SHAPING MORALITY and HISTORY: the RHETORIC and PUBLIC MEMORY of the GEORGIA DIVISIONS of the WCTU and UDC Taryn D. Cooksey A

SHAPING MORALITY AND HISTORY: THE RHETORIC AND PUBLIC MEMORY OF THE GEORGIA DIVISIONS OF THE WCTU AND UDC

Taryn D. Cooksey

A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Department of History

University of North Carolina Wilmington

2011

Approved by

Advisory Committee

Candice Bredbenner Paul Townend

Kathleen Berkeley Chair

Accepted by

Dean, Graduate School

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 “Claiming Authority and Making History: The Scholarship of the Lost Cause, Southern Women’s Organizations, and Public Memory”

CHAPTER 1...... 31 “Redeeming Manhood: The Georgia WCTU and UDC’s Efforts to Influence Masculine Morality”

CHAPTER 2 ...... 62 “Public Amnesia: The Forgotten Efforts and Motives of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union”

CHAPTER 3 ...... 77 “A Lasting Legacy: The Public Memory of UDC Rhetoric and History”

CONCLUSION...... 94 “Turning Legacy Into History: The Potential of Public History Sites”

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 97

APPENDIX 1 ...... 102

APPENDIX 2 ...... 104

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines how the differing rhetoric of the Georgia divisions of the Woman’s

Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced how individuals today encounter and remember their efforts. The leaders of the Georgia WCTU adopted openly political rhetoric that challenged southern white men’s authority and ability to lead. This rhetoric was part of an attempt to change dangerous masculine behaviors such as drunkenness or marital infidelity by limiting the range of legal behaviors. Following the repeal of Prohibition, the WCTU began to lose momentum and popularity. As their presence diminished the public lost access to enduring examples of their rhetoric, and in turn lacked information about the breadth and complexity of their goals and activities. Rather than focusing on the social and domestic problems that inspired temperance women to enter into public debates, the current public memory of Prohibition focuses on romantic and nostalgic depictions of cocktails, speakeasies, and jazz.

In contrast, the Georgia UDC did not attempt to alter government policy but instead extended feminine rituals of mourning into the public by memorializing the Confederacy and espousing Lost Cause rhetoric. Georgia Daughters’ language did not challenge white masculine authority, but instead enshrined a very specific kind of masculinity. Regardless of historical accuracy, UDC monuments and rhetoric embraced Confederate heroes as Christian men of honor who prized their homes and families above all else, even their own lives. By celebrating an idealized version of masculinity, the UDC sought to give men role models to emulate in their own lives without directly challenging southern white men’s right to power. The monuments and images of virtuous Confederates survived long after the founding Georgia UDC members, and can still be found across metro-Atlanta. However, these monuments currently lack any

iii

accompanying information that explains the rhetoric, and these sites continue to espouse Lost

Cause ideas of gender and morality without question or context.

These diverging accounts of rhetoric and memory demonstrate the need and potential for more nuanced content at public history sites. By including more information about these organizations’ rhetoric into site content, public historians would help remedy a lack of thorough information about women’s social and political activity between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of woman’s suffrage. Throughout this period, southern women had to develop creative ways to enter public discourse that drew from their traditional roles as wives and mothers. This aspect of women’s and southern history remains untold in many sites and museums, leaving the public without ways to better understand to complexity of women’s pre- suffrage political activity. However, the presence of WCTU and UDC rhetoric in and around

Atlanta presents a strong opportunity to address this gap in public historic content by using the sites and monuments already present throughout the city.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to take this opportunity to thank first, and foremost, the faculty members that assisted me throughout this project. My chair, Dr. Kathleen Berkeley offered more insight, guidance, and patience than I could have expected or hoped for. Through class discussions, meeting, and countless correspondences she helped me develop my thesis from a vague idea into a completed project with potential for further study. Dr. Candice Bredbenner and Dr. Paul

Townend demonstrated their devotion to both history department and its students by serving as committee members and providing their input and ideas throughout the daunting writing and revising process. Each of these committee members demonstrated their commitment to the

History Department’s students, and in particular the Public History program, during a period of transition and stress. Though each of these professors specializes in an area outside the scope of public history, each was willing to take on my project without hesitation, and I am incredibly grateful for their wisdom and participation.

I also wish to thank Dr. William Moore for his guidance and input in early drafts and his teachings on public memory. Similarly, Dr. Monica Gisolfi assisted me through discussions of my thoughts on southern history and memorialization. Dr. Tammy Gordon introduced me to the key ideas of the Public History program through her graduate seminars, and helped me find multiple opportunities to explore my own interests within the field. I would like to thank Dr.

David LaVere and Dr. Lisa Pollard for serving as graduate coordinator and accepting the task of keeping myself and other students on track and informed throughout the long and intimidating thesis-writing process.

Finally, I wish to thank the friends, family members, and loved ones who supported me as I wrote. In particular, Mom, Dad, Josh, William, Chelcie, Erica, Faith, Rieddhi, Richard,

Brittany, and Zack: thank you for listening to my rambling thoughts and complaints. Your time, company, and support made this process much easier and kept me motivated when I was struggling for ideas.

CLAIMING AUTHORITY AND MAKING HISTORY: THE SCHOLARSHIP OF THE LOST CAUSE, SOUTHERN WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS, AND PUBLIC MEMORY

In the decades following the Civil War, affluent white women in the South lived according to a complex array of cultural expectations that defined appropriate behaviors and determined their role in society. Political disenfranchisement and customs that taught women to concern themselves primarily with domestic affairs left women with limited ways to publically express their thoughts and concerns about southern politics and society. Between 1870 and 1920, in order to exert political and social influence, women of the region participated in a number of clubs and organizations. While suffrage organizations and groups such as the Woman’s Christian

Temperance Union organized chapters across the United States including the South, southern women also built regional heritage-based groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

As national reform groups campaigned for new legislation to pass woman suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol, members of the UDC and other heritage clubs espoused an ideology that glorified the past and enforced white male supremacy even while they promoted an acceptable public role for women. Though both were women’s organizations, the members of the WCTU and UDC adopted vastly different approaches and rhetoric in claiming public influence, and these approaches shaped how the groups fared in the public’s memory over subsequent generations.

Historians and historic sites provide insight into the development and activities of women’s political activism in the late nineteenth century and the public memory of these women. Tracing how different rhetorical approaches impacted the public memory of the WCTU and UDC relies heavily on synthesizing a broad range of scholarship from social and public history. The academic literature on the South after 1865 and ideology of the Lost Cause provided a clear picture of the culture in which clubwomen lived and formed their organizations. The

works of scholars like C. Vann Woodward and Edward Ayers explained how the political and economic circumstances following the Civil War contributed to the reformation of a society in which white men sought to defend their supremacy against any potential threat. Within the general context of a reassertion of white male authority, the scholarship of women’s political activism both nationally and within the South demonstrated how women used organizations to develop public influence, despite the challenges these groups faced within the strict political and social schema of the South. Finally, sources from the scholarship of public history and memory offer insights into how the organizations differing approaches influenced not only the extent to which the movements succeeded in immediate terms, but also the extent to which the public remembered or forgot their rhetoric and efforts. Understanding the academic interpretations of southern women’s history and public memory can help scholars and public historians understand how historic sites can make more nuanced account of this history available to visitors.

These three areas of study serve only as frameworks for understanding how the scholarship provided insights into the motives and methods of white clubwomen in the New

South. Many writers simultaneously addressed several of these subjects within their own analyses. In this study, the historical sources on the New South, women’s political movements, and public memory and historic sites are viewed as parts of a single complex history. This historic narrative delineated the full context in which these women lived and worked, how they crafted their own rhetoric, and to what extent that rhetoric has persisted. Women created these organizations in a society in which they lacked formal political power, and social customs taught well-bred white women to acquiesce to the judgment of husbands and fathers rather than to sully their reputations with public affairs. Despite rhetorically insisting that quiet and domestic lives protected women from harm and guarded their natural virtue, this system perpetuated female

powerlessness and left women without a way to address social and domestic problems within their communities and their own households. Though women could not completely transcend the limited roles they held within southern society, certain groups of affluent white women found ways to challenge the male dominated political and social hierarchy. Furthermore, despite the contrasting public aims of the women’s organizations that lobbied for legislative change and the heritage based groups, clubs gave women venues in which they could they could shape the rhetoric, attitudes, and behaviors of their male counterparts.

Any serious examination of women in the post war South must begin with an understanding of the political and economic context that constrained them. More than sixty years since its 1951 publication, C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South remains a dominant work on the subject. In Origins, Woodward examined the events in the region between 1877 and

1913, and discredited a number of myths and half-truths that pervaded previously accepted histories. Throughout his work, Woodward countered the idea of a solid and richly industrialized

New South united under resurgent antebellum leadership.

Woodward argued that Redeemers, the term given to the groups of southern Democrats who overthrew the Reconstruction era Republican leadership, bore only a nominal connection to the leaders of the Old South and instead emerged from the capitalistic middle class. These political and economic leaders carefully contrived an image of the “New South” that united southerners under the banner of progress and rapid industrialization. Despite such lofty rhetoric, the majority of southerners saw no real political or economic gains under New South leaders.

The industrialization that took place remained largely led by Northern investors and business leaders, offering few real benefits to the bulk of southerners who continued to live in a state of rural poverty. According to Woodward, Populism, and to a lesser extent Progressivism,

threatened the upper class’s political power by energizing the economically disadvantaged lower classes. Democratic Redeemers used racist propaganda and the political disenfranchisement of black voters to persuade poor white southerners to vote against their economic interest in favor of gaining political and social power over African Americans. Woodward ended his account with Woodrow Wilson’s election to the White House, an event largely regarded as the sign of a victorious South that finally cemented its political potency. Woodward’s closing sentences casted doubt over this perspective, “The change recalled to some minds the resurgence of the

South upon the inauguration of Jefferson and of Jackson. Whether the comparison had any validity beyond the matter of accents remained to be seen.”1 Through Origins of the New South,

Woodward depicted a South in which the leadership consisting of capitalist, middle and upper class white men vied to maintain power over a majority of poor white and black, southerners who stood to see few if any benefits from their economic and political policies.

Despite the breadth and depth of Woodward’s re-imagination of the Reconstructed South, he offered no analysis of women’s social perspective in the South and only briefly mentioned a handful of women by name. While some of this lack of analysis draws from the fact that historians of the era rarely wrote about the experiences of women, subsequent historians posited that Woodward was aware of its importance and open to new historical interpretations that examined how women and sexuality shaped the political and social circumstances of the period.2

Woodward’s efforts at deconstructing the dominant and exaggerated perceptions of a solid and

1 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 481. 2 Glenda Gilmore, “Gender and ‘The Origins of the New South,’’ The Journal of Southern History (2001), 775.

prosperous New South provided a thorough analysis of the broad political and social context in which the women of the South lived.

Forty years after the publication of Origins of the New South, Edward L. Ayers published

The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. Ayer’s examination of the daily lives and experiences of average southerners, including men and women of both races, presented the other half of Woodward’s account of the political leaders who sought to exploit these individuals but offered little that actually benefitted them. According to Ayers, the promises and claims of economic prosperity and a new sense of tolerance made by New South proponents like Henry

Grady were contradictory to the actual experiences of many southerners. The cultural conflicts and coalitions of the period left many people in a society that stagnated in constant clashes.

Ayers devoted much of his emphasis to the rise and fall of the Populist movement in the South.

The Populist Party typified the conflicts many southerners experienced. The Populists drew their support largely from poor, unimproved areas where cotton farming was a dominant means of employment. Despite this base of support the Populists succumbed to the instability of the political scene and changed their tactics and ideas too frequently to maintain their support.

In his examination of the upheaval of the New South, Ayers offered insights into how women lived and their efforts to increase their authority in society. He argued that through clubs and organizations women found ways to develop their own political power and challenge male- created policies and laws. In his discussion of women’s clubs Ayers observes, “Men who were suspicious of women’s clubs were not necessarily wrong. The clubs proved to be fertile sources of ferment for all kinds of troublesome issues, ranging from opposition to the South’s penal

practices and child labor to agitation for votes for woman suffrage.”3 Ayers ended his analysis with the Atlanta riot of 1906. By ending his book with the violence and instability in Atlanta he contrasted this reality with the ideal image of the New South, created in Atlanta by Henry Grady who coined the term and fervently pushed the idea of a region that was too busy enjoying industrial and economic progress to be defined by racism and violence.

As politicians and businessmen pushed the idea of the New South, many white southerners also embraced or espoused Lost Cause rhetoric that glorified a romanticized Old

South, downplayed slavery’s role in the Civil War, and cast Northerners and free black men as the villains in a battle over southern virtue personified in the southern lady. Though the basic claims of the Lost Cause are rarely contested, historians continued to debate the exact origins of the myth and who created it.

One of the most lasting explanations of the Lost Cause emphasized its role as a religious movement that employed rhetoric of sacrifice and rebirth to assuage southerners. Charles Reagan

Wilson argued that the Lost Cause became a dominant civil religion in the South, and continued to exert influence throughout the region’s history. In Baptized in Blood: the Religion of the Lost

Cause, 1865-1920 and the article “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of

Southern Civil Religion,” both published in 1980, Wilson suggested that the Lost Cause began shortly after the Civil War’s end when southern clergy drew connections between Confederate heroes and Christian virtue. In this telling of the past, the South adopted a Christian imagery,

“According to the mythmakers a pantheon of southern heroes, portrayed as the highest products of the Old South civilization, had appeared during the Civil War to battle the forces of evil as symbolized by the Yankees. The myth enacted the Christian story of Christ’s suffering and death

3 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 79.

with the Confederacy at the sacred center.”4 Aside from the clergy, Wilson identified two main groups espousing the myth throughout the South, Confederate Veterans’ and heritage organizations and the educational system. Within these groups of Lost Cause leaders Wilson observed that the United Daughters of the Confederacy exhibited unparalleled enthusiasm for drafting and enforcing the ideology.5 This contribution cemented the idea of the Lost Cause as a religious ideology that became popular through the efforts of religious leaders and volunteer groups.

After Wilson’s assertion that the Lost Cause developed into a distinct southern civil religion, subsequent historians expanded this theory by emphasizing the role average southerners played in drafting and spreading Lost Cause rhetoric. Gaines M. Foster identified middle class writers as the deciding factor for the shift in popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Foster echoed Woodward’s argument that the leaders of the post-war South were not the same as the elites of antebellum period. Foster argued that the initial efforts to revitalize

Confederate sentiment faltered because former Confederate leaders led them and used an elitist tone. In the 1890s, the tone shifted to celebratory and the interest in Confederate commemoration groups grew.6 According to Foster, the reassurance in the honor and virtue of southern manhood and society at large helped white southerners adapt to periods of post war stress and upheaval.

The contributions of southerners in Spanish American War helped the region regain military and political validation and in turn the need for Confederate celebrations waned. He concluded his work by asserting that the transfer of Confederate commemorations and memorialization to

4 Charles Reagan Wilson, “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of Southern Civil Religion, 1865-1920,” The Journal of Southern History 46 (1980), 223. 5 Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 25-26. 6 Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5-6.

women through groups like the UDC demonstrates that the tradition lost importance in them minds on many southerners.

While Foster emphasized the broad cultural function of using celebration as a means of validating the Confederacy and the Old South, other historians also interpreted the Lost Cause and the ideology of the South as a distinctly religious phenomenon. In his 1998 work Rebuilding

Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877, Daniel Stowell argued freed slaves, southern whites, and northern whites each attached different religious meanings to the Civil War.

White southerners and former Confederates looked to religion to justify their military losses and salvage a moral victory from military and political defeat.7 According to this religious ideology slavery and secession were righteous and military defeat was God’s way of preparing the South for some greater purpose. This argument drew heavily from Wilson’s assertions that the Lost

Cause became a religious movement in the region, and set that perspective in the context of a competition between three competing ideologies for control over the memory of the Civil War.

Among the scholars of the Lost Cause, most focused on the way the leaders of the post war South drafted a specific interpretation of the Old South characterized by gentle and paternalistic plantation owners, content but tamed slaves, and weak but pure women to justify white supremacy within contemporary culture. A few historians emphasized the earliest incarnations of the mythology and its origins in the Confederate veterans who needed to excuse their defeat by claiming a moral victory. Alan T. Nolan identified Edward A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner, as one the first individuals to use the term when he published The Lost

Cause: The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates in 1867. In this publication Pollard outlined most of the basic tenets of the mythology including the benevolent

7 Daniel Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 180.

nature of slavery.8 Within the same collection of essays, Gary W. Gallagher argues Confederate

General Jubal A. Early was the key originator of the Lost Cause through pamphlets and documents published between 1866 and 1872. Early’s main points glorified the military valor of

Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the entire state of Virginia.9 Both writers emphasized the earliest manifestations of the myth that sought to legitimize the South’s secession and justify their defeat. Because these early incarnations closely followed the end of the Civil War, they focused more on creating justifications for region’s involvement and loss in the war than crafting a complete image of the antebellum South.

Rather than focusing on the earliest expressions of Lost Cause sentiment many historians of the subject point to the 1880s and 1890s as the time when it became a popular regional phenomenon. In Race and Reunion, David Blight argued that after the war three competing schools of thought that broadly paralleled the three religious attitudes outlined by Stowell, emerged to explain the events. Initially, supporters of the reconciliationist vision, the white supremacists, and the emancipationists competed for control over the accepted history of the war. Eventually a fusion of the reconciliationist and white supremacist perspectives succeeded as northern politicians and businessmen realized that conceding to a past that honored the valor of both sides while glossing over the causes of the war gained them the widest audience in the

South.10 Northern acquiescence gave way to a broader phenomenon in the 1880s and 1890s when a generation of white men who were removed from fighting but caught in the political

5 Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 13. 6 Gary W. Gallagher, “Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 40-41. 10 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85.

upheaval of Reconstruction looked to Decoration Days and celebrations seeking heroes they could not find among their peers. In this space the complete myth of the Lost Cause developed which simultaneously glorified a romanticized version of the Antebellum South and revered southerners who were free of any wrongdoing before or during the war.

