Huck and The Daughters

Long before women finally gained the vote, The United Daughters of the Confederacy was founded in Nashville in 1894 by a group of ladies, all descended from Confederate soldiers who were dying off and being forgotten, a sin these ladies were determined to address. Their ascendancy, which peaked at one hundred thousand members in 1914, had a remarkable and continuing influence on the history of the Civil War, which they viewed as a personal engagement between “our heroes” and the godless hordes who invaded from the north—and won. They very successfully created and spread the legend of the Lost Cause still current today, and, by influencing decades of textbooks (not only in the South), taught generations of children a myth about benevolent slaveholders and the lilac-scented romance of the defeated South.

Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, easily his masterpiece, was published eighteen years earlier and would have given the ladies palpitations if they had dared to read it. Huck is a runaway, a thief, an irreverent boy who refuses to be “sivilized” by his guardian—the Widow Douglas—who cleans him up, dresses him in uncomfortable clothes, requires him to come to meals at a set time, and prays over him. Huck can’t stand it and runs away to find his father, a violent drunk, who lives in filth and disorder but is a more bearable companion, at least for a while, than the pious widow.

Widow Douglas, like my maternal great-grandmother and grandmother, might well have been a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They passed on to their descendants, including me, an irresistibly romantic version of what they always called “The War”: heroic and inevitably handsome and well-born young men, dying cruel deaths on the battlefields of the South or healed in hospitals by white nurse-angels. For a romance-besotted teenager, these tales had an influence unmitigated by the facts of the Civil War, which I barely knew.

I was not the only one influenced by tales that found their widest audience in Gone With The Wind, Hollywood’s 1939 film. But I am only now beginning to understand how the slew of Civil War monuments erected all over the country, and not only in the South, in many of our public spaces, parks, squares, courthouses, and even in Arlington National Cemetary, were commissioned by the Daughters and paid for with their immense fundraising ability. They were placed due to Daughters’ political influence, and survive, mainly, to this day, inserting the myth of The Lost Cause into many citizens who never asked why or how these monuments were erected. Finally, today, some of them are coming down but against a great deal of resistance.

The hundreds of monuments, however, do not exert the heavy weight of influence as do the textbooks the Daughters inserted in school curricula all over the South. They were able to censor many texts that told the truth about slavery, or at least to have a sentence inscribed on the covers, “Unjust to the South.” And since textbook publishing has long been influenced by the wishes of Texas, which buys more books than any other state, I wonder if these noxious falsehoods, perhaps slightly modified, are still being taught in grade school classrooms. When we wonder about the almost unstoppable spread of White Supremacy, these books must figure as one of the causes.

Twain’s “Huck Finn” would have caused the Daughters some difficulty. The language of racism, used throughout and especially in references to Huck’s great friend and companion, “Nigger Jim,” would have been music to their ears, but Huck’s waywardness would have horrified them. Smoking, cursing, stealing and eventually running away, Huck is the nightmare version of the nice southern white boy—who also might well be smoking, cursing, and running away.

And so the Ladies might have applauded the opposition the novel aroused from the moment it was published, when it began to be burned or banned because of its “crudeness.” More recently, it has been banned if not burned because of its use of the n-word, one of the great losses attendant on political correctness.

For it is a great novel—great in its complexity and delightful adventurousness, but especially as Jim develops, as seen through Huck’s eyes, into a thoughtful, morally complex and worthy man. The end is tragic as it had to be in 19th century America and in different versions, today.

Twain, born to a slave-holding father and witness to beatings and lynchings, also eventually expanded his moral vision and became an outspoken critic of the institution of racism. It’s a painful development and an essential one, apparently never achieved by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, although now the group denounces the hatefulness they have promoted for generations.

And the effect continues.

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