Arlington Confederate Monument Report

History News Network Runs 2009 Letter to Obama for Memorial Day

2011-05-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

History News Network, http://www.hnn.us/, has added the 2009 letter to Obama as an item for its Hot Topics listing for Memorial Day. You can see it on the Memorial Day page here,
http://hnn.us/articles/12140.html.

Unfortunately they didn't run our 2010 or 2011 letter.

You can read all three letters by using the links on the side bar to the right of this blog.

There will be a 2012 letter to President Obama. We are thinking of taking up the topic of the massacre of African American troops.

Incidentally, I strongly recommend this essay by David W. Blight on the first Memorial Day. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/opinion/30blight.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all.

Film Maker Zade Darwish co-signs letter

2011-02-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

Zade Darwish, producer of the movie, "The Runaway," about a slave rebellion in Florida has co-signed the 2011 letter to President Obama.

You can view his website and see a short video on the movie at http://www.floridaslave.com/.

The 2011 Letter to the President and background information on it can be found through the links in the right side bar.

Co-signatures are coming in and we are ahead of where we were last year.

2011 Letter to President Barack Obama Asking Him to End UDC Awards Ceremonies at U.S. Military Academies

2011-02-03T21:16:00.001-08:00

The following is the letter that will be sent to President Obama May 1, 2011 with a list of co-signers. Note at the top of the side bar of this blog is a link to this posting of the letter and the background information for this letter. If you wish to be a co-signer email me. esebesta@tx.rr.com

May 1, 2011

Edward H. Sebesta esebesta@tx.rr.com

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

Dear President Obama:

I am writing this letter with two requests:

1. Do not send a wreath to Arlington Confederate monument on Memorial Day.

2. End the practice of allowing the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to distribute awards at U.S. Service academies and military academies that provide officers to the U.S. military.

By ending these two practices, the Office of the President can demonstrate its commitment to an egalitarian, democratic United States and challenge the growing political power of neo-Confederate ideology. In the pages that follow, I will outline how and why I believe the Office of the President should take these steps and stop honoring the slave-holding Confederate States of America, whose supporters, in groups like the UDC, continue to oppose civil rights and promote a discriminatory and erroneous understanding of U.S. history. Unfortunately, to date the Office of the Presidency has actively enabled neo-Confederacy by sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument, a monument that depicts scenes of white supremacy and African-American subservience. I urge that you end this practice.

Secondly, as one the oldest and most powerful neo-Confederate organizations, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) has a long history of opposition to the values of a multiracial democratic United States of America.[i] Since its formation in 1894, the UDC has consistently acclaimed the Ku Klux Klan, opposed civil rights, and challenged racial and social equality.[ii] These political opinions are not confined to the UDC’s past; they continue and yet the organization is permitted to issue eight annual awards at U.S. service academies:

* The Robert E. Lee Sabre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York

* The Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury Award at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland

* The Lieutenant General Claire L. Chenault Award at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado

* The Admiral Raphael Semmes Award at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, New London, Connecticut

* The Matthew Fontaine Maury Award at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, New York

* The Stonewall Jackson Award at the Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia

* The William Porcher DuBose Award at the Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina

* Wade Hampton Sabre award at the Citadel given by the South Carolina Division UDC.

Permission for the UDC to give these awards to U.S. servicemen and servicewomen must be discontinued. Their annual distribution continues to legitimate the Confederacy and, by appropriating the prestige of the United States military in exchange for small gifts, the UDC both honors themselves and the Confederate leaders who fought against the U.S. military to sustain slavery and white supremacy.

The UDC’s veneration of white supremacy is not just historical. In recent years the UDC has promoted the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine, pro-Confederate books like So Good a Cause: A Decade of the Southern Partisan in which Richard M. Weaver refers to Chicago as an “evil flower,”[iii] Michael Andrew Grissom’s Southern By the Grace of God, which states slaves were well-treated servants, and lauds Thomas Dixon’s notorious, racist 1905 novel, The Clansman.[iv] Authors in UDC publications continue to correct what they state are American “misconceptions” about the horrors of slavery,[v] and promote anti-democratic, pro-secessionist bodies like the Abbeville Institute, [vi] an organization whose leaders are closely associated with the League of the South, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a ‘hate group.’ It is clear, therefore, that even in the 21st Century, members of the UDC continue its tradition of racism and opposition to equality, yet the United States military tacitly supports and enables this neo-Confederate ideology by allowing the UDC to award honors at U.S. Service academies and other military schools.

The toleration of this activity by the U.S. military reflects poor judgment. Future military officers of the Republic should not be given awards named after individuals who lead an insurrection against the United States to preserve slavery, by an organization dedicated to the glorification of this insurrection. Additionally, several of these awards are named after notorious racists.[vii] Raphael Semmes, for example, erected a tombstone in Mexico with the inscription “In memoriam of Abraham Lincoln, President of the late United States, who died of nigger on the brain, 1st January 1863,” and yet Semmes is honored with an award given to an exemplary cadet of the U.S. Coast Guard academy.

In summary, the UDC promotes a neo-Confederate ideology that challenges American democratic practices, praises and promotes racist books, and offers defenses of slavery. Consequently, in addition to ending the practice of sending a Presidential wreath to the Confederate Monument in Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, I ask you to end the practice of the UDC granting awards at America’s service academies and end their involvement in the affairs of the United States Military. Rather than annually celebrating the Confederacy, the United States of America needs a national conversation about the Confederacy, the Civil War, the overthrow of Reconstruction and neo-Confederacy. With the start of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, 2011 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 angrily explained 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.[viii]

I would be happy to provide further documentation as you require.

