“Much More than a Song”: The 1935 Campaign for a National “Dixie” Memorial

It should come as no surprise that the effort to commemorate Emmett and to build a National “Dixie” Memorial was led by chapters of the UDC and a woman who had some ties to the organization. In the decades before Fitzhugh launched her memorial campaign, the UDC had become one of the most powerful women’s organizations in the country, and the preeminent group devoted to perpetuating the memory of the glory of the Confederacy. Thirty women in Nashville founded the UDC in 1894; by the outbreak of World War I, the group had more than one hundred thousand members.¹⁰ Members had to be related to soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, and they were singularly devoted to honoring the Confederacy and promoting the myth of the Lost Cause, an invented historical narrative that provided ideological justification for white supremacy in the post–Civil War South. Promoters of the Lost Cause insisted that the Civil War had been about states’ rights, not slavery; that slavery itself had been benevolent; and that Confederate soldiers were brave defenders of American principles of freedom and liberty.¹¹

The UDC promoted the Lost Cause narrative by sponsoring reunions that focused on the bravery of southern soldiers; by publishing textbooks that popularized their version of history; and, most famously, by building hundreds of monuments honoring the cause of the Confederacy.¹² The UDC, its 1956 organizational history explains, were “monument builders” who knew that “monuments would speak more quickly, impressively, and lastingly to the eye than the written word or printed word.”¹³

While most chapters of the UDC were located in the South, the group quickly grew beyond the borders of the Confederate States. In 1901, southern transplants founded the first UDC chapter in Ohio, the Stonewall Jackson chapter of Cincinnati. By 1915, Ohio boasted six chapters in four of its largest cities—one in Cleveland, two in Cincinnati, two in Columbus, and one in Dayton—and members had begun meeting together annually at a state convention. These Ohio UDC members recognized that they were “a small body of women” who had been “transplanted far in the North,” as the president of the Stonewall Jackson Chapter explained in 1909, but they had been busy “spreading interest and unifying aims and deepening loyalty and strengthening harmony.”¹⁴

Members of the UDC in Ohio embraced a variety of causes. Most fundamentally, they hoped to bring together southern women living in the North for fellowship and support, and to convince them to continue to take pride in their Confederate heritage even while living in what might be considered hostile territory. The founder of Cleveland’s Alexander H. Stephens Chapter reported in 1914 that they sought to “enlighten” southern-born residents of Cleveland so they would feel comfortable joining the UDC. “There are many women who are holding back and can’t decide just whether they will be doing right if they join our ranks, thinking it might offend some of their Northern friends or stir up sectional feelings, and many other distractions.”¹⁵ These northern chapters saw themselves as keen protectors of memory who needed to remind transplants to remain loyal to the South. Ohio chapters of the UDC also took on the task of maintaining Ohio’s two Confederate POW cemeteries, one at Camp Chase near Columbus and one on Johnson’s Island.¹⁶ And like their brethren elsewhere, they engaged in monument building, first erecting statues of Confederate soldiers at Ohio’s POW cemeteries and then, in 1927, placing a plaque honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee on a massive boulder along Dixie Highway in Franklin County, north of Cincinnati.¹⁷

While the UDC and other Confederate heritage groups devoted most of their energy to constructing memorials that featured Confederate leaders or soldiers, their efforts to spread and legitimize the Lost Cause included a range of memory projects that were only tangentially related to the Civil War. White women memory activists, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes, led the way in promoting a “moonlight-and-magnolia” image of the Old South, one that portrayed honorable planters, happy Black mammies, and loyal slaves. Thus, in addition to statues of Confederate soldiers, UDC chapters also advocated for monuments that celebrated “faithful” slaves who had stayed loyal to their enslavers.¹⁸ But the symbol of the faithful slave was not the only one that groups like the UDC turned to as a way to celebrate the Lost Cause and benefits of plantation slavery. They found another potential symbol—and one that could do more to promote sectional reconciliation on the South’s terms more than any representation of faithful slaves ever could—in the song that had come to symbolize the southern cause during the Civil War: Dan Emmett’s “Dixie.”

