White Lies: Part Three: The Triumph of Lies

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century an entire industry materialized to satisfy the nation’s monument-building passions.

Because of the Lost Cause and its distortions of historical events, southern Whites were able to celebrate their Confederate and American heritages simultaneously.

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS may have been cast from the same metals and carved from the same stones as those that commemorated the Civil War’s victors, but they told different stories.

The monument summarizes the sentiments that supported a war of rebellion and presents them as worthy of commemoration and celebration, in perpetuity.

It took the group more than three months to meander some one thousand miles along an indirect route that dodged the shifting battlefront.

Both works had the ability to deceive their viewers, but film was such a new medium that spectators could easily be caught up in the drama without realizing all the ways that they were being manipulated by its action.

This turn of events was unusual given how steeped she had been as a youth in Confederate falsehoods and commemorations; such an indoctrination usually lasted for life.

This artist began to imagine a carved tableau that would span hundreds of square feet across the mountain’s face. In it, Robert E. Lee, astride the famous Traveller, would ride with Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson at the head of a veritable army of soldiers marching across the bare gray rock.

Drawing inspiration from The Birth of a Nation, a group of White southern men convened on its summit to revive an organization that had been shut down by the federal government decades earlier.

Given that landscape, someone less determined than Mildred Lewis Rutherford might have considered her work largely done by 1916 when her stint ended as historian general for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

“This organization of Southern women, with their sinister, revolutionary teachings and influence, I believe to be the most dangerous element in this country to-day, and your magazine is the medium through which this dangerous influence is being disseminated.”

He replied: “Mr. Noyes is one of the few Union veterans who have so seriously misconstrued the purposes of the noblest, most unselfish, and most patriotic body of Christian women on earth.”

These contrasts had not always been so stark.

Both the name and the character’s appearance reinforced racial stereotypes of subservience and, at least for some White consumers, stirred nostalgic associations of life before the Civil War.

Despite its Lost Cause misrepresentations and the more than two hundred appearances of racial epithets in the text, Mitchell’s novel remained a perennial literary favorite even into the twenty-first century.