The Last Gasp of the Lost Cause Generation
On Saturday the Stonewall Brigade of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Lexington, Virginia dedicated a new park on private property that they hope will ultimately serve as a gathering place for monuments that have been removed over the past few years.
The efforts of Brandon Dorsey, who commands the local SCV chapters, to protect their shared memory of the Civil War gives new meaning to a lost cause.
In recent years, the city of Lexington has banned the flying of Confederate flags from public lamp posts during their annual parade. Washington & Lee University, where Robert E. Lee is buried, has denied the organization permits to gather in the chapel where the general and former college president is buried. The Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson taught before the war, recently removed a statue of the general on the main quad.
It has been one defeat after another.
Dorsey was optimistic at Saturday’s dedication ceremony:
I think this is a turning point for us. We’ve had a lot of setbacks. I know a lot of us have been discouraged over the last few years. We’re going to fight back. We built these places [monuments], our ancestors built those places. We built them; we can build them again. Don’t think you’re going to come down here and take this one down.
Who would want to? After all, this park is located on private property and represents only the values of the property owner and the SCV. It has little to do with the question of whether Confederate flags and monuments should be maintained on public property.
What Dorsey fails to acknowledge is the fact that the monuments and other commemorative sites first established on public ground at the turn of the twentieth century was only made possible by the fact of legalized disfranchisement and terror.
They were made possible as a result of white political control.
The reason the SCV is now forced to ask property owners to donate their land is because those days are thankfully behind us. Our local governments, even in Lexington, Virginia, now must take into account the views of the entire community.
You can never rebuild the monument landscape of the Lost Cause without returning to a point when only one segment of the community is legally permitted to determine how history is commemorated on public ground.
I don’t have any problem whatsoever with the dedication of Lee-Jackson Park. The parties involved have every right to gather for the purposes expressed and they have every right to solicit communities for the transfer of their monuments if it can be arranged.
That said, there is no reason to believe that cities and towns across the country, that have already removed Confederate monuments or do so in the near future, will work with the SCV to extend their life in this new space.
As I’ve said before, ceremonies like this are nothing more than a rear guard action. It is itself an admission of defeat.
There is something sad and pathetic about watching what may, in fact, be the last gasp of a generation raised on the Lost Cause.
Last gasp? From your lips to God’s ear, but I have my doubts.
It is about time that this kind of propaganda is treated like the private indictment that it is. The Lost Cause was a horrid abuse of the historical record and the fact that people still try to push for its glorification and use is wild to me.