Letter finally received by the White House UPDATE:

There must be some security delay in sending mail to the White House. I finally got back the green postcard for the certified letter. It was delivered 3/27/2017 as you can see from the stamp and probably now is going through whatever processing mail goes through once it reaches the White House.  So there might be a response during this coming week.

UPDATE: As of 5/14/2017 I have not heard back.

Letter to President Trump asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument

You can sign the petition here at this link. Please, please let others know about this petition.

https://www.change.org/p/edward-h-sebesta-ask-president-trump-not-to-send-a-wreath-to-the-arlington-confederate-monument

You can read the letter in a PDF format and also download the bibliographic references for this letter at http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/sign-2017-petition-to-president-trump.html.

The following is the letter.

February 9, 2017

                                                                Edward H. Sebesta

                                                                                    

                                                                                    edwardsebesta@gmail.com

President Donald J. Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Trump:

Since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, presidents annually have sent a wreath to the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery. 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 any other commemorative token to the Arlington Confederate Monument during your administration.

There are several reasons as to why this monument, a product of what historians call the “nadir in American race relations,” should not be honored.

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a monument to traitors who through violent insurrection attempted to secede from the United States of America. It is a monument that monumentally endorses secession and treason.

In the United States of America today there are multiple secessionist movements.  These movements might seem marginal, but there are reasons to take them seriously.

The long historical view of secession movements has shown that often they start with very little public support, but over time they can suddenly be a real threat to the integrity of the nation. They are like seemingly unimportant hairline cracks that when a object is put under stress suddenly open up. The Quebec and Scottish movements both started out with very little support. The Scottish movement for decades was viewed as insignificant. Yet in a recent 2014 Scottish referendum on independence, the vote to remain a part of the United Kingdom was only 55.3%. Now there is talk of another referendum because of the British vote for Brexit. A nation whose integrity is open to question on the occasion of one major political event or issue or another will not long endure.

Though many might think that the secession of an American state from the United States of America is farfetched, recent actions by the Texas State Republican Party in 2015 and 2016 show that it is not very farfetched at all.

The Texas Nationalist Movement in 2015 and 2016 lobbied for a measure to place the question of Texas secession on the state ballot in the 2016 Republican primary. What is disturbing is that they very nearly succeeded and what is even more disturbing is the lack of patriotism of the Texas State Republican Party in opposing this movement.

At the December 2015 meeting of the sixty-member State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) the secession measure was actually voted out of the resolution committee for a vote by the full SREC, and then voted down by a margin to 2 to 1 by the SREC. What is disturbing is that the SREC refused to have a roll call vote on it, had a voice vote, and then upon complaint of the secessionists, had a stand up vote on it, done so fast that it was hard to see how individuals voted. It is astounding that it got out of the resolution committee, it is astounding that it got any votes at all in the vote by the SREC, and it is astounding that all sixty members of the SREC wouldn’t want to go on record that they are proud to be American citizens and wish to continue to be so.

Even worse at the May 2016 Texas State Republican Party convention the Platform Committee only voted down the secession ballot measure 16 to 14 with one member abstaining. You would think the vote would easily be 31 to 0 by a party which represents themselves as mainstream. How patriotic is the Texas State Republican Party when a secession measure is narrowly defeated? I hope that your administration doesn’t appoint anyone to office that supported secession in Texas or anyone that wasn’t willing to clearly stand up against secession.

Numerous opinion polls have shown that a surprisingly large percentages, (in the double digits, often in the twenties), support state secession. An appalling development as I write this letter is that the support for secession in California as reported in a Reuters/Ipsos poll on 1/23/2017 reached 32%. One Minnesota Republican Congressional District Conventions in 2010 passed resolutions supporting a state’s right to secede. Another Minnesota Congressional District in the same year came within 2 votes of passing a resolution supporting a state’s right to secede.  I hope that your administration doesn’t appoint anyone who supported secession in Minnesota, and for that matter I hope you don’t appoint anyone who supported secession anywhere in the United States.

Secession movements are even more dangerous to the integrity of a nation when they have the support of a large hostile foreign power. Though the involvement of Russia in American affairs has been a point of partisan contention in the past few months, I can assure you that Russian support for secession movements is very real. The head of one California secession movement lives in Russia. The Texas Nationalist Movement has had leaders go to meetings in Russia. Russian groups have even had the pro-secession League of the South speak at events. Having a large powerful nation supporting a small secessionist group certainly gives a secessionist group moral support, and a feeling that what they are doing is recognized as significant and important. As far as I can ascertain there has been no material support of these groups, but I ask that your administration be vigilant in making sure that doesn’t happen.