The song “Dixie” initially had nothing to do with the Civil War or the Confederacy. Lore holds that the song was written in a few hours by Emmett, a man who seems an unlikely candidate for a hero in a southern memory campaign.¹⁹ Emmett was born in 1815 in Mount Vernon, Ohio, then on the far western frontier of the United States, to parents who had migrated west from Virginia and Maryland. Raised in a musical household, Emmett learned to play the flute and the fiddle and had composed his first song, “Old Dan Tucker,” by the time he was fifteen. After brief stints as a printer’s apprentice and in a fife-and-drum regiment in the army, Emmett joined a travelling circus and began performing in blackface and composing so-called “Ethiopian” songs that used exaggerated Negro dialect. In the early 1840s, Emmett relocated to New York and founded the Virginia Minstrels, a four-man troupe that pioneered a new kind of entertainment aimed at middle-class whites. They performed entire shows of blackface skits, songs, dances, and comedic sermons which they promised would be “entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas.”²⁰ While perhaps exempt from what Emmett considered “vulgarities” in the 1840s, scholars of blackface uniformly agree that the emergence of the Virginia Minstrels ended any potentially subversive or radical political potential that blackface might once have had. The Virginia Minstrels, one asserts, “promoted particularly grotesque portrayals of blacks,” while another blames Emmett’s group for turning blackface into “a weapon by which one group of Americans defined, marginalized, and contained another.”²¹ You can understand why my son wanted to take a knee.

By 1859, Emmett found himself as a resident performer and composer with Bryant’s Minstrels in New York City. Bryant’s Minstrels were particularly known for their “walkarounds,” or large-scale song and dance numbers involving all members of the troupe that typically depicted life on a southern plantation. Emmett supposedly wrote “Dixie” in just a few hours on a rainy day in 1859 when Bryant told him that they needed a new walkaround number by that evening.²² The song, written in blackface’s common version of Negro dialect, featured a common minstrel theme of former slaves longing to return to their beloved southern plantation.

Despite being written in 1859, a time of heated debate over slavery, “Dixie” portrayed the enslaved as carefree people who saw their plantations as a kind of Eden. Indeed, the song’s original first stanza—which Bryant asked Emmett not to perform for fear of offending the audience’s religious sensibilities—included a reference to God creating “Dixie” and Adam calling it “paradise.” Another stanza described Dixie land as a place where “de darkies grow/ If white folks only plant dar toe/ Dey wet di groun wid ‘bakkir smoke/ Den up de darky’s head will poke.”²³ But it was the catchy chorus that earned the song its quick popularity and lasting fame:

While this chorus would soon be cleansed of Negro dialect and put to more martial use (“I wish I was in Dixie/Hooray, Hooray!/In Dixie’s land, I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie!”), Emmett saw “Dixie” as a simple song with “plantation words, the purport of which is that a negro in the north feels himself out of place and thinking of his old home in the south, is made to exclaim, in the words of the song: ‘I wish I was in Dixie’s Land.’”²⁴

“Dixie” became wildly popular within months of its first performance in New York in 1859, but it really began to be associated with the cause of the South when bandleader Herman Arnold played it at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the new Confederate States of America in 1861. “It made such a sensation that it became the war tune of the South,” “Dixie” scholar Cheryl Thurber writes.²⁵ Throughout the Civil War, the Confederate army used the song to rally their troops and to taunt Union forces. Confederate General Albert Pike even rewrote some of the lyrics to make the song a more respectable wartime anthem. “Dixie,” in Thurber’s words, quickly came to “represent all that the Confederacy symbolized.”²⁶

The song continued to have great symbolic importance for Confederate memory even after the war ended, perhaps best symbolized by a longstanding debate among Confederate heritage groups over whether they should adopt and standardize more “respectable” lyrics for “Dixie.” In 1903, The Alabama Division of the UDC launched a campaign to encourage all Confederate organizations to adopt more patriotic lyrics for “Dixie,” likely those penned by General Pike during the war. Only the original chorus should be retained, insisted the Florence, Alabama UDC chapter president, but even that should be changed to “correct English, not negro dialect.”²⁷ Others vehemently disagreed on grounds that again highlights the important place of the song in Confederate memory. The Inspector General of the Texas Division of the United Confederate Veterans insisted in 1904 that efforts to change “Dixie” were not unlike northern efforts to erase and distort Confederate history. “The words of ‘Dixie’ were good enough then, and they are good enough now; let them alone; they are one of the earmarks of our Southern Confederacy,” he argued.²⁸ Eventually the push for a more dignified version of “Dixie” lost steam, although the version of the song that is best known today includes only the opening verse and choruses stripped of dialect.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, Confederate heritage organizations not only came to accept Emmett’s version of “Dixie,” but also came to terms with the fact that a song that was “absolutely sacred to Southern hearts,” had been written by a northerner.²⁹ During the Civil War, this had been a hard pill for white southerners to swallow. Some insisted that the song had emerged from southern folk traditions; others attributed it to a southern author, not hard to do given that the UDC was able to find at least twenty-two different versions of the song’s lyrics in the years after the war. A short 1910 brochure by Memphis professor Thomas J. Firth made the case that the song had actually been penned by southerner Will S. Hayes.³⁰ But by then, Firth’s insistence on southern authorship of “Dixie” was becoming the exception rather than the norm.

