The Confederate Daughter Who Rewrote Alabama's Civil War History

The Birmingham New has an outstanding article on the Daughter of the Confederacy who helped rewrite the State of Alabama’s Civil War and Reconstruction history. According to the article by reporter Kyle Whitmire that woman, Marie Bankhead Owen, was “an Alabama fixture, a force from a century ago whose influence persists. Her name was Marie Bankhead Owen, the second director of the Alabama Department of History and Archives.” Among other things, she is responsible for Alabama’s Coat of Arms which includes Confederate symbols.

Alabama Coat of Army appears on the uniforms of the state police

From the article:

The Alabama Department of Archives and History was the first of its kind in the country, born out of her husband’s collection of historic artifacts and documents.

Thomas McAdory Owen was an amateur historian, but approached the discipline with zeal, collecting all the maps, newspapers, diaries and genealogical records he could lay hands on. At first, he kept the records in the House and Senate chambers when lawmakers weren’t in session. Later, he stored them in old houses across the street from the capitol — properties he acquired to build a museum.

His vision was to build Alabama’s equivalent of the Library of Congress. But between collecting and fundraising, he worked himself to exhaustion, dying of a heart attack before he could see his dream come true. After his death in 1920, the department board named his wife the new director.

At 50, Marie Bankhead Owen became only the second woman to lead a state agency, and she held on to her position for the next 35 years.

Owen was a more formidable figure in Montgomery than her late husband ever was.

“Ms. Marie” is what they called her to her face. Behind her back they called her “the Tiger Lady.”

Lawmakers feared her with reason. Her married name was Owen, but Ms. Marie was a Bankhead, a name still attached today to roads and parks throughout the state. Her father, John Bankhead, had been a U.S. Senator, as was her oldest brother, John Jr. Not to be outdone, her brother William Bankhead rose to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the most powerful American politicians during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Owen did not lack her brothers’ ambition, but she was shut off from a career in politics because she was a woman. Despite this, Owen was adamantly and publicly opposed to women’s suffrage, which she campaigned against.

Her fear was not what would happen should women get the right to vote, but rather, what would happen next — if women could vote, it was only a matter of time before Black Alabamians reclaimed that right, too.

Owen was an adamant and unrepentant racist.

In a petition to lawmakers, the Woman’s Anti-Ratification League — one of two anti-suffrage organizations Owen led — explained opposition to the 19th Amendment as “essential for the preservation of social order and the maintenance of white supremacy.”

“For Marie, ultimately race trumps gender,” says Kari Frederickson, history professor at the University of Alabama and author of “Deep South Dynasty: The Bankheads of Alabama.”

Her family connections already gave her more power than most Alabamians, male or female. Empowering women, white or Black, was a threat to the influence she had.

“Getting the right to vote for her is more about the potential for opening up the ballot to Black women, and that is much more frightening and much more catastrophic,” Frederickson says. “It outweighs any benefits that might come.”

Owen had power, but often little money. In the 1920s she lost most of her inheritance in Florida real estate speculation. After that bubble burst, she lived off the generosity of her more famous movie star niece, Tallulah — and the government.

Throughout the second half of her life, Owen hustled for various government jobs, but the director position was her “meal ticket,” as she called it in a letter to her brother. Nepotism was part of her nature.

After one Alabama governor rebuked her in a board meeting for keeping her son on her department payroll during budget cuts, Owen wrote to her brother John that she had been embarrassed but kept her composure as their late father would have expected.

“If I would follow my instincts at the present moment I would cut his G___D___ throat,” she said.

Governors came and went in Montgomery, but for most of four decades, “Ms. Marie” was constant. Beyond subsistence, her professional life focused on three missions.

To build the building her husband envisioned.

To preserve the relics of the Confederacy her family cherished.

And to purge the state’s history, iconography and culture of all traces of Reconstruction.

To Ms. Marie, symbols mattered — one symbol in particular.

The Alabama Department of Archives and History has the third largest collection of Confederate flags in the nation — much of it compiled by Thomas McAdory Owen before his death.

The building, however, was the work of Ms. Marie. And like a lot of things in Alabama, it was paid for by the federal government.

In 1934, Bibb Graves replaced Gov. Benjamin Miller — whose throat Owen wanted to cut. After taking office, Graves arranged a meeting in Washington for himself, Owen and Harry Hopkins, the head of Roosevelt’s new Works Progress Administration.

