15. Mildred Rutherford
Mildred Rutherford, a prominent Southern educator and orator, served as the historian general for the UDC at the time of the adoption of the Measuring Rod. She contributed its foreword, and served to compile the list of approved texts for teaching history in the South, as well as the list of books condemned by the UDC. Her views on slavery are summed up in a speech she delivered in Dallas in 1916. Rutherford claimed in her speech “negroes in the South were never called slaves. That term came in with the abolition crusade”. Her claim was clearly false, since the constitutions of most of the seceding states referred to slavery among their reasons for secession.
Among her numerous published works was Truth in History: A Historical Perspective of the Civil War From the Southern Viewpoint. Its chapter headings include: The North Was Responsible for the War Between the States; The Slaves Were Not Ill-Treated in the South and the North Was Largely Responsible for Their Presence in the South, and; The South Was More Interested in the Freedom of the Slaves Than the North. She claimed Reconstruction to have created the need for the Ku Klux Klan, calling the group “a necessity”. Rutherford wrote that Mary Surratt, hanged after being found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, was executed “without judge or jury”, a crime she found “far more horrible” than the murder of the President. Rutherford was a leading influence on Southern school curricula through the 1920s.