Secession is a threat to the integrity of the United States of America. Unfortunately across the nation and at the Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most sacred sites of our nation, we have monuments to honor secessionists who through violent insurrection sought to tear America apart. We normalize secession everyday with these monuments. It should not be surprising that secession is chosen by various groups as an option when they have some gripe when we portray violent secessionists as heroes.

If the Confederates had gotten their way, there would be no America to make great again.  Tearing America into different nations doesn’t make America great, it terminates America.

Not sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument would be an important message: that secession is not acceptable.

The Arlington Confederate Monument insults and denounces Abraham Lincoln, the first elected Republican president. Inscribed on the monument are the words “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.”  This is a line from a poem “Pharasalia” by the Roman poet Lucan.  It is used to smear Lincoln as a tyrant and the United States of America as being tyrannical. A speech by 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, published in the Confederate Veteran, Vol. 4 2000, explains the meaning of this inscription as follows:

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, please 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.” [No italics in the original.]

Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument endorses the monument and legitimizes this defamation of Abraham Lincoln. I ask you to consider these lines from a poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman:

O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

The fact that any wreath by any official has ever been sent to this monument with its smug, snarky slander of Lincoln is a disgrace.

I applaud your choice of a Lincoln Bible for your inaugural oath. This is a great repudiation of the neo-Confederate denunciations of Lincoln. However to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument with its inscription, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni,” is a mockery of your choice of the Lincoln Bible and renders it meaningless.

The monument isn’t just a memorial to the dead. It is intended to glorify the Confederacy, a secession attempt to preserve slavery and white supremacy. It is also a monument to the defeat of Reconstruction and the triumph of white supremacy in America. This is clear in the speeches made at its dedication.

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 the unveiling of the Arlington Confederate monument in 1914, makes it clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy.  At the unveiling, Stevens said:

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.

The need for the monument then is further explained by Stevens as follows:

From the dawn of time until the present men and women have built memorials to those they esteemed great, to those whose memories they hoped to perpetuate.

Stevens contrasts monuments to those were merely great in deeds but not in morality with the Confederate soldier who she feels were great in both deed and moral worth.

Such monuments mock and sadden each thoughtful heart. They hold aloft ideals of force and fraud. They show how in a pitiless, mistaken past success could gild a crime. They teach that great talent even selfishly used could evoke men’s applause and shut the “gates of mercy on mankind.” But not all monuments are like these. Some are like the monument the Daughters of the Confederacy dedicate to-day. They show the future how noble the past has been and place it under bond to prove of equal worth.

Thus this monument is intended memorialize the soldiers because the ideals for which the soldiers fought which were the ideals of the Confederacy, white supremacy and slavery.

Since the United Daughters of the Confederacy has 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 Stevens thought as to what the “noble past” and “ideas our heroes cherished” were. Again, one of these “ideas” was secession to preserve the enslavement of Africans.

Stevens herself, as President of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, promoted the idea that the Ku Klux Klan and other violent white supremacist groups in Reconstruction were heroes. The Alexander H. Stephens UDC Chapter in Ohio published, “Secret Political Societies in the South during the Period of Reconstruction,” a publication which defended the Ku Klux Klan, to raise money.  In a published notice to the UDC membership in the Confederate Veteran in 1914, she announced the booklet’s publication and states, “This object has your President General’s hearty endorsement, and she hopes it will receive your hearty cooperation.”  The UDC later printed the address in their publication, Southern Magazine, July 1936.

Likewise General Bennett H. Young, Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans, who spoke at the 1914 unveiling, also defends the cause of the Confederate soldier, the neo-Confederate cause of their descendants, and defends secession in his speech at the dedication 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 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.

Young’s speech is obscure as to what the Confederate soldiers, “believed to be right,” or what “their premises in the Civil War” regarding “our Constitution,” were. However, secession conventions proclaimed what the purpose of secession was: white supremacy, and the preservation of slavery.  These causes were also endorsed in the speeches of secession commissioners sent by one slave state to another to encourage further secession.

General Bennett H. Young was a supporter of Mr. S.E.F. Rose’s pro-KKK book, “History of the Ku-Klux Klan,” (1915) arguing that, “all the children and all the descendants of the men of the South” should read this book of the defeat of “carpet-bagger and negro rule.”  

