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"The Lost Cause and the Great War" examines the evolving political vision of several middle Tennessee Progressive reformers who had to react to the tumultuous changes caused by America's involvement in World War I, the New Era and the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the nation's rise to global military power. The book's main character, Luke Lea, was a prominent statewide politician who gained fame when, as an officer in the American army in 1918, he tried to capture Kaiser Wilhelm II and make him a prisoner of the armistice process. Lea and the other participants in this account matter because they were trying to balance three distinct narratives and loyalties. First, they were Progressive reformers - Prohibitionists originally - devoted to creating a nation of productive and public-spirited workers, professionals, and businessmen. They embraced a narrative of national progress as they defined the idea. Then, when events forced the Wilson administration to intervene in the First World War, these Tennesseans had to weave their vision of reform into a war effort that demanded sacrificial patriotism. Finally, they had to balance this new all-Americanism with an elaborate narrative of the Lost Cause that they had been cultivating for years. Lea and the other characters were thus forced to integrate three distinct narratives of reform, nationalism, and sectional defiance. The book argues that Lea and others harmonized these narratives effectively until the emerging Civil Rights movement began to destabilize the national commitment to racial segregation in the late 1940s. As the book details, this harmonizing required considerable work. Lea and other actors had to confront a series of challenges over three decades. The book examines these confrontations in detailed discussions of Tennessee's 1928 presidential campaign, the state American Legion's response to the federal government's slashing of veteran's benefits in 1933, and the effort of some Americans to redefine the country's place in the world around the United Nations' resolution on Human Rights. This study cautions historians of the twentieth century South to take a nuanced approach to the region's unquestioned devotion to the Lost Cause. Lea and the other characters examined here had no difficulty weaving nationalism and sectionalism into a common narrative. More important, these middle Tennesseans were like many Americans before 1945 in that they measured national power in terms of internal political coherence and economic equity. The willingness to inflict mass destruction and engineer regime change belonged to a later age"--
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Robert E. Hunt is professor emeritus of history at Middle Tennessee State University. He is author of
The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory, which won the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize in Southern History.
