Author Explores Rhetoric Of A Lost Cause

SCHOLAR DESCRIBES WORDS AS POWERFUL WEAPONS IN PERCEPTION OF SOUTH’S PLACE IN HISTORY

“Heritage, Not Hate,” author W. Stuart Towns quoted from a Sons of Confederate Veterans bumper sticker.

“Celebrating the heritage of our region, our state, our family is not a matter of hate,” said Towns, the author of “Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause,” published by the University of Alabama Press. “You can’t rewrite history. You can’t erase history. The Communists tried that. I think it’s wrong.”

Although he grew up in Forrest City - named for Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest - Towns wasn’t raised a Civil War buff . He became interested in both history and communication as an undergraduate student at the University of Arkansas during the 100th anniversary of the War Between the States.

It made Towns start thinking about how the foundation was laid for the heroic “Lost Cause” vision of the South. As early as the 1870s, he said, orators speaking at post-Civil War ceremonial events - Confederate veterans reunions, Confederate Memorial Days and Confederate monument dedications - began to paint Southerners as heroes in the tradition of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

“Time and again, in the hundreds and hundreds of speeches I’ve read, these speakers tried to defend the South’s right to secede,” said Towns, who is retired from a long career in academia, most recently as chairman of the department of communication studies at Southeast Missouri State University. “They talked about how the colonies broke away from England, won their freedom and were granted sovereignty” - which belonged to the states, they argued, not the union of them, and thus was available to the states that seceded.

“They quoted the Declaration of Independence over and over again,” he said.

The same speakers also praised the “heroism, dedication and military skill and zeal of the Southern soldier,” Towns said, “and began to hold the women in high regard for their efforts in the name of the fallen.”

“By careful attention to the ceremonial settings and the persistence of the speech-making themes over several generations, the author shows how the status of the orators, the pervasiveness of the rituals and the repetition of themes for so long created a new white-dominated Southern public identity out of the social chaos, uncertainty and despair at the end of the Civil War in the South,” wrote Charles Reagan Wilson, author of “Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis” and “Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1868-1920.”

“No Southern historian has ever brought such a wealth of source material to bear on a subject,” added Carl L. Kell, author of “Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life.” “Primary sources dominate every chapter. The work has a solid core of rhetorical/artifactual sources that, woven carefully together, never waiver from the centrality of Towns’ thesis: Lost Cause rhetoric tells the story of the South. No other region of the country can make such a claim.”

Knowing that this image of the South was largely created via a public relations campaign shouldn’t change the modern perspective on the war, Towns cautioned. “The idea that it was fought over states’ rights and slavery is largely accurate,” he says.

“What (the Lost Cause image) does do is give people in the South, people whose relatives fought in the war, some honor and sense of heritage, some idea of who their family was and its impact on who they are today,” he said. “We need to know where we’ve been so we know where we are and where we’re going.”

Towns said he is often asked what makes the South the South, and his answer is its great sense of place and family.

“It’s just amazing how Southerners care about the place they grew up, the place they came from,” he said. “For example, I moved back to Forrest City after 40-plus years because it’s home. That sense of place is what separates Southerners from other people.”

When Towns speaks June 29 at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, he’ll talk about how Georgia legislators debated the symbolism of the Confederate flag in their state flag, and the African American solons involved finally concluded it was a question of heritage, not a reflection of hate.

He’ll also discuss a plan to rename three parks in Memphis, Tenn., because “Forrest Park,” “Jefferson Davis Park” and “Confederate Park” were considered offensive.

“That’s not what a historian wants to see,” he said. “We’d have a lot fewer debates about racial issues if people understood” that statues, ceremonies and other Southern memorials to the Civil War are “about heritage, not hate.”

“Professor Towns’ talk is an opportunity to consider what we know - and what we think we know - about the Civil War and to foster some open conversation about a topic that evokes powerful emotions, even 150 years after the fact,” concluded Susan Young, outreach coordinator for the museum.

Life, Pages 6 on 06/19/2013

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