White Lies: Part Four: Reckoning with the Lost Cause

Gone with the Wind repeats the same themes as The Birth of a Nation—the ineptitude of Blacks placed into positions of power, the dangers they pose to White women, and the need for the women’s protection by members of the Ku Klux Klan (although this time vigilante activities occur off-screen).

For the rest of her career she was almost invariably typecast as a Black caregiver or maid.

The setting has all the trappings of a southern estate from before the Civil War—including Blacks who are housed in ramshackle cabins and who contentedly gather for evening sing-alongs—but no mention is made of slavery or war or Reconstruction.

Among other offenses, he charged the film producer with having “committed a peculiarly gauche offense in putting out such a story in this troubled day and age. For no matter how much one argues that it’s all childish fiction, anyhow, the master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn, with the Negroes bowing and scraping and singing spirituals in the night, that one might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. Put down that mint julep, Mr. Disney!”

“The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film,” observed historian James M. Lundberg when considering the series some two decades later.

They had learned that slavery was a benevolent institution, that a fight for states’ rights had triggered secession, that the war had been fought in defense of the U.S. Constitution, that the Confederacy had failed because it had been overpowered, that Reconstruction had been a calamitous disaster, and that Whites had been justified when they’d retaken control of the state.

In The Making of a Southerner, published in 1947, Lumpkin recollected how her father’s generation of Confederate veterans had “lent their ardor, their warm devotions, their unremitting labor, to accomplish the goal of preserving ‘Southern principles.’”

Their nighttime parade culminated in a rally around the base of the sculpture that Moses Ezekiel had helped dedicate in 1910 en route to being hired to create a Confederate monument for Arlington National Cemetery.

Meanwhile, a separate group of nonviolent counterprotesters tried to express their objections to the rally without being drawn into the melee.

Confederate monuments are not innocuous symbols...

“But in using his statue as a pretext for bigotry and violence, while wrapped in the rebel flag, they’ve demonstrated, yet again, that the Lost Cause can’t be cleansed or cloaked as benign ‘Southern heritage.’

Meanwhile, pedestrians catch their feet on Stolpersteine—stumbling stone—small pavers placed in the sidewalks that commemorate individuals who lived nearby before being caught in the Holocaust’s campaign of genocide.

“To your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier’s good name, the guardianship of his history, the emulation of his virtues, the perpetuation of those principles which he loved and which you love also, and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.”

Legally, Congress would have had to approve such a move, but Pete Hegseth circumvented that process for Fort Liberty by renaming it in honor of a U.S. Army private with the same last name as the previously honored Confederate general, Braxton Bragg.

These leaders have weaponized the term to alarm their constituents about everything from what is taught in school to which books belong in public libraries.