Sincerely Yours,

Edward H. Sebesta

[i] The online publication, Black Commentator, has an article about some of the more contemporary UDC promotion of neo-Confederacy at (http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html). For more background on the UDC’s promotion of racism information is provided online at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/ in conjunction with the Winter Institute at the University of Mississippi for both the Nader Period and the Modern Civil Rights Era, additionally a brief summary of the history of the racism of the UDC can be found at http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2011/02/united-daughters-of-confederacy-and.html.
[ii] Fannie Selph, The South in American Life and History, Nashville Chapters of United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1928, pp. 372-374, praised the KKK; for the Susan Lawrence book on the KKK see, No Author, “Memorial Fund to Honor Wilson Boosted by U.D.C,” Atlanta Constitution, 11/22/1924; in the UDC’s official publication, Southern Magazine, see Walter Henry Cook, “Secret Political Societies in the South During The Period of Reconstruction,” The Southern Magazine, pages 3-5, 42-43, Vol. III No. 1, July 1936, News Publishing Company, Wytheville, Virginia; for Mildred Rutherford’s address praising the KKK see, Mildred Rutherford, an address, “The Thirteen Periods of United States History,” delivered as UDC Historian General to the UDC convention, November 13, 1913, from a section titled, “The Humiliated South of The Reconstruction Period.” These articles can be found at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/ a web site in conjunction with the Winter Institute.

For article attacking school integration see Bruce Dunstan, Jefferson Davis – The Man America Needs Today,” UDC Magazine, June 1958, pp. 19, 23, 26, 27; Attack on school integration at UDC convention see Gen. Sumter Lowry, UDC Magazine, serialized over two issues, February 1959 pp. 32, March 1959, pp. 15, 22, 24, a speech at a UDC convention. The complete text can be read in The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The ‘Great Truth’ about the ‘Lost Cause, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2010. The United Daughters of the Confederacy ran numerous articles attacking Civil Rights and school integration during the 1950s and many of these can be read at http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/.
[iii] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes,” page 11, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 58 No. 7, August, 1995.
[iv] Grissom, Mike, “The Mystery of John Hunt Cole,” pages 27-29, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 51 No. 9, September 1988.
[v] Lee, Dr. Walter W., III, “The African Slave Trade,” pages 18-19, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 52 No. 4, April 1989.
[vi] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes: The Value of Southern Tradition,” page 17, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 68 No. 7, August 2005.
[vii] Wade Hampton, for example, was the leader of the Red Shirts who conducted a violent and successful campaign to restore white supremacy in South Carolina ending the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. Wade Hampton is a hero to the UDC South Carolina Division precisely because he restored white supremacy to South Carolina and overthrew Reconstruction. United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946, no author. The UDC South Carolina Division issued a publication with the cover, “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946.” In it on page 13 is an article titled, “Oakley Park, Edgefield’s Red Shirt Shrine.” Oakley Park is an old Plantation house which the South Carolina UDC division had decided in October 1944 to restore. The importance of this house for restoration is stated in the article, “Oakley Park was the home of General Martin Witherspoon Gary, who with his Red Shirts, in 1876, did so much to restore white supremacy in South Carolina.” The article explains further that “The “Red Shirts” were largely ex-Confederate soldiers under the leadership of their one-time military commanders,” and that “Conditions were desperate! The Democrats were determined to get the government back into the hands of the white people.” The UDC article praises the success of the Red Shirts says that they “… accomplished the overthrow of that “blackest abomination” – The Radical Government of South Carolina.”

In the 21st century the UDC continues to promote the “Red Shirt Shrine,” the UDC run Oakley Park Museum in Edgefield, South Carolina. In the June/July 2001 issue of UDC Magazine, the cover illustration is a photo of the Oakley Park plantation house for an article in the issue about it.[vii] The UDC raised money for this museum in the 1940s and has promoted them as heroes over the years, including the aforementioned Wade Hampton Sabre award.

The racism of others for whom these awards are named is given online at http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/2011/02/biographical-background-of-racism-of.html.
[viii] 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.

If you wish to be a co-signer email me.

The the racism of the persons for whom the UDC names its awards to the U.S. Military service academy students

2011-02-02T06:52:00.000-08:00

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The following is about the racism of the individuals for whom the UDC names the awards that they give to the U.S. Military service academy students.

Wade Hampton, was the leader of the Red Shirts who conducted a violent and successful campaign to restore white supremacy in South Carolina ending the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. Wade Hampton is a hero to the UDC South Carolina Division precisely because he restored white supremacy to South Carolina and overthrew Reconstruction.[i]

The UDC South Carolina Division issued a publication with the cover, “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946.” In it on page 13 is an article titled, “Oakley Park, Edgefield’s Red Shirt Shrine.” Oakley Park is an old Plantation house which the South Carolina UDC division had decided in October 1944 to restore. The importance of this house for restoration is stated in the article, “Oakley Park was the home of General Martin Witherspoon Gary, who with his Red Shirts, in 1876, did so much to restore white supremacy in South Carolina.”