In the 1890s, some Confederate heritage activists began to appreciate that the song of the South had been written by a northerner and they began insisting that “Dixie” be considered a national song, rather than just a southern or sectional one. In their effort to spread their version of the Civil War beyond their borders—to push for sectional reconciliation on southern ideological terms—the popularity of “Dixie” was a powerful tool. After all, the song offered a romanticized picture of slavery; it was associated with the bravery of southern soldiers; and it had been written by a Northerner, which suggested that the North shared the white South’s vision of itself. Thus, when a Chicago magazine published an editorial in 1897 arguing that it was “time to call off ‘Dixie’,” because it had the tendency “to keep alive the lost cause,” Confederate Veteran founder S. A. Cunningham not only insisted that “Dixie” was here to stay, but also predicted that “it will become a national air.” Eight years later, the Confederate Veteran described it as an “ugly statement” when a New York newspaper charged that “Dixie” should not be played at national events because it was “a sectional song” that “clearly meant to keep up the memory and glory of the Lost Confederacy.”³¹ Confederate heritage activists increasingly wanted “Dixie” to be seen as a symbol of national unity rather than of sectional division.

As they shifted to celebrate “Dixie’s” northern origin story, Confederate memory activists also began more openly celebrating the figure of Emmett, who was becoming something of a southern folk hero by the mid-1890s. Touring the South with A.G. Field’s Minstrels in 1895, the then eighty-year-old Emmett regularly brought down the house. Fields marveled that even though Emmett’s voice was shot, every time he stood to sing “Dixie” in the South, “the audience went as nearly wild as any I have ever seen. It seemed to me as if they would actually raise the roof from the theater.” Emmett proved so popular that Fields named one of his circus cars “The Dan Emmett.”³²

When S.A. Cunningham launched a new monthly magazine in January 1893 to promote the Lost Cause and to offer a space for news from Confederate heritage organizations, stories on Emmett and “Dixie” quickly became a regular feature. The Confederate Veteran ran its first story on Emmett in April 1893. After his death in 1904, the magazine featured a photo of him on its cover.³³

Cunningham also forged a personal relationship with the elderly entertainer during the last years of his life, visiting Emmett in Mount Vernon in 1895. Afterward, he wrote numerous stories praising Emmett’s character, humility, and talent. Emmett returned the regard, writing of his gratitude at Cunningham’s “kind assurances of the friendship of the southern people.”³⁴ When Emmett let Cunningham know that his pension was running out in 1897, the Confederate Veteran quickly rallied southerners to aid him in his time of need. Although Cunningham had rejected using the publication as a space for what he called “a miscellaneous appeal for aid,” he felt that the rule should not apply to the “upright, kindly old gentleman” who wrote “Dixie.”³⁵ Cunningham began selling autographed prints of “Dixie” to raise money for Emmett and he urged Confederate heritage organizations to donate to the cause. Many chapters of the UDC organized contribution campaigns, reporting their fundraising in the pages of the magazine. At least $160 dollars—or the equivalent of about $5,800 today—was sent to Emmett as a result of these campaigns.³⁶

