Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, late 1898 and early 1899, a really fascinating dynamic is playing out as President

McKinley tours the South to drum up support for a resolution to the Spanish-American War.

McKinley is mostly trying to win over southern lawmakers to support the Paris Treaty, and in return

he has to make a number of political and cultural appeals, including planting the seed for how the Civil War would be remembered.

In many ways, this was a key moment in which new narratives about the war and the South's role were reframed.

And that's kind of how we were tipped off to this story in an email from a listener, David.

David wrote what I would say is one of the best listener emails in a long time and sort of laid out this idea and this context and we're sort of picking it up and we'll get into it.

But David, you know, right, wrote us and said kind of like, you could see this moment as the first

embrace of the so-called Lost Cause narrative the idea that the South was fighting a

virtuous war to preserve their rights and their dignity and we've talked about that narrative on this show before,

but I often feel like it's thought of as something that's really,

that emerged maybe a little later in the early 1900s,

and I at least hadn't really seen this connection to the Spanish

American War that David points out. So let's get into the details of all that

McKinley, the Spanish American War, the roots of the Lost Cause narrative, super

fascinating. here as always

Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hi dirty. Hey there. So let's let's go sort of thread by thread here. So first, Spanish American War, then the resolution and what McKinley has to do with southern, uh, southern lawmakers and then that sort of how this maybe plants the seeds for this

lost cause idea which as I said you know David lays out might be a sort of theory that he has

or sort of a read he has but you know we'll get there but first the Spanish

...