Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause

Introduction

Introduction In the mid-­ 1990s, while working on an anthology of speeches from the civil rights movement, I began to have the feeling of déjà vu. A few years earlier , I had edited a two-­ volume collection of speeches by south­ ern orators from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and many of the themes, attitudes , values, and perceptions sounded familiar in the speeches I was reading from some of the civil rights protagonists. Segregationists like George Wallace and Ross Barnett were expressing thoughts and feelings similar to south­ ern speakers from sixty to eighty years earlier such as Charles C. Jones Jr. and John Brown Gordon. About the same time, the debates over the pub­ lic display of the Confederate flag (whether on T-­ shirts or flying from state capitol buildings), the singing of “Dixie” at football games and other pub­ lic venues, the erecting of an occasional Confederate monument or the repairing of one damaged by time or storm, the surging popularity of Civil War re­ enactments, the growth of chapters of the Sons of Confederate Veterans , and the continued strength of the United Daughters of the Confederacy all reflected some of those same themes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I kept returning to a central question as I read more and more of the mid-­ twentieth-­ century segregationist speeches: what was the rhetorical foundation for these themes, appeals, and values? I have long believed that historical study of pub­ lic address and an understanding of what speakers were communicating to their audiences in years gone by can help us better understand the present. My belief in the importance of the study of pub­ lic communication was reinforced when I began teaching a seminar on rhetoric in the civil rights movement and my students asked, after reading some of the speeches by Orval Faubus and Sena­ tor James Eastland, why intelligent white southerners continued to oppose racial justice and the civil rights movement and to defend segregation and x Introduction racial discrimination. Part, at least, of the answer I gave them lies in the enduring legacy left by the rhetoric of the Lost Cause. The proverbial lightbulb went on over their heads after they read some of the Lost Cause speeches we will be examining here. I was intrigued the more I thought about it and wanted to see if there really were connections between Lost Cause oratory, those who fought so hard to maintain segregation and racial discrimination at midcentury, and those at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-­ first who continued to defend the pub­ lic use and display of Confederate memorabilia and memories of the Civil War. Of course, there were connections, as I quickly found out; hence this volume on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause. I contend that twentieth-­century white southerners learned much of how they were going to think about race, about the North, about the Civil War and Reconstruction, and about themselves from the rhetoric of the Lost Cause. The twentieth-­ century South would have been vastly different had the oratory of the Lost Cause not prevailed. My intent is to examine how the ceremonial orators of this era created the fabric of pub­ lic memory, how to understand their words as their listeners understood them, and how to see their values and themes echo in contemporary debates and speeches many decades after they created their vision of the Old South, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction and Redemption eras. David Goldfield reminds us that “how white Southerners remembered the Civil War and its aftermath defined and distinguished the South for the next century.”1 I contend that much of “how they remembered” comes from the rhetorical foundation we call the Lost Cause. This body of Lost Cause oratory provides an excellent example of Robert Hariman’s reminder that “the analysis of a canon of pub­ lic speeches can identify crucial elements of understanding and action that are likely to be overlooked by historians.”2 These speeches arose out of the remembered smoke and blood of the Civil War, and the orators painted a verbal picture of that war as they and others recalled it with the goal in the early postwar years of restoring and strengthening the confidence of the defeated South and the shell-­ shocked former Confederates. Lost Cause ritual and oratory created a sense of order and community out of the chaos, uncertainty, and despair of defeat. The ceremonial...