Despite debates over the mythology’s exact origins, scholars agreed the southerners used the Lost Cause liberally to support political actions that favored affluent white men and imposed extra sanctions or stigmas on African Americans, while largely ignoring the needs of women and poor whites. The use of Lost Cause rhetoric to support certain political goals also ran throughout

Joe L. Coker’s Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the

Prohibition Movement. Coker argued that Southern religion was a key factor in shaping the

South’s transition from rejecting prohibition to becoming a leading supporter of the movement during the Progressive era by focusing on the efforts to pass prohibition reforms in Alabama,

Georgia, and Tennessee. Southern advocates of prohibition used the racist image of animalistic and rapacious black men to spread fear about the dangers of alcohol and the need to protect white women from the alleged violence. Male southern prohibitionists tried to limit female participation, but the WCTU provided women with opportunity to take part in the public discourse over alcohol consumption through their roles as protectors of the home. To support their efforts, women of WCTU chapters employed rhetoric that centered on the ideals of a new

Christian man of honor, characterized by a focus on familial devotion rather than public displays of valor or power.11 Through their ability to shape the ideas of masculine morality and their creation of groups that gave them access to the public debate the women of the WCTU played a key role in changing public opinion before they could cast a ballot.

11 Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibtion Movement (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 207.

Though most historians acknowledged that women contributed to the spread of the Lost

Cause, Caroline Janney argued that well before the UDC formed, women not only spread the

Lost Caused but also drafted large portions of the ideology’s content through their participation in Ladies’ Memorial Associations. Early in her analysis, Janney posited that the groups were not merely commemorative in nature but also political. For the purposes of her study Janney broadened the definition of politics to include, “the ability of individuals or groups to wield influence in their communities, state, or region.”12 Janney described how the women of these associations competed with Jubal Early for control over the history of the war and used their influence to develop a distinct southern culture. In conjunction with the fact that bereavement and memorialization were generally considered appropriate feminine activities, southern white men supported women’s control of the message because they were less likely to invoke the ire of northern politicians. Similar to Woodward and Foster, Janney observed that the women in charge were not necessarily the widows of veterans, but middle and upper class women pursuing their own political agendas by taking their traditionally private role as mourners into public forums.

Coker’s and Janney’s recent scholarship on evangelism and women’s political action draws from a well-established history of women’s movements in the South that began to develop in the 1970s. The development of this scholarship into southern women’s early political activism contributes to our current understanding of the complexity of women’s public discourse and the differing approaches they adopted as they sought increased authority and influence. The works of

Anne Firor Scott and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall demonstrate the ways these historians argued that women developed their own political voice even though they lacked formal public authority. In

1970, Anne Firor Scott published The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930, and

12 Caroline Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2008), 5.

asserted that southern women’s daily lives were far more difficult than portrayed by the myth that enshrined them as passive paragons of virtue.13 Women tolerated this role because all aspects of society reinforced the myth. Women had to simultaneously adhere to the ideal of the demure southern lady while making every effort to fulfill their responsibility to control vice among their husbands and sons. Southern women lived in relation to a double standard of male and female behavior that all aspects of their life reinforced. After the Civil War women began to seek out communities for self-improvement and turned to reform movements to remedy the sources of their troubles. Anti-alcohol activism proved a fitting vehicle for women who wanted to maintain the southern lady ideal while combating the forces that created conflict violence within the home. As southerners viewed over-indulgence in alcohol as a masculine vice, women’s organizations around the need to protect the virtue of their homes against the dangerous influence of alcohol amounted to publically supporting legislation that would alter the legal behavior of their male peers.

Such concerted efforts to reform masculine vices did not end when women received the vote in 1920. Having already employed voluntary organizations as a successful means to gaining authority and achieving a degree of political leverage women continued to use these methods throughout the early twentieth century. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie

Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching studied how Ames challenged male authority and the ideology that supported it through a campaign against lynching. Drawing on her experience in suffrage campaigns, Ames shifted her focus to the anti-lynching movements in the 1920s. Hall’s analysis revealed how even after women received the vote many women like

Ames continued to use independent organizations to challenge male authority by demanding the

13 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 4-6.

end of lynching.14 Similar to the temperance crusades, women selected a subject that typified what they saw as the primary problems in a male-controlled society. By campaigning against lynching they organized against the abuse of power by white men and condemned the use fear and violence while simultaneously calling into question the legitimacy of unhindered white male authority. Their efforts to change attitudes regarding white violence against black males gave

Ames a way to raise criticisms about the way southern society viewed men and women and undermine the gender dichotomies that cast women as helpless victims and white men as the protectors that had to resort to violence to protect southern virtue.

Other historians crafted similar arguments as the scholarship on women’s political action in the pre-suffrage South developed. In The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and

Temperance in Nineteenth Century America, Barbara Epstein concluded that an imbalance of power pushed women to seek independent networks where they could gain some autonomy.15

The temperance movement created a space where women entered the public discourse without threatening formal male authority. Leeann Whites argues that women’s reform movements gave them defensible ways to publically debate their stances on previously private issues. Whites summarizes her stance, “In essence ladies responded to the incursion of public life into the private sphere, of production into domesticity, by asserting that since parts of domestic life were now public, their ‘private’ presence in the public realm was clearly necessary.”16 Through their organizations women could make public arguments about the events around them and justify those statements with their domestic responsibilities.

14 Jacquelyn Down Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 223. 15 Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 85-86. 16 Leeann Whites, “The Charitable and the Poor: The Emergence of Domestic politics in Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1880,” Journal of Social History 17 (1984): 604.

In the mid 1980s historians’ examinations of women in the South also began to interpret their political activities within the religious context. In The Enclosed Garden: Women and

Community in the Evangelical South, Jean E. Friedman emphasized the increased pressure the evangelical community placed on women to conform to behavioral standards that pressured women to remain subservient towards their husbands.17 Because southern women faced pressure from both their families and their churches they had to find a cause that gave them increased autonomy through their roles as wives and mothers. In the South, temperance proved a particularly useful cause for women to form independent networks under the mantle of a maternal crusade to protect the family against vice. As historians developed interpretations of the temperance movement, they also looked to other reform efforts that women pursued. Analyses of reform efforts demonstrate that women used political platforms as means of achieving a greater role in public discourses, but they selected subjects that fell under the roles of maternal and domestic responsibilities. Within the range of southern women’s organizations, some women chose to participate in groups that more strictly adhered to the ideals of accepted female behavior and avoided issues such as legislation and economics.

The historiography of women’s activism explained how the social changes sparked by the

Civil War created opportunities for women to display greater authority in the public sphere. In

Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875-1915, Marsha Wedell contended that

Civil War facilitated a transition from domestic to civil affairs by creating places where their services were needed such as tending to ill or injured soldiers, mourning the dead, and managing

17 Jean E. Freidman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 21.

the household in the absence of their husbands.18 After the war women used reform movements to engage in public discourse while avoiding the appearance of challenging their domestic roles.

In her findings, she enforced the argument that through their independent associations, women developed a sense of community with other women that went beyond their kin networks and pushed women into the public sphere under the mantle of their domestic and moral authority.

These efforts to understand women’s reform movements encouraged a deeper examination into the history of women in the South as a whole. In Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women, Margaret Ripley Wolfe aimed to separate the actual history of southern women from the mythology in order to show how they were often the driving forces in major regional and national changes. Within a broad reaching analysis that explained women’s experiences across the centuries, Wolfe studied how the Civil War and Reconstruction changed women’s lives and prompted many women to seek more formal authority.19 She echoed the arguments of earlier Lost Cause and women’s historians in her assertion that southerners settled on a quasi-religious and mythological interpretation of the past to justify the region’s involvement in defeat in war. Though women, like southern men, held onto tradition, Wolfe argued that the mere recognition of problems revealed that female activists found fault with the masculine world and sought their own solutions to those problems.20

The majority of scholarship on women in the post Civil War South centered on the experiences of white women. To combat this scholarly neglect of minority women, Glenda

Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North

18 Marsha Wedell, Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875-1915 (Knoxville: university of Tennessee, 1991), 10-11. 19 Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1995), 83. 20 Wolfe, 143.

Carolina, 1896-1920, offered a thorough study of how African American women also organized a campaign for better rights than those relegated to them by the social status of their race and gender.21 Lost Cause ideology defined the historic and contemporary roles of each member for society. This ideology cast white women as innocent southern ladies dependent on white male protection. The villains in the myth were black men, imagined as rapacious beasts no longer reigned in by the controlling effect of slavery. Finally, the Lost Cause had the least to say about the roles of black women but still defined them largely as either sexual temptresses of white men or the faithful domestic servants and nannies of wealthy white families. Though still relegated to inferior status, their lack of a perceived threat to white male power gave black women some increased opportunities over their male peers to organize and campaign for equality. They formed their own chapters and organizations and began to lobby for causes that would weaken white supremacist authority.22 Their hopes of receiving some long-term recognition from white women for their organizational merits largely went ignored as the latter clung to the argument that woman suffrage would not endanger white supremacy.

These early examinations of women’s organizations created opportunities for subsequent writers to develop arguments that emphasized ways nineteenth century Americans engendered the conflict over temperance and alcohol. In the 1998 book Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America 1870-1940 Catherine Murdock argued that women did not choose temperance as a convenient means to initiate political autonomy, but because men and women of the period perceived a distinct relationship between gender and alcohol.23 Women organized

21 Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 225. 22 Gilmore, 49. 23 Catherine Murdock, Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America 1870-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 14.

behind temperance because they saw drunkenness and saloons as engines of masculine immorality. This argument established an understanding of women’s reform in which women sought more than increased political power as they engaged in efforts to alter problems in the behavior in their male peers.

These engendered conflicts not only applied to alcohol, but also prompted women to campaign for reform of other social ills. The Atlanta WCTU chapter’s campaign to raise the age of consent from ten to fourteen years of age served as the focus of Leslie K. Dunlap’s essay “The

Reform of Rape Law and the Problem of White Men: Age-of-Consent campaigns in the South

1885-1910.” According to Dunlap, the women of the WCTU tried to raise the age of consent in order to shift the blame and hold men responsible for illicit sex, particularly sex between white men and black women.24 Rather than employing racist arguments as other women’s reform movements did, these reformers argued that changing the law protected all young women in southern society. The goal behind the language of protection and virtue was to stop white men from having sex with black women. Dunlap offered one of the first arguments in which female reformers sought not only to increase their own authority, but also tried to use political action to challenge and change the behavior of their men. This theme of trying to affect change in male behavior through social reform continued into more recent scholarship. Rebecca Montgomery asserted that women sought to change masculinity through education in her book The Politics of

Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia.25 Montgomery emphasized the effect of discrimination that women faced in shaping their decision to see educating rural women

24 Leslie K. Dunlap, “The Reform of Rape Law and the Problem of White Men: Age-of-Consent Campaigns in the South 1885-1910,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes, (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 362. 25 Rebecca Montgomery, The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State university Press, 2006), 20.

as a means to reducing inequality. Through education, women sought to create a new standard of masculinity that valued virtue over sexism.

The scholarship on southern women’s reform efforts helps to clarify the obstacles women faced in the South as they campaigned for suffrage. Though scholars of southern women’s suffrage offered a variety of arguments, they largely agree that suffragists faced resistance from men who saw in the movement the spread of northern influences and an effort to challenge traditional social hierarchy. These studies on the southern suffrage movement followed the works of Scott, Epstein, and Friedman and drew from their interpretations of how women found ways to develop some political autonomy that did not challenge male power.

Evelyn Kirkley incorporated the history and role of religion in the South into the discussion of suffrage in her 1990 article “‘This Work is God’s Cause’: Religion in the Southern

Woman Suffrage Movement, 1880-1920.” Through her research Kirkley found that both suffragists and anti-suffragists used religious arguments to support their cause.26 The suffragists personal convictions, which influenced their ability to turn their campaign into a religious crusade based on righteousness and respectability, lent legitimacy to a cause that provoked suspicion in the minds of many southern men. The need to appear respectable and gain legitimacy recurred throughout the scholarly analysis of the southern suffrage movement.

Elizabeth Hayes Turner emphasized the local nature of suffrage campaigns in her article

“‘White-Gloved Ladies’ and ‘New Women’ in the Texas Woman Suffrage Movement.” Turner disconnected their campaign from the national efforts and argues against the idea that all suffragists drew from groups like the WCTU. She asserted that women eased the shift from the respected white-gloved clubwomen to suffragists by maintaining their strong connections with

26 Evelyn Kirkley, “‘This Work is God’s Cause’: Religion in the Southern Woman Suffrage Movement,” Church History 59 (1990): 509. (507-522)

the local community.27 By both continuing to don the white gloves which symbolized virtue and taking part in their earlier associations that provided needed and appreciated community services, women drew attention away from the broad controversies around suffrage and focused on the ways getting the vote would enable them to better express their devotion to the community.

As women in the South tried to live up to their traditional feminine roles while campaigning for suffrage, they also had to contend with the relationship between the national suffrage movement and the movement’s origins in the female political participation of women in abolitionist organization in the pre-Civil War North. The link reinforced the fears among southern white men that woman suffrage was another example of the North’s political infiltration of the South and a threat to white supremacy. Despite these concerns, women in the South often suggested that suffrage would in fact aid white supremacy by counter balancing the votes of black men. Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, edited by Nancy Hewitt and

Suzanne Lebsock, featured two essays that examine how suffragists in the south exploited notions of white supremacy as they built their their campaigns.28 In her study of Rebecca Latimer

Felton, Leeann Whites concluded that the end of the war and the plantation economy created a contradictory experience for Felton and her peers.29 The economic and political changes created a circumstance whereby women could finally seek greater autonomy, but simultaneously needed

27 Elizabeth Hayes Turner, "White-Gloved Ladies and 'New Women' in the Texas Woman Suffrage Movement," in ed., Bernhard et al. Southern Women: History and Identity (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 133.

28 Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993) 8. 29 Leanne Whites, “Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Problem of ‘Protection’ in the New South,” in Hewitt and Lebsock ed., 42-44

more protection from the men. Thus, Felton crafted a pro-suffrage stance in which she argued that women needed suffrage because men failed to offer adequate protection. Woman suffrage would enable white elite women to better protect race purity in the South because men could not.

Suzanne Lebsock found that as anti-suffragists used the threat of a greater black electorate to argue against woman suffrage, suffragists developed an argument for the separability of gender and race. Thus women argued that equal suffrage for women could pass without greatly affecting the voting power of blacks.30 Lebsock asserted that the way white suffragists openly campaigned on the idea that their vote could benefit white power to the exclusion of African Americans marked a key failing in historical thinking that lumped feminist movements together as avocations for the equality of all women. Her analysis drew attention to the need to understand the complexity of women’s efforts to gain increased rights in periods where sexism reinforced racism.

Historic scholarship nevertheless revealed that many times the woman suffrage campaign often provoked suspicion and frustration despite such efforts to avoid drawing the ire of southern white men. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler’s New Women of the New South: Leaders of the Woman

Suffrage Movement revealed the complex and often contradictory nature of southern women’s crusade.31 Wheeler argued that Southern suffragists sought to protect state sovereignty by calling for restricted state suffrage rather than national legislation. Though these new women believed that traditional duties and gender roles needed to be re-examined, they were largely unwilling to openly challenge male authority or paternalism. Instead, suffragists argued they needed the vote for their own reasons that rested largely on their sense of noblesse oblige. Women needed

30 Suzanne Lebsock, “Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study,” in Hewitt and Lebsock ed.,78. 31 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement 20-21

suffrage to fully carry out their domestic responsibilities and morally guide and uplift society.

Once women began to speak out on issues that were not considered proper for female public discourse, such as venereal diseases, age of consent, and brothels, they drew criticism from men who were already suspicious of whether women’s rights movements would undermine paternalistic society and therefore threaten their own control.

Though much of the anti-suffrage sentiment came from men, many women in the South also opposed the campaign. In Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Suffrage Question,

Elna C. Green used class analysis to examine which women aligned with which movement.32

According to Green, anti-suffragists came from the industrial-planter elite who believed that woman suffrage would threaten white supremacy and Democratic power in general. These women often had close connections with the Episcopal Church and conservative groups like the

UDC. Suffragists generally came from the growing urban middle class, which was more likely to support progressive reforms. Green found that when the anti-suffragists successfully aggravated fears of a decline in the normal social structure in regard to race and sex and drew upon Lost

Cause rhetoric, they often managed to defeat the suffragists.

These works offered insights into the complexity of the suffrage movement within the

South, but do not offer much explanation how southern women’s organizations differed from their northern counterparts, or how differences in the regions’ cultures created diverse experience for women who sought more influence. A recent essay by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler places southern suffragists in a national context. She describes a brief period of time in the 1880s when white Southern Democrats saw suffrage as an option to counteract the political threat caused by

32 Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 19.

black votes. 33 Once Republican officials made no effort to undo the literacy taxes and poll tests,

Democrats no longer needed women’s votes and suffrage lost its early potential for support. As suffrage in the South lost the potential for male support and met with resistance from female anti-suffragists, national suffrage leaders considered many southern states hopeless and sought victories elsewhere.

While suffragists, reformers, and other female political activists shaped much of the way women entered the public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some scholars noted the presence of a competing force from a similar segment of society. Janney argued that

Ladies Memorial Associations, the predecessors to the UDC, claimed a dominant role in drafting

Lost Cause ideology. Green argued that women who opposed suffrage often participated in groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Many of the scholars of the Lost Cause recognized the importance of groups like the UDC, who both espoused the rhetoric and regulated the messages schools and public sites could pass on to future generations. The objective historiography of groups like the UDC and other southern heritage organizations that based their mission around a specific interpretation of the past, is not as extensive as that of woman suffrage or reform. Some scholars of public memory have devoted their attention to thorough analyses of such organizations and how they shaped both their contemporary society and later generations’ understanding of history.

From the group’s inception the members of the UDC strove to maintain control over the content of southern memory and identity. In her article “‘Drill into us…the Rebel tradition”: The

Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White women’s Clubs, South Carolina, 1889-1930,”

33 Wheeler, “Race, Reform, and Reaction at the Turn-of-the-Century: Southern Suffragists, the NAWSA, and the ‘Southern Strategy’ in Context,” in Jean Baker, ed. Votes for Women: Recent Scholarship on the Woman Suffrage Movement, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 105.

Joan Marie Johnson observed a significant overlap between white members of women’s clubs and the membership of the local chapter of the UDC.34 She argued that through local efforts women of the UDC and other civic organizations helped created a pervasive Lost Cause ideology that not only shaped how people remembered the war, but also legitimized segregation under the mantle of protecting whites from the threats posed by black men. Furthermore, UDC members created a lasting legacy by building and raising funds for institutions that taught children the only

Lost Cause rhetoric.

