Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The Lost Cause is the name commonly given to a literary and intellectual movement that sought to reconcile the traditional white society of the Southern United States to the defeat of the Confederate States of America in the Civil War of 1861–1865. Those who contributed to the movement tended to portray the Confederacy’s cause as noble and most of the Confederacy’s leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, defeated by the Union armies not through superior military skill, but by overwhelming force. They also tended to condemn Reconstruction.

As we have seen from many recent pronouncements on the extreme right, this 19th century revisionist movement remains vastly influential in some segments of American society. It is the source of the standard Confederate apologist line that the Civil War was “not really about slavery.”
The standard Lost Cause view was taught as dogma in the Texas public schools as recently as when I was a child in the 1950s.

Bizarre as it seems, this idea seems not only to survive but to grow in influence in the twenty-first century.

Just today, for example, Glenn Beck claimed that race relations were on the right track in this country until the lead-up to the Civil War.
Even veteran Beck-watchers were shocked at this, but it is really perfectly consistent with Lost Cause thinking and will resonate well with segments of his audience.
(H/T Kilgore Trout)