They were very proud of what their parents and grandparents had done, and they were bitter over the economic disparities between the North and the South. The Southern population changed very little in its ethnic composition between 1865 and 1910; Southerners, therefore, felt much more connected to the events of 1861–1865.

The advent of the First World War was more welcomed in the South than the North. Southerners, on the whole, enlisted in greater percentages than Northerners and felt a stronger connection to a military heritage. By 1920, a year that was a marker in so many ways, quite a few Southerners were willing to let “bygones be bygones” so far as relations with the North were concerned.