Another indication of what the ideals of these Confederate soldiers were is revealed in a speech about the Ku Klux Klan given by Thomas Upton Sission to the 19^th Annual Convention of the United Confederate Veterans, Wednesday, June 9, 1909.  In the speech Sission at length explains that the Ku Klux Klan was the heroic effort of the Confederate soldier during Reconstruction. The minutes of the Reunion, inform the reader that Sission’s address was “accorded the most enthusiastic attention.”

As for Young’s statement of “No Apologies. No Regrets,” this is said despite the historical record of Confederate soldiers having committed racial atrocities, war crimes  of massacring surrendered African American soldiers on at least eight occasions. To send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument is a desecration of the sacrifice of these massacred soldiers. The ultimate sacrifices of these massacred soldiers obviously didn’t matter when the Arlington Confederate Monument was dedicated, but let their sacrifices matter now.

Young’s speech conflates the “South” with the “Confederacy,” thus imprisoning the South inside a metaphysical Confederacy. Not sending a wreath will assist the South in escaping this metaphysical Confederacy.

In rebuttal to one of Young’s claims, it was more than force of arms which found that the Confederacy was wrong, it was an America marching forward in history, freeing the slaves, and freeing America itself from the practice and ideology of slavery. It was this America that found the Confederacy wrong.

Another speaker was President Woodrow Wilson whose presidential administration segregated the federal government and drove many African Americans federal employees out of their jobs. While president, he helped launch D.W. Griffith’s notorious pro-Klan movie Birth of a Nation by having it shown in the White House.  It is not surprising that he would show such a movie. In Wilson’s deplorable racist work, “History of the American People,” in Vol. 5, he sees giving African Americans the right vote as an oppression and justifies violent terror writing:

There reconstruction, whose object had been, not the political rehabilitation of the southern governments, but the political enfranchisement of the negroes, had wrought a work of bitterness incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo, than the mere effects of war and a virtual conquest of arms. They had made the ascendency of the part of the Union seem to the men of the South nothing less than the corruption and destruction of their society, a reign of ignorance, a regime of power basely used; and this revolt, these secret orders with their ugly work of violence and terror, these infinite, desperate shifts to be rid of the burden and nightmare of what had been put upon them, were the consequence. [Lack of capitalization of “negroes” in the original.]

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, stands in opposition to Reconstruction, and stands 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.”

Herbert was an active white supremacist, a revolting racist, working for the denigration and subjugation of African Americans. In his address, “The Race Problem at the South: Introductory Remarks,” Herbert argues that African Americans weren’t fit to be given the right to vote stating, “…in my opinion the granting of universal suffrage to the Negro was the mistake of the nineteenth century.”  Herbert contributed to and edited the book, “The Solid South.” It is a book that aims to historically prove that African Americans in the South should not be given the vote. In the concluding chapter of the book, “Sunrise,” Herbert argues against Congress giving African Americans the franchise with a threat of race war if Congress attempts to do so.  Herbert also wrote the, “The Abolitionist Crusade and its Consequences,” not to just attack the anti-slavery movement, but American efforts to give African Americans civil rights in America,  He argued that African Americans are incapable of civilization by themselves and insisted that it was necessary to disenfranchise them. A typical comment of this rancid racist text is, “Taken in the aggregate, the shortcomings of the negro are numerous and regrettable, but not greater than was to be expected. The general advance of an inferior race will never equal that of one which is superior by nature and already centuries ahead.” [Page 236, lack of capitalization in the original.]

These are the types of people who worked to have the Arlington Confederate Monument constructed and dedicated and the types of people who accepted it. The monument crowned the establishment of white supremacy in the South and it is a monument to the triumph of white supremacy in America. Sending a wreath to the monument endorses this triumph.

Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument also enhances its prestige and the prestige of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and of the neo-Confederate groups which assemble there each year.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy has a long history of supporting discrimination and racism. They praised the Ku Klux Klan in the early part of the 20^th century, they published numerous articles against the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Topeka and in support of segregation during the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s. Even in the 21^st century they praise the white terrorist Red Shirts of Reconstruction and maintain a museum to honor them calling it the “Only Shrine of its kind,” in an article in the June/July 2001 UDC Magazine. They promoted and praised the extremist pro-Klan book, “Southern by the Grace of God,” by Michael Andrew Grissom from the 1980s and into the 21^st century. More recently, Retta D. Tindal, UDC Historian General 2010-2012, wrote in a Dec. 2012 article in UDC Magazine that “Newly liberated Negroes were not prepared for their freedom.” The article also asserts that that infamous Black Codes were fair and appropriate, and denounces the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the amendment which gave African Americans citizenship under the Constitution.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans also has a history of supporting racism and extremism. To detail it all would require a lengthy article so just some examples will be given here.

