Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 29: The Daughters of the Confederacy - and the Clintons?

Hat tip for today's entry to Ed Sebesta of the Anti-Neo-Confederate blog. This article reminds us that while in our politics the Republican Party is mainly the one of the two major parties than panders to neo-Confederates, the Democratic Party isn't always as careful as they should be about not validating the Lost Cause advocates: Senator Hillary Clinton Must Explain the Praising of a Group of KKK Supporters by David Love and Peter Gamble, BlackCommentator.com 04/20/08. Ed also blogs about this story in his post of 04/23/08.

The article links to this piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist groups: The Neo-Confederates Intelligence Report Summer 2000, which provides the following description of the United Daughters of the Confederacy:

Formed in 1894 from the remnants of local memorial associations affiliated with Confederate veterans camps, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is open only to women related to Confederate veterans of what the UDC still calls the "War Between the States."

Although the UDC promotes an image of genteel Southern ladies concerned only with honoring their ancestors — and is, in fact, the least political of the neo-Confederate groups — its publications sometimes belie that benign appearance.

In a 1989 article in UDC Magazine, for instance, Walter W. Lee minimized the horrors of the Middle Passage by pointing out that "the sixteen inches of deck space allotted each slave is not all that smaller than the eighteen inches the Royal Navy allowed for each sailor's hammock and the slaves rapidly had more room due the much higher death rate."

Lee also argued that "the worse suffering group among those engaged in the trade" were "the crews of slave ships." Other victims of slavery Lee cites are "the purchasers of slaves" who "found themselves locked into a form of agriculture that could not compete with the new machines."

Other UDC articles praise an array of neo-Confederate ideologues such as Michael Andrew Grissom, author of Southern by the Grace of God (a book which portrays the original Klan favorably) and a member of two racist groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the League of the South.

The UDC has also worked directly with these kinds of groups in erecting monuments and staging Confederate battle flag rallies. Most recently, the UDC's president, Mrs. William Wells, shared the podium with League president Michael Hill and white supremacist lawyer Kirk Lyons. (my emphasis)

The title of the Love/Gamble article refers to the official letters Bill Clinton sent as President honoring the UDC in some way. This is one of the facsimiles they provide of a Clinton letter:


Love and Gamble also link to this Time article "Correction" of 01/23/03:

The article "Look Away, Dixieland" [Jan. 27] stated that President George W. Bush "quietly reinstated" a tradition of having the White House deliver a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery — a practice "that his father had halted in 1990." The story is wrong. First, the elder president Bush did not, as TIME reported, end the decades-old practice of the White House delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial; he changed the date on which the wreath is delivered from the day that some southern heritage groups commemorate Jefferson Davis's birthday to the federal Memorial Day holiday. Second, according to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day continued under Bill Clinton as it does under George W. Bush.

Now, I don't recommend anyone putting on the sackclothes and ashes and rending clothing over this particular issue.

But the UDC is really not an organization that the President of the United States, no matter which Party s/he is from, should be honoring in this way. This is a far more appropriate attitude toward this subject, from a report also cited by Love and Gamble, Daughter of Slavery Hushes Senate by Adam Clymer New York Times 07/23/08:

The Senate's only black member, Carol Moseley Braun, made the chamber listen today as freshmen seldom do. Her oratory of impassioned tears and shouts, stopped Jesse Helms in his tracks as he defended the Confederate flag.

Senator Helms, the 20-year North Carolina Republican, had sought - and seemed to be finding -- a roundabout way to preserve the design patent held by United Daughters of the Confederacy on a symbol that includes the flag. ...

"On this issue there can be no consensus. It is an outrage. It is an insult.

"It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans, black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea." ...

The Senate, which calls itself the world's greatest deliberative body but in fact finds its votes changed sometime by public opinion but hardly ever by speeches, was convinced by the argument that the flag was an insult and killed the Helms amendment 75 to 25, as 27 senators changed their votes over three hours.

Then Ms. Moseley Braun returned to the attack, angrily. She said "This flag is the real flag of the Confederacy."

She said it symbolized the Civil War, "fought to try to preserve our nation, to keep the states from separating themselves over the issue of whether or not my ancestors could be held as property, as chattel, as objects of trade and commerce in this country.

"This is no small matter," she said. "This is not a matter of little old ladies walking around doing good deeds. There is no reason why these little old ladies cannot do good deeds anyway. If they choose to wave the Confederate flag, that certainly is their right."

But, she said, a flag that symbolized slavery should not be "underwritten, underscored, adopted, approved by this United States Senate." (my emphasis)

While this is a matter of symbolism, groups like the UDC use the trappings of respectability that comes from official recognition like the ones discussed here to validate their groups and their message, which promote a false history of the US with a racist and anti-democracy bias.

Tomorrow, for this month's last entry, I'll discuss an issue where the heritage of the Lost Cause tradition is very much with us today, and is certainly not simply a symbolic one. But because these traditions are still damaging our democracy today, the institutions of government should not be giving official sanction to groups like the UDC, which promote the false and poisonous tradition that is used to justify actions that damage our society in very real ways.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, neo-confederates, united daughters of the confederacy