LSU history professor emeritus Gaines M. Foster's "The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory" examines how the Confederate battle flag and other symbols have been appropriated by national white supremacist movements.
Foster looks at the battle flag's presence in violent events such as Dylan Roof's slaying of nine people at the Emanuel African American Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. on June 17, 2015, and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The flag now represents nationwide white resentment over gains of blacks rather than symbolizing Southern nostalgia for the Civil War, Gaines concludes.
In his groundbreaking book "Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913," Gaines explored the rise of the Lost Cause mythology and construction of Confederate monuments in the post-Reconstruction South.
Gaines in his new collection of essays shows how those developments also reflected the South's move toward national reconciliation.
The book's eight essays are "a contrarian's take on the white South's memory of the Civil War, commonly called the Lost Cause," Gaines says. "Although the Lost Cause played an important role in creating the modern South, it did not preclude white southerners from accepting reunion and embracing sectional reconciliation; indeed, it facilitated it."
In three essays first published in 1985 and 1990, Foster challenges noted historian C. Vann Woodward's view expressed in "The Burden of Southern History" that the South's defeat in the Civil War gave it a different perspective from the rest of the country's belief in national righteousness and progress.
In a thorough analysis of Woodward's work, Foster points out that Southerners after the Civil War turned into the most fervid supporters of American wars and patriotic values.
The essays written for the book provide a strong framework of Southern history leading to an extensive discussion of the Confederate battle flag's central place in today's white supremacist rebellions.
"The Fiery Cross and the Confederate Flag" gives a deeply researched analysis of D.W. Griffith's divisive film "The Birth of a Nation" and the book from which it derived, Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman." Foster concludes that despite Griffith's use of Confederate symbols, he sought to promote national unity.
Foster in "The Marble Man, Robert E. Lee and the Context of Southern History" traces how the famed Confederate general's legacy has changed over the years from beloved national icon to traitorous criminal. Even Lee's reputation as a military master has declined.
In his wide-ranging summary of historical views about Lee, Foster presents him as a white supremacist of ingrained racist beliefs. He also cites Lee's post-war promotion of national unity.
"The Solid South and the Nation-State" shows that although the South follows current conservative opposition to the federal government's "deep state," Southern members of Congress played a major role in creating it by strongly supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs.
The final essay concludes that the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag in current American politics doesn't represent a Southern effort to re-fight the Civil War. Rather, white supremacists have appropriated the flag as a national symbol to express their grievances and desire for a traditional white-ruled America.
"The long and continuing battles over Confederate symbolism reveals a serious and troubling divide within American society today," Foster says. "Framing it as a continuation of the Civil War or the persistence of the Lost Cause emphasizes the failings of the white South and thereby obscures the racist heritage and racial problems of the country of the whole."
Foster makes a convincing case that that Confederate symbols now represent deeper political passions than Southern nostalgia.
Comments