The article explains further:

The “Red Shirts” were largely ex-Confederate soldiers under the leadership of their one-time military commanders. Forbidden to organize into military companies and regarding the gray uniform of the Confederacy as inappropriate, the men arrayed themselves in red shirts and formed mounted bands which patrolled the State in the interest of the Democratic nominee for Governor, which was Hampton, against the Republican nominee, Chamberlain. “A white man’s government”, they said. Then followed a long struggle for control. The Republicans held the State House, and were sustained by United States troops. Conditions were desperate! The Democrats were determined to get the government back into the hands of the white people.

The Red Shirts, who gathered at Oakley Park and rode out from there were a great factor in achieving this, and in the election of Hampton in 1876, and thus was accomplished the overthrow of that “blackest abomination” – The Radical Government of South Carolina.”

In the 21st century the UDC continues to promote the “Red Shirt Shrine,” the UDC run Oakley Park Museum in Edgefield, South Carolina. In the June/July 2001 issue of UDC Magazine, the cover illustration is a photo of the Oakley Park plantation house for an article in the issue about it. .[i] The UDC raised money for this museum in the 1940s and has promoted them as heroes over the years, including the aforementioned Wade Hampton sabre award.

Raphael Semmes erected a tombstone in Mexico with the inscription “In memoriam of Abraham Lincoln, President of the late United States, who died of nigger on the brain, 1st January 1863,” is somehow honored with an award given to an exemplary cadet of the U.S. Coast Guard academy.

Professor Gerald Horne, in his book, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” discusses the obsessive racism of Semmes. Brazilian society displeased Semmes because of racial antipathies. Horne quotes Semmes in his rejection of post-war colonization of Brazil as follows:

‘The effete Portuguese race,’ he sputtered, ‘has been ingrafted [sic]upon a stupid, stolid Indian stock in that country … this might be a suitable field enough for the New England schoolma’am and carpet-bagger, but no Southern gentleman should think of mixing his blood or casting his lot with such a race of people.’

Horne explains that while Semmes, as a Confederate naval officer during the Civil War, was hosted and feted by Brazilian society he was obsessed with their racial composition. Horne writes:

He was disgusted with “amalgamation” in Brazil, thinking it provided a poor example for North America, as it was leading to “mongrel set of curs” that would “cover the whole land.” He was more pleased with South Africa where “the African has met the usual fate of the savage, when he comes in contact with civilized man. He had been thrust aside, and was only to be seen as a straggler and stranger in his native land.” As he saw it, “the inhabitants of the Cape Colony seemed to resemble our own people” in their penchant for white supremacy.

Horne also questions Semmes being considered a hero and writes:

The “damage done by Raphael Semmes to the commerce of the United States” amounted to “ten millions of dollars.” Yet despite this mayhem he inflicted on the U.S. during the course of his treasonous revolt, after the war his “statue” was placed prominently on “Mobile’s busiest thoroughfare, standing near the sea he so long loved and dominated.”[ii]

Following the defeat of the Confederacy, Matthew Fontaine Maury attempted to recreate the slave-era Old South in Mexico. As noted by Gaines M. Foster in his book, “Ghosts of the Confederacy,” Maury and his comrades planned to:

Bring with them a proportional number of “negro skilled laborers in agriculture” who would enter the country as “peons” – a concession that caused Maury to consider himself an abolitionist. Together, the best families and faithful peons would build a “New Virginia” in a part of Mexico that reminded Maury of the Valley of the Shenandoah.[iii]

Maury also worked at length for a scheme to colonize the Amazon basin of Brazil with African- American slaves. Maury’s contempt for Brazilians and his plans for this slave expansion are shown in these excerpts in a letter of instruction to Herndon who he sent to Brazil as a scout for his scheme:

Who shall people the Great Valley of this Mighty Amazon? Shall it be peopled with an imbecile and an indolent people or by a go ahead race that has energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develop and bring forth the vast resources that lie hidden here?

… That valley is to [be] the safety valve for our Southern States, when they become over-populated with slaves, the African Slave Trade will be stopped, and they will send their slaves to the Amazon. Just as the Mississippi Valley has been the escape valve for the slaves of the Northern, now free, States, so will the Amazon be to that of the Mississippi.[iv]

To further promote this expansion of slavery Maury resorted to the fear mongering of race war, in De Bow’s Review in an article advocating the transfer of African American slaves to the Amazon.[v]

A columnist in the UDC Magazine in 1958 writing about an article praising Maury, lists this as an example of Maury accomplished intellect. Further the columnist quotes Maury writing to his cousin that transferring African American slaves to the Amazon “…would be relieving our own country of the slaves, it would be hastening the time of our deliverance, and if it would be putting off indefinitely, the horrows [sic] of that war of races, which without an escape is surely to come."[vi]

Despite his iconic status in the South, Robert E. Lee was a racist who worked against African Americans after the Civil War. His attitudes are best described by his son Robert E. Lee Jr. The 1904 book Recollections and Letters of General Lee, written by his son, R.E. Lee, Jr., includes the following remark by General Lee:

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

Robert E. Lee wrote the notorious White Sulphur Manifesto to undermine and oppose the Republican Party civil rights policies in the presidential election of 1868. In this letter Lee wrote:

It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. But this opposition springs from no feeling of enmity, but from a deep-seated conviction that, at present, the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power. They would inevitably become the victims of demagogues, who, for selfish purposes, would mislead them to the serious injury of the public.

