7. The Lost Cause was perpetuated through entertainment
During the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Second World War, images of the antebellum and post-war South emerged through novels, lectures, plays, and the medium of film. Among the earliest proponents of the Lost Cause was North Carolina-born Thomas Dixon Jr., who also bore the distinction of being an ordained Baptist minister. Dixon produced novels and plays which depicted the mythical South of being a land of noble cavaliers, genteel and gracious ladies fair, and loyal slaves, some of whom were considered part of the family. Those who were not remained unflinchingly supportive of their masters, with only a few “trouble causers” upsetting the apple cart.
Dixon’s novels and plays were wildly popular in the South in the first decades of the 20th century, and his lecture tours were well attended. Those who went learned of his predictions of an inevitable race war, if the Jim Crow laws weren’t strictly enforced. During the period of his greatest popularity, statues and monuments honoring and ennobling the Confederacy and its leaders appeared throughout the South, most of them funded by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The group, and others like it, also lobbied schools at all levels of education to adopt the tenets of the Lost Cause in teaching history, and throughout the South commissioned text books to support the mythical belief that the South had never fought for slavery, but rather to defend itself against Northern aggression.