Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring, 2000 Page: 4
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THE LOST CAUSE IN DALLAS,
TEXAS, I894-I897
BY KELLY MCMICHAEL STOTTs far as the eye could see, Texas flags, torn
and tattered Confederate flags, and "Old
Glory" waved in the light afternoon
breeze in City Park on April 29, I897. According
to a local newspaper account, the entire population
of Dallas turned out for the unveiling of the
first large Confederate monument in Texas, an
attendance estimated at over 40,000.1 Katie
Cabell Currie, president of the United Daughters
of the Confederacy (UDC) in Texas, had initiated
the monument campaign, and her unfailing devotion
to the project had seen it to completion.2
Currie and her UDC sisters organized an elaborate
two-day celebration-a parade, speeches,
ball, and "love feast"-that climaxed their threeyear
drive to erect a monument to the Confederate
dead. The celebration recalled images of the
Lost Cause, of the heroic men and devoted
women of the South; but the rhetoric also spoke
of progress, industrialism, and urban expansion, of
a South growing and prospering. Of a state, and
more certainly, the community of Dallas, Texas,
emerging as a major economic cross-roads for the
southwest. But why erect the monument? Why
support its costly construction? Did the monument
serve as an official cultural expression to the
white men and women of Dallas, and if it did,
what did that expression represent?
Monuments like the one erected in Dallas
are a cultural phenomenon that help people
understand their past, present, and future.3 The
monuments function to maintain social order andperpetuate existing institutions. In the South, a
memorial to the Confederate past might be glorifying
the memory of an agriculturally-based
society with a strict class, race, and gender hierarchy.
The South was defeated, but within that
defeat it found a refuge. Southerners retreated into
an invented past-one made of the stuff of myths
and referred to collectively as the Lost Cause.
Beginning immediately after the war as an
intellectual defense, by the i88os the myth of the
Lost Cause had slipped into a nostalgic celebration
of a war not lost, but won. The South transformed
the causes of the war: "patriotism, duty,
endurance, valor" became the central issues of the
war, not military might or slavery.4 The Confederacy
was made heroic and honorable, and
monuments to its memory signify one aspect of
the Lost Cause celebration, a movement that
manifested itself in many rituals, symbols, and
organizations. Historians agree that southerners
used the myth to express a social purpose, but
differ as to how and why they used it. The movement
has been described alternately as a crutch
during a period of social trauma, as a move toward
sectional honor and pride, as a reaffirmation of
antebellum authority, as a reassertion of traditional
gender roles, and as a means of stability
during a transitional period between the old and
new South. All of these interpretations have some
validity, but in Dallas, Texas, white citizens used
the construction of a Confederate monument,
and the accompanying Lost Cause celebration, asThe erection of the Confederate Monument in City Park in I897 was the culmination
of three years of effort by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.4
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Dallas Historical Society. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring, 2000, periodical, 2000; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth35100/m1/6/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.