South still regarded as the truth to many to this day. As Robert Penn Warren observes ‘at the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality’, the belief of the Southern people allowed the event to be celebrated rather than mourned. 267 This stubborn tendency from the South to not allow history to override the glorified myth of the South has led to a blurring of the boundaries, consequently allowing both to interweave and create a distorted view of the Old and New South. After all, ‘A Myth’ Mark Schorer has observed, ‘is a large, controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to the facts of ordinary life’. 268 In conclusion, the myth of the Old South has been almost completely relying on the memory of both the people of the Civil War era and the generations after to continue to push the myth and allow it to become completely enshrined into the beliefs of the American people. Going back to the titled quote, ‘the Past is never dead, it’s not even past’, the continuous use of memory to keep the Southern image alive, allows the Old South to never be truly settled in the past, by the continuation of memory, the Old South will always be present in the hearts and minds of Southerners and Americans alike.
267 Foster 268 Gerster, Myth and Southern History; The Old South , p.2.
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