Letter to Obama mentioned in the "Washingtonian"

The article is here:

http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/17300.html

The title is "A War to Remember - but How?: How Obama should remember the Confederacy as the 150th anniversary of the Civil War approaches" and is by Cragg Hines.

From the article:

The President may need all the historical understanding he can muster as the nation begins to mark the Civil War’s 150th anniversary next spring and our first African-American chief executive becomes a focus.

For Obama to take a leading role in commemorating the Civil War “is what Americans expect—it’s what the world expects,” says Frank Smith, founding director of DC’s African American Civil War Memorial & Museum. But as McDonnell’s misstep illustrated, politicians had best proceed carefully when dealing with a war that many historians see as the most divisive—and decisive—time in the nation’s development.

“It’s not only appropriate but necessary for the President to recognize it in a relatively forceful way,” says S. Waite Rawls III, president of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

Obama already knows the sort of controversy that can flare up. Over the protest of academics, he has continued the tradition of sending a Memorial Day wreath to the Confederate Monument at Arlington Cemetery. His response to complaints was also to send one to the African American Civil War Memorial on DC’s U Street.

Question #8, "As President would you send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument?"

The Committee Against Neo-Confederacy will be sending out a questionnaire concerning neo-Confederacy to the 2012 presidential candidates. One of the questions will be as follows:

8. As President would you send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument?

Yes, No, Undecided, Other.

There are twelve questions in the questionnaire. They are posted online here:

http://newtknight.blogspot.com/2010/10/questionnaire-for-2012-presidential_15.html

The 2011 Letter to the President

There will be a letter in 2011 written to the President of the United States asking the President not to send a wreath to the Confederate monument. The letter will be circulated probably starting in January 2011.

Report on the 2010 Letter to President Obama

2010 REPORT ON THE LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA – Ed Sebesta 8/21/10

The letter was mailed on May 1, 2010 to President Barack H. Obama. There were a total of 48 co-signatures for the letter. President Obama sent a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument and the African American Civil War memorial. He did not reply to our letter as of 8/15/10.

The History News Network did have our letter online with a link from their main page and additionally our letter from last year.

2010 Letter on the History News Network http://hnn.us/articles/126704.html.

2009 Letter on the History News Network http://hnn.us/articles/85884.html.

The letters and links to news articles about the letter are on the blog http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com, as are the reports on the letters and additional information.

As a result of these letters I was interviewed for a planned article in the Washingtonian about President Obama and the Civil War Sesquicentennial and how Obama should and will mark the Sesquicentennial.

I am planning on writing a 2011 letter and making this an annual effort until a president ceases to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument. It allows us to get the issues of Federal government support for neo-Confederacy before the public, and to raise other issues about neo-Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

2010 Letter to Obama concerning the Arlington Confederate monument is on the History News Network website

The 2010 Letter to Obama is online at the History News Network website in the "Historians and History" section at this link:

http://www.hnn.us/articles/126704.html

Additionally, they have the 2009 Letter to Obama online also in the "HNN Hot Topics: Memorial Day" page as the 2nd item in the list.

http://hnn.us/articles/12140.html

The Extremism of the Sons of Confederate Veterans

I am going to put all the documentation of the hysterical extremism of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) in this one blog posting. As I compile additional documentation I will just have it in this one blog posting.

ITEM #1 : CLAIMS THAT LINCOLN WAS A COMMUNIST


The Southern Mercury was published by FPAC, "the educational foundation of the Sons of Confederate Veterans." They stopped publishing since they ran out of funds to do so. The Southern Mercury published many extremist articles. The material they published in this periodical was material they thought would educate their members.

One of the cover articles for the March/April 2008 issue of the Southern Mercury is "Republican Party: Red From the Start," by Alan Stang, ( http://www.alanstang.com/), and the article asserts that the Republican party was a communist conspiracy from the beginning. [Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 2, March/April 2008, pages 26-29.]

The article is a review of "Red Republicans: Marxism in the Civil War and Lincoln's Marxists," by Al Benson and Walter D. Kennedy, leading neo-Confederate. (http://olesouthbooks.com/kennedy_brothers/red_republicans.php) or (http://www.newswithviews.com/Stang/alan30.htm). It is a book that asserts that there was some type of communist conspiracy in the Republican party. As Stang explains [Page 27]:

"Even a brief perusal through Red Republicans will verify the idea that the Republican party has been Communist since its inception."

