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Abstract
Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia is one of the most iconic cemeteries in the United States, featuring an array of significant memorials and graves relating to the US Civil War. The Hollywood Memorial Association, a group of middle and upper-class white women, would play an outsize role in remaking Richmond as Confederate holy ground. They began with Hollywood Cemetery itself—which they came to call “Our Westminster”—establishing it as the city’s preeminent memorial site. Drawing on research at the HMA archives in Richmond, this article examines Hollywood Cemetery and related sites around Richmond as material secular forms that were sacralized through the work of the HMA. There are two facets considered here: the first is the way that the Confederacy was sacralized in order to authorize the “Lost Cause” myth propagated by Confederates to obscure the real motives and causes that led to Southern secession. The second is the distinct way that whiteness itself was sacralized. The Hollywood Memorial Association was a key player in the creation of a sacred secular material culture that glorified white supremacy and helped to undo the halting efforts at equalizing Black citizens during Reconstruction.
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Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
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Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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“A Bleak Outlook Is Seen for Religion.” The New York Times. February 25, 1968: 3.
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Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
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Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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Confederate Memorial Literary Society Miscellaneous Monuments and Memorials (CMLS). Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Mss3 M9722 e. Sections 1–17.
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Coski, John M., and Amy R. Feely. “A Monument to Southern Womanhood: The Founding Generation of the Confederate Museum.” In: A Woman’s War: Southern Womaen, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy. Campbell, Edward D.C., Jr., and Kym S. Rice, eds. Richmond: Museum of the Confederacy and the University Press of Virginia, 1996: 131–163.
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Cox, Karen. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Revised edition. Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 2019.
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Du Bois, W.E. Burghardt. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920.
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Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Fields, Karen E., trans. New York, NY: Free Press, 1995.
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Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Markmann, Charles Lam. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
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Fariello, M. Anna. “Personalizing the Political: The Davis Family Circle in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.” In: Mills, Cynthia, and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003: 116–132.
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Fields, Karen E. “Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation between W.E.B. Du Bois and Emile Durkheim.” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 435–462.
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Hillyer, Reiko. “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South.” The Public Historian 33.4 (November 2011): 35–62.
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Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
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Hollywood Memorial Association (HMA). Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Mss3 H7299 a (CMLS). Sections 1–9.
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Janney, Caroline. “Cornerstone Contributions: Where Are the Women?” The Virginia Department of Historic Resources blog. April 13, 2022. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/blog-posts/cornerstone-contributions-where-are-the-women/
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Janney, Caroline. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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Charter of Jefferson Davis Monument Association, March 1889 (JDMA). Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Mss3 M9722 e253.
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Jordan, Cornelia J.M. Richmond: Her Glory and Her Graves. A Poem in Two Parts. Richmond, VA: Richmond Medical Journal Print, 1867.
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Mathews, Donald G. At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
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Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Second Edition. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
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M.R.W. “A Woman’s Protest.” Richmond Times-Dispatch. Apr. 12, 1905: 4.
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Oakwood Memorial Association (OMA.) Virginia Museum of History and Culture. MSS3 Oa45 a.
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Oliphant, Elayne. The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
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Paden, William E. “Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion.” In: The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Clarke, Peter B., ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 31–45.
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Pollard, Edward A. The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. New and Enlarged Edition. New York, NY: E.B. Treat, 1890.
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Richmond News Leader. “Oppose Playground at Clark Springs.” February 6, 1932: 2.
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Richmond News Leader. “Playground for Negro Children Will Be Sought.” January 29, 1932: 2.
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Schaefer, Donovan O. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
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Schaefer, Donovan O. Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
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Sullivan, Marek. Secular Assemblages: Affect, Orientalism, and Power. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2020.
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Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Whites, LeeAnn. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
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Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 428 | 138 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 33 | 10 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 46 | 23 | 0 |
Search for other papers by Donovan O. Schaefer in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia is one of the most iconic cemeteries in the United States, featuring an array of significant memorials and graves relating to the US Civil War. The Hollywood Memorial Association, a group of middle and upper-class white women, would play an outsize role in remaking Richmond as Confederate holy ground. They began with Hollywood Cemetery itself—which they came to call “Our Westminster”—establishing it as the city’s preeminent memorial site. Drawing on research at the HMA archives in Richmond, this article examines Hollywood Cemetery and related sites around Richmond as material secular forms that were sacralized through the work of the HMA. There are two facets considered here: the first is the way that the Confederacy was sacralized in order to authorize the “Lost Cause” myth propagated by Confederates to obscure the real motives and causes that led to Southern secession. The second is the distinct way that whiteness itself was sacralized. The Hollywood Memorial Association was a key player in the creation of a sacred secular material culture that glorified white supremacy and helped to undo the halting efforts at equalizing Black citizens during Reconstruction.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 428 | 138 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 33 | 10 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 46 | 23 | 0 |