“Aunt Marie had badgered Governor Graves into going to Washington and demanding this sum,” her niece Tallulah said in her autobiography

Owen made her best pitch before Hopkins asked to speak with Graves alone. Hopkins was somewhat irritated by the Alabama panhandling and told Graves that WPA didn’t have the money for “every little old lady who wanted an archive.”

Graves then reminded the president’s advisor that Owen’s brother was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

And that her other brother was the chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee.

When Owen returned to the room, Hopkins asked where it was she wanted to build her archive.

“Hopkins saw the light,” Tallulah wrote. “Aunt Marie got her million.”

Today, the white marble home of the Alabama Department of Archives and History stands across Washington Avenue from the state capitol. The building has been expanded twice, and its grounds now take up a full city block, but for a small parcel — the First White House of the Confederacy.

Murray, the Archives and History director today, doesn’t criticize Owen without first acknowledging what good she did for the department. However, Owen was not a professional historian or archivist, he says. Her personal interests often clouded the department’s mission and cluttered its collections. More significantly, Owen was among the most significant purveyors of an antebellum “history” that had little or no basis in fact.

“Speaking more broadly, Marie was an extraordinary influence in the creation within Alabama of that Lost Cause mandate or cultural influence that pervaded much of Southern society and even nationally,” Murray says.

Owen wrote and distributed history plays for Alabama school children, and she penned Southern romance novels that depicted the Confederacy as a virtuous place that civilized African savages through benevolent slavery. One novel, Yvonne Braithwaite: A Delta Romance, she managed to get published.

Perhaps most crucially, Owen guided Alabama history curricula, writing the first textbooks covering state history.

“She defended the legality of secession,” Frederickson, the UA history professor, wrote, “and identified President Lincoln’s call for volunteers following the firing on Fort Sumter as the start of the Civil War, which she called the War Between the States.”

Owen’s view that Lincoln started the war was not uncommon in her day, just as it’s portrayed, too, in the racist, Klan-aggrandizing cinematic milestone, “The Birth of a Nation.”

Owen downplayed, marginalized or outright omitted contributions by African-Americans in her texts, focusing instead on the state’s abundance of rivers and other natural resources to explain its economic vitality before the war….

Owen had been active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy for much of her life, but in 1936 the Alabama division elected her to leadership — division historian, a job that usually involved collecting minutes of chapter meetings and assisting members’ research.

But Owen wasn’t a passive note-taker. No sooner than she had accepted the job than she received an alarming letter from the division president, Mollie Jones of Auburn. Jones reported that a junior high school teacher in Montgomery had told students there that Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and other Confederate heroes were traitors and the Confederacy had been a treasonous rebellion against the American government.

“For Montgomery of all places to have such heresy taught is beyond words an outrage,” Jones wrote. “In every town where there is a chapter and in others, if possible, if such as this is going on, we could investigate and it would be a real contribution.”

Owen accepted the challenge and quickly organized a campaign to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Alabama classrooms.

“She comes up with all these talking points and then encourages members of the UDC to begin surveilling schools,” Frederickson says. “What are they teaching? How are they teaching it here? This is what you say when you go and meet with the principal of the school.”

First, Owen encouraged chapter presidents to interrogate their school superintendents and history teachers. In addition to portraying Davis and Lee as heroes, the United Daughters of the Confederacy fought to ban the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” from school recitals, to remove “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” from classrooms and to rename the Civil War the “War Between the States.”

“In case any one of them is so illy informed as to be teaching this false history, the truth of the matter should be placed in their hands with the view of having the coming generations realize that what the South fought for was the same kind of independence as our Revolutionary fathers,” Owen wrote to the chapter presidents.

But Owen didn’t limit her advocacy to what should be banned. She solicited Douglas Freeman, the author of a Robert E. Lee biography, to draft a new “Confederate Catechism” for school children to memorize, and she pressured publishers to include the Confederate Catechism in history textbooks.

“We will just have to let them know that we will not take false history supinely and that it is money out of their pockets when they try to force such false teaching upon the younger generations,” Owen wrote to the division president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Owen expanded her campaign beyond Alabama. She wrote letters to UDC leaders and elected officials throughout the South, pushing them to follow Alabama’s example. Through pamphlets, plays and radio shows, the UDC spread Owens’ agenda throughout the region.