On pages 70-71 in the Jan./Feb. 2017 Confederate Veteran in their two-page ad for “Confederate Gifts from GHQ,” is the anti-Semitic book “The South Under Siege 1830-2000,” which argues that the Civil Rights movement is a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Christian society. In the book Conner asks, “First, why would the Jewish-controlled U.S. news media be so willing to distort the truth about racial violence so greatly, in order to obtain hate-crimes legislation?” and as a possible answer Conner poses another question, “… are they the acts of a dangerously-paranoid people?”

The book, quoting the notorious anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald, claims that the idea of racial equality in intelligence, was a Jewish conspiracy stating:

Until after the turn of the 20th century, anthropologists had routinely recorded genetic as well as cultural differences between races and ethnic groups – that being the whole point of anthropology. The highlighted differences among the races had included those of intelligence. But as Kevin MacDonald points out in The Culture of Critique, a German-Jewish-immigrant named Franz Boas changed all that. At Columbia, Boas arbitrarily claimed that biological differences between races were miniscule – that environment alone shaped the behavior of the different races and ethnic groups (a la Rousseau). A number of other Jewish anthropologists swiftly adopted Boas’ position; and soon the Jews dominated the field of cultural anthropology. As MacDonald points out, by 1915 the Jews had gained control of the American Anthropological Association; and by 1926 they were chairing the anthropology departments at all of the major universities.

The ad recommends the book to the SCV members as, “An excellent defense against the ‘official’ history currently taught in the government schools.” The book is also sold in the 2016-2017 SCV Merchandise Catalog with the same recommendation.  A 2003 book review in the Southern Mercury, published by the SCV Educational PAC, praises the book stating that it is a “masterful volume.”

The SCV sells and has sold for years  The Birth of a Nation, recommending it as “silent film masterpiece” with the statement that the movie is “so politically incorrect that it hasn’t been shown publicly in years!” implying that it is a valid film but suppressed.

At the 2015 SCV national convention in Richmond, Virginia the “heritage luncheon” speakers were James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy. Walter Donald Kennedy is the author of “Rekilling Lincoln” which seeks to “rekill” the slain president by destroying his reputation.  Walter Kennedy wrote the cover article for the Nov./Dec. 2012 Confederate Veteran titled “Lincoln’s Band of Tyrants,” in which Lincoln is grouped with Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler and concludes with the sentence, “Lincoln, Marx, Engels and Hitler are indeed a strange but deadly ‘Band of Brothers.’”

In summary, sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument is wrong for these reasons: it legitimizes treason, it legitimizes secession; it is a monument for white supremacy; it slanders Abraham Lincoln; and it enables neo-Confederate organizations with their racist agendas.

In your inaugural speech you said, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” Your speech talks about unity, stating, “We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.” White supremacy is of course unpatriotic. It is the idea that we are divided into different classes of Americans based on race, which is deadly to the American idea.  You also stated that “The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.” Sending wreaths to monuments honoring the Confederacy undermines this idea. I earnestly hope that you will embrace the sense of common national identity you proclaimed in your inaugural speech.  Do not pursue business as usual and please give this letter due consideration.  

                                                                                    Sincerely Yours,

                                                                                    Edward H. Sebesta

Change.org petition to Pres. Trump asking him not to send wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument is started.

This is the link to the petition which is a letter to Pres. Trump asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument.

https://www.change.org/p/edward-h-sebesta-ask-president-trump-not-to-send-a-wreath-to-the-arlington-confederate-monument


I will have a WORD version of the letter available later. I have a PDF version available here to read. I decided to not have a WORD version on the internet but a PDF instead. Below is a link to both the letter to President Trump and a bibliographic resource to the contents of the letter.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/sign-2017-petition-to-president-trump.html

Please sign and let others know about this petition. Goal is one million signatures.

The certified letter has been mailed.

Slocum Massacre in Texas and "Americans Forgotten Mass Lynching" in Arkansas

A couple articles about white attacks on African Americans in the period in which the Arlington Confederate Monument went up.

http://tpr.org/post/should-texas-remember-or-forget-slocum-massacre#stream/0

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/16/america-s-forgotten-mass-lynching-when-237-people-were-murdered-in-arkansas.html

Atlanta Race Riots in 1906

In 1906 in Atlanta white mobs inflamed by Atlanta newspapers attacked African Americans. The death tool estimates vary with at least 25 dead. It was a horrific race riot.

