The Lost Cause

Programs 293, 294

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Are we still living with the racial divide left over from the Civil War? This provocative audio documentary explores the history of a conflict that nearly tore America apart.

Confederate man with gun

Has it resurfaced today in the rise of white supremacism, anti-immigrant sentiment, the attack on diversity policies, as well as the Confederate battle flags brought into the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 insurrection?

You’ll hear distinguished historians and a former US senator from Alabama explain the ideology that came to be known as the Lost Cause.

Jones, Green, Seidule, Blight, Sinha.

Julia Ward HoweOver a third of all white families in the South actually owned human beings. And their four million African American captives had a monetary value estimated at $126 billion in today’s money.

Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh, co-star, Gone with the Wind

So the Confederacy and its hero Robert E. Lee were defending the largest financial asset in the American economy, second only to real estate. In effect, they formed a new country — although it was never recognized. In later decades, some of the Lost Cause was romanticized in popular films like Gone with the Wind and Confederate statues.

But the reality was brutal. The death toll from the Civil War is now estimated at 750,000 — the equivalent today of more than 7 million soldiers lying lifeless. We listen to a stirring rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written by the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe.

And we learn how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution, which briefly protected the rights of the freed people, were undone in the following years by the spread of Jim Crow segergation, as upheld by a conservative Supreme Court.

Supported in part by the Holborn Foundation, through a grant to the Humankind Program Fund. This program is dedicated to the memory of John Gilbert.

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To Learn More:

• Robert E. Lee and Me, by Ty Seidule (now visiting professor, Hamilton College)

• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, by David Blight (professor, Yale University)

• The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, by Manisha Sinha (professor, Univ. of Connecticut)

• Educational Reconstruction, by Hilary Green (professor, Davidson College)

• Bending Toward Justice, by Doug Jones (former US Senator, Alabama)

 

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