While he was alive, Confederate heritage activists showed their support of Emmett and his famous song by helping provide for him in his old age. But as soon as Emmett died, activists like Cunningham and the UDC redirected their energy toward getting Emmett and his famous song recognized and celebrated in public monuments. A few years after Emmett’s death, Cunningham, minstrel troupe leader Field, and Memphis Commercial Appeal editor Charles Mooney launched a campaign to build a memorial to Emmett in Richmond, Virginia.³⁷ Southern “patriotic” organizations meanwhile lobbied unsuccessfully to move Emmett’s body from Ohio to somewhere in the South and to rebury him under a ceremonial tombstone.³⁸ By the 1910s, the Texas Division of the UDC had established a committee to raise funds to build a monument to Emmett. While they wanted to be recognized as beginning the work, they ultimately hoped that the national organization would appoint someone from each state to help plan for an Emmett memorial.³⁹

While the first monument built to honor Emmett—a ceremonial 1915 stone to mark his gravesite in Mount Vernon, Ohio—was not built by Confederate heritage activists, they could take pride in the fact that the monument reflected their work to promote “Dixie” as national song and unifying force. Emmett had been buried in an unmarked grave in 1904 after the local theatrical club in Mount Vernon failed to raise the funds for a proper tombstone.⁴⁰ In 1915, white southerners were thrilled when a rich Ohio man took it upon himself to pay for a ceremonial marker at Emmett’s unmarked grave. James Lewis Smith, who was not from Mount Vernon, seemed more interested in building monuments than he was specifically in Emmett; he had funded a Civil War memorial and a memorial to victims of a bridge collapse in his hometown of Ashtabula. But the eight-foot shaft he erected at Emmett’s gravesite reflected the influence of the southern memory campaign to sell “Dixie” as a national, rather than a sectional, song. “To the Memory of Daniel Decatur Emmett,” the inscription read, “Whose Song DIXIE LAND Inspired the Courage and Devotion of the Southern People and now Thrills the Hearts of a Reunited Nation.”⁴¹ The news was reported widely in newspapers throughout the South. The Confederate Veteran praised Smith’s “patriotic action” in building a tombstone to the man who wrote the song that was “destined to become the inspiration to a nation.” That magazine contains, as far as I can tell, the only extant photo of the 1915 memorial.⁴²

Other memorials to Emmett soon appeared in the South. In 1927, the Calvary Episcopal Church erected a monument to Emmett in Fletcher, North Carolina, as part of a project to honor notable people in southern history. A year later, a Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the UDC put up a plaque that recognized Emmett and orchestrator H.F. Arnold for writing and arranging the music that was performed at Jefferson Davis’s inauguration.⁴³

Not to be outdone, the Ohio Division of the UDC decided that they needed to ensure that Emmett got the recognition he deserved in his Ohio hometown. In 1930, three Columbus UDC members went to Mount Vernon to scout a suitable site for a memorial tablet to Emmett and to garner support from local leaders. Consulting with the mayor and several local women, they secured permission to place a large boulder mounted with a commemorative tablet in front of the Mount Vernon Memorial Theater building. The location thrilled committee chair Ouida S. LaRue, as the building was “quite the show place of the city and on a beautiful main street and a coast to coast highway.” In short, it was a site that both signified the importance accorded to Emmett’s deeds and was likely to be viewed by a wide public. The tablet included several bars of “Dixie,” along with an inscription nearly identical to that on the 1915 gravesite memorial (fig. 2). The UDC presented the boulder as a gift to the city in an elaborate 1931 ceremony that included prayers, a formal address, and the audience singing both “America” and “Dixie.”⁴⁴ As those song choices suggest, by the early 1930s, Confederate heritage activists had largely succeeded in their efforts to frame “Dixie” as a patriotic national song.

Kentuckian Mary Darby Fitzhugh knew of the Ohio UDC’s successful efforts to erect a monument to Emmett and “Dixie” in Mount Vernon; she praised the Ohio chapters for working together to erect this tribute to Emmett.⁴⁵ But her dreams were bigger. She wanted a grander monument, one that would have the backing of Ohio’s cultural and political leaders, would be funded by a broad subscription campaign, and would be erected in Mount Vernon, the state capital of Columbus, or even in Washington, D.C. Although Fitzhugh never described her vision for what that monument might look like, she came up with the idea of “The ‘Dixie’ National Memorial, honoring Daniel Decatur Emmett, Ohio composer,” organized a board of supporters, launched a fundraising effort, and sought to sell the project to the public. Although her work ultimately failed, it was certainly not due to a lack of energy or ambition on Fitzhugh’s part. Indeed, it is not too much to suggest that her passion for Emmett and “Dixie” bordered on obsession.