Karen L. Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the

Preservation of Confederate Culture provided a deeper analysis of how southern women created and preserved a distinct vision of southern identity and culture.35 Cox argued this influence developed as women controlled the Lost Cause through their accepted duties of bereavement and commemoration. Similar to historians understanding of women’s reform movements, Cox asserted that participation in the UDC allowed women to pursue public agendas and still receive the praise accorded to proper southern ladies. As they adhered to the feminine ideal, they used their influence to uphold conservative traditions while working to change what they perceived as the evils of their society. For the women of the UDC, the construction of monuments was central to upholding southern values through a permanent medium. The simultaneous growth of women’s reform efforts in areas like education created another opportunity for UDC women to continue transmitting their interpretation of Confederate culture to their communities and youth beyond the walls and monuments of the cemetery. These women were committed to passing on

34 Joan Marie Johnson, “‘Drill into us…the Rebel tradition”: The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White women’s Clubs, South Carolina, 1889-1930,” Journal of southern History 66 (2000): 526-528. 35 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gaineseville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 96

what they argued was an impartial history that honored and vindicated the Confederacy while defending southern culture. Through their efforts the UDC influenced the development of the

New South by constantly reminding southerners and northerners of the ongoing importance and legacy of their version of the Old South.

The efforts of UDC members made a lasting impact in American memory of the Civil

War and how Americans think of memory and commemoration in general. Michael Kammen observed in Mystic Chords of Memory, Americans’ obsession with memory and tradition developed in earnest between 1870 and 1915.36 He attributed this new interest in the past to a combination of the growth of economics and industry, including railroads that made the spread of information more feasible and the increased interest in commemorative activities among the generation of Americans that followed the War and sought ways to remember their ancestors’ heroics.

These efforts to commemorate and preserve the past created a problematic version of history. Kirk Savage argued that contests over memory, power, and identity lie in the creation of

Civil War monuments almost as soon as the war ended. He highlighted a few efforts to memorialize black figures, but concluded that since the war the images immortalized were largely depictions of whiteness.37 Even emancipation memorials favored presenting an image of

Lincoln as the bestower of freedom over the former slaves who earned their liberty. Savage also highlights what he terms statues of the common soldier, which are in actuality statues of white soldiers. Throughout his analysis Savage only briefly mentioned the UDC once and focused on the monuments themselves as actors in an ongoing historical debate. Though this emphasis

36 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 37 Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth- Century America ((Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 211.

underlined the power of monuments to relay political messages across generations it separated the women who were influential in establishing the tropes of so many monuments from the results they created.

Savage’s work marked part of an ongoing effort among historians and public historians to incorporate more honesty and complexity into the nation’s historic sites and monuments. In

1999, two writers issued this challenge through case studies that examined how politics, and in some cases outright deception, played into the origins of many of these sites. Patricia West’s

Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums examined four house museums and charted how the historical interpretations that museum staff presented simplified history and enshrined famous figures with little critical analysis of their lives of actions.38 Her most relevant chapter is the examination of the Mount Vernon Ladies’

Association. Though the MVLA began its efforts before the outbreak of the Civil War, the escalating tensions caused the southern organization, led by Ann Pamela Cunningham, to eschew any mention of Washington’s personal politics, including his ownership of slaves or any effort to free them. Instead they crafted a message that enshrined Washington as a unifying figure and devoted more attention to the furnishings than to any discussion of the late President’s personal politics. Throughout her analysis West contended that the people responsible for the content at these sites need to move beyond the message the founders of the MVLA wanted and offer visitor information about both the subject and the context in which the founders created their sites.

38 Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian University Press, 1999),162.

James Loewen conducted a similar mission in Lies Across America: What Our Historic

Sites Get Wrong through a blunt debunking of ninety-one sites throughout the country.39 Loewen paid particular attention to sites and monuments that endorse prejudiced and hierarchical versions of history, particularly those that continued to depict retellings of the Lost Cause as fact.

By refusing to update their content these sites not only offer inaccurate account of the past, but also reinforce those accounts are factual. By spreading these versions as truth they condoned biased, and often racist, interpretations of history where the sites could benefit visitors as points for critical discussions of the past.

These two sources serve as guides to how the efforts of groups like the UDC and the memorial associations not only altered the way their contemporaries discussed the Civil War, but also shaped how Americans remembered the war for almost 150 years after this event. The essays collected in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory edited by

James and Lois Horton emphasized this point.40 Though written by individual authors including

David Blight, Ira Berlin, and John Michael Vlach, the essays worked together to collectively argue three main ideas. First, the essays asserted that the majority of Americans possessed a skewed understanding of slavery’s role in American history and the Civil War. The second theme throughout the collection was that despite controversy and a general unwillingness to discuss the subject, public historians were the best equipped to facilitate an honest and fair public discourse on slavery, its enduring consequences, and the ways people sought to obfuscate the truth. People from a broader array of socio-economic background visit historic sites than those that have access to higher education. By dealing with a more diverse segment of the population,

39 James Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 18. 40 James Horton and Lois Horton, Slavery and Public History: the Tough Stuff of American History (New York: New Press, 2006), x

public historians are able to educate a broader base of people than other educational institutions.

Finally, the essays reflected on the continuing challenges historians face in their efforts to remedy misconceptions about slavery’s place in the Civil War. These obstacles came mostly in the form of objections from heritage groups like the UDC, which were largely involved in the fundraising efforts of many sites and inexorably invested in maintaining their control over historical truth.

That the memory of the Civil War remained a contested subject demonstrates the endurance of the UDC’s efforts to write history and preserve that history for generations to come. The subject remained a topic of academic interest as shown by W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s

2008 study The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory.41 Brundage offered a social history of how people produce memory and how they inscribe it on the landscape. Throughout the book,

Brundage organized his chapters by alternating the enduring presence of white memory in public spaces with efforts by African Americans to challenge that memory. Through his methodology,

Brundage demonstrated how the fight over memory was also a fight for political leverage.

Brundage emphasized that white women’s success at shaping public memory was the impetus that convinced men it was an efficient way to gain or maintain authority. Furthermore, Brundage reinforced the argument that by controlling memory southern women expanded the boundaries of their own acceptable behavior by validating male authority while simultaneously broadening their own influence.

These three areas of scholarship helped inform further research into how southern women navigated the constricting political and social terrain in order to find opportunities to improve their own conditions before they could vote. The secondary literature revealed that women in the

41 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3-5

South lacked options to remedy problems created by male authority. Aside from the need to create their own political power in a system that denied them public authority, women faced domestic threats from a society that condoned drunkenness and adultery in men, but left women with few options to address these problems. Aside from Elna Green, few historians provided explanations as to why some women aligned with the political reform groups while others joined conservative leaning heritage societies. Why white women from similar backgrounds chose two different forms of expression in their efforts to enter public discourses requires further study beyond the scope of their works. While some historians like Leslie Dunlap argued that WCTU members sought not only to increase their own political power but also to alter the attitudes and behaviors of their husbands and male peers, scholarship has neglected how women from both the reform and heritage groups attempted to change the actions of men in their communities by embracing different methods.42

To date the scholars of the South, women’s activism, and public memory have not addressed the extent to which the rhetoric and approaches adopted by the Woman’s Christian

Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy influenced the extent to which their messages would survive into later generations. Though both organizations serve as examples of women’s pre-suffrage political activism, the differences between their public statements underscores the complexity of how southern women approached changing both their roles in society and ideas of masculine morality. The members of the WCTU used politically charged and critical rhetoric that challenged men’s ability to lead and demanded women’s entrance into the public sphere as part a broader national campaign. Meanwhile, UDC members employed rhetoric that supported white male power and celebrated the virtues of the region while

42 Dunlap, 362-362.

espousing a specific kind of Christian morality and challenging leaders to follow. Both groups sought to initiate changes in attitudes and mindsets for subsequent generations. Once politically defeated, the messages of the WCTU began to fade from the public in favor of the language of their opponents. As a result, the public increasingly lost access to and memory of WCTU’s rhetoric and ideas. In contrast, the United Daughters of the Confederacy avoided discussions of legislation and instead used their public influence to celebrate an idealized masculinity through memorialization. By using commemorative ceremonies and monuments they inscribed their beliefs into the local landscape and communities traditions. This approach in turn created a lasting rhetoric that the public could easily view for centuries.

The city of Atlanta and surrounding areas, is an apt location to examine how these differences affected public memory. The city housed active divisions of both the WCTU and the

UDC. Boosters also focused on the Atlanta’s status as a strong example of a modern city of the

New South. The city’s current historic sites, monuments, and museums also demonstrate how much access the public has to the messages and history of these groups. Furthermore, the diversity of people in metro-Atlanta reinforces how well developed sites can reach an audience that may not have immediate access to other academic venues such as colleges or archival depositories.

The following three chapters of this thesis draw from the secondary literature and primary sources to examine the rhetoric and legacy of the Georgia divisions of the WCTU and the UDC. Chapter one examines how the WCTU used openly political rhetoric to claim their own public authority from men, while the UDC transformed the private duties of mourning and memorialization into public rituals. Within both approaches was an emphasis on changing attitudes towards morality, and, in particular, what traits and behaviors defined a virtuous man.

The second chapter demonstrates how the rhetoric of the WCTU has largely faded from

Atlanta’s public memory since the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, replaced by an attitude that glamorizes Prohibition era cocktail culture. Chapter three explains how the monuments and sites created and sponsored by the UDC remain largely intact, and current displays offer little or no context on the deeper political and social meaning behind the organizations laudatory language. These chapters show how the difference in the WCTU’s and the UDC’s language and approach shaped how the public remembered or forgot the presence and efforts of each organization. In turn, they provide insight into a portion of the complex history of women’s political activity that Atlanta historians could make more readily available to the public.

REDEEMING MANHOOD: THE GEORGIA WCTU AND UDC’S EFFORTS TO INFLUENCE MASCULINE MORALITY, 1870-1920

In the decades immediately following the Civil War, the southern states were in a period of economic, political, and cultural flux. Following military defeat, southern elites initially had to resign much of their political power to Northern Republicans. Simultaneously, the

Reconstruction Amendments, which promised African Americans freedom and equal protection and recognition under the law, presented the population of newly freed slaves as a direct political threat to white, male power in the South. With the undermining of the plantation economy, the increased traffic of Northern businessmen into the South delivered a strong blow to the economic security of the traditional southern elites. Military defeat, the legal widening of political power, and demise of the plantation economy created a crisis in the confidence of white men who saw their traditional bases of power threatened, as their political culture evolved. In response, some elites used threats, violence, and biased laws to defend their status.

While southern white men saw their political leverage threatened by outside forces, women throughout the nation began to form organizations to enter the public domain, and address issues that affected their communities and families.43 Participation in women’s organizations also gave women opportunities to address and try to influence contemporary perceptions of gender and acceptable behavior among men and women. Though women’s organizations often had a national presence, state and local chapter members worked autonomously to determine the best way to accomplish their goals while fitting into the mores and customs of their area. Within the South, adapting to the societal standards of the region often proved challenging for women trying attain greater public influence. As the membership and

43 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9.

presence of women’s organizations started to grow throughout the region, groups adopted a variety of strategies for trying to accomplish their goals within a society that pressured women to adhere to the idealized image of the white-gloved lady.

The economic, political, and cultural climate of Georgia in the decades between 1870 and

1920 provides an ideal setting to examine how clubwomen approached becoming public figures while male elites already believed their power was being threatened by outside forces. The increase of urban professionals created a group of centrally located upper middle class women with the leisure time needed to take on social causes, while the conservative political structure meant these women still had to navigate around traditional attitudes of women’s inherent domesticity when developing their new public personas. The Georgia chapters of two women’s organizations, in particular, exemplified the different approaches southern, white women took to increased their influence and alter men’s behavior prior to woman’s suffrage. Despite pressure to conform feminine ideals, members of Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union called out men’s inability to protect their homes and families, and challenged lawmakers to pass reforms that would legally restrict undesirable and dangerous male behaviors. Furthermore, their participation in the WCTU placed these women within a national organization, in which they campaigned for legislative changes that they hopes to see passed across the country, not just in their community or region. These actions created a volatile and public discourse regarding the proper behavior of southern men and women. Simultaneously, members of the Georgia Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the preceding Ladies Memorial Associations, which gave way to the UDC, adopted a more subtle and local approach to changing ideas and behaviors. They expanded traditionally feminine roles as mourners and keepers of memory to launch a Confederate memorialization campaign that both expressed conservative southern

mores and repeatedly reminded southern men of the values they ought possess and where their priorities should lie. Furthermore, the activity and leadership of both organizations reveals that there was no overlap between the groups’ officers, who were most responsible for shaping the rhetoric of the Georgia organizations. Though the sources do not reveal exactly why women chose one group over the other, the distinctiveness indicates that women were aware of the different approaches available to them, and consciously selected one over the other. This choice depended largely on their attitudes towards the role of the state in prompting moral reform, and the extent to which women sought to disrupt the current power structure.

The demoralizing affect of military defeat and initial Republican victories during

Reconstruction, though short-lived, influenced Georgia politics for decades to come. The 1868 special elections voted Republican governor Rufus Bullock, and thirty-two black legislators into office. These victories stemmed largely from the votes of newly enfranchised African

Americans. Conservative Democrats in Georgia immediately began campaigns of violence and intimidation that resulted in the state’s “redemption” in 1871.44 Though official Republican control over the state lasted only three years, the memory of outsiders gaining power through the votes of formerly enslaved black men fueled a political ideology of southern white male supremacy that dominated the state well into the subsequent century.

Similarly, changes in the southern economy carried another perceived threat to those who traditionally held power in Georgia. Following the Civil War, Georgians experienced a decline in net worth and economic power that necessitated a shift away from an agrarian economy.

Between 1860 and 1870 the average net worth of a white male in Georgia dropped from 4,000 dollars to 1,400, and from twice that of the average northern male to three-quarters of the

44 James C. Cobb, The Georgia Odyssey: A Short History of the State, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. 29-30.

northern average.45 The decline in the price of cotton and an increase in the crop’s growth also prompted the need for an economic system that depended less on cash crops and more on business.46 Developing successful businesses in the South depended on persuading northern investors to take an economic interest in the region. Accomplishing this task required boosters like Henry Grady to convince northerners to believe that southerners had given up the backward- looking and prejudiced ideals associated with the region and promote images of a “New South” that was eager to embrace progress and a renewed spirit of cooperation for the economic benefit of all.47 The inflated rhetoric of boosters like Grady bore little resemblance to the actual political or social climate of Georgia, but rousing speeches served their purpose and increased investment and economic interest in the state.

Though the state benefitted from the increased revenue, conservative southerners latched onto the increased presence of northern businessmen and capital as another example of outside interference from individuals who sought to corrupt the region and force southerners to abandon the traditional values they argued defined their region. Even as successful Georgia politicians benefitted financially from the increased presence of Northern capital, they wasted no time in exploiting cultural outsiders when political conflicts threatened their power among poor whites.

The presence of northern, and often times Jewish, businessmen provided southern elites with a scapegoat they could use to unite poor and working class whites, while deflecting attention away

45 Cobb, 31. 46 Cobb, 32. 47 Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 21.

form their own political and economic failings.48 Scapegoating and fear mongering formed the basis of the elite, white, southern political strategy.

Upon reclaiming authority in 1871 and for the bulk of the following century, maintaining white male power in the South depended on the belief that the traditional southern racial hierarchy was the best system for the region and any shift in the balance of power would not only undermine the values and mores that defined the region, but also put genteel white southerners in danger. Only by stressing the threats posed by northerners and minorities, could southern elite men confidently garner support from white men of all classes. Rather than addressing contemporary problems, “the politics of Redemption belonged …to the romantic school, emphasizing race and tradition and deprecating issues of economics and self-interest.” 49 The swift rise to power and the successful use of fear-based politics granted southern Democrats authority that went largely unquestioned, but continued success depended on making sure their power remained unchallenged and that outsiders and subservient groups did not attempt to step beyond their accepted roles within society.

Women’s organizations had to contend with this system of institutionalized fear and unchallenged white, male authority as their members sought to carve out greater public influence. Southern politics left little room for moderation and club leaders had to determine if their organizations would embrace the current political system or challenge the leadership to include the perspectives of women. It is within this hierarchy, that the Georgia chapters of

WCTU and the UDC developed divergent strategies for accomplishing their goals and reshaping contemporary ideas of the proper behaviors for women and men. In 1880 “Mother” Stewart, a

48 Nancy MacClean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” in The Journal Of American History. 940-941. 49 C. Vann Woodward. The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 51.

founder of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Ohio in 1874, led the formation of the first chapter of the Georgia WCTU in 1880, in the basement of the Trinity

Methodist Church in Atlanta. By 1883, enough local chapters existed that they created the first statewide Georgia chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in 1883 in Atlanta.50

Almost immediately after the state group’s formation, members had to address charges of unladylike behavior. In the 1885 campaign, which saw Atlanta’s shift to a dry city, unnamed critics accused the WCTU of influencing women to abandon their proper domestic roles by encouraging them to leave their homes and address the public. Despite pressure to acquiesce,

WCTU members addressed these charges directly and argued men’s failures at their own duties were the reason women had to become public and political figures. In response to these attacks,

Rebecca Latimer Felton, superintendent of the Georgia WCTU’s Department of Petition Work, declared, “My friends, do not wonder that your heart-broken wives and mothers should in desperation be driven in to the public eye to plead for the protection of our sons for whom we have gone into the very gates of death to give being, but hear me, rather wonder, that we do not lay violent hands down upon the foul institution which is daily dragging them down to hell!” 51

Felton’s rebukes characterized the arguments Georgia temperance women would use throughout their campaigns. The consumption and abuse of alcohol were cast as uniquely masculine problems, which left women unprotected, and unable to properly raise families. Men who supported liquor traffic were willing to put families at risk; in turn they failed as fathers, husbands, and sons, and forced women to enter the public to protect the homes that men would

50 Lula Barnes Ansley, The History of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: From Its Organization, 1883-1907, 37-38, 50. 51 Ansley, 82.

not. Felton’s comments served not only as a call to arms for women but also a scathing criticism of how men throughout the state prioritized profit and pleasure over home and family.

Despite their emphasis on their roles as mothers, homemakers, and Christians, participation in the Georgia WCTU exposed women to criticisms of undermining traditional southern culture and threatening both the status and the perceived privileges women possessed.