At the Congressional hearings on Reconstruction Lee expressed support of slavery and believing that Virginia would be better off without African Americans.[vii]

[i] “United Daughters of the Confederacy, South Carolina Division: Golden Anniversary 1896-1946,” no author. Also, Harris, Donna, “Oakley Park: Only Shrine of its Kind,” page 23-24, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 64 No. 6, June/July 2001.
[ii] Gerald Horne, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” pp. 190-91, New York University Press, New York, 2007.
[iii] Foster, Gaines M., “Ghosts of the Confederacy,” page 16, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.
[iv] Gerald Horne, “The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade,” pp. 113-16, New York University Press, New York, 2007. Maury’s plan is discussed from page 112 to 127.
[v] The fact must be obvious to the far-reaching minds of our statesmen, that unless some means of relief be devised, some channel afforded, by which the South can, when the time comes, get rid of the excess of her slave population, that she will be ultimately found, with regard to this institution, in the predicament of the man with the wolf by the ears—too dangerous to hold on any longer, and equally dangerous to let go.

To our mind, the event is as certain to happen as any event is [sic] which dependents on the contingencies of the future, viz.: that unless means be devised for gradually relieving the slave states from the undue pressure of this class upon them—unless some way be opened by which they may be rid of their surplus black population,—the time will come—it may not be in the next nor in the succeeding generation—but, sooner or later, come it will, and come it must—when the two races will join in the death struggle for the mastery,” from Matthew Fontaine Maury, “Direct Foreign Trade of the South,” De Bow’s Review, Vol. 12 No. 2 Feb. 1852, pp. 147.
[vi] Col. John C. Lawton, “Matthew Fontaine Maury,” UDC Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 3, March 1958, pp. 6-7, 10, 17.
[vii] Robert E. Lee, “Memoranda on the Civil War,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. 36 No. 4, August. 1888, 600-01 for his views on slavery; ---, Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress, (Washington: GPO, 1866), 135-36 for his views of ridding Virginia of African Americans.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy and their white supremacist beliefs

2011-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

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As one the oldest and most powerful neo-Confederate organizations, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) has a long history of opposition to the values of a multiracial democratic United States of America.[i] In the UDC’s early years it promoted the Ku Klux Klan as being the heroic accomplishments of Confederate heroes. The Tennessee Division UDC did this in its book “The South in American Life and History,” declaring, “The Ku-Klux Klan’s great achievements were: The inevitability of Anglo-Saxon supremacy; the virtue of the courage and patriotism of the Confederate soldier; and that at last, ‘truth will prevail.’” [ii] Susan Lawrence’s book, “Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan,” was praised at a UDC convention as a book every Southerner should read.[iii] S.E.F. Rose wrote the book “The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire,” which was “unanimously endorsed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in convention,” in 1913, with a dedication which says:

This book is dedicated by the author to the Youth of the Southland, hoping that perusal of its pages will inspire them with respect and admiration for the Confederate soldiers, who were the real Ku Klux, and whose deeds of courage and valor, have never been surpassed, and rarely equalled in the annals of history.

In the 1930s in the UDC’s Southern Magazine they published a lengthy defense and justification of the Ku Klux Klan by Walter Henry Cook.[iv]

Mildred Rutherford, a great hero of the UDC and their historically most prominent Historian General in a speech to the UDC convention in 1913, said:

The Ku Klux Klan was an absolute necessity in the South at this time. This Order was not composed of the “riff raff” as has been represented in history, but of the very flower of Southern manhood. The chivalry of the South demanded protection for the women and children of the South.[v]

When the modern civil rights movement started in the United States, the UDC in its magazine campaigned strenuously against integration and civil rights. In a typical article, “Jefferson Davis – The Man America Needs Today,” by Bruce Dunstan, he informs the reader that the principals of Jefferson Davis are needed to oppose civil rights and oppose:

… forced shameful race-mixing, that causes lowered educational standards, immorality, and finally a mongrelized people, will bring about the downfall of America, as integration of races doomed the once cultured, and prosperous cities and nations of Carthage, Athens, Rome, and Sparta.[vi]

In another issue of UDC Magazine in the Civil Rights Era, the speech of rabid segregationist Gen. Sumter Lowry, notorious candidate for Florida governor is reprinted, evidently meeting the UDCs approval. Lowry tells the UDC:

Now there immediately occurred a violent and bitter reaction against the idea of forcing white and colored children to associate together in public schools and institutions - there have been millions of words written and every conceivable reason given why the people of the South so violently oppose the integration of the races. But when you get right down to the underlying cause, it leads to just one place, that is the definite and certain knowledge that if you mix male and female together in intimate, social relationship from childhood to maturity, it will bring on intermarriage-it will do this regardless of race or color.

Now the conspirators who wish to destroy our nation well know if you mix people of different color in marriage and if you infuse the blood of fourteen million negroes into the blood stream of the white American, you will breed a mongrel race, neither white nor black, and the history of the world shows that when a nation becomes mongrelized, it dies.[vii]

Other articles from the UDC Magazine attacking civil rights in the 1950s can be found at the website http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/. [Note to reader this website will have the material put online in time for the mailing of the letter May 1, 2010, however, it planned to have the material online during February.]

In modern times, the UDC promotes the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine and the books it published, and other neo-Confederate books. Clara Erath first mentions Southern Partisan in 1989 in discussion of an article in it about a speech by M.E. Bradford, in her regular column, “Confederate Notes, in UDC Magazine.