Fitzhugh was in her mid-fifties when she launched her “Dixie” memorial campaign. An energetic, multi-talented career woman, she had by then been married and divorced twice and had worked as a governess, a teacher, and on the advertising staffs of several newspapers. In 1935, she was working on a motor safety campaign in Knoxville, turning out pamphlets with titles like “My Motor Creed.” An advocate for women’s rights, Fitzhugh had fought for women’s suffrage in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the mid-1940s, she was a member of the finance committee of the National Women’s Party.⁴⁶

Fitzhugh was also a proud daughter of a Confederate veteran. Her father, Edmund Bainbridge Richardson, was a doctor who, Fitzhugh claimed, had fought at the Battle of Shiloh as a young man.⁴⁷ Fitzhugh had been a member of the Louisville, Kentucky, chapter of the UDC until she moved away in 1917. Whether she remained a member of the UDC is unclear, although the secretary of the Louisville UDC affirmed that Fitzhugh had been a “member in good standing” and expressed hope that she would join another chapter.⁴⁸

Fitzhugh’s interest in Emmett ran deep, as reflected in the many documents she left behind in the Dan Emmett papers at the Ohio state library. By 1933, she had already begun gathering permissions from Emmett biographers and collectors to use previously published illustrations or photos of Emmett’s possessions in her monument publicity campaign.⁴⁹ Fitzhugh was as invested in protecting Emmett’s archive as she was in commemorating him. She did research on Emmett at the Library of Congress and kept a list of every item relating to Emmett indexed there.⁵⁰ She planned to use some of the money raised by her campaign to catalog and index the papers of Emmett that the state of Ohio owned, papers that she felt were not being treated with the respect they deserved. As she lamented in a handwritten note in the margins of one document: “one can see the DDE [Daniel Decatur Emmett] Mss. and sermons, etc. packed on top of an old wardrobe [at the library]—no care—a shame—…What is OHIO thinking about to let DDE’s work be thus kept?”⁵¹

Why Fitzhugh chose to devote her talents to enshrining Emmett and “Dixie” is not entirely clear. Her interest in him and his famous song were certainly driven by the fact that she was an amateur composer with a passion for music. Fitzhugh held copyrights for at least three songs, and she extolled popular melody as “one of the avenues through which the human soul finds expression.”⁵² Fitzhugh may also have been drawn to Emmett because of her own Kentucky heritage and her romantic nostalgia for the settlers of the western reserve. She saw Emmett not just as a powerful symbol for the Lost Cause, but also as a more sweeping representative of the pioneer spirit that built America. She spoke and wrote of the “indomitable men and women” who crossed the Alleghenies to settle Ohio “in the onward advance of western civilization.”⁵³ She extolled the beauties of the Northwest territory, the heroism of settlers like Emmett’s ancestors, who overcame “treacherous Indians” to clear the land, and “the thrilling episodes of pioneer life” of settlers who came with little to the “Utopia of the West.” It was this spirit of bravery, enterprise, and determination that produced both Emmett and “Dixie,” Fitzhugh argued. For her, the writing of “Dixie” was “an outcome of the settlement of the Northwest Territory,” which left to the world a song that was recognized from “the four corners of the earth, irrespective of tongue…as America’s most engaging song” which “folds into its heart all peoples of God’s beautiful domain.”⁵⁴ Fitzhugh thus developed a historical trajectory for “Dixie” that linked the proud cause of the South to a romanticized version of America’s frontier history.

For Fitzhugh, Emmett represented an ideal symbol for commemoration. He was, she insisted, a “gallant, heroic spirit” who was unconscious of his “natural gifts” and was “attuned to every impulse of humanity.” Equally important, Emmett was a northerner who appreciated the culture, beauty—and what she saw as the natural social order—of the South. Although he was “born in what southerners considered a northern state,” Fitzhugh argued that Emmett “idolized to his last hours the ‘sunny south,’ its environs and the vernacular and customs of its hospitable people.” She cherished a small slip of paper on which Emmett had written, “I will proclaim it loud and long, I love ‘Old Dixie’ right or wrong.”⁵⁵ Emmett was a hero to Fitzhugh precisely because he was a northerner of “pioneer stock” who expressed admiration for the South.