In general, taking up the mantle of protecting Christian virtue and the sanctity of homes provided women a respectable way to enter public debates and develop their political ambitions.52

However, because the South was so dependent on the belief in male chivalry and female fragility to support the white supremacist hierarchy, WCTU members’ willingness to challenge men’s judgment threatened to undermine the ideological basis of the region’s political systems. Lula

Barnes Ansley noted in her history of the Georgia WCTU that, “Mr. W. P. Pledger, a speaker for the liquor men, had declared from a public platform in Atlanta, that women left their homes to go out and campaign and work for temperance, they by this act, forfeited their right to man’s homage.”53 Pledger’s argument aptly summarized conservative southern men’s fear of women’s political activity. Powerful white men relied upon the idea of women’s innocence, passivity, vulnerability, and respectability as justification for their violent and fear-laden efforts to maintain political authority. Once women started to enter public politics in support of causes that countered these men’s interests, they threatened their power by simultaneously criticizing men’s authority and doffing the feminine respectability that served as the ideological basis of southern

Democratic control.

Over the next few decades WCTU members in Georgia used issues like temperance, sexual education, and raising the age of consent as a means to simultaneously address masculine

52 Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady, 147-148. 53 Ansley, 102.

failings while encouraging legislatures to codify limits to men’s range of acceptable behaviors.

Repeatedly, WCTU rhetoric asserted that women’s emergence into the public stemmed from the urgent need to police masculine behaviors that put women and families at risk. Women’s duties changed once men failed at theirs. Two issues in particular, prohibition and the push for raising the age of consent, typified how women’s campaigns were an attempt to change the rhetoric that allowed white men to act without question, and change behavior through outlawing transgressions.

When discussing prohibition, Georgia WCTU members left no question regarding their goals and reasons. The sale and consumption of all alcohol needed to be outlawed for the safety of families. Temperance literature and speeches throughout the state made ample use of violent and guilt-laden imagery to emphasize the extent to which men’s imbibing left wives and children at risk of violence, poverty, and moral ruin. In her address at the 1891 convention, Georgia

WCTU president, Mrs. W.C. Sibley recounted the story of a family destroyed by the violent rage of a drunken father. Sibley, the daughter a judge and wife of cotton mill president William C.

Sibley, employed graphic and gory imagery to underscore her argument:

In Pennsylvania a drunken man and his wife get into a quarrel; they fight and he strikes her a blow which kills her. In his drunken attempt to revive her, he takes the red-hot tongs from the fire, and burns deep holes into her flesh. Not satisfied with this he lays the red-hot coals upon the body, to which they are still clinging when the young son comes home to find his mother dead upon the floor, her arms outstretched, blood running from her ears, nose and mouth, portions of her body cooked and burnt with the coals sticking to her flesh, the room looking like a slaughter house and the father lying dead drunk in the midst of his awful work.54

In a three-sentence long story, Sibley thrice referenced the husband’s drunken state as the cause of the horrific scene, and repeatedly emphasized its ghastly imagery. In her address at the 1894

54 Mrs. W.C. Sibley, “The President’s Address,” 1891 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Annual Convention Program, 22.

convention Sibley recounted brutal stories of a husband who killed his wife by dragging her across a barbed-wire fence and crushing her skull with an axe, and a father who killed his infant child by throwing it against a wall before he murdered his wife and sister-in-law.55 In all three stories, Sibley emphasized the brutal and shocking dimensions of each crime, despite the fact the relating such details put her odds with the idealized image of the demure and genteel southern lady.56 Though indelicate in their graphic nature, these stories stressed the danger women and children faced from drunk and violent husbands and fathers. Simultaneously, Sibley’s use of examples from throughout the country demonstrated a willingness to associate the Georgia

WCTU with the national temperance campaign, and characterized alcohol abuse as a male problem rather than a southern male problem. This national character of the WCTU cause and rhetoric further challenged southern men’s right to power by likening them to northern men, and in turn ignoring arguments of southerners’ inherently exceptional character. Through her examples, Sibley made clear that the problems Georgia temperance women sought to address were not simply the sale and consumption of alcohol, but the wider problem of unchecked male behavior, which left women with few means of defending themselves or addressing potential domestic threats.57 Outlawing alcohol was a way to hinder men from behaving violently and irresponsibly.

Rather than relying solely on violent imagery of drunken aggression, Georgia temperance women also used a national perspective to enter public discourses on the broad economic and political benefits of prohibition. Through these arguments WCTU members could not only

55 Sibley, “The President’s Address,” 1894 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Program, 16. 56 Frances Elizabeth Willard, Woman and Temperance, or The Work and Workers of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Hartford: Bark Publishing, 1883. 556. 57 Barbara Leslie Epstein, women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 106.

demonstrate their knowledge of finances and politics, but also challenge whether men were really placing the best interest of homes and families over personal gain. Even after Georgia lawmakers passed statewide Prohibition in 1907, temperance women throughout the state continued to argue for political and economic benefits of Prohibition in a way that cast supporters of the sale and consumption of alcohol as selfish and immoral. In a 1911 convention address, Georgia WCTU president Mrs. T.E. Patterson, the wife of a judge, declared, “What has

Prohibition done for Georgia? It has decreased taxes; increased property values; increased business values; stimulated progress; bought homes; put children in school; started savings bank accounts; lowered the death rate; decreased drunkenness and crime…And who is glad?

Everybody but the brewers, distillers, and a small following of degenerate outcasts, the natural product of their desperately wicked business.”58 Within the same address, Patterson exemplified

Maine as the leader in Prohibition and outlined the increased revenue, savings educational and job opportunities, reduced crime Maine’s residents enjoy as a result of outlawing liquor.59

Patterson’s rhetorical strategy simultaneously questioned the morality of any Georgian who continued to support the liquor trade, while asserting that those in power in the state ought to abandon ideas of “old Georgia” in favor of matching the example set by a northern state.

Through this speech, Patterson demonstrated women’s ability to understand and debate matter of politics and finance, undermined the values of her political opponents, and placed herself and the

Georgia WCTU in support of national reforms that would make the South more like northern states.

58 Mrs. T.E. Patterson, “The President’s Address,” Supplement to the Convention Number of Georgia Bulletin, October 1911. 59 Patterson, “The President’s Address.”

The rhetoric of Georgia WCTU leaders like Sibley and Patterson contradicted the image of the ideal southern lady and challenged the political and economic interests of southern elite men. Through the public debate over alcohol women could began to address problems that resulted from unchecked masculine power and used their mission to protect their families as a means of campaigning for reforms that would effectively outlaw undesirable male behaviors.

WCTU members used this opportunity to address other masculine transgressions beyond drunkenness as chapters across Georgia initiated a social purity movement. The campaign to increase the legal age of sexual consent exemplified this movement’s attempt to change the attitudes, rhetoric, and laws regarding which party was held responsible for illicit sexual activity, and to hinder men from engaging in extramarital sex and to protect vulnerable women. Their efforts also attacked the sexual double standard, which held women responsible for sexual transgressions, while men’s participation was often overlooked.

Georgia WCTU literature supported the national movement for increased sexual and physiological education, but the Georgia chapter stressed different aspects of the movement than the national movement, and demonstrated how WCTU members used their place within a national organization to address local problems as well. The national social purity movement stressed the need for increased moral and practical education regarding sex, with a special emphasis on the dangers of “the white Slave traffic,” or forced prostitution of young white women.60 The Georgia division’s focus on social purity, developed early within the organization, and was inevitably linked with issues of class, race, and status. Sibley’s address to the 1891 convention, briefly and succinctly characterized the scope of the social purity movement within

Georgia. The Georgia WCTU president urged, “Let us work more diligently for the social purity

60 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, “National Purity Congress to Meet at Battle Creek,” Georgia Bulletin. October 15, 1907.

and rescue of ‘unfortunates.’ Let us warn the colored race against the enemy that is dragging them down to a more degrading and subjugating slavery than any they have ever known.”61 For

Sibley and the Georgia WCTU, those most in need of the education and services rendered by the social purity movement were poor white and African American women. Through this statement,

Sibley casts the issue of social purity not as a problem of young, and well-off, white women being subjugated by men, but rather a problem of those of lower status not being able to effectively refuse the will of their superiors, leaving upper class white men with unchecked power to coerce poor women, black and white, into sex. This focus marked one of the primary problems white women faced in a culture in which men sought to maintain, as much as possible, the political and social hierarchy of the antebellum South. Under the plantation system, slave owners could take sexual advantage of female slaves without fear of consequence.62 Wealthy white men’s continued power in the New South meant that they enjoyed similar sexual power over women of lower status, while the victims of coerced sex and the wives of unfaithful husbands lacked any official means of combatting these transgressions.

These issues of race, status, and power with regard to men’s sexual behavior drove the

WCTU’s campaign to increase the age of sexual consent in Georgia. Changing the law would effectively alter who was responsible for sexual encounters, limit the scope of acceptable behavior for white men, and challenge the double standard toward marital fidelity. The need to make men more accountable for their sexual misconduct had developed enough attention from the organization that it warranted inclusion in the organizations annual political resolutions.

When describing the issue, Georgia WCTU members clearly saw age of consent and rape law

61 Sibley, “The President’s Address,” 1891 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Program, 24. 62 Dunlap, 356-357.

reform as a moral issue. The sixth resolution of the 1911 Convention stated, “We protest against all laws regulating vice, or that in any way give legal recognition to the social evil; we again petition our Legislature to raise the age of consent for girls from 10 to 18 years and beg for the co-operation of the federated clubs in Georgia to help secure this measure.”63 The push to increase the age of consent across the state was less focused on young women’s sexual maturity and more concerned with regulating male behavior.

Men who had sex with a woman under the age of consent could be tried and punished for rape, even if the use of force or coercion was absent or unclear. In other cases, the woman would have to present proof that force was used and defend her character against scrutiny.64 An increase in the age of consent for women would decrease the number of women men could have sex with without risking legal punishment. Within the South, questions of coercion and a woman’s morality in cases of illicit sexual relationships were entwined with issues of race, class, and status.65 White, wealthy men enjoyed largely unchallenged power in the South that extended into sexual dynamics. Their power allowed them to pressure women of lower status into sex without the use of blatant force and coercion. Simultaneously, racial and class based stigmas meant black and poor women had a more difficult time defending their morality and virtue against judges and jurors who tended to relate more with the defendant than the victims.66 Reforming rape laws to include all women under the age of eighteen regardless of race or class would prevent elite men from engaging in forced sexual intercourse with women, and in turn limit these sexual men’s

63 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. “Report of the Resolutions Committee,” Georgia Bulletin. October 27, 1911. 64 Leslie K. Dunlap, “The Reform of Rape Law and the Problem of White Men: Age-of-Consent Campaigns in the South, 1885-1910,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History ed. Martha Hodes. (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 355. 65 Dunlap, 361. 66 Laura Edwards, 12.

opportunities. Reducing the number of women available for elite white men to have sex with, in turn, reduced women’s threat of disease and adultery posed by husbands.

Campaigns to alter men’s behavior, and legally reassign the responsibility for sex to men was part of an attempt to challenge long-standing sexual double standard in which men could behave freely without reproach, while women’s sexual purity and innocence was held under constantly scrutinized. Georgia WCTU members addressed this double standard early in the organization’s history, and the disproportionate consequences illicit sexual relations had on women in comparison to men. Within the first decade of the Georgia WCTU’s founding,

Corresponding Secretary, Missouri H. Stokes directly addressed both issues as she described the formation of a committee to raise funds for the establishment of homes for “penitent erring women.” Stokes stated, “In our own land- yea, almost under the shadow of our own churches— there is a class of human beings against whom society bars its doors, and who have long been given over to helplessness and infamy…and the Bible, which teaches but one and the same standard of morality for both sexes, has impelled some of our white-ribboned sisters to go out seeking to save even these lost ones.”67 Though couched in language of saving women of ill repute, Stokes statement clearly articulates where she perceived the origin of the problem lay.

Under the double standard present in the antebellum South, white men could engage in sexual relationships before and outside of marriage with little or no judgment, while women who engaged in the same behaviors were maligned and ostracized. This attitude allowed white men to use their power and status to engage in sexual relationships with women with no fear of reproach.

67 Missouri H. Stokes, “Report of the Corresponding Secretary,” Minutes of the Sixth Annual Convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Georgia, 1888.

In conjunction with the critiques of specific behaviors, such as drunkenness and infidelity, women in the Georgia WCTU used their position within the organization to level generalized attacks against men’s ability to care for families and prioritize the safety of their homes over economic or political gain. Rebecca Latimer Felton repeatedly emphasized men’s failings in her address at the 1888 Convention. When addressing criticisms that politics was men’s work, she countered, “True but has man done it? …Isn’t it time to call in help again when the men give up and yield to the enemy?”68 Felton’s criticisms of men’s inability to manage their homes, communities, and government grew more scathing as she questioned men’s morality.

Felton declared, “Sneer at women’s weak effort if you will! Better employ that wasted breath to convince us of your loyalty and patriotism; better spend that time in redeeming your manhood!”69 Felton’s attacks demonstrated that WCTU rhetoric often went beyond campaigns for new laws that would police men’s actions. Her comments challenged the traditional social mores and she asserted that it was time for men to prove their virtue to women.

The WCTU’s aims did not stop at challenging their male peers to enact laws that would enforce better behavior. They also pushed schools, churches, and parents to educate their children, especially sons, as to the benefits of temperance and leading a moral life. This campaign for WCTU sanctioned education was part of an effort to influence the attitudes, morals, and behaviors of later generations and ensure that the WCTU’s message lasted for centuries to come. Members of the Georgia WCTU identified the need for education programs early in the organization’s history and continued to emphasize this point after Georgia passed statewide temperance legislation in 1907. During the 1888 convention, Georgia WCTU president

68 Rebecca Latimer Felton, “Woman’s Relation the Temperance Work,” Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Georgia, Eighth Annual Convention, 1890. 51. 69 Felton, 53.

Mrs. W.C. Sibley called for legislation to pass laws requiring public schools to teach

“compulsory scientific temperance instructions.” Sibley left no doubt that the purpose of this curriculum was to influence the future behavior of young children. “The children of the country must yet be educated in temperance through schools, as a necessary adjunct and preparation to prohibition. What better to help the temperance cause than forewarning and forearming the young against the evil effects of the liquor habit? What are public schools for but to prepare the rising generation for good citizenship?”70 Sibley’s address directly linked temperance, morality, education, and citizenship. For children to grow into virtuous and beneficial citizens, schools needed to instill temperance values in them.

The WCTU’s efforts to persuade schools to teach students to support and uphold temperance did not stop once legal Prohibition began in the state. WCTU members passed resolutions urging local Union presidents to convince schools to include temperance education in their curriculum and offered essay contests to get students to develop their own pro-temperance arguments.71 These arguments for greater temperance education were an effort to teach younger generations the immorality of the behaviors WCTU women sought to eradicate within their own society. Insisting that schools instill WCTU teachings into children exemplified their desire to reshape both their contemporary morality and the values, and in turn the behaviors of future generations.

While WCTU members pushed for political reforms that altered legal male behavior and the values formally taught to young men, women in the Georgia Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy used a different approach to attempt to change contemporary and future ideas

70 Mrs. W.C. Sibley, “The President’s Address,” Minutes of the Sixth Annual Convention of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Georgia, 1888. 15. 71 “Report of the Resolutions Committee,” Georgia Bulletin, October 27, 1911.

of what qualities and behaviors made up the ideal southern man. The rhetoric and methods employed by the Georgia UDC demonstrated how women who led organizations, often members of the wives of upper middle class and affluent professional and business men, did not use one approach for entering public discourse, but selected contrasting methods in their attempts to develop public influence and authority. The development of the Georgia Chapter of the United

Daughters of the Confederacy followed the same general trends that occurred throughout the region. The UDC chapters began to form roughly a generation after the more loosely structured

Ladies Memorial Associations, which organized in the region in the years shortly after the Civil

War. These associations built monuments to honor the Confederate dead and organized annual celebrations as tributes these soldiers.72 Official Confederate memorial celebrations in Georgia began in 1866 when the women of the Atlanta Ladies’ Memorial Association held Confederate

Memorial Day services on April 26 at Oakland Cemetery.73 The activities of the LMAs in

Georgia and across the South helped establish precedent for women to pursue public activity through memorialization efforts. The romanticized memories of Confederate women as the last to surrender and the stronghold of traditional southern values enabled them to adopt a more public role and influence ideas of masculine morality without inviting the skepticism or scorn of overtly political women’s organizations.74 In November of 1895, three decades after the formation of the Atlanta Ladies’ Memorial Associations, the Georgia Division of the United

Daughters of the Confederacy organized and adopted the mantle of Confederate

72 Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 9. 73 “Confederate Memorial Day In Georgia,” GeorgiaInfo, accessed June 23, 2011. http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/confmem.htm 74 Cox, 10.

memorialization.75 The most apparent goal of the Georgia UDC, under the leadership of first president C. Helen Plane, was to use monuments, memorial activities, and education reforms to espouse Lost Cause ideology and to cement the ideology of Southern white supremacy.

The rhetoric of the Georgia UDC championed Lost Cause ideals of white supremacy, the nobility and innocence of the Old South, the benevolence of slavery, and the dangers of political and social interference from Northerners or African Americans. Advocating Lost Cause ideology, in turn, required UDC women to romanticize and adhere to an idealized image of women as demure, subordinate, and domestic. By using memorialization, a logical extension of bereavement and wifely devotion, the Daughters could successfully enter the public sphere and influence discussions of history, politics, and morality without inviting judgment from southern elites. Through this approach, the Daughters avoided entering formal public politics in that they did not lobby for changing the laws or lawmakers. Once they successfully entered public discourse and gained control over memorials, monuments, and other forms of information, these women could in turn use these platforms to shape the language and ideas of men’s character and morality and attempted to create a culture of more virtuous masculine behavior

Georgia’s Daughters could not effectively alter attitudes regarding virtuous men’s behavior without first gaining some measure of control over Lost Cause rhetoric and demonstrating their proficiency at espousing other aspects of romanticized southern history.

UDC rhetoric in Georgia centered on what Daughters characterized as correcting history. This task consisted of disseminating a view of the antebellum South and the Civil War that professed complete southern innocence. Throughout her career as President of the Georgia Division of the

United Daughters of the Confederacy and Historian General of the national organization, Athens,

75 Angela Esco Elder, “United Daughters of the Confederacy,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, accessed June 30, 2011, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3766&hl=y .