A particular target of her campaign, Frederickson says, were any cultural vestiges of Reconstruction.

“To her Reconstruction was this time in which the federal government, aided by carpetbaggers and unqualified Black men, had their boots on the neck of the white south,” Frederickson says. “It was a time of humiliation, a time of great corruption, and anything that is a result of that time is absolutely illegitimate.”

Through their political power, her father and brothers had done much to erase Reconstruction from politics and government, legalizing convict leasing and helping to enact the Alabama Constitution of 1901.

Owen used her influence to target the historical artifacts and symbols of Reconstruction.

“She is trying to make it a regional thing as well: Let’s reclaim these important symbols from the carpetbaggers and Negroes,” Frederickson says of Owen’s campaign. “And she’s successful.”

By 1939, five years after Owen’s trip to Washington, work on Archives and History’s new home in Montgomery was nearing completion. It was a stately government building, with white marble drawn from Sylacauga and a walnut-paneled director’s office about twice the size of the governor’s office across the street.

As construction on the Archives’ new home neared completion, Owen set out to leave a different sort of mark on Alabama — and to erase one more vestige of Reconstruction.

Owen called Alabama’s state seal a “monstrosity” and successfully lobbied to replace it with an updated version of a seal used before the Civil War. Of the Reconstruction-era seal, Owen did not disguise her contempt.

“The intention of these aliens was to stamp a defeated people with the insignia of a conquering nation,” Owen wrote.

Simultaneous to replacing the seal, Owen commissioned a wholly new symbol — the Alabama coat of arms.

On April 23, 1939, the cover of The Birmingham News Sunday magazine featured the debut of the new design, approved by the Legislature the week before. The new symbol would hang in both houses of the Legislature, the governor’s office, the governor’s mansion “and in suitable places in our institutions of higher learning and in our public schools,” Owen wrote inside the magazine.

At the top is a sailing ship bringing the first French settlers to the state’s shore. Two bald eagles face each other, between them a shield decorated with symbols of the five governments of Alabama — a Union shield atop French, Spanish, British and Confederate flags.

The Confederate banner included is not one of the three official flags of the Confederacy but the rebel battlefield banner already adopted by defiant Southerners.

Beneath them, the two eagles clutch a banner with a Latin phrase few Alabamians would understand.

Audemus jura nostra defendere.

Owen seems to have come up with the words — the new state motto, passed by the Legislature to replace the old “here we rest” — on her own. Owen explained she took inspiration from an 18th century poem, “What Constitutes a State?”

“Men who their duties know,” the poem concludes. “But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.”

Or as Owen condensed it for the 20th century into a mantra of Alabama stubbornness and Southern defiance …

“We dare defend our rights.”

In 1945, John Hope Franklin visited the Archives and History building in Montgomery to pore over records there. Franklin would become one of the leading Black history experts in the country, but at the time, he was a relatively recent Harvard graduate and young college professor nosing through Alabama Civil War records.

The documents he sought, Franklin recalled in his memoirs, could only be seen with permission from the director.

“I hear there is a Harvard n—-r here,” Owen said to anyone within earshot, including Franklin who was standing right in front of her. “Have you seen him?”

Owen’s secretary explained that Franklin was the man she was looking for.

“You don’t look like a Harvard n—-r to me,” Owen said to him. “Have a seat.”

Owen gave Franklin the records he wanted, but not before quizzing him about where he was from and where he’d received his education. When he told her he’d done his undergraduate schooling at Fisk University in Nashville, she called it “a good old Confederate State!”

“She spoke of the end of the war and how relieved she was that the ‘boys’ would be coming home,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “Mirror to America.” “It was equally obvious that she hoped that the segregated South she was so enamored of would last forever too unaffected by peace or war.

“Days of infamy had passed,” he wrote. “More days of infamy yet remained.”

Owen was reaching the end of her career, and her influence was waning, as was her family’s power. By 1946, both her brothers had died, and with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a new Democrat from Missouri was changing the party her family once controlled. The new president, Harry Truman, embraced a civil rights agenda, integrating the military and commissioning studies of abuses in the South. When Southern Democrats formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party in 1948, Owen was appointed head of the women’s division.

In that job, she toured the South again giving speeches to civic groups. She compared Truman’s push for greater civil rights for African-Americans to the fascism the Allies defeated in Nazi Germany.