Fitzhugh was equally enamored of the charms of “Dixie,” which she extolled not just as the song that inspired the Southern cause, but as a cultural artifact that actively promoted and encouraged national reconciliation. “Dixie,” she wrote in a short undated poem, was “the song that cements the ties of nationalism.” It was “characteristic of the body and soul of a Nation that breathes goodwill to all mankind.”⁵⁶ She explained her perspective in more detail in a pitch for a film project based on the life of Emmett. “Dixie,” she argued was “a song created in the State of New York, immortalized in the South, gathered momentum in the North, and to-day, symbolizes the complete union of a reunited nation.”⁵⁷ For her, “Dixie” appealed equally to northerners and southerners and thus stood as a powerful symbol of national pride.

Fitzhugh’s enthusiastic boosterism of both Emmett and “Dixie” also reflected her own deeply entrenched white supremacist beliefs. Fitzhugh embraced an idealized version of an Old South where enslaved people were happy and everyone knew their place. Fitzhugh’s first husband, L.D. Fitzhugh, whom she married in 1902, came from one of the more storied pro-slavery families of Kentucky. L.D.’s father had served on General Lee’s staff during the Civil War. His grandfather was the noted racial theorist George Fitzhugh, who argued in his 1857 book, Cannibals All!, that Black people were as “but a grown up child” and that society had a “duty” to enslave them in order to protect them from the capitalist world.⁵⁸

Although Fitzhugh was long divorced from L.D. at the time she launched her memorial campaign, she shared at least some of her grandfather-in-law’s paternalistic attitude toward Black people. She insisted that white southerners were “deeply invested in the education of the negro race” particularly in “vocational training and the cultivation of inborn musical talents.”⁵⁹ She described the pre–Civil War South as “an Elysium…where masters were kind, where care never came and where joy held sway the whole year round” and recalled fond memories of being held by her “old black mammy” while the woman sang “Old Dan Tucker,” another of Emmett’s compositions.⁶⁰ The song “Dixie,” she wrote, offered a positive and nostalgic portrayal of “our beloved colored friends in the glorious setting of idle and work hours, magnolia blossoms.” She also praised Emmett’s “antics” as a blackface minstrel performer, which made “the big wide world sit up and giggle.”⁶¹ For Fitzhugh, a memorial to “Dixie” and to a blackface performer like Emmett was inextricably linked to her nostalgic vision of the old South and was meant as a way to further enshrine the Lost Cause version of slavery and racial history into national memory.

By the time Fitzhugh began seeking support for her project in 1935, the Lost Cause narrative had already found a comfortable place in northern memory culture, largely due to the work of Confederate memory activists. Lost Cause ideology had also found a place in northern popular culture, as northern advertisers in the 1910s and 1920s responded to customers’ anxiety about modern life and urbanization by linking their products to nostalgic portrayals of the old South. Tin Pan Alley, historian Karen Cox has shown, produced reams of “back-to-Dixie” songs whose sheet music covers featured caricatures of Black people, a fact that certainly reflected the impact of the work of Confederate heritage organizations to popularize “Dixie” as a way to influence northerners’ perceptions of the South.⁶²

Thus, when Fitzhugh launched her memorial campaign, she could take for granted that many in the North had already come to view “Dixie” as a symbol of national reconciliation that should be treasured in both the North and South. Perhaps as a result, she did not seek the UDC’s support for her project but instead sought to win the favor of cultural, business, and political leaders throughout Ohio. Reflecting her own experience as a journalist and public relations specialist, she began the campaign in June 1935 by seeking letters of endorsement from the governor, Ohio’s senators, leading businessmen, and influential educators. Even though the effort to memorialize Emmett and “Dixie” was being spearheaded by a southerner, Fitzhugh wanted to ensure that it had the blessing and support of Ohio elites.

