The Lost Cause: Pollard's Book Title, the UDC and the 1919 Measuring Rod

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This episode examines how the defeated Confederacy shaped American memory of the Civil War. The phrase Lost Cause came from Virginia journalist Edward A. Pollard's 1866 book, which he wanted to call History of the War until his New York publisher chose a more marketable title. The narrative cast slavery as benevolent and recast the war as a defense of states' rights, despite secession declarations and Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech naming slavery as the Confederacy's foundation, and despite Southern demands for federal power in the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision. It also deified Robert E. Lee while writers influenced by Jubal Early blamed James Longstreet, who had criticized Lee and worked with Republicans during Reconstruction.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy spread the story through the Children of the Confederacy, card games of Confederate heroes and control over textbook adoption, leading Northern publishers to print separate editions for Southern schools. In 1915 C. Helen Plane of the UDC hired Gutzon Borglum to carve Stone Mountain and asked that the Ku Klux Klan be included, the same year William J. Simmons burned a cross there after The Birth of a Nation, and Gone with the Wind later carried the narrative nationwide. The episode covers resistance from Frederick Douglass at Arlington in 1871, editor John Mitchell Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and Tuskegee students in 1966, and modern fights over flags, holidays and monuments.

• Mildred Lewis Rutherford's 1919 pamphlet A Measuring Rod was used to reject books that framed secession as rebellion or condemned the South.
• Jefferson Davis's 1881 memoirs presented the war as purely about constitutional rights.
• John Mitchell Jr. of the Richmond Planet campaigned against the 1890 Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, which was removed after the 2020 and 2021 protests.
• Tuskegee students defaced the town's Confederate monument after Sammy Younge Jr.'s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
• In Texas, Confederate Heroes Day often falls on the same weekend as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.