How Confederate propaganda landed in schoolbooks [View all]
By Greg Huffman
April 10, 2019
... students .. enrolled in the South's public elementary and secondary schools between 1889, when the government began counting students, and 1969, the height of the segregationist Jim Crow era ... were subjected to the alternative reality of the Lost Cause, a false version of U.S. history developed in response to Reconstruction that minimizes slavery's central role in the Civil War, promotes the Confederacy's aim as a heroic one, glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, and portrays the white South as the victim.
The poisonous Lost Cause lessons were taught to multiple generations of Southerners to uphold institutionalized white supremacy — in part through public school curriculums shaped by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). More famous these days for their controversial Confederate monuments, the UDC had an almost singular focus on making sure the Lost Cause propaganda was so ingrained in the minds of Southern youth that it would be perpetual. Their most effective tool? School textbooks ...
At its annual reunion in Atlanta in 1919, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) set up a committee to promulgate the Lost Cause version of history through textbooks. It brought together the most prominent Confederate heritage associations — UCV, UDC, and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Each appointed five members. It came to be known as the Rutherford Committee after its most prominent member, Mildred Lewis Rutherford ...
Another prominent member of the committee was Julian S. Carr, the former Confederate general and North Carolina industrialist. He's now infamous for his 1913 speech at the dedication of the UDC's "Silent Sam" Confederate veterans monument formerly on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill in which he urged support for white supremacy and called it a "pleasing duty" to horsewhip a "Negro wench" for allegedly publicly insulting a "Southern lady" ...
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