Another excerpts from page 27:

"... Lee and Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a 'Civil' War, rather than a secession, they would and could easily have seized Washington after Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals."

We learn on page 28 that "The GOP Convention of 1860 took place in Chicago, a supposed flaming center of German Communism."

On page 29 Stang explains that:

"So again, the Republican Party did not 'go wrong.' It was rotten from the start. It has never been anything else but red. The the characterization of Republican states as 'red states' is quite appropriate"

Somehow this leads to Alan Stang discussing that Ron Paul isn't a communist, but has to run as a Republican and but that Ron Paul is against Red Republicanism. Dr. Paul is alleged to be a true Democrat but not a modern communist Democrat as he explains on page 29.

"Dr. Paul is much more a traditional Democrat. I refer of course to the Democrat Party before the Communist takeover, which began with the election of Woodrow (Federal Reserve -Income Tax-World War I) Wilson and was consummated with the election of liar, swindler, thief, traitor, and mass murderer Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

In the end notes for the article, the reader is urged to visit http://www.alanstang.com/ for additional articles.

So I did and looked at the books he writes and has for sale.

Alan Stang sees many conspiracies in the Republican party and is the author of a book, "Not Holier Than Though" (http://alanstang.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=15&zenid=8345353ecd6ab41c78def320548c1822) which asserts that George W. Bush and Karl Rove "have colluded to make the Republican Party a sodomite organization from the top down."

ITEM #2: SONS OF CONFEDERATE VETERANS ON OBAMA AS PRESIDENT


The Southern Mercury was published by FPAC, "the educational foundation of the Sons of Confederate Veterans." They stopped publishing since they ran out of funds to do so. The Southern Mercury published many extremist articles. The material they published in this periodical was material they thought would educate their members.

One of these articles is, "Americans Face The Worst Presidential Candidate in History," by Robert Slimp [Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 3, May/June 2008, pages 28-33]. Robert Slimp is a leading figure in the Council of Conservative Citizens, http://www.cofcc.org/.

In the article Slimp is dismayed by all three then presidential contenders, McCain, Clinton and Obama, as he he states towards the conclusion, "I will not attempt here to suggest for whom we should vote in this truly horrible choice of candidates."

Slimp's comments on Obama from pages 32-33 give you an idea of the temper of the whole article. [Errors in the original]

"It is very clear to me that if Barack Obama should be elected President, he would be extremely anti-white and would demand reparations for slavery and press hard for affirmative action to the degree that it would hurt young whites who were seeking jobs or admission to College and Graduate Schools. Even if he were elected, I would think he would be a one term President and the Congressional Republicans with a "corporal's guard' of Democrats would stop most of the radical and unjust laws he would propose. However, I believe that his rhetoric and anti-white legislative proposals would stir up racial riots. If he were running for re-election, these riots would turn into an extremely violent nature that would seriously damage race relations in America, and leave entire sections of some of our cities in ruins."

The article concludes with an exhortation to the reader to hold true to the values of Southern heritage which for Slimp includes racial purity as follows in these two excerpts. [Page 33]

"We who have a Southern heritage cannot afford to surrender our history and symbols. One of our greatest United States Senators, Richard Russell of Georgia, said during the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "I believe that we should love all people, regardless of race. We must respect one another. However, we must all be proud of our race and will fight to preserve it. I am not ashamed of my beloved Southland. If there has ever been a land worth saving, in Dixieland, I'll take my stand to live or die for Dixie." [Russell was an opponent of civil rights legislation.]

"'There is a race,' cried Giradeau 'which coming down through the centuries enveloped with antagonistic influences and hostile nationalities, has stood out in perpetual protest against surrendering our principles by amalgamating with other peoples.'" [Giradeau was a famous pro-slavery antebellum theologian.]

This article was followed by another article in the Southern Mercury by Robert Slimp, titled, "Will the 2008 Election Bring the End of the America We Know?" [Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 4, July/August 2008, pages 34-37]

A notable excerpts [page 34]:

"Behind the scenes, the insiders who are paying for the election of both the Republican and Democratic candidates for president and some of the members of Congress, are One Worlders. These are the big international bankers, members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, and others who believe that the quickest way to achieve their aims ..."

Also, unlike the previous article, where Obama is referred to as Senator Obama or Barack Obama, in this article it is always Barack Hussein Obama. Maybe there are two Barack Obama's in the Chicago phone book and Slimp wanted to be clear. The rest of the article is the promotion of other third party Presidential candidates, such as Bob Barr with the libertarians, an extensive discussion of Ron Paul, and Charles Baldwin of the Constitutional Party.