In a 1995 article UDC Magazine columnist Clara Erath recommended to her readers the book, “So Good a Cause: A Decade of Southern Partisan” and which had an essay by Richard M. Weaver referring to urban Chicago as a “evil flower.” Erath, in reference to the essay, concludes, “At a time when this kind of ‘evil flower’ seems to have spread over the nation, membership in the UDC reinforces our knowledge of who we are and from whence we came, and it gives us a sense of community with those who share our heritage.”[viii]

Similarly, in 1999 Erath discussed an issue of Southern Partisan devoted to providing a extensive list of books for Southerners to read and recommends some specific racist works from that list including: “Remembering Who We Are,” by M.E. Bradford; “The Southern Tradition at Bay,” by Richard Weaver; and “I’ll Take My Stand,” by Twelve Southerners, the Southern Agrarians.[ix] Southern Partisan also advertised in the UDC Magazine in the 1980s.

The UDC helped launch the book publishing career of neo-Confederate Michael Andrew Grissom by the inclusion of a section of his shortly to be published work, “Southern By the Grace of God,” with ordering information in the UDC Magazine, in 1988. This is a volume that has sections defending the Ku Klux Klan, holding up lynching as a heroic civic virtue, and recommends the books of Thomas Dixon, such as “The Clansmen.”[x] It was one of the two books founding the modern radical neo-Confederate movement.

Clara Erath enthusiastically recommended Richard M. Weaver’s “The Southern Tradition At Bay” to her readers, a book originally published in 1968 by Arlington House and republished by Regnery Gateway in 1989.[xi] Erath effusively praises it gushing:

The Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live.

This book was key in the origins of the modern neo-Confederate movement advancing many of its core ideas and concepts. Since it was either promoted or quoted in the UDC Magazine repeatedly it would be instructive to examine it.

The book was originally Weaver’s dissertation, “The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture,” at Louisiana State University for his doctorate in English in 1943. Weaver died in 1963, and in 1968 it was posthumously published with two editors, George Core and M.E. Bradford, the latter a campaigner for George Wallace. The Forward was written by segregationist and Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson. It was critical to founding the modern neo-Confederate ideology by claiming that Southern traditions and ways had failed to be developed into a philosophy but that it could be done and should be done which he does so in his book.[xii]

Weaver sees the southern culture as being anti-modern, anti-democratic, hierarchal, religiously pre-modern, and feudal in origins. Weaver advocates the restoration of this culture as a solution for what he sees as the problems of modern society. In his book he paints slavery and large plantations as idyllic, for example.

The feeling of being bound to a locality, which has been almost wholly lost by the deracinated population of the modern metropolis, was a part of the plantation dweller’s daily consciousness and an important factor in his self-respect. In the midst of traffic in human beings there was, paradoxically, less evidence of the cash nexus than in the marts of free labor, and even the humble could have the deep human satisfaction that comes of being cherished for what one is. Between the expression “our people,” euphemistic though it may have been, and the modern abstraction “manpower” lies a measure of our decline in humanity.[xiii]

Another defense for slavery and expression of his racism is as follows:

The Northern public has generally displayed a strange credulity with respects to stories of abuses emanating from the South, and when these are multiplied tenfold, as they were in Reconstruction days, it is little wonder that many Northerners of good will, whom a visit to the South would have undeceived, went on believing that slave holders had subjected their Negroes to deliberate and systematic brutalizing. Somewhere between two opinions distorted by passion lay a truth: on the one hand, Southerners had done less than they might have toward civilizing the blacks, and on the other hand, Northerners, accepting the dogma that the Negro had the white man’s nature and capacities, had conceived an imperfect notion of the problem.[xiv]

Emancipation is seen as a problem for African Americans, Weaver writing:

That the presence of the African had been the chief source of Southern misfortunes was a common admission; yet his very childlikeness, his extraordinary exhibitions of loyalty, and his pathetic attempts to find his place in the complicated white man’s civilization rather had the effect of endearing him to his former owners.[xv]

Curious for a book advocated by a women’s organization, in Weaver’s epilogue he advocates the revocation of suffrage for women arguing;

Distinctions of many kinds will have to be restored, and I would mention especially one whose loss has added immeasurably to the malaise of our civilization – fruitful distinction between the sexes, with the recognition of respective spheres of influence. … Southerners were adamant, and even today, with our power of discrimination at its lowest point in history, there arises a feeling that the roles of the sexes must again be made explicit. … and I think that women would have more influence actually if they did not vote, but, according to the advice of Augusta Evans Wilson, made their firesides seats of Delphic wisdom.[xvi]

The UDC attitude towards the Middle Passage of the slave trade is revealed by an appalling speech by Dr. Walter W. Lee III on the transatlantic slave trade presented at the convention of the New York Division of the UDC in 1988 and reprinted in the UDC Magazine in 1989. The speech seeks to correct what Lee feels are “misconceptions” about the Middle Passage. Starting out with biting sarcasm attacking the movie “Roots,” Lee argues that most of the slaves transported were already slaves living in terrible conditions, so the Middle Passage wasn’t that much worse. The slave trade was blamed on local African rulers who sold Africans into slavery rather than the slave traders and plantation owners. The death rate of the Middle Passage is alleged not due to the terrible conditions that the slaves endured, but as Lee explained, “… due to the immense psychological shock of being ripped from surroundings that, if brutal, were at least familiar …”

Further Lee explains:

Much is made of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and it was in truth horrific. But it may be commented that the sixteen inches of deck space allotted each slave is not all that much smaller that the eighteen inches that the Royal Navy allowed for each sailor’s hammock and the slaves rapidly had more room due to the much higher death rate.

