Hannah’s Reviews > Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause > Status Update

“A monument tells historians more about who emplaced it than it does the figure memorialized.”

“The military doesn’t practice democracy; the military enforces democracy.”

“White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.”

Actual proof that the Virginia legislature commissioned authors to create textbooks that “not give the impression that slavery was the cause of the war.” Literally right after Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights pushed for the elimination of segregation AND as Brown v. Board of Education was being decided. You don’t say...

“The Lost Cause became a movement, an ideology, a myth, even a civil religion that would unite first the white South and eventually the nation around the meaning of the Civil War. ... The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control.”