the pre-war and some the postwar of southern society was/is romanticized because it was the closest thing we had to the London “ton” and “the season” which makes for great romance novels like GWTW with the endless balls and parties and the most important decision was what one wore to the horse race or to the biggest dinner party of the year and who filled their dance card …
even today you can find novels where the barley legal (or younger) plantations owner daughter either swoons over the arranged marriage with the neighbor’s son or runs away from it and meets the handsome northerner who worms her way in her heart …then the 2 males meet in epic battle ect … although there are examples in the more “aware” ones have incidents that shows how slavery was bad (usually a character’s stopping of an owned woman being raped by her owner )
In the rather large historical romance collection, i inherited it was a tie between the revolutionary war and the civil war on who had the most written on it … in fact one series started in the first and ended in the second…
I said it was generally a better source for drama. Millions of stories have been told; you’re going to find a counter-example for any general rule of story-telling.
I don’t think your general rule even holds. People (or at least authors) like an underdog, sure, because it’s an easy way to introduce narrative tension. But—this is completely in line with your “millions of stories have been told” line—one need not look to the losing side in a conflict to get a heroic underdog. Take, again, Saving Private Ryan. Sure the D-Day landings are successful and the allies win the war, but by focusing the story on a small group of soldiers sent on a dangerous mission through contested territory, we’re allowed to envision characters on the side of moral right facing long odds and possible defeat in detail, even if their side wins in the end.
If you want downtrodden/disadvantaged/forlorn soldiers struggling on against a superior force, you don’t need to tell the story of confederates, you could easily tell the story of a group of union soldiers facing defeat (and maybe even being actually defeated) in one of the many engagements that the Union lost. Glory, for instance. Or you could tell a story where Union troops were in a dire situation, but through tenacity and bravery managed to hold on as in the parts of Gettysburg that weren’t a love song to the Confederacy.
The Confederacy is unique in that there was a concerted effort on the part of southern propagandists and apologists after the war to tell the story in the most sympathetic light, through an individual lens. There is nothing about the circumstances of the Confederacy that makes especially worthy of attention by story tellers, other than that the Lost Causers did a lot of the leg work in spinning their version of the war and it’s causes into one hell of a story. A damn fanciful one at that.
And there were zillions of novels, plays, and movies made about them. Not to mention all those old murder mysteries where the action is confined to a snow-bound mansion or a private island in a storm so that one of those present has to be the murderer. Only the well-to-do could afford those. I’ve read dozens and they were always set in the northeast.
But we don’t care about that aspect of society any more as a culture. WWII pretty much destroyed it. The Confederacy is a different animal that still lives and has a current culture that interests many.
Particularly if you (and this is a general you) find the idea of an ordered society where people who look like you are born into a higher social strata, and the wealthiest among them can dispense justice and mercy at their will, as if it is their god-given right to do so. Good luck telling that story, set historically and in America, outside the south.
The south definitely has it with music. Their is no song equivalent in the north to “Dixie”. Which was so good the Union made a parody of it. Watch “Dixie - Union Version”.
Nobody sings a song in the north glorifying what they did like in the song “I’m a Good Ole Rebel”. Where is a song such as “I’m a good Ole Unionist”?
Some others:
I dare you to watch the video to this song “The Irish Brigade” and not get just a little confederate sympathies. Or the song “Johnny Reb” by Johnny Horton.
Watch the video of “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and try not to soing “Hurrah, hurrah, for the southern rights hurrah”.
And then of course, there’s my personal favorite, The Battle Cry of Freedom. Down with the traitor, up with the stars! That beats the socks of Dixie any day.
If you’re going to whip out contemporary songs, then all bets are off. Regionalism just isn’t quite what it was 150 years ago, though I’ll grant that parts of the south certainly do like to cling to it more than other parts of the country. Which may further speak to the central issue of this thread: is it really because the south is so much more “interesting” or is it because certain other factors are in play, and those factors aren’t necessarily a positive, when viewed dispassionately.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I grew up in the south myself. I even went to a certain southern military school that’s been around since before the Civil War and may or may not still celebrate the day its student body fought, as mere boys, in a pitched battle against the Union army.
But, somehow, I see through all that. Those “boys” were all military age (albeit on the younger side), and if they had really wanted to fight for what they believed in, they could have had their daddy buy them a commission. As it stands, I’d rate them about on par with wealthy chicken hawks who avoided service in Vietnam by joining the reserves. They were the sons of the landed gentry who actually owned slaves, and yet let poorer men do the fighting, sold them on a line they were fighting for their homeland that the Union Army never would have had cause to invade if they hadn’t foolishly seceded over slavery, and then thumped their chests for the rest of their lives about that one battle they fought in where a handful of their buddies got killed. That’s the Confederacy in a nutshell to me. A fine facade, but examined closely, even as an example of flawed protagonists and anti-heroes, it’s not especially unique. You can find flawed men and women everywhere, you can find hypocrites everywhere, and you can find drama everywhere, but I think where you choose to look and who you choose to celebrate can say a lot about you, whether you realize it or not.
You are having the same problems talking about the actual OP as most everyone else in this thread. This is decidedly not about whether one side or the other was evil, more evil, did nasty stuff or was the golden Buddha.
Actually, if you had read the thread since it started out in Café Society, you’d see that you are mistaken. My point and some other posters is that evil is more interesting, it stands to reason that we would then need to establish that the Confederacy was in fact evil.
“Dixie,” embraced as it was by the South, appears to have come from somewhere in Ohio. I’m not very knowledgeable about pre-Civil War American music, but minstrel shows provided popular music on both sides of the Mason Dixon line.
Blues and Jazz were rooted in the South, especially New Orleans (home of both Louis Armstrong and W. C. Handy) but their popularity exploded all over the country after the turn of the century. The introduction of radio circa 1925 was quite the leveler of regional tastes and favorites, though Northern music of the early 1900s was more informed by Jewish and eastern European influences, like Polka and Vaudeville (although many Northern cities became hubs of Jazz and Blues too), while Southern music had more Black and Irish origins. Both were swell, but the edge goes to the South.
Villains are often more fascinating than heroes, so it’s possible. Let’s face it, who was more colorful and fascinating, Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader?
There is something compelling in the narrative of a failed cause, though. An element of tragedy, in the literary sense, if not the moral sense. People love “Macbeth,” even though Macbeth failed and was the bad guy. The South gives you the failure element and a lot of moral questions to explore. (I am fascinated by the number of otherwise intelligent SDMB posters who struggle with the concept of the OP.)
The Union’s obvious great story is Grant, a failure in everything that wasn’t being a soldier but the greatest general in the history of America, who led the most brilliant and audacious campaign in his country’s history, and who was a person of tremendous moral strength, working and succeeding in a military culture that was politicized to an extent barely comprehensible today. It would make an incredible HBO series.