ITEM #3 PROMOTING WHITE SUPREMACY


The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) (www.scv.org) have their regular magazine, Confederate Veteran, but they also have a lesser known magazine, Southern Mercury. Technically it is published by a Political Action Committee and not the SCV, but it shares the same mailing address as the SCV. The website http://www.southernmercury.com/ for the magazine is quite uniformative. For the SCV's public image this is just as well.

On contributor is Frank Conner who is the author of "The South Under Siege," a Neo-Confederate book available at his website http://collards.phantacom.net/b001a.htm.

This is an extract of Frank Conner's article (Where We Stand Now And How We Got Here, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sept./Oct. 2003, pages 10-14, extract from page 12):

*******************************
The Liberals Create a False Public Image of the Blacks

The 20th, century liberals (North and South) decided to use black civil rights as their main moral weapon against the white South, just as their 19th century predecessors had done prior to the War of Northern Aggression.

After the turn of the 20th century, the white Southerners had disfranchised and segregated the blacks, in perhaps the mildest reaction possible at that time to the blacks' transgressions. The blacks — then a childlike people had been selling their votes to the Democrats en masse for $.25 apiece in national elections. This so enraged the Northern Republicans (who believed that the blacks owed them) that in 1890 they almost succeeded at reinstating key elements of Reconstruction in the South (via the Force Bill). The white Southerners weren't about to undergo any part of that experience again, so they disfranchised the blacks lawfully via universal poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.

At the same time, due primarily to the ruinous practices of the Northern capitalists, many Southern blacks could no longer earn a living as sharecroppers; so they moved into the towns. But they did not under-stand town life, and the white Southerners lacked the money and other resources to teach them; consequently, the blacks' crime rates soared. Their homicide rate became seven times that of the whites. In sheer self-defense, the Southern whites segregated the blacks. The Northern liberals could not reasonably object to any of that. So instead, they began creating a false public image of the blacks.

Early in the 20th century, the liberals took control of the humanities departments in the colleges and universities of America. Previously, anthropologists had routinely recorded the notable differences in IQ among the races; but at Columbia, a liberal cultural anthropologist named Franz Boas now changed all of that. He decreed that there were no differences in IQ among the races, and the only biological differences between the blacks and whites were of superficial nature. The liberals swiftly made it academically suicidal to challenge Boas' flat assertion. Mean-while, the liberals in the media heaped special praise upon black athletes, musicians, singers, and writers — and treated them as typical of the black race. The liberals were creating a false image of the blacks in America as a highly competent people who were being held back by the prejudiced white Southerners.

*********************

The next section is titled "The Liberals Destroy the Old South in the Name of Black Civil Rights."

Oddly enough, Conners book is mentioned at the end of the article in the biographical note for him, but none of the anti-semitic writing is present.

The Southern Mercury magazine reveals the real face of the SCV and it is angry white nationalism of an organization with roughly 30,000 members, a headquarters building, and substantial money.

Leon F. Litwack and David W. Blight both co-sign letter to President Obama

Leon F. Litwack co-signed the letter to President Obama and sent me a letter thanking me for undertaking the effort to write Obama.

His historical writing is of landmark importance in the history of America. If you haven't read his books, I recommend you do. Been in the Storm So Long and Trouble in Mind are two of his books that I strongly recommend.

David W. Blight is also an author of great importance. If you haven't read his books, I recommend that you do. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee are two books I strongly recommend.

Having both these persons as co-signers is just amazing. I am humbled.

I am still working on gathering signatures. I mail the letter May 2nd, but I will be still gathering co-signatures and will fax the letter with the additional signatures to the white house Wednesday prior to Memorial day.

I am not successful this year, I will write a letter in 2011, 2012, and until a President stops sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate memorial.

In 2009 I wrote a letter focused on the history of the Arlington Confederate monument and its white supremacist and neo-Confederate meanings. In 2010, I wrote a letter where sending a wreath is part of a wider pattern by which the federal government enables neo-Confederacy.

For 2011 I will take up another theme. During the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War I will have a letter for each year until a president decides to stop sending the wreath.

In 2011 I will be in a much better position to get a hearing for my letter than this year or last year.

