By the time the Virginia-born Wilson came to office, a cult of the Confederacy known as the Lost Cause had succeeded in popularizing an extravagantly racist version of Southern history. This telling cast slavery as a benign institution beloved by the enslaved, and it valorized the Ku Klux Klan for violently suppressing Black political expression after Emancipation. The Lost Cause presented Confederate generals as honorable men who fought to secure “states’ rights” instead of human bondage. The legal scholar Michel Paradis argues that the naming honor was “one of the crowning achievements” of the Confederate propaganda machine. It put rebels who had nearly destroyed the Union on an equal footing … Continue reading Cult of the Confederacy (Woodrow Wilson)