Conclusion

The conclusion provides a brief discussion of the DAR’s significance vis-à-vis the historiography of American conservatism and gender. While it remains to be seen how recent developments will affect the DAR’s commemorative, educational, and patriotic activism in the years to come, its history reminds us that the Daughters played a vital role in shaping and disseminating conservative notions of nationalism that continue to reverberate in the new millennium. This chapter examines the organization’s activities in the twenty-first century; in particular, it tries to explain why so many American women, including numerous African Americans, continue to join the organization and what it means to be a Daughter of the American Revolution during the era of Donald Trump.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the historiography of the DAR and summarizes the study’s findings. It also explains how theories on nationalism, gender, and memory enhance our understanding of the organization’s ideology and activism. Many of the organization’s commemorative rituals would not have been possible without the cooperation of local communities, suggesting that the Daughters confirmed and strengthened existing ideas about gender, race, and the nation among many white citizens. Most importantly, it introduces Egyptologist Jan Assmann’s conceptual distinction between “communicative memory” and “cultural memory,” arguing that it can help historians better understand the tensions and intricate connections between elite and vernacular memories of the nation. These two modes of memory, persevered by many political and historical groups such as the DAR, are inextricably entangled because the memories of families, towns, regions, and the nation tend to be connected with and are fused into what is presented as the coherent collective memory of one single imagined community.

“Let Us Clasp Hands, Red Man and White Man”

This chapter probes the organization’s peculiar fascination with American Indians and its various efforts to commemorate white-Indian friendship and Indian patriotism. It also looks at the close connections between the Daughters’ interpretations of Native American pasts and the DAR’s attempts to improve Indians’ lives in the present. By sanitizing and romanticizing America’s history of racial violence and colonial conquest, the Daughters justified white nation-building and white supremacy while further consolidating notions of Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Daughters across the nation commemorated what they regarded as cordial collaboration between the two groups, loyal Indian support during America’s wars, and Indians’ ostensible willingness to cede their ancestral homelands to the United States.

“I Wanted It to Change and to Make Up for Its Past”

The chapter explores the organization’s post–World War II history. This period saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” Despite these challenges, the DAR’s views on race, immigration, gender, and the nation’s past remained virtually unchanged. It continued to embrace ethnic nationalism, opposing racial integration and a liberalization of America’s immigration laws, and upheld the very same ideals of femininity and masculinity that its campaigns had emphasized prior to 1945. The organization regarded the social movements of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and second wave feminism, as a grave danger to the nation. Although the DAR began to admit black members in 1977 and finally acknowledged African Americans’ patriotic contributions to American independence in the 1980s, its public rhetoric of civic tolerance frequently belied the DAR’s conservative views on race and gender.

“A Long and Mighty Race of Heroic Men”

The chapter scrutinizes the efforts of the DAR in the Midwest and West to commemorate western expansion during the antebellum period. It reveals that the organization used the memory of Western pioneers and explorers to maintain strict racial boundaries of national inclusion, while simultaneously upholding traditional gender binaries within white America. Most of the DAR’s activism in the Midwest and West revolved around marking the trails that pioneer families and explorers had used to reach the region prior to the Civil War. But in stark contrast to the remembrance of the American Revolution, women were conspicuously absent from the tales the Daughters offered prior to the 1920s. Western Daughters highlighted primarily the heroic accomplishments of pioneer men, whom they regarded as masculine warriors for their violent resistance against Native Americans. Only the organization’s post-World War I Madonna of the Trail campaign focused on the memory of pioneer mothers, but as in the case of the Revolution, female pioneers’ heroic determination was interpreted as part and parcel of women’s natural instincts as wives and mothers.

“Woman Proved Herself Man’s Helpmate”

This chapter examines the DAR’s gendered interpretations of patriotism and its efforts to commemorate the American Revolution. In addition, it explores the organization’s turn toward antiradicalism in the post-World War I era and analyzes its impact on their remembrance of colonial and Revolutionary America in the interwar period. The chapter shows that although the Daughters countered male-centered accounts of the War of Independence, insisting that Revolutionary women had been as heroic as men, they generally affirmed traditional gender dichotomies and used memory to defend gender hierarchies in the present. To the Daughters, preserving the memory of early female patriots remained crucial to safeguarding the American nation because its stability depended on the same gendered principles that had governed colonial America.

“Conserve the Sources of Our Race in the Anglo-Saxon Line”

This chapter analyzes the ways in which the DAR ignored African American citizens and their contributions to US nation-building in the context of Civil War memory, as well as the fears of racial intermixture harbored by its members. In addition, it examines the Daughters’ efforts to “Americanize” new immigrants and their excessive admiration for “racially pure” Appalachian Mountaineers, before providing a brief account of the infamous 1939 controversy over black opera singer Marian Anderson’s request to perform in the DAR’s concert hall in Washington, D.C. In contrast to the organization’s fascination with Indians, African Americans remained virtually invisible in its tales about the nation’s past. This deliberate amnesia—together with the DAR’s opposition to racially “suspect” immigrants, support for restrictive immigration legislation, and profusive praise for Anglo-Saxon Mountaineers—reflected a deep-felt conviction that patriotism and whiteness were inextricably intertwined.