The 2009 letter to President Obama

I thought I would provide the 2009 letter to President Obama on this blog. The 2010 letter is this blog entry. http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2010/02/2010-letter-to-president-obama.html

May 8, 2009

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

Since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, presidents have sent annually a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument. Prior to the administration of George H. W. Bush, this was done on or near the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Starting with George H.W. Bush, it has been done on Memorial Day.

I ask you to not send a wreath or some other commemorative token to the Arlington Confederate Monument during your administration or after.

There are several reasons as to why this monument, a product of the Nadir in American race relations, should not be honored, and I list and explain them in this letter.

The monument was intended to legitimize secession and the principles of the Confederacy and glorify the Confederacy. It isn’t just a remembrance of the dead. The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers. In its design it also tells wrong history, boasting fourteen shields with the coat of arms of fourteen states. Thus it claims that Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were part of the Confederacy. They weren’t.

The monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which raised the funds to erect it. The UDC’s reasons for the monument are instructive. In the address of Mrs. Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at its dedication, she makes clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy:

Great ideas and righteous ideas are alone immortal. The eternal years of God are theirs. The ideas our heroes cherished were and are beneficial as they are everlasting. These were living then; they are living to-day and shall live to-morrow and work the betterment of mankind. Thus our heroes are of those who, though dead, still toil for man through the arms and brains of those their examples have inspired and quickened to nobler things.

Since the United Daughters of the Confederacy upheld in multiple publications in the early 20th Century that the Ku Klux Klan was the heroic effort of the Confederate soldier, we have an idea what the “noble past” and “ideas our heroes cherished” were. Of course one of these “ideas” was secession to preserve the institution of African slavery.

Likewise General Bennett H. Young, Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans also defends the cause of the Confederate soldier, the neo-Confederate cause of their descendants, and defends secession in his speech as follows:

At this hour I represent the survivors of the Southern army. Though this Confederate monument is erected on Federal ground, which makes it unusual and remarkable, yet the men from whom I hold commission would only have me come without apologies or regrets from the past. Those for whom I speak gave the best they had to their land and country. They spared no sacrifice and no privation to win for the Southland national independence.

I am sure I shall not offend the proprieties of either the hour of the occasion when I say that we still glory in the records of our beloved and immortal dead. The dead for whom this monument stands sponsor died for what they believed to be right. Their surviving comrades and their children still believe that that for which they suffered and laid down their lives was just; that their premises in the Civil War were according to our Constitution….

The sword said the South was wrong, but the sword is not necessarily guided by conscience or reason. The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth. Right lives forever, it survives battles, failures, conflicts, and death. There is no human power, however mighty, that can in the end annihilate truth.

In fact, most white Southerners in 1914 agreed that both slavery and secession were wrong. Not Young. No apologies. No regrets -- despite the historical record of Confederate soldiers having committed racial atrocities of massacring surrendered African American soldiers on at least eight occasions.

Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, makes it clear that the monument stands for the legitimacy of secession, in opposition to Reconstruction, and for white supremacy. In his History of The Arlington Confederate Monument at Arlington, Virginia, he writes:

In 1867 the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

Within a generation after Congressional Reconstruction, American historians condemned it …. as “a crime against civilization,” and public opinion seems to have approved the verdict.

Herbert goes on to refer to the Confederate soldiers who joined the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts as being heroes for restoring white supremacy and overthrowing Reconstruction, referring to “the soldiers who fought the battles of the Confederacy and … by their courage and devotion during the two decades after the war, were saviors of Anglo-Saxon civilization in their section.”

The monument itself has a Latin motto, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” It translates, “The winning cause pleased the Gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato.” This is a classical reference which to the cognoscenti implies that Lincoln was a despot and the Union cause unjust; Cato, the stoic believer in “freedom,” would have sided with the Confederacy.

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.

Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events.

Fr. Alister C. Anderson, as Chaplain-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), at the 85th anniversary of the dedication of the Arlington Confederate Monument in 1999, gave a lengthy speech explaining its meaning. His understanding of the Arlington Confederate Monument can be said to be fairly representative of modern neo-Confederate opinion.

