| This dissertation explores the ex-Confederate South's journey from secession to super-patriotism. It focuses on four major questions: How and why did the post-Civil War South, a region singularly isolated from the progress and prosperity of the rest of the nation, nevertheless become the preeminent bastion of American super-patriotism? How did southern support for the creation of the military-industrial complex shape political and economic development in the region? What ramifications did southern hawkishness have for national politics, particularly in light of the region's extraordinarily influential position within the Democratic Party? And how did southern support for military intervention abroad contribute to the expansion and transformation of American government and foreign policy in the twentieth century? This study challenges a historiography that has long assumed that southern hawkishness and militant patriotism were inevitable developments. Although Lost Cause ideology celebrated the martial values embodied in Confederate icons such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the region's historic suspicion of federal power, its weak economic position in relation to the North, and the intensely partisan nature of its politics engendered staunch southern opposition to militarism and interventionism at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. Only after the declaration of war on Germany in April 1917---and the region's subsequent emergence as host to a large portion of the nation's military-industrial complex---did the now familiar "Hawkish" South emerge. This dissertation explores how and why this striking change in southern political culture came about. |
