Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory.

Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Pp. xxx, 265. $45.00, ISBN 1-57233-272-7.)

An excellent introduction by Cynthia Mills sets the stage for this collection of fourteen essays in four groupings that follow. Drawing upon recent scholarship in several fields, Mills raises intriguing questions about gender, section, and memory. Why was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), with its male membership, the prime mover behind northern monuments, while the women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) led memorializing efforts in the South? Why did the wave of monument-building crest in the North in the 1880s but not in the South until the early 1900s? Why do some monuments fade into urban wallpaper while others become touchstones for new causes? Describing the monuments that dot the cemeteries and squares of the South as "messengers from the past," Mills also poses questions about the messages these monuments conveyed to those who saw them when the drapery was first pulled away (almost always by a young child) and to those of us seeing them for the first time decades or centuries later (p. xv). How, Mills asks, does a monument's meaning change as the event memorialized recedes in time?

Just how well the essays that follow in this volume decode the messages of the monuments is mixed. Every one of them contains some interesting nugget of insight, information, or just plain trivia (Confederate Christmas seals, for example). Many offer fresh answers to the questions Mills poses. But several others fall short because they are too brief. Some essays barely begin before they end, never having moved beyond setting the stage or from the superficial to the specific. Others lay out intriguing premises but close before providing enough analysis or evidence to be convincing.

In part 1, "The Rites of Memory: Differing Perspectives," essays by Catherine W. Zipf, who examines the significance of the physical cemetery layout and the architecture of the cemetery lodges, and by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, who discusses white women's postbellum clubs and how women lost control of the historic preservation movement, are especially good. In part 2, "Heroes and Heroines of the South," M. Anna Fariello's careful examination of a trio of Davis family grave sculptures by George Julian Zolnay stands out.

All three articles in part 3 (Karen L. Cox, "The Confederate Monument at Arlington: A Token of Reconciliation"; William M. S. Rasmussen, "Planning a Temple to the Lost Cause: The Confederate 'Battle Abbey'"; and Cynthia Mills, "Gratitude and Gender Wars: Monuments to the Women of the Sixties") are excellent. Cox aptly sums up the Confederate monument at Arlington as "a pro-southern textbook illustrated in bronze": the gallant officers, the faithful body servants, the sacrifice of wives and mothers, and more are present in the monument sculptor Moses Ezekiel created for the UDC (p. 158). The exceptional essay in part 4 is Micki McElya's "Commemorating the Color Line: The National Mammy Monument Controversy of the 1920s." Not only is this one of the most bizarre tales in this collection, but, because of McElya's innovative reading of a wide variety of print sources and images, hers is one of the best essays. In a book about the art and architecture defining and depicting the Lost Cause, images are crucial. In every essay, the illustrations are well suited to the prose.

Rather than fourteen short--often too short--essays that too frequently leave the reader wishing for greater depth, perhaps eight or nine longer essays would have better served this topic. All of the authors, however, fully appreciate what is deeply understood by those who fight so ferociously to control the iconography and placement of monuments, whether of Confederate generals in the 1880s or African American tennis stars in the 1980s: monuments have the power to inscribe upon the landscape a particular memory of an individual or event. Whoever controls the monument controls the memory.

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 

KATHRYN ALLAMONG JACOB