This is a C-Span talk by Professor Bauerlein about his book, "Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906."

https://www.c-span.org/video/?165421-1/negrophobia-race-riot-atlanta


There has been a play about the Atlanta Race Riots.

http://www.artsatl.com/review-innovative-four-days-fury-unearths-ugly-truths-atlanta-race-riots/

This is another article about six different riots.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/09/19/6-instances-when-whites-took-to-rioting-leading-to-death-despair-destruction/

The Confederate Veteran published an article in 1906 blaming the race riots on African Americans. Below is the link.

http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=167:qconfederate-veteranq-blames-atlanta-race-riots-on-persons-advocating-for-civil-rights-for-african-americans&catid=37:the-nadir-of-race-relations&back=yes

This website has documentation about how the Confederacy and neo-Confederacy is really about white supremacy.

This was the world of the Arlington Confederate Monument. A world where African Americans were ground under.

First draft of letter to Donald Trump done and sent to colleague

The first draft of the letter to Donald Trump asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument was finished this morning and sent to a colleague for proofing and editing.

I am planning on getting the letter mailed by certified mail before mid-February, hopefully early next week.

You can co-sign at
https://www.change.org/p/edward-h-sebesta-ask-president-trump-not-to-send-a-wreath-to-the-arlington-confederate-monument

You can download a PDF of the letter and also the bibliographic references for the letter at
http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/sign-2017-petition-to-president-trump.html

Mailed today.

Daisy McLaurin Stevens, United Daughters of the Confederate President General and Arlington Confederate Monument Dedication Speaker recommends pro-Klan Booklet.

Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was the UDC speaker for the dedication of the Arlington Confederate Monument.

She was also thought the Ku Klux Klan were heroes.

This is the letter from Confederate Veteran, Vol. 22, 1914, page 152 from Stevens addressed to the UDC membership. She endorses the publication of a pro-Klan speech in a pamphlet and urges the membership of the UDC to purchase it. Text of interest is in the 2nd half of the letter.

Click on the image to see the whole thing.

You can download the address from  https://archive.org/details/secretpoliticals00cook


The address by Walter Henry Cook, at Western Reserve University, was published by a UDC local chapter.  It is not known when it was published, but perhaps it was in 1914.

This  is what Confederate "heritage" is really all about, white supremacy and rancid racism.

Composing a letter to President Trump asking him to not send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument

I am composing a letter to President Trump asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument.

I am hoping to finish it tonight. Then send it to a friend for proof reading.

One of the major changes from the 2009 letter to Barack Obama is the rise of secessionist movements in America and the support for secession in the opinion polls.

You can co-sign here.

https://www.change.org/p/edward-h-sebesta-ask-president-trump-not-to-send-a-wreath-to-the-arlington-confederate-monument

Tulsa Race Riot

The Tulsa Race Riot was a horrific massacre of African Americans by white rioters.

It included airplanes bombing the African American neighborhood in Tulsa.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/

http://www.ebony.com/black-history/the-destruction-of-black-wall-street-405#axzz4WdCvcd44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4a7tabocNk



The Boston Avenue United Methodist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma insisted on providing their facilities to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 2013.

Atlanta Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy pamphlet with ad by the Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan ad shown below appears in a pamphlet by the Atlanta Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is an ad by the early 20th century Ku Klux Klan founded by William Joseph Simmons. The ad is a pack of lies. The KKK of the early 20th century was violent and lawless.  It is not surprising that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) would accept such an ad in a pamphlet devoted to their history. The UDC was very enthusiastic about the Reconstruction KKK.

Hilary A. Herbert who headed up the committee to get the Arlington Confederate Monument constructed writes on Race in the South

https://ia801604.us.archive.org/28/items/jstor-1009884/1009884.pdf

Self-congratulatory racist.

Woodrow Wilson, shows the movie "Birth of a Nation" in the White House

This article is how Woodrow Wilson aided in the promotion of the movie "Birth of a Nation."

http://chnm.gmu.edu/episodes/the-birth-of-a-nation-and-black-protest/

Incidentally, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which often participates in annual celebrations at the Arlington Confederate Monument, sells "Birth of a Nation" as a film that accurately represents history.  https://scv.secure-sites.biz/store.php

This is a more descriptive review of the film.

http://nypost.com/2015/02/07/why-birth-of-a-nation-is-still-the-most-controversial-movie-ever/

This is the film which Woodrow Wilson praised as "history written with lightning."

"Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century" by Nicholas Palter

https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Crow-Wilson-Administration-Segregation/dp/0870818643

Sometime ago, I purchased "Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century," by Nicholas Patler It is about the resistance to Woodrow Wilson implementation of segregation in employment by the Federal government.

What I really liked about this book is the preface. I haven't had time to read the book yet, but will.

Patler in the preface to the book describes his attendance at a history session about Woodrow Wilson where the historians really didn't want to deal with Wilson's racism. Patler writes that the audience members "referred to the inconsistency between Wilson's ardent defense of individual freedom and equality at home and abroad the the poor treatment of blacks in America ..."

Patler reveals that the historians in the conference were really fans of Wilson rather than historians.

Patler writes:

"I did not hear a good explanation that day. Although Dr. Link admitted that this attitude was 'a blemish on the Wilson administration," it seemed the speakers in general tiptoed around the topic, and the consensus was, in so many words, 'Why focus on this negative aspect of the Wilson years when he accomplished so many positive things?'" 

Patler's mentions in his preface that in his investigations he discovered:

"Not only were African Americans segregated en masse in federal departments, but in many cases they were harassed, downgraded, and terminated as well."

There is this video of him talking on C-Span about Woodrow Wilson
https://www.c-span.org/person/?nicholaspatler

Yet, Princeton University decided that Wilson still needed to be honored as some type of hero.

This was the general environment of the early 20th century in which the Arlington Confederate Monument went up.

United Daughters of the Confederacy North Carolina Division Ku Klux Klan Post Card

The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is the group that led the effort to erect the Arlington Confederate Monument. This post card by the North Carolina Division of the UDC shows what Confederate "heritage" meant to the UDC.

The North Carolina Division of the UDC was so proud of their donation of a flag of the Ku Klux Klan to the Museum of the Confederacy that they issued a post card to publicize it.

CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO SEE THE WHOLE IMAGE

William Howard Taft's "Little Brown Brothers." The Philippines American War and the brutal suppression of Philippine Independence

William Howard Taft was the first American Governor-General of the Philippines when the Philippine Independence movement was brutally suppressed by the American army after the Spanish American War.

The Filipinos had an independence movement and with the defeat of the Spanish by the Americans they sought to establish an independent Philippines. The American government however decided to keep the Philippine as part of the spoils of war and waged a brutal ware of suppression against the Philippine independence movement.

The death tool of Filipinos is estimated to be 200,000.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war


The book, "Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn," by Leon Wolff, was published in 1962 and was awarded the Francis Parker Prize by the Society of American Historians an affiliate of the American Historical Association.

It was reissued in 2001 updated and including accounts of numerous atrocities committed by U.S. Soldiers during the Philippines-American War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_brown_brother

It is available in both hard cover and soft cover and used copies are available.
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Brown-Brother-Purchased-Philippine/dp/1582882096/

This isn't the only book available on the topic.  Another book is "Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903," by Stuart Creighton Miller, who was a professor at San Francisco State University and published by Yale University. It also is available in hard cover and soft cover and used copies. Though the used hard copies are really expensive, but the used paperback copies are quite cheap.

I just finished ordering both of them.

This is one article about William Howard Taft's administration of the Philippines.

http://www.libertas.bham.ac.uk/publications/Essays/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20BAASPhilippinesAdamBurns[1].pdf

This is a dissertation, "William Howard Taft and the Philippines, 1900-1921."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/280064.pdf

I am not necessarily endorsing them, but I think they are eye-opening. The whole occupation is just appalling in its racism.


For those people who always like to excuse the atrocities and behaviors of the past, I give you a speech delivered in 1899 to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale University by William Graham Sumner. It was published in the Yale Law Journal, Jan. 1899.  The title is,  "The Conquest of the United States by Spain." Please no arguments about presentism. The occupation of the Philippines was understood to be an appalling idea then as it is understood to be now.  The link to the address given by Sumner is below.


http://praxeology.net/WGS-CUS.htm

The Brownsville Incident

The Brownsville Incident was were 167 African American troops stationed in Brownsville, Texas were unjustly dishonorably discharged in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt as part of Roosevelt's pandering to white supremacists.

The dishonorable discharges were reversed in 1972 by Richard Nixon.