Lee argues that the efforts by the British to stop the slave trade were harmful. He also feels that the sailors on the slave ships were treated worse than the slaves. Lee concludes his speech by saying:

I have said and will say little about the morality of the trade. Like it or not, before machines, there was no replacement for forced labor, and of its various forms slavery was the easiest to use. I will say this: condemnation is easy and there is always enough blame to go around. … ‘judge not lest we also be judged.’[xvii]

More recent and note worthy promotion of neo-Confederacy by the UDC is the promotion of the Abbeville Institute (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/) by Clara Erath[xviii] and the UDC awarding its director Donald Livingston, leading neo-Confederate intellectual, the Jefferson Davis Gold Medal.[xix] Donald Livingston was formerly the head of the League of the South Institute until he broke away and formed the Abbeville Institute. The new institute is largely the same people who were formerly in the League of the South Institute and comprises the who’s who of neo-Confederate professors. He is also a contributor to the racist website “Stalking the Wild Taboo.”[xx]

Another prominent UDC Magazine columnist named Retta D. Tindall recommended Michael Andrew Grissom’s book, “Southern By the Grace of God,” in a 2007 column titled “Confederate Classics: For Research, Reference, or Refresher.” According to Tindall, “If you have a child or a grandchild or a UDC friend or family member who loves Confederate history, these books are sure to become treasures, too.”

In reviewing Grissom’s writing and making it clear what she considers “heritage,” Tindall states:

Mr. Grissom wrote this book for four reasons: to offer a firm understanding of our heritage, to instill pride in being Southern, to pursue the elements that characterize the South, and to rally Southerners to defend and preserve their heritage.

It is clear that even in 2007 the UDC continues to define “Southern heritage” as white nationalism.

[i] The online publication, Black Commentator, has an article about the UDC’s racist history at (http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html).
[ii] Fannie Selph, The South in American Life and History, Nashville Chapters of United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1928, pp. 372-374.
[iii] ---, “Memorial Fund to Honor Wilson Boosted by U.D.C,” Atlanta Constitution, 11/22/1924.
[iv] Walter Henry Cook, “Secret Political Societies in the South During The Period of Reconstruction,” The Southern Magazine, pages 3-5, 42-43, Vol. III No. 1, July 1936, News Publishing Company, Wytheville, Virginia.
[v] Mildred Rutherford, an address, “The Thirteen Periods of United States History,” delivered as UDC Historian General to the UDC convention, November 13, 1913, from a section titled, “The Humiliated South of The Reconstruction Period.”
[vi] Bruce Dunstan, Jefferson Davis – The Man America Needs Today,” UDC Magazine, June 1958, pp. 19, 23, 26, 27, quote on page 23.
[vii] Gen. Sumter Lowry, UDC Magazine, serialized over two issues, February 1959 pp. 32, March 1959, pp. 15, 22, 24, a speech at a UDC convention. The complete text can be read in “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The ‘Great Truth’ about the ‘Lost Cause,” University Press of Mississippi, Jacksonk, 2010.
[viii] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes,” page 11, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 58 No. 7, August, 1995.
[ix] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes,” page 9, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 62 No. 11, December 1999.
[x] Grissom, Mike, “The Mystery of John Hunt Cole,” pages 27-29, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 51 No. 9, September 1988.
[xi] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes,” page 9, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 53 No. 10, October 1990.
[xii] Weaver, Richard, “The Southern Tradition At Bay,” pages 388-389, published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1968.
[xiii] Weaver, Richard, “The Southern Tradition At Bay,” page 52, published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1968.
[xiv] Weaver, Richard, “The Southern Tradition At Bay,” page 168, published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1968.
[xv] Weaver, Richard, “The Southern Tradition At Bay,” page 169, published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1968.
[xvi] Weaver, Richard, “The Southern Tradition At Bay,” page 394, published by Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1968.
[xvii] Lee, Dr. Walter W., III, “The African Slave Trade,” pages 18-19, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 52 No. 4, April 1989.
[xviii] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes: The Value of Southern Tradition,” page 17, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 68 No. 7, August 2005.
[xix] Erath, Clara, “Confederate Notes: Abbeville Institute Co-Founder & President Honored,” page 18, United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, Vol. 68 No. 10, November 2005.
[xx] Livingston, Donald, “Secession and the Modern State,” http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/dwliv01.html, printed 1/29/11. The white supremacist ideology of this website and be read at this main page, http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/index.html.

Letter to Obama mentioned in the "Washingtonian"

2010-11-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

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?"

2010-10-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-21T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-07T09:35:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-02-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-01-10T18:14:00.001-08:00

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

Final Report on 2009 letter to President Obama concerning the Arlington Confederate monument

2009-10-26T04:35:00.000-07:00

REPORT ON 2009 LETTER TO OBAMA CONCERNING THE ARLINGTON CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL – Ed Sebesta 10/17/09

INTRODUCTION:

I started researching neo-Confederates in 1991, and have become aware of the ways the Federal government aids and enables neo-Confederacy.

