The Oklahoma Board of Education recently passed new curriculum standards requiring educators to teach that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud or discrepancies — despite numerous judicial rulings and audits indicating that the election was legitimate. In other words, to reinforce “The Big Lie.” The new standards would require students to “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results.” The new standards were inserted into the curriculum by State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a staunch supporter of President Trump.
This comes after the Oklahoma Senate declined to take action on a resolution that would reject the election denial language in the social studies standards. Walters lobbied against the resolution, and the far-right group Moms for Liberty issued a letter threatening to challenge any Republican lawmaker who voted for it.
As a result of the Civil War, the South was devastated. The loss of life, infrastructure destroyed, and the abolishment of slavery meant the collapse of their economy and social order. The trauma of their defeat led to a special type of storytelling to justify their cause and minimize the role slavery played in all of it. This mythic revisionist storytelling is the Lost Cause Ideology still prevalent today.
If history is written by the victors, then post-Civil War America is a rare exception to the rule, says Chara Bohan, Georgia State University professor of educational policy studies in the College of Education and Human Development.
Bohan collaborated with other educators, including Dean’s Doctoral Fellow Wade Morris, to analyze history textbooks published in the decades after Reconstruction and found the “Lost Cause narrative,” which advocates a heroic view of the Confederacy, not only predominated in Southern classrooms but crept into history textbooks used across the North as well. By the 1930s, the so-called “mint julep” portrayals of figures including John Brown, John Wilkes Booth and Nathan Bedford Forrest had become the national consensus.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “The South Lost the War but Won the Peace.” That “Peace” was the culture war, a culture war they continue to wage. It began with their resistance to Reconstruction efforts designed to enforce protection of the newly freed slaves. White Southerners were still unwilling to recognize the rights and freedoms of African Americans whom they deemed inferior and undeserving of liberty. They found new ways to keep black people in “their” place, with the rise of “Jim Crow” laws that the 1877 Hayes Compromise ushered in under “states’ rights.”
Because women were seen as inherently nonpolitical, and memorializing was not seen as political, they were able to take the lead in memorializing this mythic history. Memorial Associations aided by White Supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan began their mission to vindicate themselves as traitors and preserve their old Southern way of life. The term originated from a Virginian, Edward Pollard’s 1866 book, The Lost Cause.
The ideology grew in the late nineteenth century through writings, speeches, museums, and monument building. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded in 1894, 30 yrs after The Civil War) eventually became the chief promoters of the Lost Cause, but Confederate veterans, authors, academics, politicians, filmmakers, and other secessionists all contributed to feeding it.
It was a romanticized version of the Civil War and Confederate heroism pushed by the UDC who advocated for it to be incorporated into school curriculums. Think Moms for Liberty, the granddaughters of the UDC, picking up where they left off.
Even when neo-Confederates were not allowed in decision-making rooms (i.e. political office), they found alternatives ways of ensuring the Lost Cause narratives prevailed in textbooks. The Southern states demanded the books they purchased advance their revisionist perspective.
In 1919, the UDC’s Rutherford Committee published “A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books,” and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries,” a pamphlet that distilled Lost Cause ideology into bullet points and set clear standards for what was considered acceptable in textbooks.
UDC members wrote their own textbooks, such as Susan Pendleton Lee’s “A School History of the United States,” which romanticized slavery and lionized Confederate leaders. These books were adopted for use in Southern schools, often to the exclusion of all others. They lobbied school boards and state textbook committees to endorse pro-Confederate books and blacklisted those that did not meet their standards. Textbooks that failed to affirm the Lost Cause narrative-such as acknowledging slavery as the central cause of the Civil War-were targeted for removal.
During the pandemic, Mom’s for Liberty’s revived this age old “Lost Cause” assault with renewed vigor and violence on educational institutions from school boards to classrooms over curriculums containing factual historical. Then as now, this whitewashed history was not limited to the South, it spread nationally. Textbook publishers, in the North, were eager to tap into this large new customer base that the post-Civil War Southern states represented, so they revised (i.e. whitewashed) textbooks to meet their approval.
In 1897, for example, a group of Confederate veterans approached B.F. Johnson Publishing Company and asked the company, which had never published school textbooks before, to champion “the right of southern children to books.” The publisher’s president obliged, and the company published Lee’s Primary School History of the United States in the same year to meet the group’s demands.
This recasting of history carries on today, says Professor Bohan, as publishing companies continue to print different versions of history books to comply with the priorities and educational standards of various states. Bohan concluded about her research and the lingering implications of Americans’ miseducation.
People latch onto histories. History informs and inspires us. Probably why fascists use a mythical past “Golden Age” as a central tool for political mobilization, legitimacy, and the creation of a collective identity, like the narrative of American exceptionalism. Fascist leaders invoke an idealized era-such as Mussolini’s invocation of ancient Rome or the Nazis’ myth of Aryan origins-as a time of greatness, unity, and strength that has been lost due to the actions of perceived enemies (liberals, minorities, foreigners, etc.). For decades, white Southerners studied and endorsed a version of the Civil War that all but ignored the experiences of the enslaved and glorified the actions of Confederate leaders.
These are deeply held beliefs that capture generations for a lifetime. Changing minds or countering it is difficult especially when the power of the federal government is behind it. Slavery and the fight to preserve it is a deeply shameful part of our past so the people who engaged in and benefitted from slavery don’t want it taught in school.
Germany’s approach to teaching its Nazi past is comprehensive, mandatory, and deeply rooted in confronting historical responsibility. The education system emphasizes critical reflection on the Holocaust, the mechanisms of Nazi ideology, and the societal failures that enabled authoritarianism.
Germany’s education system treats its Nazi past as a moral imperative, combining rigorous historical analysis with ethical reflection to ensure new generations understand the dangers of hatred, propaganda, and indifference. This approach has become a global model for confronting dark chapters of national history.
America could learn a thing or two about the teaching of all American History. There are organizations like The Institute for Common Power working toward this goal. I’ve attended several of their webinars. This weekend they celebrated the history of the Freedom Riders. It was informative and inspiring. Their work should be supported because they support and empower educators to teach history.
Education can be a tool for liberation; Education can be a tool for erasure.
This essay is part of a series taking shape to inform and connect the dots of history on the long lasting effects of The Lost Cause and it’s modern iterations and players.
SOURCES:
https://inclusivehistorian.com/lost-cause-myth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/rewriting-history-civil-war-textbooks
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/lost-cause-definition-and-origins
This piece ties in with my own research about how southern schoolbooks, novels, short stories, memoirs etc. and United Daughters of the Confederacy speeches and publications after the Civil War and right up to the Civil Rights Movement gave highly distorted accounts of how Christmastime had been experienced by enslaved persons in the South. These accounts almost always claimed that all slaves were thrown lavish Christmas feasts, got at least a week off from labor over the holiday, and received considerate presents from their enslavers. They never mentioned that some slaves got no holidays or presents at all, and totally ignored the many enslaved persons who were whipped, sold or rented over the holiday. Nor did they reveal the large numbers of enslaved people who exposed their discontent over and hatred for slavery by attempting to escape for their freedom over the holidays. Robert E. May