Anderson believes that the Civil War was a holy war between an orthodox Christian nation (the South), a view widespread in the neo-Confederate movement, and what he feels was an un-Christian and heretical North, as he explained in a series of articles in the Confederate Veteran as Chaplain-in-Chief of the SCV. This explains some of the passages of his speech at the Arlington Confederate Monument. In his speech Anderson explains regarding the monument:

… It reveals and concentrates in beautiful, rugged bronze nearly every idea that a true Southern historian, theologian, statesman, and patriotic citizen could present about the religion, culture, morals, economics, and politics of a civilization from out of which the Confederate States of America evolved. The monument captures the ideals and accomplishments that still existed at the end of the War for Southern Independence. Thank God it does not depict the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the most disgusting and destructive period in United States history from which the South has never really recovered.

Anderson goes on to note Washington’s presence in bronze:

It depicts George Washington on horseback with the Latin inscription DEO VINDICE, which means, “God Vindicates.” Southerners believed under the Constitution they had the right to secede if they were being harmed by a tyrannical government.

To Anderson, as to other neo-Confederates today, the Arlington Monument exists to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy, which he sees as the ideas of the neo-Confederacy.

Anderson goes on to explain, correctly, the meaning of the main inscription on the monument, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” This is a line from a poem Pharasalia by the Roman poet Lucan, used to represent Lincoln as a tyrant and the North as tyrannical. Fr. Anderson explains:

Victix causa, “the winning cause (or side)”, referring to Julius Caesar’s inordinate ambition and his lust for total power and control, is compared with President Lincoln and the Federal Government’s desire and power to crush and destroy the South. Next we read diis placuit which translates “pleased the gods.” In this context, gods are with a small “g” and refer to the gods of mythology; the gods of money, power, war and domination, greed, hate, lust and ambition. Next we come to the noble climax of this quotation, sed victa cantoni which translates “but the losing side (or cause) pleased Cato”. Here Lucan, the poet, refers to Pompey’s fight to retain the old conservative, traditional republican government of Rome. Even though Pompey was defeated by Caesar’s greater military power, his defeat, nevertheless, pleased the noble Cato. And here, of course, Cato represents the noble aims of the Southern Confederacy. The South fought politically to maintain the Constitution which had guided her safely for eighty-seven years. She merely wanted to be left alone and governed by it. The aggression-minded totalitarian Northern government would not permit that and so she pleased the gods of abolitionism, transcendentalism, utopianism, state centralism, universalism, rationalism and a host of other “isms.”

Anderson here denounces abolition, the anti-slavery movement that ultimately led the United States of America out of the moral evil of slavery, as an evil itself.

Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Memorial Monument enhances the prestige of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization with a long history of racism from praising the Ku Klux Klan in the early part of the 20th century, to publishing articles against the Civil Rights movement in the Civil Rights Era, to promoting neo-Confederacy today. When the president of the United States of America enhances the prestige of this monument and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, he strengthens a group working to set back America’s progress in race relations.

Finally, in 2009, the main speaker for the annual observance at the Arlington Confederate Memorial is Ron Maxwell, director of the movie “Gods and Generals,” whose neo-Confederate meaning he made clear in an interview in Southern Partisan. He also has written expressing his fear of Hispanic immigration leading to civil war in the notoriously racist Chronicles magazine, the organ of the ultra-right Rockford Foundation.

For the president of the United States of America to send a wreath to the monument this year would contribute to providing Ron Maxwell with a more prestigious setting for his speech. It would aid and abet the ongoing use of presidential prestige and this monument for their neo-Confederate agenda.

I ask you to break this chain of racism stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, and not send a wreath or other token of esteem to the Arlington Confederate Monument. This monument should not be elevated in prestige above other monuments by a presidential wreath.


Sincerely yours,

The 2010 Letter to President Obama.

May 1, 2010

President Barack H. Obama
The White House1600
Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

I am a researcher of the neo-Confederate movement and one of the editors of “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction” (Univ. of Texas Press, 2008). Neo-Confederacy is a movement that has a broad spectrum of prejudices against African Americans, Unitarians, Muslims, Hispanics, Gays & Lesbians and others. It opposes civil rights. It supports the subordination of women. Beyond that it is against the very ideas that are the foundation of a democratic society; is hostile to egalitarianism; and, advocates a hierarchical society which they call “ordered liberty” which is largely the liberty to order others around.

Included in this letter are several examples of how the federal government itself, and through its associated agencies, continues to support and enable neo-Confederacy. The Office of the President has the opportunity to end federal government support for, and enablement of, neo-Confederacy.