Currently the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a racist organization,[1] is an eligible charity in the Combined Federal Campaign, an equivalent of the United Way, for Federal employees.[2] The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), another racist organization,[3] gives awards named after Confederates to cadets in the American military service academies.[4] President William Clinton sent no less than three separate letters of congratulations to the UDC in less than a year after Carol Moseley Braun successfully denied the UDC renewal of their Patent for their design.[5] Recently the SCV announced an intention to get involved in the Junior ROTC in the schools of South Carolina.[6]

A recent issue of the Confederate Veteran, an official publication of the SCV, has the following photo caption:

“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.”

In the photo you can see the officers, many of them African American, standing around a Confederate monument with the Confederate battle flag marked on it.[7] If you enlist with the U.S. Army you might end up attending an event organized by the SCV.

Finally, there is the wreath that is annually sent to the Arlington Confederate Monument by the President on Memorial Day.

Federal support for neo-Confederacy legitimizes state and local support for neo-Confederacy.

I have not yet compiled a comprehensive list of all the ways the Federal government supports and enables neo-Confederacy but, following the publication of my co-edited book “Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction,” (University of Texas, 2008), I decided to start writing to my elected representatives to attempt to put an end in to these practices. I wrote letters both to my congressional representative Eddie Bernice Johnson and President Barack Obama about the SCV attempting to get involved with JROTC and the UDC giving awards to cadets at the U.S. service academies and I did not get any response from Rep. Johnson and only a non-specific form card thanking me for my opinion from President Obama.

Following these initial letters I decided to target the annual ceremony at Arlington, and hoped that on Memorial Day (25 May 2009) no Presidential wreath would be sent to the Confederate Memorial. Collaborating with James Loewen, we drafted a letter and form for signatures.

OPERATIONS:

Our letter explaining the Confederate ideology inherent in the Arlington Confederate memorial sculpture and its origins, and criticizing the practice of laying a Presidential wreath, initially gathered 21 signatures during the week prior to Saturday 5/16/09. I had a few contacts and I started pulling books off the shelf of my history library of authors I thought would be sympathetic and started to email them. On Saturday 5/16/09 I both faxed the letter and a table of the co-signers, and delivered hard copies through the United States Post Office and United Parcel Service (UPS), to the White House. Following that mailing James Loewen contacted people he knew for signatures. On the Wednesday, 5/20/09, prior to Memorial Day, I faxed a longer list of signatures, a copy of the letter and a copy of an article about the letter published on History News Network. I did a final fax to the White House on Friday, 5/22/09. While gathering these signatures we also sought media coverage for our letter. James Loewen, Michael Phillips, and Frederick Clarkson all helped with getting press coverage. In total there were 66 co-signers of our letter.

RESULTS

The story first broke on the History News Network on Tuesday, 5/19/09, through James Loewen’s efforts. The History News Network published our letter in its entirety and a partial list of the co-signers. Then journalist Judy Pasternak, who I had been working with, published an article on The Daily Beast news site (5/21/09). The Dallas Morning News decided to run a story, written by Marjorie Korn, who Michael Phillips had been working with, on Sunday, 5/24/09. This article ran on the same day in the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. James Loewen and I then got calls from the Associated Press, which ran the story. Throughout this week prior to Memorial Day, other media picked up the topic: ABC News, for example, covered the story and carried the text of our letter on their website on 5/23/09.

As our letter gained publicity, one of our co-signers, who taught at a Christian private school, became the target of neo-Confederate activists who emailed the head of that school complaining about the letter and signature, even though the History News Network stated on their web page with our letter that the institutional affiliations were for identification purposes only. One of our co-signers was Bill Ayers. The media focused on this, which distracted from the message and arguments of our letter, and gave the impression that our effort and assessment of the Arlington Confederate monument was that of extreme radicals.

In my attempt to get signatures, I emailed Kirk Savage, professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of "Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America" (Princeton University Press, 1997). He did not want to sign, and suggested to me that Obama send a wreath to the Confederate monument and to make some other compensatory observance. I didn’t agree with him and explained why. Following our correspondence, on Saturday, May 23, 2009, before Memorial Day, the Washington Post published an article about the Arlington wreath laying by Savage:

Many of my colleagues in academia are urging President Obama to pull the plug on this tradition. I doubt that he will, for the simple reason that the men buried around the Confederate memorial sacrificed, suffered and died just as the black and white soldiers of the Union did. Most of the descendants of those Confederates, whatever their political stripe today, would be loath to deny their ancestors a simple gesture of recognition.

In my opinion, Savage avoided the issue that the Arlington Confederate monument obscures the issue of slavery and glorifies the Confederacy: the monument isn’t just funereal. Savage's Washington Post essay recommended that President Obama send a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial in addition to the Arlington Confederate Memorial.[8] On Memorial Day, 25 May 2009, Obama did just that. He additionally sent wreaths to the mast of the USS Maine and the Spanish-American War Memorial in Arlington Cemetery.[9]

The story and the controversy over sending the wreath was covered by CNN, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, http://www.politico.com/, ABC News, and the Washington Times, among others, on May 25, 2009, as the issue of the Arlington Confederate monument and the wreath became part of the general news coverage of President Obama’s observances of Memorial Day.