Georgia native, Mildred Lewis Rutherford championed the spread of Lost Cause history. This approach countered that of WCTU leadership in that it avoided direct attacks on men’s behavior or priorities in favor of promoting a specific idea of masculinity that encouraged men to emulate the alleged virtues of their heroic ancestors.

Her 1914 address to the Georgia UDC Convention discussed, in detail, the key components of the Lost Cause. According to Rutherford, contemporary accounts of the past slandered the South, and her mission, and the mission of the UDC in general, was to correct a series of lies that purportedly demonized the region and its heroes. Rutherford’s first correction to the history of the Civil War was that the conflict was not a war of secession or rebellion, but a

“war between the states, for the non-seceding states of the United States made war upon the seceding states…to force them back into the Union.” The cause of this conflict between the states was not slavery, but rather what Rutherford described as “differing interpretations of the

Constitution as to what rights were reserved to the States.”76 Rutherford expanded her argument regarding the exact political and cultural causes behind the war, including a history of the nation’s political parties and agricultural differences. The various arguments each centered on the belief that northerners simply did not understand or respect the southern way of life and sought to impose their will upon the southern states. Thus, in defense of their sovereignty and lifestyle, southern leaders seceded from the Union. These leaders had no intent of going to war, and the ensuing violence was the result of the North’s efforts to again force its will upon the seceding states.

Rutherford’s defense of slavery not only excused the institution, but also argued it greatly benefitted the enslaved. By this logic, in the slaves to Christian society and values slaveholders

76 Mildred Lewis Rutherford, “Address delivered by Miss Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Historian General, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Wrongs of History Righted.” (Nov. 13, 1914)

civilized these men and women and allowed them a chance at salvation. Rather than being ignorant of their improved status, Rutherford asserted that slaves preferred their conditions under slavery to the stresses of providing for themselves. “Was the negro happy under the institution of slavery? They were happiest set of people on the face of the globe,-- free from care or thought of food, clothes, home, or religious privileges.” Her address also argued that slaveholders cared for their slaves like fathers did for their children. 77 These remarks stood in stark contrast to those of

WCTU members like Rebecca Latimer Felton. Rather than asserting that fathers failed at their duties, Rutherford insisted that southern men were exceptional patriarchs, and even tended to the needs of slaves with paternal devotion. Aside from ignoring any potential wrongdoing by southerners, Rutherford’s arguments regarding the antebellum South served a broader political and social purpose of establishing a set of principles that southern men should emulate.

Rutherford’s “corrected” history highlights the typical arguments of Lost Cause advocates. These assertions did more than present a romanticized picture of the Old South. They justified a political and social hierarchy that granted white upper-class men unchallenged power, an obvious departure from Georgia WCTU leaders’ insistence men ought relinquish some power to women. By glorifying the plantation system, in which the plantation owner was head of the political, economic, and family units, Daughters argued that this sort of hierarchy was best for the people of the region. The anti-suffrage sentiments of Daughters like Rutherford further affirmed the belief that power ought stay in the hands of white men.78 Pragmatically, limited suffrage assured a smaller chance that Republicans might gain political advantage by appealing to relocated northerners, the poor, and freed slaves. Keeping power in the hands of the traditional

77 Rutherford, “Wrongs of History Righted.” 78 Anne E. Marshall, “Mildred Lewis Rutherford,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.newgeorgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3178&sug=y.

southern elites helped maintain the status divisions that gave upper class white women some relative political and social advantage over those of lower status. Opposing women’s suffrage aligned UDC leadership with the values of southern political leaders and demonstrated to men that their activity presented no threat to their formal authority.

Supporting Lost Cause ideology and the continuation of absolute white male power meant even privileged white women had to adhere to strict moral standards regarding their appropriate behavior and their proper role in society. The Lost Cause idolized the southern woman as the symbol of the region’s purity and innocence, and her protection was the reason white men should stop at nothing to maintain power. The myth collapsed if southern white women did not maintain the image of the innocent white-gloved lady, a constant reminder of both female purity and southern gentility. For women like the Daughters to truly benefit from white male power, they could not simply glorify white men of a certain class. Through monuments, markers, and public statements the UDC created a very specific type of southern man, who lived by a specific moral code that these women inscribed across the landscape. This mythologized southern hero could be a leader or an anonymous soldier that every man could relate to, but regardless of status these men always placed God, family, and home before all else.

As a result, these women tried to initiate a shift in cultural values that would encourage men to behave in a way that would benefit families over individual men.

The language of the Georgia UDC members stressed not only the heroism and sacrifice of Confederate soldiers and leaders, but also emphasized particular characteristics and values that all Confederates seemed to share. This language centered on three traits that served as subtle, but constant reminders of what southern men ought to emulate. The rhetoric of Georgia

Daughters described Confederate soldiers as examplifiers of Christian virtue, often free of sin,

who prioritized the best safety of their homes over all else, and were especially protective of their female kin. Through changing the legendary values of Confederate heroes, Daughters attempted to subtly change the behavior of men, by providing them with role models rather than attempting to outlaw undesirable behaviors.

UDC monuments in and around Atlanta emphasized the virtuous character of

Confederate soldiers and their devotion to protecting the safety of their homes. A towering granite obelisk outside of the Dekalb County Courthouse in Atlanta, erected in 1908, links

Confederate character with virtue twice among the four engraved sides (image 1). The front of the monument reads, “To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, of whose virtues in peace and in war we are witnesses to the end that justice may be done and that the truth perish not.” Another side of obelisk states that Confederate men were, “modest in prosperity, gentle in peace, brave in battle…They knew no law of life but loyalty and truth and civic faith and to these virtues they consecrated their strength.”79 Both these quotes underscored the image of the average Confederate soldier as a man who was virtuous, loyal, modest, and peaceful unless forced into action to defend kin and hearth. The Kennesaw Chapter of the United

Daughters of the Confederacy used similar language in an obelisk dedicated to the confederate dead, erected at Marietta Confederate Cemetery in 1908 (image 2). Following the declaration that soldiers died in defense of “Georgia homes,” the obelisk reads, “They sleep of our noble slain, defeated yet without a stain, proudly and peacefully.” 80 The Kennesaw Daughters juxtaposed the traditional argument of defending states’ rights with the idea that Georgia men also fought to defend their homes. These monuments to the anonymous Confederate dead served not only to memorialize the sacrifice of soldiers, but also to provide contemporary Georgia men

79 Confederate Monument, Dekalb County Courthouse Square. 80 Confederate Monument, Marietta Confederate Cemetery.

with a general role model to emulate. All white men in Georgia could live up to the ideals of their heroic ancestors, if they lived a virtuous life and selflessly put the safety of their homes before all else.

Image 1: Monument to the Confederate Dead outside if the Dekalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia.

Image 2: Monument to the Confederate Dead at the Marietta Confederate Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

Georgia UDC’s leaders conceptualization of Confederate virtue became more specific as

Daughters compared the supposed virtues and flaws of Confederate and Union leaders.

Rutherford’s characterization of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln pinpointed which traits epitomized southern male virtue. In her biographical account of both presidents, she described how a young Davis bravely promised to protect his older sister from a strange noise in the

woods, thought to be the local drunkard.81 The account repeatedly emphasized Davis’s reputation as loving and devoted husband and father, a humble Christian, and a perfect role model for children.82 Simultaneously, she remarked upon Lincoln’s unhappy childhood and turbulent marriage. She underscored Lincoln’s alleged lack of regard for family by accusing him of signing the Emancipation Proclamation in the hopes that freedom would inspire the former slaves to attack women and children throughout the South. Regarding Lincoln’s religious beliefs,

Rutherford challenged her audience, “but is it right that a man who made no profession of religion in life should be held up for emulation to the Christian children of this generation? …

Shall our children be taught that great Americans need not love God, need not believe in the

Divinity of our Lord and in inspiration of His Holy Word, and need not acknowledge Him before men?”83 Rutherford assured her audiences that her account of the two leaders was factual unbiased history that both adults and children should learn. However, her history, and the official stance of the UDC, cast the two men as moral foils to each other. Lincoln, unhappy at home, lacked respect for families or God. Davis adored his family, nobly protected the women close to him, and followed Christian teachings. Rutherford designed this comparison explicitly to instruct young Southerners to follow the moral examples of Davis, the epitome of the southern gentleman.

Though couched in language of states’ rights and southern superiority, Georgia

Daughters used rhetoric that often paralleled the language of the state’s WCTU members. Both emphasized Christian virtues and protection of the home and family as traits that the ideal

81 Rutherford, Jefferson Davis The President of the Confederate States and Abraham Lincoln The President of the United States, 1861-1865, 1916. 4. 82 Jefferson Davis The President of the Confederate States and Abraham Lincoln The President of the United States, 1861-1865, 1916, 9-13, 35. 83 Rutherford, Jefferson Davis The President of the Confederate States and Abraham Lincoln The President of the United States, 1861-1865, 1916, 34.

southern men shared. While members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union directly challenged men’s ability to protect their families and run local governments and businesses without corruption, Daughters used Lost Cause mythology and their role as keepers of memory to define the traits that typified Confederate heroes and epitomized the southern gentlemen.

These differing approaches to how women publicly discussed masculine behavior and character demonstrated the extent to which affluent, white women hoped to influence new attitudes towards gender, morality, and the sexual double standard. Both groups idealized men who put the best interest of wives and children before personal gain, and stressed the importance of adhering to Christian morality. However, the WCTU’s openly political and critical rhetoric prompted scorn from elite men who feared another threat to their power. The UDC’s subtle approach to shaping ideas and behavior through celebrating southern heroism, were an effort to influence ideas of how chivalrous southern gentlemen should act without directly challenging white male authority.

The Georgia divisions of the WCTU and the UDC were both active during at the same time, however they functioned independently of one another. The officer rosters of both groups show no overlap in organization leadership (Appendices 1 and 2). The lists of officers for the

WCTU and UDC cannot show to what extent the rank and file membership of the groups overlapped with one another, and the overlap among general members may be greater than that among organization leaders. The fact that the leadership among each organization was distinct from the other meant that the groups did not share members who would have been among those responsible for shaping the division’s rhetoric and activity within Georgia. Within formal addresses given at conventions, the groups focused on their own agendas rather than addressing the arguments or activities of other organizations. This internal focus and lack of overlap within

group officers indicated that women already possessed attitudes towards the role of the state in affecting moral reform, and whether or not they supported the contemporary hierarchy. The primary exception to this pattern was the WCTU leadership’s discussion of suffrage.

The national WCTU’s pro-suffrage stance made Georgia politicians wary of whether or not the local organization would try to push the issue within the state. Though willing to challenge and criticize men’s leadership abilities, Georgia WCTU leaders decided that they could best accomplish their goals if the distanced themselves from the issue. In the 1894 convention the Georgia WCTU passed the resolution, “That, as a State organization, we, the

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Georgia, declare it to be the duty of this convention to adopt only the principles espoused and plans devised by the National Woman’s Christian

Temperance Union that are best suited to the needs of our Southern work; and, that, while reaffirming our loyalty to the National Union, we hereby believe that woman’s suffrage is not conducive to the best interests of our temperance work in Georgia.”84 The adoption of independent causes and presence of independent leaders reinforced the argument that the women of the WCTU and the UDC selected different methods and arguments according to which approach they believed would best accomplish their goals. The sources do not reveal what factors influenced their decision to join one group over another, but they do show that women in the post Civil War South had options as to how conservatively or radically they pursued gaining influence and shaping men’s behavior.

Although the statements of the leaders from the Georgia WCTU and UDC did not explain why women chose to participate in one organization over another, the arguments of historians of southern women’s activism offered insights into the personal perspectives that

84 “Resolutions,” 1894 Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Program, 12.

would influence such a choice. The decision to take a leadership role in either the WCTU or the

UDC stemmed from whether individual women thought the best way to remedy contemporary social problems was through broad government-based solutions, or through localized shifts in cultural values. Though it was not as fervent a push for political equality as the woman’s suffrage movement was, participation in the WCTU demonstrated a belief in that the government could effectively alter behavior and morality through regulation. In New Women of the New

South Marjorie Spruill Wheeler asserted, “It became clear to these southern reformers that problems related to health, safety, and morality must be resolved by large-scale, government- directed efforts, not by altruistic individuals.”85 In comparison, the members of the UDC did not seek a change in attitudes through government initiatives that limited behavior, but rather attempted to influence a change in behavior by creating a cultural shift that instilled new attitudes towards masculinity. Ideas of noble Confederate heroes who prioritized their role as patriarchs was part of the Confederate culture that Daughters sought to instill through their commemoration efforts.86 The distinction between these attitudes towards changing behavior is subtle, but underscores a key difference in philosophy between the two groups. For the members of the WCTU, limiting male through the law would impose a new morality for all people that could over time replace the sexual double standard that left women and families at risk. UDC members believed that instilling morals by creating new role models could inspire men to behave differently of their own accord, without having to enact new legislation.

The political and cultural developments of the late 1920s and 1930s further cemented the methodological and rhetorical differences that would contribute to the decline of the WCTU’s public presence and the persistence of the UDC’s. The political threats to Prohibition and the

85 Wheeler, 51. 86 Cox, 1, 163-164.

ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 prompted a change in the WCTU’s general strategy that relied less on using language to persuade men to vote in favor of continued

Prohibition, and instead depended on mobilizing large numbers of enfranchised women to the polls.87 However, the transition away from rhetorical persuasion and towards increased voter turnout meant that WCTU leaders no longer stressed the dangers that male drunkenness and sexual licentiousness posed to families and communities. The language used by Georgia WCTU leaders in the late 1920s reflects this shift in rhetoric priorities. In a September 1928 letter to fellow WCTU members state President Mrs. Marvin Williams urged readers, “Write me all about YOUR county and just what YOU have done to get votes in every precinct. One vote in your county might win the state. You do not have to win the county—win it if you possibly can, but let us have every vote no matter if only a few.”88 This new strategy embraced the potential benefit of woman’s suffrage, but catalyzed the disappearance of the WCTU’s initial goals and motivations from the public’s perception. Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1935 the women of WCTU continued their efforts to influence conservative social reforms and personal pledges of temperance, but the organization never recovered from the blow to their political leverage.89 Officially, the Georgia WCTU maintained records through 1982, but the organization’s focus became increasingly local after 1935 and their activity would continue to wane since the repeal of Prohibition. The national WCTU remains active to some extent through charity work and campaigns to encourage individuals to abstain from consuming any alcohol, but their official website does not list an affiliate in Georgia.90

87 Lorraine Gates Schulyer, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of north Carolina Press, 2006), 140-141. 88 Mrs. Marvin Williams, Correspondence to Georgia WCTU members, September 22, 1928, 89 Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 210), 357. 90 “Affiliates,” Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, http://www.wctu.org/affiliates.html.

In contrast, the UDC’s approach remained relatively stable throughout the subsequent decades. Local UDC chapters continued to sponsor and build monuments throughout the twentieth century. The metro Atlanta areas of Decatur and Marietta were among the most active, seeing the completion of monuments as late as the early 2000s.91 Though active interest in espousing Lost cause ideology waned throughout the mid twentieth century, the UDC’s efforts to supply schools with pro-Confederate texts ensured that most students were taught Lost Cause history. Scholars such as Karen Cox linked this education as a contributing factor to the widespread opposition to segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. While UDC sanctioned Lost Cause rhetoric no longer dominates school curriculum, the UDC maintains an active presence in Georgia, where local chapters continue to host Confederate Memorial Day services, and the occasion maintains status as in official state holiday in Georgia.92 The consistency of the UDC’s rhetoric and methodology would help provide them more longevity in regards to public presence.

By choosing different language and methods the leadership of the two organizations established a difference between the groups that would influence the extent to which their messages continued to be present in later generations. Their overtly political focus meant that the permanence of Georgia WCTU rhetoric relied more heavily on their continued political success.

The eventual fate of the Eighteenth Amendment in American policy marked a defeat that weakened the WCTU’s social and political influence in the long run and strengthened the ideas of liquor supporters. In contrast, the leaders of the Georgia UDC avoided formal politics and

91 United Daughters of the confederacy, Georgia Division, Confederate Monuments and Markers (Fernadina Beach, FL: Wolfe Publishing, 2002). 92 Confederate History and Heritage Month Committee, “Confederate Heritage Month” http://confederateheritagemonth.com/heritage/2010/events.php. Georgia Government, “State Holidays” http://www.georgia.gov/00/channel_modifieddate/0,2096,4802_64437763,00.html.

direct attacks on masculine behavior and as a result the longevity of their rhetoric did not depend on legislation, but their communities’ general support of their activities. By employing Lost

Cause ideology and supporting white supremacy, Georgia daughters crafted rhetoric that their male peers were unlikely challenge. The use of monuments and annual celebrations ensured that their ideas became a part of people’s landscape and traditions.

PUBLIC AMNESIA: THE FORGOTTEN EFFORTS AND MOTIVES OF THE GEORGIA WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION

When the rhetoric of women’s organizations directly criticized and challenged men’s political authority and identified male behaviors as urgent problems, women experienced a much greater challenge in creating an enduring message. The presence of contemporary political opposition from male elites meant that the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance

Union were engaged in a battle to defend their right to enter public discourse and the legitimacy of their claims and concerns. Without this immediate generalized support from those in power,

WCTU members were caught in a campaign to change ideas about gender and morality for generations to come, while many of their male contemporaries simultaneously sought to undermine those messages.

The Georgia WCTU’s efforts to not only change contemporary laws but initiate educational reforms for children and young adults demonstrated their concern with creating a lasting legacy for younger generations to follow and inspiring a permanent shift in values and behaviors. However, the efforts and motives of the Georgia WCTU largely faded from memory in the decades following their most active years. The legislative defeat of Prohibition with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933 undermined the WCTU’s effectiveness, and helped established the rhetoric of their opponents as the dominant way individuals in Georgia, and throughout the nation, thought of temperance and Prohibition. As a result, the public also forgot the lasting effects of other WCTU campaigns such as their push to increase the legal age of consent. With the demise of WCTU rhetoric and Prohibition, the public forgot, and lost access to, information regarding the complexity of their efforts and the social and domestic issues that inspired their entrance into public politics. The absence of lasting monuments to the WCTU in

Atlanta, compounded by a lack of information from accessible educational institutions left many

Georgians without a better understanding of the organization. Simultaneously other forces continue to embrace the rhetoric of Prohibition opponents, casting a deeper shadow on the

Temperance Women’s goals and efforts. The current push to further loosen the state’s liquor laws borrows heavily from anti-Prohibition language. Present day popular culture in Atlanta, and elsewhere, glorifies the underground cocktail culture of the Prohibition Era and has since sparked a partial revival of the jazz age aesthetic. This lack of information in sites and schools, combined with legal debates and the popularity of Prohibition cocktail nostalgia create an atmosphere in which the public memory of the WCTU is nearly absent, lost in romanticized images of speakeasies. As a result, individuals lack access to the complex history of the Georgia WCTU, and how members used the platform of the national organization to publically address problems they witness and experienced within their own communities.