Unfortunately, to date the Office of the Presidency has actively enabled neo-Confederacy. Besides sending a wreath to a monument of neo-Confederate ideology in Arlington Memorial Park, presidents have attended parties celebrating the birthday of Robert E. Lee, thus normalizing the Confederacy, and former president Bill Clinton wrote three letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy undermining former Illinois U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun’s historic 1993 victory over the UDC and Lost Cause nostalgia.[1]

I ask you to end the federal government’s support and enablement of neo-Confederacy starting by not sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument on Memorial Day or any other day this year or years to come.

Rather than celebrating the Confederacy, the United States of America needs instead a national conversation on the Confederacy, the Civil War, the overthrow of Reconstruction and Neo-Confederacy. With the approach of the Sesquicentennial of the start of The Civil War, 2010 would be an ideal time to begin such a discussion to acknowledge the historical truth about these issues. With a false understanding of the historical past we poison the future. Or as the great W.E.B. Du Bois explained angrily in regards to the upcoming Civil War Centennial celebrations in 1960:

"Thus we train generations of men who do not know the past, or believe a false picture of the past, to have no trustworthy guide for living and to stumble doggedly on, through mistake after mistake, to fatal ends. Our history becomes “lies agreed upon” and stark ignorance guides our future.[2] "

The neo-Confederate organization the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is enabled by the federal government in the following ways:

* They are allowed participation in the Combined Federal Campaign as a recognized charity.

* The SCV is permitted to host events for the United States Army.

* The SCV is allowed to get involved with the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in the high schools.

One of the more notable means whereby the neo-Confederate movement is supported is the designation of the SCV as an eligible charity for the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) since 2003.[3] As you know the CFC is the rough equivalent of the United Way for federal government employees. Through the CFC the SCV is enabled to raise funds from federal employees.

Involvement in the activities of the United States Army is shown in a 2006 issue of the Confederate Veteran, an official publication of the SCV, which has the following photo caption referring to an activity of a local SCV camp:

"The Colonel James J. Searcy Camp 1923, Columbia, MO, hosted a visit by the US. Army Staff Ride Class to the Centralia, MO, Battlefield and massacre site in connection with their class instruction. More than 40 active NCO members participated. They were all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans."

Above the caption you can see the officers, many of them African American, standing around a Confederate monument with the Confederate battle flag marked on it.[4] Hence, an American that enlists in the U.S. Army might end up attending a neo-Confederate event organized by the SCV. The SCV’s prestige is enhanced by its status as a host of the US Army, the SCV gets to be involved in the class instruction of Army officers, and the SCV is thereby legitimatized with US Army officers.

The SCV seeks to be involved in the Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (JROTC). In the Nov./Dec. 2009 issue of Confederate Veterans the SCV announces in an article that it is going to expand the awarding of the South Carolina Division SCV’s H.L. Hunley JROTC award nation wide so as to reach, as Program Chairman Trip Wilson explains, “…500,000 cadets serving in 3,500 JROTC units…” The purpose of this award is to advance the goals of the SCV as Chairman Wilson explains:

"If each year we are able to recognize 500 to 1,000 cadets nationwide and get Sons of Confederate Veterans’ compatriots into high schools presenting the awards, then there is unlimited potential the good it can do in educating our young people and changing the perception of them and their parents have of our organization."[5]

The SCV does have an educational foundation, the Foundation for the Preservation of American Culture, which published a magazine, Southern Mercury, from 2003 to 2008, which ceased publication due to the lack of funds. From this magazine we can assess what type of “educating” and “instruction” the SCV might attempt and see what CFC contributions would help fund.

In an article in a 2003 issue of the Southern Mercury, SCV member Frank Conner argued that the modern Civil Rights movement was an attack on the South. He also asserted that African Americans have lower IQs than whites and that this fact was covered up by a conspiracy of liberals. In a section of the article titled, “The Liberals Create a False Public Image of the Blacks,” Conner wrote:

"Early in the 20th century, the liberals took control of the humanities departments in the colleges and universities of America. Previously, anthropologists had routinely recorded the notable differences in IQ among the races; but at Columbia, a liberal cultural anthropologist named Franz Boas now changed all of that. He decreed that there were no differences in IQ among the races, and the only biological differences between the blacks and whites were of superficial nature. The liberals swiftly made it academically suicidal to challenge Boas’ flat assertion. … The liberals were creating a false image of the blacks in America as a highly competent people who were being held back by the prejudiced white Southerners."