The white citizens of Brownsville, Texas were furious that African American troops were stationed in their town and waged a campaign to get rid of them.


http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=trotter_review

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_Affair

https://dmna.ny.gov/historic/articles/blacksMilitary/BlacksMilitaryBrownsville.htm

There is a book on the Brownsville Incident by, "The Brownsville Raid," by John D. Weaver, published in 1970.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ZPoa6od2tYUC&pg=PA321#v=onepage&q&f=false


This was the America which allowed a Confederate monument at the Arlington National Cemetery.

Rayford W. Logan's book "The Betrayal of the Negro"

Rayford W. Logan's book, "The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson" is a classic and major work of African American history. It is about the oppression of African Americans from after the fall of Reconstruction in 1877 to the end of Woodrow Wilson's term and show how the political system betrayed African Americans rights as human beings.

It is widely available in libraries and you can order it online and often it is in book stores. It is well worth reading. In reading it you will understand the context of the acceptance of having a Confederate monument erected in Arlington National Cemetery. The monument is the crowning of the triumph of white supremacy in American and the defeat of African American civil rights.

These are some links to learn about the book.

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3437918


This is the wikipedia page on Rayford Logan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayford_Logan

Besides blogging on the effort to convince President-Elect Donald Trump not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument, I am also going to be blogging items about the times when this monument went up so that this white supremacist monument is seen as a phenomenon of a white supremacist time.

President William Howard Taft in 1912 explains to the United Daughters of the Confederacy at their General Convention that the Civil War is about white pride.

President Taft’s speech at the United Daughters of the Confederacy General Convention in 1912 where he explains the meaning of the Civil War as being white pride nationwide. 

Pages 18 – 21, “History of The Arlington Confederate Monument at Arlington, Virginia,” by Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association. Copyright United Daughters of the Confederacy 1914. Boldface is added to this speech by the blogger. Spelling as found in the book.  The speech given by Taft is an erasure of history. 

Also, note Taft's warm feeling about the incoming Woodrow Wilson administration which will institute segregation in Federal employment and Wilson himself will show the pro-Ku Klux Klan movie, "Birth of a Nation," in the White House and praise it as "history written with lightning." 

The text follows:  

Evening, November 12, 1912.

Mrs. Marion Butler, President of the District of Columbia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, introduced the President of the Board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia, who heartily welcomed the Daughters to the city in glowing words.

Mrs. Butler next introduced the President of the United States, Mr. Taft, saying:

"This is the first time the Daughters of the Confederacy have held an Annual Convention out of the South. We have assembled here to lay the corner-stone of a Confederate monument, to be erected at Arlington, the Federal Cemetery, the former home of Lee. Permission to build this monument was granted to the Daughters of the District of Columbia and the Confederate Veterans by Mr. Taft when Secretary of War. We deem it most fortunate and propitious that we are assembled in the National Capital for such a purpose and are to be welcomed by the same distinguished citizen, who is now President of the United States. We trust that the building of this monument will be the keystone of the arch of a reunited country.

Ladies, the President."

The President replied as follows:

"Ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy:

I beg to welcome you to Washington. You have captured this city beautiful and made it more lovely by your presence. As its temporary head, I give you the freedom of the city, and recognize that in what you have done, you have founded a shrine and an altar here which will be visited in the future by many a faithful pilgrim.

If the occasion which brings you here were the mourning at the bier of a lost cause, I know that the nice sense of propriety of a fine old social school would have prevented you from inviting me, as the President of the United States, to be present. You are not here to mourn or support a cause. You are here to celebrate, and justly to celebrate, the heroism, the courage and the sacrifice to the uttermost of your fathers and your brothers and your mothers and your sisters, and of all your kin, in a cause which they believed in their hearts to be right, and for which they were willing to lay down their lives. That cause ceased to be, except in history, now more than half a century ago. It was one which could elicit from half a nation, and brave and warlike race, a four year struggle in which lives, property, and everything save honor were willingly parted with for its sake. So great was the genius for military leadership of many of your generals, so adaptable was the individual of your race to effective warlike training, so full of patriotic sacrifice were your people that now when all the bitterness of the struggle on our part of the North has passed away, we are able to share with you of the South your just pride in your men and women who carried on the unexampled contest to an exhaustion that few countries ever suffered. The calm observer and historian, whatever his origin, may now rejoice in his heart that the Lord ordained it as it is. But no son of the South and no son of the North, with any spark in him of pride of race, can fail to rejoice in that common heritage of courage and glorious sacrifice that we have in the story of the Civil War and on both sides in the Civil War.