Georgia’s landmarks are not completely devoid of monuments to the efforts of the

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In Atlanta, a single memorial water fountain sits in the center of the ground floor of the Georgia State Capitol Building in Atlanta (image 7). An approximately four foot high marble marker contains an image of Mary Lattimer McLendon and the inscription, “Mary Lattimer McLendon / June 2, 1840- November 20, 1921 / Mother of suffrage in Georgia. Pioneer leader in temperance cause. She made the world a wider world for women, a safer place for all mankind. She had the will to serve and bear, the love to do and dare.

To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” The marker stands just behind a small water basin and both stand on two graduated marble slabs. The back of the marker displays the image of a ribbon seal and the words, “Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.”93 Erected in

1923, the fountain is part of the memorial work by WCTU women in the early twentieth century

93 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Fountain, Georgia State Capitol Building.

to mark the efforts of the group’s leaders.94 These fountains served not only to commemorate local organization leaders but also celebrate the organization’s achievement in influencing

Prohibition reform. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s website lists sixty-five WCTU built fountains that still stand in the United States. Of these fountains, only seven are in southern states. In addition to the fountain in the Capitol Building, a second fountain in Griffin makes

Georgia the only southern state where multiple fountains have been found. The five remaining southern memorial fountains are in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.

In contrast, northern and western states with fountains often have three or more memorials, and in the cases of Massachusetts and California, there are nine and thirteen remaining fountains, respectively.95 Drawing from the presence of these fountains, Georgia seems to be the southern state with the greatest lasting presence of WCTU created rhetoric in public spaces. The fountain’s references to both temperance and suffrage serve as reminders that Georgia WCTU leaders sought to change men’s behaviors and instill new morals through policy-based initiatives that gave women more equal standing to men with regard to the law. The presence of the fountains cannot serve as measurement of the extent to which individuals internalized WCTU attitudes. However, these memorials and their context do offer insights into how much of the

Georgia WCTU’s message is still accessible to people today, and what efforts site managers have made to explain the history and goals of the organization to site visitors.

94 Carol Mattingly, “Woman’s Temple, Women’s Fountains: the Erasure of Public Memory,” American Studies 49 (2008), 133. 95 “WCTU Drinking Fountains- Then and Now,” Woman’s Christian Temperance Union Website, http://www.wctu.org/fountains.html.

Image 3: WCTU fountain in the Georgia State Capitol Building In Atlanta, Georgia.

There are no signs near the Atlanta fountain to offer viewers any further explanation as to who McLendon was and how she contributed to the temperance and suffrage causes. Nothing nearby indicates that McLendon was the younger sister of Rebecca Latimer Felton, a founding member of the Atlanta WCTU in 1880, and the founder of the Georgia Women’s Suffrage

Association in 1894.96 Standing alone in front of the lobby’s main staircase, the marker looks out of place amidst the walls lined with statues to Georgia’s notable politicians and military leaders, many of whom were Civil War heroes. As the lone marker in the building’s wing to a female figure and a woman’s organization, the fountain provides an ideal starting point for information and perspective regarding the role of women’s organizations in state and local politics. The fountain, erected shortly after the passage of woman’s suffrage, serves as an homage to the potential of women’s political power and their votes. Without any accompanying information it

96 Ann Ellis Pullen, “Mary Latimer McLendon,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2894

instead only offers viewers a glimpse into the fact that women were present in politics prior to suffrage, and that temperance and suffrage shared support from at least one prominent local woman.

Despite the lack of interpretation, the fact that the fountain remains standing and prominently displayed within the capitol building offers the opportunity to develop a stronger public memory of the WCTU. Across the country many of the fountains built by WCTU chapters were torn down or left to deteriorate.97 These fountains did more than laud the accomplishments of the WCTU, they often served as a direct response to temperance opponents. According to

Carol Mattingly, “The fountains were intended to provide pure drinking water in heavily trafficked areas of towns and cities, as men often claimed drinking liquor a necessity because of the unavailability of clean drinking water.”98 Though no longer functional, the water fountain in the Capitol Building demonstrated how Georgia WCTU members used their public influence to counter the claims of men who wanted to keep the alcohol trade legal.

The creation of these markers also stands as testimony to an aspect of WCTU activism rarely discussed by academics or public historians. Temperance women, like their peers in the

UDC, understood and embraced the importance of claiming public space to build lasting messages that the public could view long after the creators died.99 By carving their messages into marble, Georgia WCTU members hoped they had created a permanent reminder to all who saw it of the values they wanted to spread. This permanence in turn lent legitimacy to their cause.

Opponents could not simply alter the message, they would have to either physically destroy it or leave it to crumble over time. That the Atlanta fountain remains in good condition and on display

97 Mattingly, 144. 98 Mattingly, 140. 99 Mattingly, 135

in the capitol means that the marker has the potential to serve as a valuable educational tool and can still teach viewers about women’s political activism in the South.

The presence of WCTU fountain demonstrates the potential for sites in and around

Atlanta to tell the full story of temperance and women’s activism in the state. That potential remains untapped however as most museums and sites overlook the organization’s presence within the state and their efforts to change politics and attitudes towards the appropriate behaviors of the sexes. Even leading museums of the state have not included information on the

Georgia WCTU into their local history accounts. The Atlanta History Center describes their permanent Atlanta history exhibit Metropolitan Frontiers as, “the largest and most comprehensive exploration of urban history in the Southeast. The history of Atlanta’s emergence as a major city is one of growth, change, and renewal. This award-winning exhibition presents the regenerative story of Atlanta, as symbolized through the fiery legend of the Phoenix, with four artifact-rich environments introducing Atlanta as a rural region, a transportation center, a commercial city, and a suburban metropolis.” 100 The exhibit, which opened in 1993 and is currently on display, uses Atlanta’s transition to a major urban center of the Southeast to discuss the political, economic, and social changes that occurred throughout the city’s history, and uses artifacts to highlight the experiences of minority groups and relate some of the most controversial elements of the Atlanta’s development.101 Displays inform visitors about the city’s changes at the beginning of the twentieth century. These changes include the rise of Atlanta’s black business district, and in turn the growth of an African American middle class, and the use a

Klan robe to the growth of the KKK and violent racism present throughout the region in the early

100 “Metropolitan Frontiers,” The Atlanta History Center. http://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/cms/Metropolitan+Frontiers/105.html 101 “New museum gives Atlantans a look at their region’s past,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 25, 1993.

1900s. These aspects of the exhibit demonstrate that curators made an effort to incorporate social history into the museum’s account of the region’s past.

Despite the breadth of the exhibit, the displays offer relatively little information regarding the political experiences of women. Dresses dating from the late 1890s and the 1920s relate the changes women’s social lives from the full dresses of the Victorian Era to the less modest sheath dresses of the Jazz Age. The artifacts, images, and text offer no account of any of the women’s organizations present in the city and state. The exhibit also offers no information on Georgia’s statewide Prohibition.102 Between 1908 and 1935 Georgia was officially a dry state, and the passage and repeal of Prohibition was a constant source of political and economic debate within the state. The issue also prompted many upper class white women to challenge their traditional gender roles and engage in public debates over the role of alcohol in contributing to abuse and poverty within the home. The history of Prohibition and the WCTU in the South offers sites and museums an opportunity to inform visitors about how women used the organization to address problems that threatened women and families. These women believed that statewide and national solutions through legislative reforms were the best way to try to change behaviors and morality.

Furthermore, as one of the leading metropolitan centers in the Southeast, Atlanta is an appropriate setting for examining how politically active women pursued their goals amidst a culture that emphasized their silence and domesticity. The Atlanta History Center is perfectly situated to inform diverse groups of visitors about this aspect of Georgia and women’s history.

Unfortunately, the exhibit overlooks this story, and in turn visitors continue to lack access to accurate information about the goals of temperance women and the complexity of their political and social campaigns.

102 David M. Fahey, “Temperance Movement,” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-828

Even within the formal curriculum of metro-Atlanta public schools, students only receive a small amount of information about the WCTU, and that content tends to focus on the group’s failings rather than their successes or complex goals. The American Pageant, the most popular

Advanced Placement text used in the city, barely references the WCTU and only does so within the broader discussion of Prohibition. The text mentions the organization’s founding by Francis

E. Willard, and that the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the country’s history, but concludes the discussion of Prohibition by focusing on legalized alcohol’s role in boosting the economy during the Great Depression.103 The other most popular history textbook in Atlanta,

The Americans, offers more information regarding the WCTU’s activist efforts in prisons, insane asylums and their eventual contribution to the suffrage movement, but still concludes the discussion of the group on a negative note. The book asserts that the WCTU’s campaign to pass prohibition laws was only an effort to force alleged improvements upon immigrants and the lower classes, and contends that though well-intentioned the WCTU’s efforts overlooked the other services saloon’s provided to such individuals including check cashing, serving meals, and community building.104 Neither text mentioned the WCTU’s efforts to successfully raise the age of consent or their efforts in providing better education about sexual health and the spread of venereal disease. The texts provided basic information on the group, but offered no in-depth or regional analysis that informs readers about how members balanced national platforms with the expectations of their communities.

The development of a public memory of the WCTU in Georgia also encounters challenges from ongoing political debates regarding the need for “Blue Laws” which restrict the

103 David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (Hougton Mifflin Company, 2006), 664, 782. 104 Gerald A. Danzer, J. Jorge Klor De Alva, and Larry S. Krieger, The Americans (Holt McDougal, 2006), 513-514.

sale of alcohol on certain days of the week. When addressing the current restrictions against the sale of alcohol on Sundays in Georgia, opponents to the law overwhelmingly employ rhetoric that reflects the language of prohibition opponents in the early 1900s. In a debate piece for the

Atlanta Journal Constitution, Vice President of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States,

Ben Jenkins called the Blue Laws an “archaic tradition,” and declared both the current laws and

Prohibition wholly negative and oppressive statures. Jenkins wrote, “Despite America’s overwhelming repeal of Prohibition more than 75 years ago, Georgia remains one of the last holdouts continuing to block the sale of alcohol at private retail stores on Sunday—a ban that costs millions annually in lost tax revenues…It’s time for legislators to repeal this Prohibition holdover that’s long out-lived its relevance.”105 Jenkins argument emphasizes the economic benefits that would result from allowing Sunday alcohol sales, focusing primarily on the damage done to business owners and the lost tax revenue. The current state Governor, Nathan Deal, echoed this sentiment when he signed into law a bill, which would allow communities to vote on whether or not to keep the current the Blue Laws.106 By emphasizing the failure of Prohibition and the financial consequences of restricting alcohol, Blue Law opponents used language that temperance opponents employed over a century ago. The presence of anti-temperance arguments that politicians and lobbyists still use demonstrates that the rhetoric of the WCTU’s opponents successfully survived into the present day. In contrast, the morality based and gendered arguments of the WCTU have disappeared, and do not appear in modern discussions of alcohol traffic and the law.

105 Ben Jenkins, “Pro & Con: Should Georgia allow retail alcohol sales on Sundays? Yes, this archaic measure needs to go the way of Prohibition.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, February 14, 2011. 106 Aaron Gould Sheinin, “Deal signs bill clearing path for Sunday sales of alcohol,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 28, 2011.

As cities and counties across Georgia began to adopt dry legislation, liquor traffic supporters focused on prohibition reform as a failed experiment that would cost cities and businesses large sums of money as a means of countering the arguments of temperance advocates. When Rome, Georgia voted to go dry in July of 1887, the Weekly Constitution of

Atlanta reported on the event, summarizing both sides of the prohibition debate. According to the article, “The anti-prohibitionists took the ground that they are opposed to sumptuary legislation…that prohibition does not prohibit; that it is a mere experiment which has failed elsewhere; that it will decrease trade away from Rome; that it will decrease the city’s revenue from eight to ten thousand dollars annually without accomplishing the slightest moral reform; that it will cause from twelve to twenty storehouses to remain vacant and drive away a portion of

Rome’s businessmen.”107 The arguments of those in favor of the liquor trade in the late nineteenth century are nearly identical to those of Blue Law opponents today. Both emphasize that the laws restricting liquor produce no moral benefit, while hurting the economy and government through loss of revenue, all the while impinging on people’s ability to do business freely. These ideas characterize the modern political memory of temperance, in which oppressive prohibition laws failed to accomplish intended moral reforms, and instead cost retailers and local governments money.

Compounded with the political push against the regulation of alcohol sales, the memory of Prohibition in popular culture also contributes to the general amnesia surrounding the WCTU.

A renewed interest across the country in vintage cocktails and mixology has spread into

Atlanta’s nightlife and sparked a nostalgic vision of Prohibition that effectively made the bootleggers heroes who subverted unjust laws. Today, many writers involved in the cocktail

107 “Rome Goes Dry,” The Weekly Constitution, July 12, 1887.

resurgence use the history of temperance and Prohibition to emphasize the romantic and historic cache of mixology and drinking as social activities. In his cocktail recipe book, Ted Haigh, a columnist for Imbibe Magazine and curator of The Museum of the American Cocktail, characterizes temperance and Prohibition as “bumps” in the cocktail’s road to prominence.

According to Haigh, the temperance movement, “bore the mantle of religion, but it was just as much sociological. Just as the Civil War was a violent reaction between the agrarian South and the urban North (of which the slavery issue was a potent manifestation of this discord), so alcohol represented the new battleground between factions of people struggling to understand … what they saw as a general moral backslide…It was simple human nature that people wanted the satisfaction of casting blame on some single person, group, event, or thing.”108 Haigh’s account of temperance leaves no doubt as to who he thinks was in the wrong. Temperance advocates blamed and eventually outlawed alcohol, seeking a scapegoat for the consequences of urbanization and modernization, rather than seeking less drastic ways to ease their transition into a changing society. This depiction of Prohibition, and temperance women ignores the risks of violence, illness, and poverty that alcohol contributed to, and lacks any understanding of women’s efforts to protect themselves and their families from these threats.

Haigh also describes how Prohibition brought about an unexpected boon for the cocktail, forcing bootleggers and sellers to mask the bad taste of illegally produced spirits with flavorful mixers and described the end of Prohibition as the dawn of a new era in which people could again freely enjoy spirits and cocktails.109 This nostalgic attitude towards the illegal sale and consumption of alcohol during Prohibition fuels the growth of clubs and restaurants in Atlanta

108 Ted Haigh, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: from the Alamagoozum to the Zombie and Beyond, 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them (Beverly, Mass.: Quarry Books, 2009), 21. 109 Haigh, 23-24.

that capitalize on the imagery of speakeasies to draw in young crowds. A number of restaurants and bars in Atlanta emulate the speakeasy atmosphere by requiring visitors to venture either upstairs or underground to access dining rooms filled with 1920s décor and menus stocked with

Prohibition era cocktails. The most thorough of the mock speakeasy experiences comes from the aptly named Prohibition, in Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead community. The cocktails are called

“prescriptions” and the bartenders employ traditional techniques for serving drinks in the 1920s themed bar. The most unique touch to Prohibition’s speakeasy atmosphere is the secret entrance.

To gain access to Prohibition, visitors must enter a red phone booth and dial a “secret” number.

Once dialed, a hidden door in the back of the phone booth opens to let visitors into the bar.110

When popular culture dominates the rhetoric of Prohibition history, and provides the most accessible sources of information for the public, then people lack accurate portrayals of the women who campaigned for temperance and why they did.

In the absence of better information and interpretation from sites and institutions, the public memory of the WCTU remains largely nonexistent, while in its place, the political pundits and popular culture highlight the failings of Prohibition. These factors create a skewed version of history in which Prohibition was divorced from any supporters and the underlying motivations and cultural contexts were lost to images and rhetoric of Jazz Age parties and failed political experiments. Modern discussions make legalized prohibition seem like an inherently foolish idea and question the rationale of anyone who would ever support the needless law. In turn, the public lacks access to opportunities to learn about women who risked their reputations, their social currency, to campaign for the safety of homes and families.

110 Bob Townsend, “The Secret’s out on Atlanta’s speakeasy bars,” Access Atlanta http://www.accessatlanta.com/atlanta-restaurants-food/the-secrets-out-on-285861.html.

The current narrative overlooks much of what makes the development and eventual decline of the WCTU in Georgia, and across the South, a compelling account of how women navigated the politics of fitting the goals of a national organization into the expectations of southern society. The focus on Prohibition alone, as an agentless and misguided experiment that gave rise to a thriving subculture before its eventual demise ignores those women who fought for its passage and the other social problems they sought to remedy. Within a culture that prized women’s innocence and domesticity, even the most fortunate women were left at risk by their lack of formal authority. With no checks on male behavior, upper class white men were free to abuse alcohol, use prostitution and coercion to commit infidelities, and behave violently towards family members without reproach or legal consequences. In light of these circumstances, WCTU women used issues like temperance, sexual education, and age of consent reform to open a public dialogue about harmful male habits and to challenge perceptions of appropriate male and female behaviors. If men were not going to use their political authority to protect the safety of homes and families, then women had to enter politics to ensure their safety and the proper upbringing of their children. Through the use of national campaigns, WCTU members sought to create laws that would prompt a permanent change in how men could behave and how both sexes viewed the sexual double standard. The repeal of their greatest political success, and the resulting disappearance of their rhetoric from the public domain left a gap in the perspectives individuals can access.

The efforts to pass laws against drinking and statutory rape were attempts to codify language that held men responsible for the very habits that most endangered families. With no right to vote, women could only hope to persuade legislators to outlaw the behaviors they sought to remedy. These efforts, especially within the South, put WCTU women in direct opposition

with male elites, and made them a threat to male power, and left members open to accusations of behaving in ways unfit for proper southern women. Their contemporary southern society depended on widespread belief in the idea of the fragile, domestic southern lady, to support the white supremacist ideology that dominated local politics. By entering public debates and challenging leaders’ will, WCTU members undermined this ideology and those ascribed virtues that defined respectable southern womanhood. Despite the risks, these women continued to use their place in the WCTU to carve out public influence and to directly challenge the morality of male behavior and the consequences of female subservience, within a culture that often went to violent extremes to defend white, male authority. These efforts by WCTU members were crucial to the development of other politically minded women’s organizations, including the suffrage movement.

