[...]
When the town of Gettysburg erects a marker at the battle scene commemorating and explaining what happened THERE, that's a legitimate monument. When the UDC trudges out to ******* Montana to perch some Confederate figure from two thousand miles away in front of a public building --- that's friggin' propaganda.
Propaganda? For what purpose? To promote what idea?
As I keep linking --- the
Lost Cause.
>> The
Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the
Lost Cause, is a movement that describes the
Confederate cause as a heroic one against great odds despite its defeat. The beliefs endorse the virtues of the
antebellum South, viewing the
American Civil War as an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life,
[1] while minimizing or denying the central role of
slavery. While it was not taught in the North, aspects of it did win acceptance there and helped the process of reunifying American whites.
The Lost Cause belief system synthesized numerous ideas into a coherent package. Lost Cause supporters argued that slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War, and claimed that few scholars saw it as such before the 1950s.
[2] In order to reach this conclusion, they often denied or minimized the wartime writings and speeches of Confederate leaders in favor of post-war views.
[3] (See
Cornerstone Speech.) Supporters often stressed the idea of secession as a defense against a Northern threat to their way of life and said that the threat violated the states' rights guaranteed by the Constitution. They believed any state had the right to secede, a point strongly denied by the North. The Lost Cause portrayed the South as more profoundly Christian than the greedy North. It portrayed the slavery system as more benevolent than cruel, emphasizing that it taught Christianity and civilization. Stories of "happy slaves" were often used as propaganda in an effort to defend slavery. These stories would be used to explain slavery to Northerners. Many times they also portrayed slave owners being kind to their slaves. In explaining Confederate defeat, the Lost Cause said that the main factor was not qualitative inferiority in leadership or fighting ability but the massive quantitative superiority of the Yankee industrial machine.
[4] At the peak of troops strengths in 1863, Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers by over 2 to 1 and financially, the Union had three times the bank deposits as the Confederacy.
[5]
For most white Southerners, the Lost Cause evolved into a language of vindication and renewal, while critics have stated that
white supremacy was a key characteristic of the narrative.
[6] Supporters typically portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and its leadership as exemplars of old-fashioned
chivalry and
honor, defeated by the
Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South's superior military skill and courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the
Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to destroy the traditional
Southern way of life. In recent decades Lost Cause themes have been widely promoted by the
Neo-Confederate movement in books and op-eds, and especially in one of the movement's magazines, the
Southern Partisan. The Lost Cause theme has been a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of honor, tradition, and family roles.
[7] The Lost Cause has inspired many prominent Southern memorials and even religious attitudes.
[8] <<
The same thing that spurred Dixon's "The Clansman" (1905) and Griffith's "Birth of a Nation".(1915) Rewriting history of (then) half a century past. These statues/monuments ALL date from that period and virtually all placed where they were by the UDC, a major propaganda arm of the Lost Cause.
That's exactly why they're there, that's why they're placed where they are. Propaganda transmitters. The technology of the time. Just as Griffith made it seem real with his "history written in lightning" film, in its time technologically innovative. Monuments, strategically placed in public squares, in traffic circles, on city property, in front of local government facilities, all to lend the propaganda an air of "legitimacy" so that it would be taken seriously.
Not unlike the way the (original) Ku Klux Klan, already developing a shady reputation in 1867, drafted a famous and respected war general to be its CEO -- to make it appear "legitimate".
It's always crucial to ask "
who put this here" and "
why". --- and why it's placed
where it is.
As also already laid out, this all coincided with the proliferation of Jim Crow laws and facilities marked for "white" and "colored" and rampant race riots and rampant lynchings where postcards and body parts were sold as souvenirs. The same time the Klan re-formed, literally to ride the wave of Birth of a Nation, which rode the wave of The Clansman. It's all tied together in the same time period and generated by the same propaganda and mindset.
And the same time, for one example, that baseball banned blacks for six decades between Moses Walker and Jackie Robinson You notice baseball never describes Robinson as "the first black player", because he wasn't. What they say is he "broke the color line" without ever going into detail about what the "color line" was --- a so-called "gentlemen's agreement" to in effect erect the same "white/colored" signs over the doors to MLB. That too came in the same period, for the same reasons.
History books don't go into a whole lot of these dynamics. That's the influence of the same propaganda.