It has naturally taken a long time for the spirit of hostility that such an internecine struggle develops completely to die away. Of course it has lasted a less time with those who were the victors and into whose homes and domestic lives the horrows of war were not directly thrust. The physical evidences of war were traceable in the South for decades after they had utterly disappeared in the North in the few places in which they existed. Then there are conditions in the South which are a constant reminder of the history of the past. Until within recent decades, prosperity has not shed her boon of comfort upon the South with as generous a hand as upon the North. Hence those of us at the North who have been sometimes impatient at a little flash now and then of the old sectional antagonism are unreasonable in our failure to appreciate these marked differences.

For years after the war, the Republican Party, which had carried the nation through the war to its successful conclusion, was in control of the administration of the Government, and it was impossible for the Southerner to escape the feeling that he was linked in his allegiance to an alien nation and one with whose destiny he found it difficult to identify himself. Time, however, cures much, and after awhile there came a Democratic Administration of four years, and then another one of four years. Southerners were called to Federal offices, they came to have more and more influence in the halls of Congress and in the Senate, and the responsibility of the Government brought with it a sense of closer relationship to it and to all the people for whom the Government was carried on.

I speak for my immediate Republican predecessors in office when I say that they all labored to bring the sections more closely together. I am sure I can say that, so far as in me has lain, I have left nothing undone to reduce the sectional feeling and to make the divisions of this country geographical only. But I am free to admit that circumstances have rendered it more difficult for a Republican Administration than for a Democratic Administration, to give to our Southern brothers and sisters the feeling of close relationship and ownership in the Government of the United States. Therefore, in solving the mystery of that Providential dispensation which now brings on a Democratic Administration to succeed this, we must admit the good that will come to the whole country in a more confirmed sense of partnership in this Government which our brothers and sisters of the Southland will enjoy in an Administration, in which Southern opinion will naturally have greater influence, and the South greater proportionate representation in the Cabinet, in Congress, and in other high official stations. While I rejoice in the steps that I have been able to take to heal the wounds of sectionalism and to convey to the Southern people, as far as I could, my earnest desire to make this country one, I can not deny that my worthy and distinguished successor has a greater opportunity, and I doubt not he will use it for the benefit of the nation at large.

It fell to my official lot, with universal popular approval, to issue the order which made it possible to erect, in the National

Cemetery of Arlington, the beautiful monument to the heroic dead of the South that you founded today. The event in itself speaks volumes as to the oblivion of sectionalism. It gives me not only great pleasure and great honor, but it gives me the greatest satisfaction as a lover of my country, to be present, as President of the United States, and pronounce upon this occasion the benediction of all true Americans."

The President was given an ovation, the convention rising in appreciation of his greeting.

Huge readership spike of this blog from South Korea

I am getting ready to write Donald Trump asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument. I was reviewing the information I collected in 2009 and also what I have since learned.

I was looking at the Arlington Confederate Monument Report blog and I noticed that there had been a spike in viewers and so first I went to see where they were from. How surprising to see that the most viewers were from South Korea. It is hard to see on the Google map supplied below but you can see the South Korean readership in the list.

Japan has recently called home some envoys because they are upset over a statue to memorialize South Korean women who were put into brothels by the Japanese military in World War II.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/asia/japan-diplomats-south-korea/

http://time.com/4625449/japan-south-korea-comfort-women-statue/

I think that the move by Japan to retaliate is not well thought out. There are probably in the last week hundreds of millions of people who previously had never heard of the "comfort" women, sex slaves for the Japanese military, who now have learned the history of these sex slaves.

I also think it was very foolish that it was thought that a treaty agreement could be done to push this historical crime down a memory hole. Did the Japanese government really think this would work?

Good for those who won't allow this to be pushed down the memory hole. One time in preparation for a short business trip to Korea, I read a 600 page history of Korea. Korea history has good parts, but poor Korea has had some really bad times, such as the Mongol invasion and the Japanese occupation.

I don't know why the Japanese government isn't just ignoring the statue, perhaps there is a nationalist desire for a conflict.

As for my South Korean readers, I hope my blog was a help.

As for the Russian readership, there is an interest in Russia to foment division, like secession, in the United States and I am getting periods of high readership from Russia occasionally for my blogs.

This is captured from the screen on 1/7/2017 at 8:30 pm roughly EST.