Edith D. Pope and Her Nashville Friends: Guardians of the Lost Cause in the Confederate Veteran.

Edith D. Pope and Her Nashville Friends: Guardians of the Lost Cause in the Confederate Veteran. By John A. Simpson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 276. $35.00, ISBN 1-57233-211-5.)

Edith D. Pope spent forty years working for Confederate Veteran magazine, twenty of them as editor. In his third book, John A. Simpson examines Pope's role in the feminization of the Confederate memorial movement. Additionally, Simpson explores how the Civil War and its aftermath profoundly changed the lives of elite white southern women.

Born in 1869 to a socially prominent plantation family, Pope, like others of her generation, inherited little wealth but a strong sense of regional pride. In 1892, four years after her graduation from Tennessee Female College, she took a position in Nashville as secretary to Sumner Archibald Cunningham, founding editor of the monthly Confederate Veteran. The magazine featured eyewitness accounts of battles, idealized descriptions of antebellum life, and notices for veterans' reunions. After Cunningham's death in 1913 Pope became the magazine's editor, serving until it folded in 1932. As Simpson argues, Pope--an educated, single, professional woman of elite white southern background--is representative of many women of her generation, who, faced with financial insecurity and a lack of marriageable men, created respectable careers in the urban South.

Pope's leadership of the magazine signaled a new direction in the Confederate memorial movement. Just as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) replaced the United Confederate Veterans as the primary Confederate memorial organization, Pope's tenure as editor of the Confederate Veteran witnessed "a fundamental shift in format away from soldiers' reminiscences to a newsletter for the Daughters" (p. 33). Indeed, in 1914 the UDC saved the magazine from financial decline by agreeing to subsidize the publication. The post-1914 magazine published glorifications of slavery and defenses of secession, themes that reflected the interests of the UDC, as well as reports of UDC events. Simpson provides a useful case study of the group's Nashville No. 1 chapter, demonstrating the diversity and influence of the organization.

Although the focus on the UDC provides effective context, Simpson might have made fuller use of the historiography of southern women. More significantly, although Simpson acknowledges that Pope and the UDC shared the racism of their time, he shies away from fully accepting the implications of this recognition. By labeling the racial views of the UDC as a "major snag" in evaluating their "positive contributions," Simpson encourages the view that the legacy of Confederate memorializers can be separated into a positive "heritage" and an unfortunate racial prejudice (pp. 169, 170). On the contrary, the UDC's racial ideology was not incidental to its "traditional white southern values" (p. 115). The effort to commemorate the Confederacy grew out of the late-nineteenth-century effort to justify segregation and disenfranchisement and silence interracial political dissent. Pope's impressive professional accomplishments cannot be neatly separated from the racial agenda of the Confederate memorial movement.

University of California, Santa Barbara 

SARAH H. CASE