To the Editor:
Your recent articles on the restoration of the Confederate statue at the intersection of Prince and South Washington streets — Montie Martin's "A Statue with 100 Names" (Sept. 27) and Nancy Jennis Olds' "'Appomattox' Gets Makeover" (Oct. 11) — indicate that the romanticism and sentimentality of the South, otherwise known as the Lost Cause and exemplified in the glorification of the Confederate soldier, continue into the 21st century. But what W. J. Cash wrote of Southern sentimentality in 1941 still resonates today: "And of course the sentimentality waxed fat on the theme of the Confederate soldier and the cause for which he had fought and died. This soldier, I suggest, was in sober truth a proper subject for any people's pride. And men (Western men, at least) have everywhere and eternally sentimentalized the causes of their wars, and particularly the causes that were lost. All of them have bled and died for God and Womanhood and Holy Right; not one has ever died for anything so crass and unbeautiful as the preservation of slavery."
Craig D. Taylor
Alexandria