ABSTRACT
Between the 1890s and 1940s, white southerners made the northern modern game of football palatable to their conservative southern tastes by cloaking it in imagery associated with the Lost Cause, a mythologized Old South, and a martial manhood personified by Robert E. Lee in the same way they employed these ideas and images to make their transition to a modernized New South less jarring. At the Universities of Mississippi, Virginia, and Louisiana State, students who matured alongside the Lost Cause invented traditions and cultures that directly tied their campuses’ football stars to Confederate soldiers and officers, and genteel southern gentlemen. By doing so, they set standards of white southern masculinity and marked the sport of football and the campuses on which it was played as white. By the interwar period, southern college football boosters amplified these traditions to market southern football teams to national audiences who rapaciously consumed a southern culture that celebrated an idealized patrician agrarian past as seen in popular-culture products like Gone with the Wind. Ultimately, these students and alumni created lasting monuments to the Old South and the Confederacy just as practitioners of the Lost Cause did with soaring statues and revisionist histories.