The enthusiastic response she received from Ohio politicians and educators in response to her request for letters of endorsement highlights the success of the Confederate campaign to turn “Dixie” into a symbol of national reconciliation. No one she approached questioned the value of her project. Indeed, everyone she approached offered their blessing and sometimes their active support for the plan. Many of their responses reflected their shared understanding that the popularity of “Dixie” had played a key role in improving relations between the North and South. Ohio Governor Martin Davey expressed his “enthusiastic approval” for her memorial plans and confessed that it was “particularly pleasing” to him that the daughter of a Confederate soldier had taken the lead in planning a memorial to Emmett. He wrote Fitzhugh that honoring the composer of “Dixie” would “pay tribute to the inspiring spirit that has made us a united nation.”⁶³ The director of the Ohio Department of Education agreed that Emmett should be honored because “‘Dixie’ has been a great force in the unification of our people.”⁶⁴ B. H. Darrow, the founder of the radio education program “Ohio School of the Air,” perhaps summed up this sentiment best in his response to Fitzhugh’s request for support. “Dixie,” he wrote, “is much more than a song.…[I]t really helped to bring the divided people back together. It typified the inter-dependence of North and South, the oneness of spirit, because a Northerner’s best became the greatest joy of the Southerner’s heart.”⁶⁵ From the best of the North to the heart of the South; what could be a better symbol of national reconciliation after such a divisive conflict?

By August, Fitzhugh had assembled a Board of Trustees for the memorial, which included the Ohio state commander of the American Legion as president, the secretary of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce as vice-president, and the managing editor of the Ohio State Journal as treasurer. She had created a blank contract that could be used for fundraising and a postcard that would be sent as a receipt to supporters. She had even started drafting a brochure for the project that featured a picture of Emmett in an oval on the front center, flanked on either side by the U.S. Flag and the Confederate Flag (fig. 3).⁶⁶

But on the local level in Mount Vernon, reactions were more mixed. Fitzhugh did little to cultivate support among residents of Mount Vernon, one of her proposed potential sites for the memorial. None of the board members she recruited were from Mount Vernon, perhaps because she assumed that residents of Mount Vernon had already fully embraced a community identity as the birthplace of the author of “Dixie.” Fitzhugh did find support from the manager of the Memorial Theater, who assured her that that the citizens of Mount Vernon would be “justly proud to take part in this splendid and well-deserved tribute in which you are a factor.”⁶⁷ Fitzhugh also successfully recruited the mayor, a local minister, and the Boy Scouts to participate in the mass meeting, held on August 5, 1935, on a program that included remembrances of Emmett, the playing of both “America the Beautiful” and “Dixie,” and her presentation of plans for a memorial.⁶⁸

All that was missing was an audience. Only ten people—eight women and two men—showed up for a meeting, which was held in a space that seated one thousand.⁶⁹ Fitzhugh was sorely disappointed with the local turnout. “Even the mayor got up and said how mortified he was that after much publicity in The Banner [the local Democratic paper] about the meeting there were none to prove they wanted a Memorial, that Mt. Vernon had never shown the proper interest,” she wrote in the margins of a document now left behind in the Dan Emmett papers.

The lackluster response may have reflected the lingering political associations of Emmett and “Dixie” with the South and the Democratic Party, of which Emmett had been a proud member during and after the Civil War. While the local Democratic paper had publicized her event widely, she complained that the Republican paper had been far less supportive. Even after “showing my letters of endorsement to both the owner and editor of the news [emphasis in original],” she complained, the meeting was only given a brief notice with the caveat that “Mrs. Fitzhugh says she has letters of endorsement.”⁷⁰

Fitzhugh also seemingly had not considered whether any Ohioans might resent her leading this charge as an outsider to the state, a concern likely not triggered by the work of the UDC Ohio in 1931. Fitzhugh, however, quickly came into open conflict with a group based outside Columbus that called itself the “Daniel Decatur Emmett League of Ohio.” Little information about the league has survived, but the group’s director general, Clark Doughty, was an Ohio Democratic politician.⁷¹ In August 1935, the league sponsored a major public celebration in Emmett’s honor at a park in Columbus, which included a fiddler’s contest, a storytelling contest, a spelling bee, and orators talking about their memories of Emmett.⁷² We do not know why Fitzhugh and the Dan Emmett League clashed over the memorial plans, but Fitzhugh resigned from the board of the “Dixie” National Memorial only two weeks after its official launch. She made the decision, she wrote rather vaguely in her resignation letter, “because I cannot subscribe to existing conditions in the city of Columbus, in which personalities and facts have entered.” She thanked those who had supported her efforts “as a southern woman to pay tribute to a native Ohioan whose song, ‘Dixie,’ all peoples of the world love.”⁷³ Without Fitzhugh’s energy and leadership, the memorial campaign soon withered.

