16. The heyday of the Lost Cause followed World War I
Throughout the decades before and following World War I the Lost Cause thrived in the emerging New South. Over fifteen hundred monuments, memorials, placards, historical road markers, and other visible salutes to the Confederacy appeared across the United States. Not all were in the former Confederacy, they appeared on battlefields in Pennsylvania and Maryland, in cemeteries North of the old Mason-Dixon line, and in the nation’s capital at Washington. They were supported by a new vision of the South, in which slavery was sanitized, and the motives of the secessionists attributed to political differences, rather than moral.
In the South, Jim Crow laws prevailed, and though there were protests against them, Southern political strength was such that they remained for the most part unchallenged. Although President Woodrow Wilson desegregated the federal Civil Service in 1913, the United States military remained wholly segregated. The US Supreme Court upheld the principle of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites in 1896, rendering protests against segregated facilities largely moot. In the states of the former Confederacy, as well as some others, separate drinking fountains for whites and blacks stood in the shadow of monuments to heroes of the Confederacy, and customers at segregated lunch counters in Southern towns could gaze out the windows upon memorials to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the other Confederate leaders of the American Civil War.