In another section of this same article titled, “The Liberals Destroy the Old South in the Name of Black Civil Rights,” Conner asserts that the white South was unfairly vilified by the media during the Civil Rights Era resulting in “the patently unconstitutional Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965” being passed by which he asserts, “The Old South was destroyed, and its belief system and way of life were discredited outside the South.”[6]

Conner’s article is a summary of a section from his book, The South Under Siege (2002). In this section in the book, however, Conner focuses his attacks on Jews, pointing out that Boas was Jewish, and tells his readers that the Civil Rights movement was a Jewish plot against the South. He concludes that “Northern Jewish intellectuals/activists” are the “deadliest” enemies of the South.[7] The book is reviewed in the same issue as Conner’s article with reviewer Ann Rives Zappa recommending it, writing, “The South Under Siege is a masterful volume of work painstakingly researched by author Frank Conner.”[8]

This article by Frank Conner isn’t one outlandish essay that accidentally got published in the Southern Mercury. Rather, it is broadly representative of the contents of the issues of this magazine. Conner’s four other articles in the magazine, including the cover article for the first issue, along with the contributions of other authors, the issues of Southern Mercury form a collection of similar hysterical and extremist articles.

Another example of the SCV’s extremism is an article in a 2008 issue titled, “Republican Party: Red From the Start,” by Alan Stang. This essay argues that the Republican Party was a Marxist conspiracy from its inception. Stang writes:

"In retrospect, it appears because nothing so atrocious had ever happened here, Lee and Jackson did not fully comprehend what they were fighting. Had this really been a “Civil War,” rather than a secession, they would and could have easily seized Washington after Manassas and hanged our first Communist President and the other war criminals."[9]

Another activity of the Southern Mercury, Confederate Veteran and the SCV online store is the promotion and sale of books that defend or whitewash slavery. The very first issue of Southern Mercury in 2003 has a review praising the John C. Perry’s book, "Myths & Realities of American Slavery: The True History of Slavery in America" (2002) in which the enormity of the whipping of slaves is trivialized by book author John C. Perry, who writes:

"Even in my youth, in the middle of the twentieth century, I was whipped, by a switching from my mother and a belt from my father. The old adage, 'spare the rod and spoil the child,' was taken seriously in my home as I was growing up."[10]

The reviewer, Ann Rives Zappa, writes “In this masterful treatment of the subject, the author uses historical data, personal accounts, and statistics to establish facts and debunk myths.”

A 2003 issue of Southern Mercury had a short story titled, “Choosing Slavery in Mississippi Over Freedom in Pennsylvania,” about a slave who preferred to be a slave. Later in the same issue a book reviewer recommends yet another pro-slavery book, "The Myths of American Slavery" by Walter D. Kennedy (2003). The book has a whole chapter titled “Abolitionism Versus Christianity,” in which the abolitionists are held to be anti-Christian heretics and in which Kennedy condemns the Southern Baptist apology for supporting slavery, the Racial Reconciliation Resolution, at their 1995 annual convention, saying “The resolution is nothing more than liberal double-speak for an act of cultural genocide against the South.”[11]

The SCV also sells these two defenses of slavery in its Confederate Veteran magazine, as well as reprints of 19th century defenses of slavery as “Confederate Gifts” and “Classic Southern Gifts.” The SCV also sells these books in their annual merchandise catalogues, and in their online bookstore (https://scv.secure-sites.us/store.php).

This includes one book titled, “Antebellum Slavery: An Orthodox Christian View,” (2008) by Gary Lee Roper which claims an orthodox Christian defense of slavery. The foreword of the book explains that Antebellum slavery was God’s providential plan to uplift Africans. This book was also promoted by the SCV’s Chaplain Corps in their publication, Chaplain’s Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in which reviewer Michael Andrew Grissom tells the reader “THIS IS A MUST READ!” and “The book makes the point it is ludicrous to apologize (as several states have done recently) to a black population for legal slavery that occurred years ago when presently illegal slavery exists in at least 20 countries of the world including the USA.”[12] Further documentation of SCV extremism can be found on the internet site: http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/.

In summary, the SCV promotes a neo-Confederate perspective that challenges American democratic practices, praises and sells extremist and racist books, and offers defenses of slavery. Consequently, in addition to ending the practice of sending a Presidential wreath to the Confederate memorial in Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, I ask you to revoke the SCV’s participation as a recognized charity in the Combined Federal Campaign, deny the SCV permission to host events for the United States Army, and prevent the SCV’s future involvement Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs in America’s high schools.