If we end our story in 1935, Fitzhugh’s efforts might seem like an abysmal failure. Although Fitzhugh herself continued to advocate for a national monument for at least another year, no major national memorial was ever erected to Emmett or his song “Dixie.”⁷⁴ But if we step back and take a longer view, we can see that the larger project that Fitzhugh was participating in—a Confederate memory project to promote “Dixie” as patriotic, national song and to honor Dan Emmett as its author—had a great deal of success.

The song “Dixie,” of course, became for many years exactly what these southern Confederate activists hoped it would be: widely accepted and popular outside the South. By 1935, northern newspapers were describing “Dixie” as “Southern as corn pone and molasses; as American as Old Glory.”⁷⁵ While “Dixie” again became more controversial in the 1960s, with Black activists attacking the song as “a badge of slavery” and a “symbol of white superiority and white supremacy,” Lost Cause memory activists successfully used “Dixie” to promote white southern perspectives on slavery and the Civil War for over fifty years.⁷⁶

The work of Confederate memory activists also had a profound influence on local memory culture in Mount Vernon. Up until the mid-1930s, residents in Mount Vernon had not taken the lead in celebrating the city’s connections to Emmett and “Dixie,” and support for Fitzhugh’s campaign was lukewarm at best. Indeed, a journalist from a nearby Ohio community chastised residents of Mount Vernon in 1935 for not jumping on Fitzhugh’s campaign to build a national monument to Emmett. “Wake Up! Mt. Vernon,” he implored, predicting that an Emmett memorial “would become a shrine where thousands of people, especially southerners, would visit for sentimental reasons.”⁷⁷

That realization—that Emmett and “Dixie” could be not only points of local pride, but also a potential way to attract tourists to Mount Vernon—began to dawn on local leaders as they saw these outsiders touting the man and the song. In 1934, Mount Vernon’s flagship downtown hotel renamed its restaurant the Dan Emmett Grill. Its new menu featured a drawing of Emmett superimposed over the sheet music for “Dixie.” Over the next fifteen years, Dixie Antiques opened downtown, an elementary school, a park, and several streets were named after Emmett, and local boosters saved Emmett’s childhood home so it could be converted into a house museum.⁷⁸ In 1955, Mount Vernon began celebrating a Dixie-themed summer sidewalk sale that eventually became the Dan Emmett Arts and Music Festival. In the late 1960s, even as Black activists were attacking “Dixie” as a symbol of white supremacy, community leaders decided to create the Mount Vernon Dixie Corporation to build a heritage tourism campaign around Emmett and “Dixie.” The Dixie Corporation staged some version of a historical musical drama telling the story of Emmett and “Dixie” every year between 1968 and 1974.⁷⁹

There is much more that the history of Mount Vernon’s celebration of Emmett and “Dixie” from the 1930s through the present-day can teach us about commemorative politics, white racial identity, and historical memory, but this article can only offer an origin story for the roots of this commemorative impulse.⁸⁰ The role of Confederate heritage activists like Fitzhugh and the UDC in promoting the celebration of Emmett and “Dixie” in the early decades of the twentieth century has been largely forgotten in Mount Vernon. Yet arguably, Emmett became central to the identity of the city in Mount Vernon in part as a result of these early efforts of southern Confederate heritage groups who helped construct Emmett as a hero and who pushed “Dixie” as a way to promote the myth of the Lost Cause. Nor did they abandon this campaign in 1935. In 1951, when the Ohio Sesquicentennial Commission launched an initiative to celebrate Ohio history by placing historical markers at community corporate limits, it was the Sons of the Confederacy who pushed for a marker honoring Emmett and “Dixie” at Mount Vernon’s borders.⁸¹

Today, the phrase “whistling Dixie” connotes engaging in “unrealistic, hopeful fantasizing,” a reference to the hope that the South would win the Civil War. But when Fitzhugh and other advocates of the Lost Cause whistled Dixie, there was nothing unrealistic about their hope that the song—and its symbolic meanings—would become as beloved by northerners as it was by southerners or that the work of southern memory activists would come to influence the memorial landscape and commemorative politics outside the South. My son’s experience is testament to their success.