In Ms. Marie’s twisted view of history, America had been the one fighting for white supremacy.

In 1955, she survived a car wreck, but her injuries triggered a steep decline in her health.

She soon retired and died three years later at the age of 88.

Near the entrance to her old, first-floor office sits a bust of Ms. Marie. The bronze sculpture is true to its subject, with a stern, serious face that looks out of its white marble enclave as if still watching the hall. Next to the bust, there’s a photograph of Owen with a paragraph describing her opposition to women’s suffrage and her support for Jim Crow.

“Owen believed that the right to vote should be governed by state law because federal protection would lead to increased voting by African Americans,” it says.

Wherever Owen’s image appears in the public parts of the building, there are similar descriptions nearby.

Murray, the director, says the department has no intention of erasing Owen’s contributions but is focused instead on correcting her mistakes and filling in the gaps she left behind.

He understands that without her, this office and this building might not exist. Reminders are everywhere, including her old office, where he works. The furniture is the same she brought here 80 years ago. The walnut paneling is still there, as is the private bathroom. Between two tall windows looking out at the capitol, a canvas portrait of Ms. Marie stares down.

But the Archives has grown.

In 2014, the department rebuilt and redesigned much of the Museum of Alabama on the second floor. While it still includes some artifacts collected by Owen and her husband, it also shares slave narratives, as well as exhibits on Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Near the exit, there’s a space set aside for the modern-day, with a small white sign saying “Exhibit in Progress.” Behind the glass, there’s a gray mannequin torso with a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt.

When George Floyd’s murder set off a national movement in 2020, Archives and History was still under COVID lockdown. Murray said he and the department staff felt they needed to do something to match the significance of the moment

“We could have released a statement saying, if you want to learn more about the history of race and racism in the United States, here’s some great online material,” Murray says. “But from the first moment that we contemplated that, I knew that it was incomplete to the point of being dishonest, because we knew that we could speak to the fact that systemic racism was a reality in our country because we can see it in our own work as an agency.”

In the department’s Fall 2020 newsletter, Archives and History published a 12-point plan, called its Statement of Recommitment, and Murray wrote a candid admission of the damage the Owens family had caused the state.

“The fault of the Owens was not in the decision to collect Confederate history, which is of indisputable importance, but in the disproportionate use of agency resources to preserve the Confederate past while declining to do anything remotely similar for the history of African Americans in Alabama,” Murray said in the newsletter.

From now on, Murray promised, the department would do whatever it could to repair as much of that damage as possible.

Ms. Marie haunts this place, but not through her bronze likeness in the hall, nor through her Haunted Mansion-like portrait in the director’s office. What she’s left here lives in the basement — 24 boxes of her personal papers. Among pressed flowers and birthday cards are brittle, yellowed letters, speeches and research notes on Alabama history.

Among the strategy memos for the school curricular campaign are letters that by themselves seem mundane — moms asking where they can buy tiny Confederate flags for their children, and campaign pitches for new Confederate monuments, including a statue of Jefferson Davis that still stands outside the Alabama capitol.

Owen and her fellow Confederate Daughters understood something important. Confederate iconography and monuments were not relics, but vessels — filled with racist ideology and false knowledge, and designed to carry their contents into the future.

And it’s still working.

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2 thoughts on “The Confederate Daughter Who Rewrote Alabama’s Civil War History”

Tedra Ulmer says:

September 14, 2023 at 1:18 am

Honestly, after reading about her I feel as though I should shower using lye soap. She did her work well. Even when I started teaching in Texas, I had to be fairly nimble to include truth rather then UDC propaganda (which was blatantly included on state required knowledge and skills to be taught, which meant it was also tested).

I decided upon a strategy of saying “(THIS) is fact…but if you see it on a test, you’ll need to choose (THIS) as the answer. My students did very well in testing. And I didn’t have to wrestle with my conscience.

1. admin says:
  
  September 14, 2023 at 3:49 pm
  
  Oh my God!
  
  My wife went to high school in Virginia and she has some interesting things to say about how the Civil War was taught. Until ninth grade, she went to a public school in New York. Then a whole world of “the War of Northern Aggression” was opened up for her in the late 1970s.

The Confederate Daughter Who Rewrote Alabama’s Civil War History

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