The situation was the same when those articles and writings
emerged over a century ago that we tag “Lost Cause” thinking.
They still exist: we can study them even now as emergent myth or
as emergent tradition, but we are not yet ready for that level
of analysis. Vallee observed a predicament that has not changed
in forty years. The situation has deteriorated, if anything.
Still being ill-equipped to observe or measure the emergence of
myth or tradition, “Lost Cause” criticism is necessarily
primitive and unsatisfying. There are, as I said, available to
letter readers and newspaper skimmers certain wartime Southern
memes that take the form of insights or truths about the larger
issues. Contemporary writers are interpreting great events and
people’s relation to those events. The white Southerner is in
crisis and the crisis is cosmic, touching every aspect of life:
contracts, friendships, family relations, the meaning of
loyalty, of nation, of justice, of personal self-respect,
familial survival, and much more o