"...politicians pledging their fealty to the National Alliance for Victory - after all, how could one say they were against victory?
The slogan that emblazoned every campaign stop Vardaman made across the Confederacy read "Vardaman for Victory," but nobody really dared ask, in part because they suspected he had no good answer but also because of concerns of what his rabid Red Scarves might do to them in response, what exactly he intended to do to secure such a victory. After all, September and October, the months immediately ahead of the vote, were the months in which what little remained of Confederate control in Tennessee broke apart at Tullahoma and Knoxville and Alabama became threatened for the first time, while in Virginia Lejeune was able to score a major defensive victory at Fredericksburg but his counterattacks fell short of his own stated goals. The Confederacy was struggling to keep up with the industrial production of the North, and now with the sea lanes in the Gulf of Mexico utterly unprotected a blockade that would dramatically tighten over the next year had been imposed on Confederate ports, and by the end of October Mexico would have exited the war, creating even more chaos.
Throughout this, though, the Confederate populace remained lockstep in continued support of the war, in part thanks to the sophisticated propaganda machine from the NAV that promised a slave rebellion that would dwarf the legendary Nat Turner and Jed Ford uprisings. Caricatures of white women carrying mulatto babies were particularly popular, explicitly suggesting that a future in which the Confederacy failed to repel the Yankee was one in which freedmen would impregnate "the daughters and sisters of the noble soldier at will" while implicitly insinuating via the clever use of the word "soldier" that men were fighting for the honor of white women at this point more than anything else. Other pamphlets mused that a Yankee victory would see the Confederacy annexed with Black men appointed "military governors" in perpetuity, or stood aghast in detailing the poverty that the collapse of the slave economy would bring about.
For that reason, Vardaman's rallies drew hundreds if not thousands of people, with an outdoor screed in Atlanta pulling probably close to a third of the city to listen to him speak, and his rallies were often followed by riots and lynchings carried out by his Red Scarf mob that very pointedly attacked suspected naysayers. Though there was not much in the way of organized opposition to Vardaman and his coming election really a fait accompli despite a spirited campaign by Tillmanite protege Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama, the "we shall win with the bullet box if we cannot win with the ballot box" philosophy that became pervasive amongst reactionary Confederate paramilitary organizations in the late 20th century had its origins in the Red Scarves Movement that increasingly came to inhabit their own reality and increasingly demanded that their fellow citizens inhabit it with them.
A Vardaman speech was a social event as much as a political platform, but there was a kernel of the old Vardaman in them. His speeches expounded at length upon the sacrifice that the common Confederate was making, and much of his motivation to find an "honorable conclusion" to the war seemed just as much tied up in the political realities of the 1915 Confederacy as it did his equating the loss of his son Jake at Nashville to the losses other fathers and mothers around Dixie had felt; he could, quite credibly, suggest to them that he felt and understood their pain and grief. Violent and revanchist as his movement was and cynical as his betrayal of Tillman had been, Vardaman's populist cry to continue the war at all costs did seem to have been grounded in a very real realization that as bad as the war was, whatever would follow in a defeat Confederacy was likely to be worse, a sentiment he shared with his much more sober-minded and rhetorically cautious running mate, George Patton. Thus the struggle was just as much about defeating the enemy as it was about haphazardly gluing together a quickly collapsing social order, and few realized that the Confederacy had about a year left in it until the apocalypse they had feared was upon them..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33