country. Historical sites and museums also started

(34:24):
re examining their collections and their missions after the war,
as these institutions started trying to more accurately represent the
war and its repercussions. This has really been an ongoing,
many year effort. The Museum of the Confederacy, which we
mentioned earlier, merged with the American Civil War Center in
twent thirteen to form the American Civil War Museum, and

(34:46):
that's a museum that tries to give a more honest
look at the Civil War. But you can still see
glimpses of the Lost Cause narrative all over the place,
And this decade's long failure to honestly reckon with the
Civil War has done so much damage. Polls about how
many Americans know or don't know that the Civil War
was about slavery or regular occurrence. But it's not just

(35:09):
whether people know a particular fact about history. The lost
Cause ideology contributed to racist violence and discrimination all over
the United States, and as we've already mentioned, it put
the emotional healing of the idea of the nation and
of white people in the South ahead of justice for
formerly enslaved people and their descendants. So this is a

(35:29):
great example about how this kind of false narrative is
not just about whether people know a particular intangible truth.
It also has real and ongoing consequences that we still
feel today. Yeah, we still see them in our inbox
in response to episodes. From time to time, I have
gotten in arguments with friends about that whole state's rights

(35:51):
business and I'm like to own slaves, That's what I can't. Yeah,
they're so we weard to me, I will say, it
is weird. The romanticism of that is strange to me
because I don't as much as I love history, I
don't tend to romanticize it in that way. Um, you

(36:13):
know what I mean. Like, it's not part of my
cultural identity that I am from lines of this or that,
and I you know, I don't have that investment, So
it's a little hard sometimes for me to understand the
attachment to it. Yeah, I am pretty sure, Like I
have not looked at every single person in the entire
family tree, but pretty sure on both sides of my

(36:36):
family in the eighteen sixties, everyone in the family tree
was living in North Carolina. There are definitely people in
my family tree and direct ancestors of mine who served
for the Confederacy. And like, I totally understand, as I
said earlier that like people don't want to imagine bad
things about their ancestors. But to me, regardless of any

(36:59):
of those in the visual people's reasons for serving, they
were still serving as part of, you know, a group
of states that had established themselves as a slave nation
in an army that was fighting a lord to extend
and protect slavery. Like, whatever your personal reasons for that,

(37:21):
that's still a side that you were on. Yeah. Yeah,
uh well, and it's one of those things I don't
know if it will help people reconcile it. Right, the
the nuance of the individual versus the individual's part in
a larger group, how much they're influenced by what they
grew up with, and how that has probably you know,
had probably warped their perception of right and wrong, particularly

(37:44):
in regard to this issue. I mean, it's still as
you said, it comes down to that is the side
you were on. Um, yeah, I don't it's a little
it's it's hard for people to to accept even now. Um,
And I don't know the way through that. I think
there are a lot of groups doing a lot of
good effort, and some of the stuff that we talked

(38:04):
about right there at the end of like trying to
really take an honest look at things and and reckon
with it is a big part of that. But yeah,
it's a weird it's a weird thing. Um. There's a
lot of psychology to it to be unraveled. Yeah, you
and I were talking about something totally different earlier this week,
and I was saying, how a lot of times when

(38:25):
we look at things, we have to sort of hold
multiple contradictory truths about things in our heads at the
same time. Uh. And I think that's the case for
a lot of folks here. Yeah, And it's it's difficult
but doable and important to It's an important skill to
learn to be able to see multiple facets that are

(38:45):
not always comfortable. I mean, it's kind of what we're
working on all the time, right, Like, no one person
is simple and easily summated. They all had problems. We
all do. They're all humans and fallible. Yeah. So, uh,

(39:06):
before I read listener mail, I just want to shout
out to all of the people that have sent really,
really lovely emails after our episodes on Vivian Thomas and
Helen tausig Um. I did those episodes in part because
I just needed an episode about saving babies. We have

(39:27):
talked before about how a lot of times I'll they'll
have a point in working on the show where I'm like,
time to save some babies. So I kind of forgot
that every time we do that. We then hear from
people who either they were saved or their babies were saved,
and I just kind of, uh, I forgot about that pattern.
So anyway, we got a ton of really lovely emails

(39:49):
from heart moms and other parents, and then people who
were born with a congenital heart condition who had one
of these procedures, or who had other relatives who were
affected and whose lives were saved or extended thanks to
surgeries that were We're pioneered by by Thomas and tausigin Blaylocks.

(40:11):
So I need to send thank you notes and replies
to all these folks I think still so thank you
so much to Jen, Kelsey, Kyle, Timmy, Sarah Asaki, a
different Sarah, and Nicole. Jen also asked us to remember
her aunt, Barbara Linda, who died from a congenital heart
condition as a baby in the nineteen fifties. Um, thank

(40:32):
you so much to everybody who has sent all those
email letters. I had. I had a hard time figuring
out which of them to read, and so I just
wanted to thank everyone for sending them. And then I'm
gonna read an episode on a related topic but slightly
different because it's about the listener mail that was on
our Vivian Thomas episode. This is from Carrie, and Carrie says,
I have a possible solution to what your listener sean

(40:53):
Or was referring to at the end of your eleven
eighteen episode on Vivian Thomas concerning how she had heard
of incubator babies but couldn't find anything in your archive.
In your fort show Indian School Basketball Champions Part two
podcast from eleven fifteen seventeen, you gave a description of
the St. Louis World's Fair in which you mentioned that

(41:14):
babies and incubators were on display there. In response, I
wrote to you on eleven seventeen with information from an
article I had written about the incubator baby custody case
that made national news on and off for ten years
beginning in nineteen o four. You read my email at
the end of your twelve eleven podcast. Perhaps your reference

(41:36):
to the St. Louis World's Fair and my email are
at least part of what Seanna remembered. In addition, you
had mistakenly referred to me as she. I wrote to
you on twelve twelve seventeen pointing this out. You wrote
back and apologized, but the show's production had already wrapped
until mid January, and you were not able to make
a public correction anyway. I thought this might help clear
things up. Keep up the good work, Mr Carrie. I'll

(41:58):
leave out the last name for privacy. So let's talk
about mistakes I made three years ago and still remember. Uh,
that is exactly what happened. Um. We had gotten this
email from Carrie immediately after we did our last recording
session for and because of the way our time off
schedule was following, and then immediately after I came back

(42:20):
from being away, you Holly were going to be away
recording drawn and so we had something like a month
of episodes already in the can and we were not
going to be in this studio again for three or
four weeks. UM. And I was very embarrassed and felt
very bad about it, and also it was like, I
don't know how to fix this. So I'm glad Carrie

(42:41):
that you sent this email. UM. Carrie had even noted
that he was a Mr. In the email that he
originally sent him. I just overlooked it. So I am
sorry for that. I am sorry that three years ago
I did not find a way to publicly correct that
and thank you again for sending this note. UM, we
have gotten a few hypotheses about what folks might be remembering. UM.

(43:04):
Some of them are related to different podcasts, and some
of them are related to things that were on the
radio or on television theories. I'm not really sure if
you would like to write to us about this any
other podcast or history podcast. At i heart radio dot com.
We're also all over social media ad missed in History
and that's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

(43:25):
And you can subscribe to our show on the I
heart radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.