It is this history of the beginnings of women’s political activism amidst a political and social atmosphere that tried to pressure women to remain quiet and domestic that individuals miss when historians let popular culture dominate the rhetoric of temperance and Prohibition.

The nostalgic images of speakeasies and cocktails ignore the social and domestic concerns that made up the context of the original temperance debate. The presence of the WCTU fountain in the Capitol Building offers a glimpse of the influence that the organization once held throughout the state, but the sites and institutions within Georgia, and especially Atlanta, are capable of telling a much more complete story. The location provides the perfect environment for sites and museums to discuss how the growth of a new urban business and merchant based upper class allowed well-off white, women to easily access peers with similar concerns and goals. Through the development of organization like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, women could navigate around their lack of formal political authority and engage in public debates with men

about their inability to prioritize familial safety in political and business affairs, and how their own personal behaviors left women and children at risk. By incorporating the history of the

Georgia WCTU into sites, historians can introduce the history of how women created their own political and social influence and agency in a culture that urged them to remain quiet and obedient.

A LASTING LEGACY: THE PUBLIC MEMORY OF UDC RHETORIC AND HISTORY

Members of the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy used the traditionally domestic and feminine ritual of mourning to develop a public role in society through the creation and maintenance of public monuments, memorials, and celebrations. Because

Daughters used their entrance into the public sphere to celebrate an idealized southern manhood, rather than openly challenging the actions of contemporary southern men, they experienced little resistance to their efforts to spread their ideas. The Daughters’ fervent support of the South’s nobility and traditional hierarchies applauded rather than threatened, elite, white, male power.

Through their memorialization and educational efforts, Georgia Daughters attempted to influence the rhetoric and attitudes surrounding gender and morality. UDC sponsored monuments and educational efforts throughout Georgia enshrined Confederate soldiers and leaders as flawless champions of the Old South. As depicted, these idols acted honorably at all times, placing their devotion to God, home, and family before all else.

As in the case of the WCTU, the continued presence of UDC rhetoric in Atlanta cannot measure to what extent people internalized or chose to accept the ideas of masculinity that the

Daughters presented. However, the examples of sites that still display and employ the UDC’s ideas of southern masculinity and morality demonstrate that the organization successfully drafted messages that survived largely intact into the present day. Both the WCTU and the UDC sought to create messages that would last for generations so that their potential influence could outlive them. In terms of which organizations rhetoric and beliefs continue to be accessible to and viewed by members of the public, the Georgia UDC enjoyed a more lasting legacy than their counterparts in the WCTU. The content and interpretations in historic sites, educational materials, and museums are key to understanding the modern legacy of the Daughters’ efforts.

These sites and institutions in and around Atlanta, Georgia demonstrate the extent to which the rhetoric of the UDC remains on display without contextualization, and to what extent site managers have attempted to provide more information regarding the motives behind the words and images these women chose. Public historians have helped spark a movement among historians and educators to address the racist, sexist, and elitist ideas portrayed in the monuments.111 Despite these efforts, the rhetoric of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other Lost Cause advocates continues to be the interpretation of history that is most accessible to many individuals.112 Even these more nuanced sites focus primarily on the racist aspects of such rhetoric and have not yet begun to address how UDC women attempted to address gender morality within southern society through their idealizations of masculine fidelity and heroism.

The continued presence of UDC rhetoric without contextualization combined with the lack of

WCTU rhetoric leaves Atlantans without easily accessible sources for understanding the complexity of southern women’s early political and public activism.

The Marietta Confederate Cemetery’s presentation of the history of the cemetery and the

South continues to support mythologized ideas of gender roles throughout its monuments.

Though originated by the Atlanta Ladies’ Memorial Association, the Kennesaw Chapter of

United Daughters of the Confederacy assumed control of the site, and inscribed the landscape with memorials to both the soldiers who died in the Civil War and the individuals who sought the develop and maintain the site. The current layout of the cemetery contains a mix of the early memorials, such as the obelisk to the unknown Confederate dead, and a series of benches that

111 Edward T. Linenthal, “Epilogue: Reflections,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006), 224. 112 Caroline C. Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 199.

blend the history of the Confederacy with the history of the cemetery, juxtaposing martial and domestic virtue, creating everlasting monuments to both the idealized southern man and woman.

The Marietta Confederate Cemetery grew out of the 1863 donation of a small plot of donated land intended to bury approximately twenty Confederate soldiers who died in a rail accident. At the request of the Ladies’ Memorial Association, in 1866 the Georgia Legislature allocated 3,500 dollars for the relocation and proper burial of Confederates who died across the state.113 In 1908, the Kennesaw Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy gained ownership of the Cemetery and erected the monument in honor of the Confederate Dead.114 This transition from the LMA to the UDC was common across the region as the local Memorial

Associations lost the ability to compete with the widespread growth and popularity of the UDC chapters.115 The obelisk stands as the focal point of the cemetery grounds and each of the four sides bear inscriptions and symbols in tribute to the Confederate men who died in the war. The inscriptions and relief carvings represent the typical rhetoric of UDC monuments, a laurel wreath and a Southern Cross of Honor introduce passages relating the heroism of the men from the southern states who died in defense of Georgia’s rights and homes. One panel shows the image of a single, unadorned flag above the inscription, “For though conquered they adore it, love the cold, dead hands that bore it.”116 The language and images of the obelisk present an idea of

Confederate men as noble and valiant, who were models of southern and Christian virtue.

Other signs and markers throughout the site also continue to espouse Lost Cause ideals and romanticized perspectives of the proper roles of men and women. Among the features at

113 Larry Blair and Betty Hunter, “Welcome to Marietta’s Garden of Heroes: Here Lie the Men in Gray,” Marietta City Cemetery and Confederate Cemetery Brochure. 114 Blair and Hunter, “Garden of Heroes.” 115 Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 194. 116 Monument to the Confederate Dead, Marietta Confederate Cemetery, Marietta, Georgia

Marietta Confederate Cemetery, the most unique is the series of memorial benches that line the pathway through the grave markers. Rather than overtly honoring the soldiers who died in the

Civil War, each bench features a bronze sculpture of an item, and a bronze book inscribed with text that outlines the history of the LMA which built much of the cemetery and Mattie Harris

Lyon, who spearheaded much of the effort to clean up the grounds in the 1920s. These markers provide a rare memorialized glimpse into the organization that developed the site and drafted much of the original content and ideas behind it. The cemetery offers no information about the lives of Lyon and other LMA members, but uses them as quasi-mythological symbols of southern femininity. Removed from any larger context or background, the women referred to are the female counterparts to the heroic Confederate soldiers, devoted southern women who treasured and celebrated the memories of those soldiers who died to protect their homes. Instead of offering information about the political and social circumstances surrounding the cemetery’s development, the benches use quotes, narrative, and imagery that reaffirm the traditional ideas of southern masculinity and femininity that originated in the rhetoric of the Lost Cause.

The first two benches in the series outline the sense of female devotion that inspired the movement to relocate the bodies of the fallen soldiers to a single, honorable location. As with each bench, the first bronze book begins with a quote from Lyon, referred to casually as

“Mattie,” who recounts the sense of heartbreak felt by women of the previous generation who lived through the war, and how their loyalty to their male kin drove them to honor the

Confederacy (image 4). The adjacent narrative text reads, “At the end of the war many of the southern women were left without their fathers, husbands, or sons. These men of the South were buried in graves near where they had fallen in the aftermath of the war, a few women personally

saw to it that over 3,000 men were brought here from battlefields and hospitals to be interred.”117

On the marble bench, next to the open book, sits a small bronze sculpture of a woman’s straw sun hat (image 5). The second bench displays the sculpture of a closed parasol, next to a book, which describes how the Ladies’ Memorial Association formed in 1866 to ensure the proper care of the site and continued recognition of Confederate Memorial Day (image 6). The accompanying quote from Lyon reads, “There was nothing left for the women to do for the soldiers only to guard their resting places from desecration.”118 Used to protect women’s pale complexions from the sun, the hat and parasol serve as reminders of southern women’s inherent fragility and domesticity. These markers begin the narrative of the cemetery not with the sacrifice of the Confederate soldiers, but with the women who were left behind and left the safety and comfort of their homes to begin the state’s memorialization movement.

Image 4: Close-up of book on the first memorial bench at Marietta Confederate Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

117 Memorial Bench, Marietta Confederate Cemetery. 118 Memorial Bench, Marietta Confederate Cemetery.

Image 5: First Memorial Bench and Marietta Confederate Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

Image 6: Second Memorial Bench at Marietta Confederate Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

The quotes, sculptures, and narratives recount a specific idea of southern women, which prioritizes romantic imagery over historic interpretation. The ribbon-trimmed hat and ruffled parasol show viewers, before they read the text, that true southern ladies were delicate and fragile. The images were not any feminine ornament, but two accessories meant to protect an elite woman’s whiteness against the sun, an exclusively outdoor hazard. The quotes and narrative text explain the need for these gentle women to leave safety of the home. According to the

history provided by the books, when faced with the deaths of their closest male relatives, the only way these women could continue to demonstrate their devotion and fulfill their roles as wives, daughters, and mothers was to ensure the proper burial and recognition of those who died in battle. Their primary work was still an extension of their connection to the men in their lives and their former domestic duties, only now instead of caring for men in their daily lives, women tended to the cleanliness and welfare of their graves.

Following this introduction to the women’s mission, the benches begin to intersperse domestic and martial imagery as the books follow the same quote and narrative pattern. The sculptures include a shovel, and pair of gardening shears, a canteen, a hand spade, and a

Confederate cap. Beside these images, the narratives tell how the devoted women secured funding from the Georgia Legislature for the continued care of the park in 1866 and prompted and the push in the early 1900s to restore the neglected grounds. Further down the foot path, benches relate general facts about the cemetery grounds, including the site’s notability as the first place legally sanctioned to fly the Confederate flag in 1898 and as the largest Confederate cemetery south of Richmond, Virginia.119 The sculptures associated with these inscriptions also convey symbolic messages to viewers. The pair of gardening shears and hand spade remind visitors, once again, of women’s role as caretakers by picturing tools associated with the tending of domestic gardens. Other symbols directly evoke the memory of the deceased soldiers interred at the site, such as the canteen and Confederate uniform cap. One bench features a sculpture of a shovel, which simultaneously invoke images of digging graves or trenches, and serves as compelling parallel to the image of the more feminine gardening spade. The final bench in the series provides statistics regarding Confederate deaths in nearby battles, juxtaposed with the

119 Memorial Bench, Marietta Confederate Cemetery

image of a military drum (image 7). A final quote from Lyon succinctly captures the site’s mission, “I want you younger generations to always remember the best men- the flower of the

South- were in the Army.”120 The series of markers begins with the women who sought to create a lasting memorial to the Confederate dead, and ends with a reminder of the sacrifices, bravery, and nobility of those men. Rather than neglecting women’s contributions, the benches use their efforts to highlight the romanticized male and female virtues of the Lost Cause. The benches remain on display without any accompanying information and continue to espouse UDC style rhetoric without context or explanation.

Image 7: Final Memorial Bench at Marietta Confederate Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia.

These benches along the main pathway of Marietta Confederate Cemetery demonstrate the complex nature of how the legacy of the LMA and UDC women who shaped the site’s content live on in contemporary memory.121 When viewed as parts of a single history, the UDC obelisk and the memorial benches detail a specific sequence of events and the underlying

120 Memorial Bench, Marietta Confederate Cemetery. 121 Memorial Benches, Marietta Confederate Cemetery.

motives. Southern men, characterized by their bravery and virtue, took up arms to defend both states’ rights and the safety of Georgia’s homes. After their sacrifice, the women they left behind transferred their traditional domestic roles into that of care takers creating proper burial and memorial sites. According to the text and images within the cemetery, this movement was entirely an outgrowth of women’s existing duties. This narrative ignores the political and social motives and ramifications of the Confederate memorialization movement. The content offers no hint that by developing such sites women sought out public influence and gained some measure of control over the image of proper masculine character traits through idealizing those they saw as most beneficial.

Other sites around Atlanta demonstrate how the Georgia UDC successfully developed rhetoric about gender and morality that survived into the present day. The history and development of Stone Mountain Monument and Theme Park shows how the UDC’s language and imagery remained largely intact even after the site itself changed owners. The carving, which began in 1915, required a series of architects and was not completed until 1972. In 1916 owner Sam Venable deeded the property to the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial

Association, an outgrowth of the Atlanta United Daughters of the Confederacy. The site fell under control of the State Park Authority in 1941, was bought by the state in 1958, and was sold to the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation in 1998. The Stone Mountain Memorial

Association, established in 1958, maintains control of the park’s natural and historic content.122

During the mountain’s original conception and development the mountain also served as the home for the inauguration and regular meeting of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux

Klan. Officially, Stone Mountain literature acknowledges the presence of the Klan, but does so

122 “Stone Mountain History,” Stone Mountain Park, http://www.stonemountainpark.org/text/Stone%20Mountain%20History.pdf

only briefly, describing their presence as more of a coincidence than the result of a genuine amity between the KKK and UDC. The History and Self-Guiding Tour brochure states, “During this thriving period in the city’s history, the mountain itself was home to more sinister events.

The second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan had their ceremonial inauguration on top of the mountain in November 1915. Klan members continued to rally on top of the mountain for the next forty years, until the State of Georgia purchased the land and forbade them from using the mountain.”123 As described by Stone Mountain Memorial Association, it would seem that Klan members happened to use the site at the same time that the Stone Mountain Confederate

Memorial Association, under the leadership of C. Helen Plane, sought to transform the site into a

Confederate monument.

The current Stone Mountain exhibit regarding the site’s own history offers only marginally more information regarding the presence of the Klan. In a single small panel titled,

“A Dark Side of Our History,” six sentences explain roughly the same information as the brochure adding only that the Klan was influenced by the release of the film Birth of a Nation.

The panel reads,

The Ku Klux Klan, a secret society promoting white supremacy was revived at Stone Mountain in 1915. That year, the motion picture The Birth of a Nation premiered, glorifying the “Old South” and the original Klan of the 1860s. Inspired by the film, a group gathered on the Mountain to burn a cross as a signal that the Klan was still alive. For the next forty years, Stone Mountain had the dubious honor of being the Klan’s ‘scared soil.’ In 1923, Sam Venable, owner of the Mountain, gave the Klan easement to hold their rallies here. The marches of hooded men and cross burnings continued until the State of Georgia purchased the property in 1958.124

Again, the existence of Klan meetings and Stone Mountain seems coincidental at best, and at

123 History and Self-Guiding Tour, Stone Mountain Memorial Association. 124 Stone Mountain History Exhibit, Discover Stone Mountain Museum, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia

worst merely tolerated by officials, rather than welcomed.

Letters from Plane, the first president of the Atlanta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy reveal the true feeling UDC officials held towards the Klan and how they sought to use the image of Klan members as another image of southern chivalry. In a 1915 letter to architect Gutzon Borglum, Plane offered her ideas for design of the mountain face, and stated,

“The Birth of a Nation will give us a percentage of Monday’s matinee. Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South I feel that it is due to the Ku-Klux

Klan which saved us from negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it immortalized on Stone

Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching the distance?”125 Borglum quickly reigned in this idea to the more practical sculpturally feasible tribute of depictions of leading Confederate officers Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and

Stonewall Jackson.126 Despite the design revisions, Plane clearly wished to weave images of white supremacy and violence into her idea of male chivalry and heroism. Most importantly,

Plane explicitly sought to create a monument to the men that she argued characterized the ideal of the heroic southern gentlemen.

Though the park does not endorse Klan activities or embrace openly racist or elitist rhetoric, a recent tour through the museum exhibits, shops, and laser show reveal that current owners have made little effort to update their content to include information regarding historic minorities and the political and social leanings of the individuals responsible for the site’s early development. In 1998, the site transferred to private control after being bought by Herschend

125 Correspondence from Helen C. Plane to Gutzon Borglum, December 17, 1915. MARBL archives, Emory University. (Emphasis added by Plane). 126 James W. Loewen, Lies Across America, 141-142.

Family Entertainment Corporation.127 The company catalyzed the site’s transformation from historic site to theme park by incorporating new rides, tours, and attractions, but did not contribute much of their resources to the historic content. As a result, the UDC style, Lost Cause rhetoric remains prevalent throughout the park’s many historic attractions.

One of the options available to visitors is a walking tour of Stone Mountain’s historic houses and out buildings, transported to the grounds from across the state. These buildings include a mid 1840s plantation, a doctor’s cabin dating to approximately 1826, the Thornton

House (circa 1784), 1830s slave cabins, a barn, a farmyard, a 1800s smokehouse, the Dickey

House from roughly 1840, and an 1875 schoolhouse.128 Despite the adundance of historic houses and buildings the content inside these sites offers little information on the men, women, and slaves who lived and worked in these structures. The bulk of the content of each building centers on the architecture, furniture, and material goods with the structure. Even the slave cabin brushes over the actual condition of those who lived there, a single poorly printed label for the entire cabin explains only that, “This household area of the plantation is large enough to house a family with several children.”129 The caption provides no insight into the lives of slaves, the conditions of the trade that brought them to the cabin, or even exactly how large a family of several children might be.

This lack of historic information about the era continues throughout each building. Where the numerous domestic structures serve as a perfect setting to discuss gender roles and the living conditions of men and women from different races and social classes in the Old South, the captions focus only on architecture and furnishings. The rooms visual displays of furniture and

127 “Stone Mountain History,” Stone Mountain Park, http://www.stonemountainpark.org/text/Stone%20Mountain%20History.pdf 128 “Antebellum Plantation and Farmyard” Brochure, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia. 129 Slave Cabin Exhibit Text, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia.

household items are the only glimpse into the lifestyles of the people who used these structures.

Without more thorough information, these visuals and the label text reinforce the idea of peaceful and idyllic Old South. The general condition of the buildings’ informative content demonstrate the willingness of the Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation and the Stone

Mountain Memorial Association to ignore the condition and effectiveness of the educational material in exchange for the more profitable focus of glorifying the Old South.

The presence of poor maintenance and funding is not consistent throughout the park.

