Many forget how divided sentiments were in the Southern states were at the time of the Civil War. Abolitionist convictions clashed with racist White Supremacy or anti-war advocates faced down vigilante jingoists throughout the war. When Texas soldiers returned after the war to overgrown fields and a devastated economy, as Juneteenth both freed the slaves and established Federal Marshal Law, resentments seethed as most set about rebuilding interrupted lives. Restoring the South also meant building memorials and reconstructing Southern memory. Anyone who tells you this was easy is selling you something.

Flash forward to the late 1800s, as these Confederate veterans aged into their twilight years and gathered for reunions that reconciled former Union adversaries. Before there was any such thing as social security or a 401K, these aging warriors and their widows beyond working age often depended on meager war pensions and family charity. Thus began the United Daughters of the Confederacy, organized to help support Old Veterans Homes, sponsor cemetery burials or commemorative food drives, but also raising money for Confederate monuments as a way of “remembering the Confederate cause and tradition” of the Antebellum South.

Empowered by suffragist progress for women, the UDC supported numerous noble social programs for indigent veterans and widows, but they could also be accused of advancing the “Lost Cause” narrative of the New South that mythologized the Ku Klux Klan as depicted in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation… the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915 that celebrated masked vigilantes saving civilization from the evil forces of darkness using extralegal violence. And flying the same flag didn’t help with often half-hearted PR attempts to distance Klansmen from the UDC mission, as the group donated Confederate memorials in most major Southern cities.