Sincerely Yours,


Edward H. Sebesta

[1] The texts as well as images of Bill Clinton’s letters to the UDC can be found along at http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html. Ed Sebesta has possession of the issues of UDC Magazine which have these letters and can confirm all the other research materials of this article.
[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Lie of History as It Is Taught Today (The Civil War: The War to Preserve Slavery)," February 15, 1960, from “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader,” edited by Andrew Paschal, Collier Books edition, New York, 1993, pp. 115-120.
[3] No author, “SCV has been approved for the 2003 Combined Federal Campaign (CFC),” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 51 No. 4, July/August 2003, pp. 50. Current approval, “Combined Federal Campaign,” Confederate Veteran, Vol. 67 No. 6, Nov./Dec. 2009, pp. 11.
[4] No author, no title, Confederate Veteran, Vol. 64 No. 3, May/June 2006, pp. 39, lower left corner. Note: The volume and numbering system of the Confederate Veteran magazine has been changed at least three times in the last twenty years and is not consistent over time.
[5] No author, “Junior ROTC H.L. Hunley Awards Program, Confederate Veteran, Vol. 67 No. 6, Nov./Dec. 2009, pp. 52-53.
[6] Frank Conner, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sept./Oct. 2003, pp. 10-14.
[7] Frank Conner, “The South Under Siege: 1830-2000,” Collards Publishing Company, Newnan, (Georgia), 2002. Comment on Franz Boas being Jewish is on page 393, comment on Northern Jewish intellectuals being the deadliest enemies of the South is on page 400. Almost all of Chapter 20 is focused on Jews with subheadings such as “During the First Half of the 20th Century, the Northern Jews Lay the Groundwork for a Black-Civil-Rights campaign,” and “American Jews Spearhead the Substitution of Secular Humanism for Christianity via the Courts. …”
[8] Frank Conner, “Where We Stand Now: And How We Got Here,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sept./Oct. 2003, pp. 10-14.
5 Ann Rives Zappa, “The South Under Siege: 1830-2000,” book review, Southern Mercury, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sept./ Oct. 2003, pp. 30-31.
[9] Alan Stang, “Republican Party: Red From the Start,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 2, March/April 2008, pp. 26-29.
[10] John C. Perry, “Myths & Realities of American Slavery: The True History of Slavery in America,” pp. 134-35, White Mane Publishing, Shippenberg, 2002.
[11] Walter D. Kennedy, “Myths of American Slavery,” Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna (LA), 2003, quote about Baptist resolution page 89.
[12] Michael Andrew Grissom, “Book Review,” Chaplain’s Corps Chronicles of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, April 2008, pp. 17-18. http://www.scv.org/pdf/chaplains/ChaplainsChronicleApr08.pdf Printed out 11/28/09. The directory of the Chaplains Corps is http://www.scv.org/committeeView.php?cid=CC.

"Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1861-1965" by Robert J. Cook

I recommend very much reading Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 by Robert J. Cook, Louisiana Statue University Press, 2007.

The book discusses how different groups contested for the memory of the Civil War. How Civil War historians tried to avoid the issue of race and the Civil War and have the Civil War remembrance be largely a "brothers' war." He tells how others fought this interpretation and how the remembrance of the Civil War was impacted by the news events of the Civil Rights movement.

Also detailed is how segregationists interpreted the Confederacy and the Civil War to defend segregation.

I think people need to consider how the neo-Confederate movement will impact the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

The author is also one of the co-signers to the 2010 letter to President Obama.

Co-signatures for letter to Obama beginning to come in.

People are beginning to co-sign my letter to President Obama. I am not going to have it online right away for reasons that will become obvious later.

Last year the letter campaign was rushed, so we just got co-signers of professors and prominent academics. This year I am broadening it to include community leaders, journalists, and others as well as historians and academics.

Already some very prominent people have co-signed. As each person signs, I ask for referrals to other persons that they think might sign and also encourage the invididual to forward the letter to those they think might be interested.

The co-signature campaign is on a roll now, and I think we should be able to gather a remarkable number of signatures.

2010 Letter to Obama concerning the Arlington Confederate memorial is done.

It has been written and is being circulated for signatures. I am not going to have it online until it makes the news.

For those of you who didn't see last year's letter to Obama I have it at the URL below. It mostly concerns itself with the history and meaning of the memorial.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/ObamaLetterNR.pdf


Also, this is the report on the 2009 letter to Obama. http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2009/10/final-report-on-2009-letter-to.html