Areas that serve to glorify the romantic image of the Old South and southern culture are clean, well lit, filled with ample reminders of the glory of antebellum Georgia. Gift shops throughout sell a broad range of “southern pride” memorabilia including shirts, key chains, mugs, and toys adorned with the Rebel Flag. The primary museum in Memorial Hall devotes an entire case to memory of Helen Plane, but offers no information regarding her support of white supremacy or the Klan activity that took place at the mountain. The rest of the “History of Stone Mountain” exhibit details the early history of the site prior to the Civil War, then shifts focus to the decades long carving process, though ignoring the idea of including mounted Klansmen.

The most accessible aspect of Stone Mountain, the laser show only reaffirms the pro-

Dixie message present throughout the site. Amidst a medley of current pop and classic rock songs, the climax of the show features Elvis Presley’s rendition of “An American Trilogy. ”

Viewers see images of magnolia trees and southern belles, which accompany the musical tribute to the South. During the chorus of “Oh I wish I was in Dixieland,” and “Glory, glory hallelujah,” the relief images of Davis, Lee, and Jackson are brought to life in laser, to march into battle. A broken sword morphs into the divided nation, and a fallen soldier prompts the

animated Lee to cry for the violence brought upon his people.130 These men according to the show, the park’s content, and mountain itself represent the epitome of southern manhood.

After transitioning to state and eventually private ownership, Stone Mountain Park continues to employ the same pro-Southern rhetoric that emphasizes male chivalry and the glory of the Old South over historic content that could inform visitors about the complexity of gender and race within southern history and contemporary society. Even the sections of the park that attempt to serve an educational purpose, the house museums and the history museum, avoid examining aspects of the site’s history that might invite criticism or controversy. The extended relationship with the Ku Klux Klan is reduced to a coincidence, and none of the content mentions the founders’ explicit support of white supremacy and chivalry realized through Klan violence.

Schools and museums in and around Atlanta also demonstrate the lasting effect of the

UDC’s rhetoric. Within the past fifty years, public high schools and museums such as the Atlanta

History Center made a greater effort to address the mythological aspects of Lost Cause history often repeated throughout the South as fact. Books and classrooms more openly address the role of slavery in the cause of the Civil War, and have removed language that presented the Old

South as a period of unadulterated nobility and innocence. A recent push among scholars, such as David Blight and Patricia West prompted the inclusion of more historically accurate content at sites that offer visitors information regarding the origins and development of Lost Cause ideas.

Yet these changes have not reached all aspects of UDC rhetoric.

The Atlanta History Center “Turning Points” exhibit, built in 1993, explores the history and legacy of the Civil War in Georgia. The exhibit provides a thorough account of the motives

130 Stone Mountain Park Laser Show, Stone Mountain Park Georgia.

of soldiers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and uses the concluding displays to offer visitors some information about the history and impact of the Lost Cause. A wall panel and text on the four sides of the base of a reproduction monument in the shape of a Confederate soldier contain text explaining the Lost Cause. The wall panel explains how the Lost Cause “downplayed the role of slavery,” and that this memory, “came at the expense of African Americans.”131 The panels at the base of the small statue inform visitors that the Lost Cause became the dominant way southerners, and many northerners, remembered the war, but that the emphasis on the

South’s nobility did not help the poor black and whites who made up the majority of the region’s population.132 This content explains succinctly how the myth developed and how it masked both the causes of the war and continued poor living conditions of most southerners. Though the displays present some of the social and intellectual history of the Lost Cause, the content does not discuss the people who sought to cement the ideology into Americans’ minds, particularly the UDC members who were crucial to the spread of the monuments noted by the museum.

Similar to the Atlanta History Center, the curriculum of metro-Atlanta public schools attempts to address some of the spurious history about the South, but does not offer much information regarding those who propagated these versions of the past and why. The material presented in the two most popular Georgia textbooks, both published in 2006, overlooks the historical contributions of groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The American

Pageant is the most nuanced of the textbooks popularly used within metro-Atlanta high schools.

The text explains how the presence of northern Republicans and “Radical Reconstruction,” was short lived, and provides a brief historiography of Civil War scholarship. This section includes discussion of the southern apologists and the eventual shift to the theories of scholars like Eric

131 “Turning Point,” Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia. 132 “Turning Point.”

Foner’s and Steven Hahn’s complex histories of period.133 The second most popular textbook,

The Americans, describes the legacy of the war as another example of America’s unfettered progress, ending its discussion of the Civil War by lauding the Reconstruction Amendments and

Reconstruction as a time of “expanding opportunities.”134 These two texts demonstrate how the exact interpretations of the legacy of the Civil War still vary between writers, but neither of these two popularly read books mentions the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Without this information young readers lack insight into how popular, but historically inaccurate, Lost Cause interpretations of history spread, or how women were key to the ideology’s growth.

The fact that textbooks used across the country overlook the efforts and influence of groups like the UDC is not surprising. As this information is not available to Georgia students as a part of the curriculum, local history sites and museums have an obligation to provide fuller and more complex treatments of the past in their content. Including the history of the UDC and how the members used feminine rituals in an attempt to shape the rhetoric of the Confederacy and the image southern gentlemen would help visitors learn how Georgia’s women tried to develop their own public authority before they gained formal political power.

Though academic and public historians increased their efforts to address the fallacies of

Lost Cause rhetoric, they focus primarily on the racism and elitism inherent within the ideology.

Modern content at sites and museums often detaches Lost Cause ideology from the individuals who created it and their motivations for rewriting history. While important, white supremacy and elitism were just two parts of the Lost Cause rhetoric created by the United Daughters of the

Confederacy. The Daughters also tried to use their status and influence to change attitudes of

133 David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 498, 500-501. 134 Gerald A. Danzer, J. Jorge Klore De Alva, and Larry S. Krieger, The Americans (Holt McDougal, 2006), 401.

masculine morality. The ideology as presented in UDC sites and markers in Georgia presented two inexorably linked moral codes for women and men. Women were to remain apolitical, and concern themselves with domestic affairs. Attitudes of southern exceptionalism depended on women’s willingness to adhere to the idea of the white-gloved lady, the innocent and fragile symbol of southern virtue. If southern white women were to behave according to these strictures, then they attempted to promote an image of the southern gentlemen that better suited their needs.

In the Daughters’ depictions of southern men, they were not only brave in battle, but also faithful followers of Christian morality and infallibly devoted to the welfare of their homes and women.

These ideals of male and female virtue were an attempt to address the sexual double standard by holding men to the same standards that already applied to women. Though UDC rhetoric undoubtedly attempted to reinforce attitudes of white supremacy, they also attempted to shift perceptions of gender and morality towards a more equal system. As of yet sites and educational institutions do not use their UDC content to inform visitors about how the Daughters’ ideas were another effort by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to shape their culture and society despite their lack of formal authority.

TURNING LEGACY INTO HISTORY: THE POTENTIAL OF PUBLIC HISTORY SITES

The contrasting rhetoric used by the Georgia divisions of the Woman’s Christian Temperance

Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy contributed to the persistence of their message in Atlanta’s modern culture. The Georgia WCTU leaders repeatedly voiced their dissatisfaction with men’s ability to lead society and protect their families. These women sought changes to laws as a means of permanently altering behaviors and attitudes. Their approach meant that the longevity of their ideas was bound up in their continued political influence. As a result, the repeal of Prohibition weakened the WCTU’s influence and resulted in a modern culture in which temperance is remembered narrowly as a failed experiment to control drunkenness and the WCTU’s efforts in other reforms, such as raising the age of consent, is largely forgotten by the public. This vacuum of more nuanced information about the WCTU eschewed the complexity of their goals and their contemporary circumstances and allowed room for nostalgic images of cocktails and speakeasies to become the ideas most readily associated with temperance and Prohibition.

In the same era, and in relation to the same cultural dynamics, the Georgia division of the

UDC avoided public politics and instead used Lost Cause ideology through memorialization in an attempt to shape ideas regarding white supremacy, southern culture, and masculine and feminine morality. Their rhetoric did not challenge southern men’s actions or judgment, but instead idolized mythologized images of Confederate leaders and soldiers as paragons of masculine virtue. These idols still posed a type of challenge to contemporary men’s behavior, but rather than directly attacking men, Georgia Daughters tried to provide new role models that would inspire men to behave in more virtuous fashion. Generations later, UDC monuments are still accessible to the public, and most lack further information from site managers that

contextualizes the images and language the Daughters used or how their memorialization efforts fit into part of the broader movement of women’s early political activism. In order to address these issues, public history sites can provide access to more information regarding the complexity of how women in Georgia approached taking on public causes.

How public history sites interpret the efforts and rhetoric of the Georgia WCTU and

UDC is one determinant of whether or not people have an opportunity to develop a better understanding of their history. Sites, museums and monuments are unique as educational resources in that they are accessible to individuals of all ages, economic classes, or education levels. This broad accessibility makes such venues the only exposure to structured interpretation of the past than many individuals might receive after high school. As such, the men and women in charge of developing sites have great potential influence and a genuine responsibility to visitors. Their sites have the ability to depict information and interpretations that people might not otherwise encounter. As a result, site managers must take care to ensure their sites depict accurate and even-handed portrayals of the past. Including more content about the WCTU, the

UDC, their rhetoric, and legacy would not only add more social history to the public history sites in Atlanta, it would also give visitors a more accurate and nuanced interpretation of the past.

Rather than thinking of women’s political activity as something that developed only after woman gained the right to vote, or as a single monolithic movement with only one set of goals and actors, visitors would have a chance to learn about the complex and varied ways southern women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries approached public and political activity.

In conjunction with providing a more accurate presentation of the past, incorporating more nuanced content about these organizations would help create interest in and opportunities to develop better interpretations of other groups and organizations in Atlanta’s history.

According to James Loewen, “recognizing local history on the landscape, helps empower people to make more local history.”135 If Atlanta public historians updated site content with the information about and examples of the rhetoric of the WCTU and UDC, it would demonstrate how a person’s or group’s choice of language reveals how those people viewed their role in society, their ability to effect change, and how they interacted with their cohorts. This method would serve as a useful way for other sites to examine how other social groups, organizations, or communities interacted with their societies at large. It would also provide visitors with an opportunity to think about their rhetoric in relation to their society, and with which peer groups they most identify.

135 Loewen, 14.

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APPENDIX 1: GEORGIA WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION OFFICER LIST

Year Name Title 1888 Mrs. W.C. Sibley President 1888 Mrs. Walter B. Hill Vice President 1888 Ms. Missouri Stokes Corresponding Secretary 1888 Ms. Emmie S. Stewart Recording Secretary 1888 Mrs. Clairborne Snead Treasurer 1891 Mrs. W.C. Sibley President 1891 Mrs. Walter B. Hill Vice President 1891 Ms. Missouri Stokes Corresponding Secretary 1891 Ms. Emmie S. Stewart Recording Secretary 1891 Mrs. C.H. Smith Treasurer 1893 Mrs. W.C. Sibley President 1893 Mrs. Walter B. Hill Vice President 1893 Mrs. E.E. Freeman Corresponding Secretary 1893 Ms. Emmie S. Stewart Recording Secretary 1893 Mrs. C.H. Smith Treasurer 1894 Mrs. W.C. Sibley President 1894 Mrs. Walter B. Hill Vice President 1894 Mrs. J.A. Thomas Corresponding Secretary 1894 Ms. Emmie S. Stewart Recording Secretary 1894 Mrs. S.P. Harvey Treasurer 1905 Mrs. Jennie Hart Sibley Honorary President 1905 Mrs. Mary Harris Armor President 1905 Mrs. Milton H. Edwards Corresponding Secretary 1905 Mrs. Robert V. Hardeman Recording Secretary 1905 Ms. Theresa Griffin Assistant Recording Secretary 1905 Mrs. C.H. Smith Treasurer 1907 Mrs. Jennie Hart Sibley Honorary President 1907 Mrs. Mary Harris Armor President 1907 Mrs. T.E. Patterson Vice President 1907 Mrs. Milton H. Edwards Corresponding Secretary 1907 Ms. Theresa Griffin Recording Secretary 1907 Mrs. W.G. Cotton Assistant Recording Secretary 1907 Mrs. R.E.L. Harris Treasurer 1908 Mrs. Jennie Hart Sibley Honorary President 1908 Mrs. Mary Harris Armor President 1908 Mrs. T.E. Patterson Vice President 1908 Mrs. Milton H. Edwards Corresponding Secretary 1908 Ms. Theresa Griffin Recording Secretary 1908 Mrs. Walter T. Newman Assistant Recording Secretary 1908 Mrs. August Burghard Treasurer

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1909 Mrs. Jennie Hart Sibley Honorary President 1909 Mrs. T.E. Patterson President 1909 Mrs. Lella A. Dillard Vice President 1909 Mrs. Milton H. Edwards Corresponding Secretary 1909 Ms. Theresa Griffin Recording Secretary 1909 Mrs. James B. Huff Assistant Recording Secretary 1909 Mrs. August Burghard Treasurer

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APPENDIX 2: GEORGIA UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY OFFICER LIST

Year Name Title 1895 Mrs. C. Helen Plane President 1895 Mrs. L.H. Raines Vice President 1895 Mrs. John K. Ottley Corresponding Secretary 1895 Mrs. Virginia Bates Conyers Recording Secretary 1895 Mrs. Annie J. Miller Treasurer 1895 Mrs. Rebecca Boggs Registrar 1896 Mrs. W.F. Eve President 1896 Mrs. C. Helen Plane President 1896 Mrs. R.E. Park Vice President 1896 Mrs. Loula Rogers Recording Secretary 1896 Mrs. Randolph Ridgely Corresponding Secretary 1896 Mrs. James Moore Treasurer 1896 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1896 Mrs. Dora C. Lanier Registrar 1897 Mrs. James A. Rounsaville President 1897 Mrs. C. Helen Plane Honorary President 1897 Ms. Anna C. Benning 1st Vice President 1897 Mrs. John K. Ottley 2nd Vice President 1897 Mrs. Cornelius Terhune Corresponding Secretary 1897 Mrs. C.B. Willingham Recording Secretary 1897 Mrs. M.M. Madden Treasurer 1897 Mrs. Dora C. Lanier Registrar 1897 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1899 Ms. Mildred Rutherford President 1899 Mrs. C. Helen Plane Honorary President 1899 Mrs. L.H. Chappell 1st Vice President 1899 Mrs. A.B. Hull 2nd Vice President 1899 Ms. Alice Baxter Corresponding Secretary 1899 Mrs. J. Laurence Caldwell Recording Secretary 1899 Mrs. R.C. Neely Treasurer 1899 Mrs. M.L. Johnson Registrar 1899 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1901 Ms. Mildred Rutherford President 1901 Mrs. C. Helen Plane Honorary President 1901 Mrs. L.H. Chappell 1st Vice President 1901 Mrs. A.B. Hull 2nd Vice President 1901 Ms. Alice Baxter Corresponding Secretary 1901 Mrs. J. Laurence Caldwell Recording Secretary 1901 Mrs. R.C. Neely Treasurer 1901 Mrs. M.L. Johnson Registrar

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1901 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1903 Mrs. Alexander B. Hull President 1903 Mrs. C. Helen Plane Honorary President 1903 Ms. Alice Baxter 1st Vice President 1903 Mrs. R.L. Nesbett 2nd Vice President 1903 Mrs. A.O. Harper 3rd Vice President 1903 Mrs. N.B. Harrison Corresponding Secretary 1903 Ms. Sarah G. Stokes Recording Secretary 1903 Mrs. C.C. Sanders Treasurer 1903 Mrs. M.L. Johnson Registrar 1903 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1905 Mrs. Alexander B. Hull President 1905 Ms. Alice Baxter 1st Vice President 1905 Mrs. R.L. Nesbett 2nd Vice President 1905 Mrs. A.O. Harper 3rd Vice President 1905 Mrs. N.B. Harrison Corresponding Secretary 1905 Ms. Sarah G. Stokes Recording Secretary 1905 Mrs. C.C. Sanders Treasurer 1905 Mrs. M.L. Johnson Registrar 1905 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1907 Mrs. Helen C. Plane Honorary President 1907 Ms. Alice Baxter President 1907 Mrs. R.L. Nesbett 1st Vice President 1907 Mrs. Walter Lamar 2nd Vice President 1907 Mrs. T.D. Caswell 3rd Vice President 1907 Ms. Mattie B. Sheibley Recording Secretary 1907 Mrs. R.G. Stephens Corresponding Secretary 1907 Mrs. C.C. Sanders Treasurer 1907 Mrs. Lee Trammell Registrar 1907 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1907 Mrs. Herbert Franklin Acting Historian 1911 Ms. Alice Baxter President 1911 Mrs. Anne Caroline Benning 1st Vice President 1911 Mrs. Walter D. Lamar 2nd Vice President 1911 Mrs. Trox Bankston 3rd Vice President 1911 Mrs. E.K. Overstreet Recording Secretary 1911 Ms. Sallie Hanson Malone Corresponding Secretary 1911 Mrs. Oswell Eve Treasurer 1911 Mrs. Lee Trammell Registrar 1911 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1911 Mrs. Zebulon Walker Auditor 1911 Mrs. Walter D. Lamar President 1911 Mrs. C. Helen Plane Honorary President 1911 Mrs. Herbert M. Franklin 1st Vice President 1911 Mrs. Zebulon Walker 2nd Vice President

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1911 Mrs. W.C. Vereen 3rd Vice President 1911 Mrs. James E. Hays Recording Secretary 1911 Mrs. Duncan Brown Corresponding Secretary 1911 Ms. Mattie B. Sheibley Treasurer 1911 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1911 Mrs. James T. Dixon Auditor 1911 Ms. Rebecca Black Dupon Recorder of Crosses of Honor 1921 Mrs. Frank Harold President 1921 Mrs. W.S. Coleman 1st Vice President 1921 Mrs. Walter Grace 2nd Vice President 1921 Mrs. L.G. Youmans 3rd Vice President 1921 Mrs. Oscar McKenzie Recording Secretary 1921 Mrs. S.H. McKee Corresponding Secretary 1921 Mrs. G.P. Folks Treasurer 1921 Mrs. R.A. Grady Auditor 1921 Mrs. James T. Dixon Registrar 1921 Ms. Mildred Rutherford Historian 1921 Ms. Rebecca Black Dupon Recorder of Crosses of Honor 1921 Mrs. F.O. Miller Director of Children of the Confederacy

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