Coverage typically mentioned three key elements of the debate over our letter. First, that President Obama was going to continue to lay a wreath at the Confederate memorial in Arlington, despite our letter. Second, that President Obama, indirectly responding to our letter, became the first president to send a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial, albeit, I think, as token compensation for sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument. Third, President Obama, ignoring the comments about neo-Confederate ideology outlined in our letter, touched on the Civil War and used some “Romance of Reunion” themes in his Memorial Day speech, a speech which was reported in the media as a response to our letter. Obama stated:

"Those who rest in these fields fought in every American war. They overthrew an empire and gave birth to revolution. They strained to hold a young union together. They rolled back the creeping tide of tyranny, and stood post through a long twilight struggle. And they took on the terror and extremism that threatens our world’s stability.

Their stories are the American story. More than seven generations of them are chronicled here at Arlington. They’re etched into stone, recounted by family and friends, and silently observed by the mighty oaks that have stood over burial after burial.

To walk these grounds then is to walk through that history. Not far from here, appropriately just across a bridge connecting Lincoln to Lee, Union and Confederate soldiers share the same land in perpetuity. (emphasis added)[10]"

The sections highlighted, particularly the last paragraph, are reminiscent of language regarding the Civil War during the early twentieth century which obscured the issues of slavery and race, and yet we continue to hear it two generations after the modern civil rights era.

The SCV sent a message of congratulations to President Obama for sending the wreath.[11] This is somewhat hypocritical since the SCV in the Southern Mercury, the publication of their educational foundation, had hysterical articles predicting race war if Obama got elected.[12]

In the week following Memorial Day, Lonnie Randolph, head of the South Carolina NAACP spoke out denouncing President Obama’s decision to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate memorial. In an article in the Charleston Post and Courier, 5/29/09, Randolph said that he was drafting a letter to send to Obama condemning his decision to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate memorial. In turn Lonnie Randolph was attacked by Randall B. Burbage, commander of the South Carolina State SCV division. Burbage claimed that Randolph's comments were an “attack on the country’s heritage” and “pitting South Carolinians against each other.” Given the articles of the SCV publication, Southern Mercury, Burbage’s comments are truly hypocritical.[13]

Additional articles were run on the History New Network about the Arlington Confederate Memorial, one by James Loewen on 5/28/09[14] and another on 6/15/09 by Ron Maxwell,[15] one of the speakers at the Arlington Confederate memorial. Maxwell’s speech was also on Huffington Post.[16] A video of Maxwell’s speech is online at the Stephen D. Lee Institute of the SCV.[17]

President Obama has not, as of 10/13/09, replied directly to our letter about the monument.

ASSESSMENT

In general I have contradictory assessments of the results of the letter. This view is not shared by my co-writer James Loewen and is mine alone.

On the positive side it is probably better known now than it has been for decades that there is an Arlington Confederate monument and that presidents have been sending wreaths to it. Also, the ideology behind the monument is now known to at least some people, whereas before, excepting a few neo-Confederates, it wasn’t widely known. Additionally, by reading our letter online many more people also know that there is a neo-Confederate movement. This is an initial step in making the public aware of the federal government’s support for neo-Confederacy.

On the negative side, President Obama, by sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument, has legitimized Confederate monuments in general. The neo-Confederates are very keen to have the Confederacy be legitimized by finding and promoting African Americans who praise the Confederacy or at least deny that there is anything negative in honoring the Confederacy. What better African American to do this than the first African American president? Neo-Confederates also keep track of acts of the presidents that can be used to defend Confederates and the Confederacy. For example, the public may not be aware that President Eisenhower had a picture of Robert E. Lee in the Oval Office, but neo-Confederates are.

Additionally, sending a wreath to the African American Civil War Memorial establishes the principal that one gesture compensates for another. Observing the past becomes a racial balancing game. Instead of an action being judged on its own merits, in this case by our commitment to civil rights and racial equality, it becomes a matter of doling out favors to be equaled out between groups. For example, someone might speak at a function of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (http://www.cofcc.org/) but claim it was okay since they were also scheduled to speak at a fundraiser for the United Negro College Fund.

Finally, President Obama’s speech legitimized what should be discredited; the Romance of Reunion language of the early 20th Century, a period described by James Loewen as the 'nadir' of U.S. race relations.

However, further reflecting on Obama’s action of sending a wreath to the African American Civil War memorial, I think there are some positives to it. This is very likely going to be an annual observance by President Obama for the rest of his term of office, and I doubt that following presidents will want to cease this observance, if only to avoid controversy. Also, each year when a wreath goes to the African American Civil War memorial the historical narratives on how this annual presidential observance came to be will involve our letter. Since Obama sent the wreath to the African American Civil War memorial in response to our request not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate memorial, the historical narrative also can have implications that the African American Civil War memorial is in opposition to the Arlington Confederate monument and thus suggest an abolitionist meaning to the Civil War and possibly puts a potential tension of opposites into the annual Memorial Day observances.

The additional wreaths also raise the question of why not more wreaths. If there is a wreath for one Civil War memorial for Union soldiers who are African American why not more wreaths for other Civil War Union soldiers who were not? What veterans of what wars are overlooked now? Why not a wreath for the veterans of the Mexican American War, the Barbary War? There is the potential for some historical group or hereditary organization to ask for a wreath for their chosen monument and excavate for a future discussion the Memorial Day changes in 2008 and bring to the public’s attention the historical narrative of what happened then. So I see that for a couple reasons the discussion of the issues raised in our letter will continue into the future.

The historical narrative also raises a question about what happened next for the opposition to the Arlington Confederate memorial. A question we need to answer before the next Memorial Day.

I think that President Obama’s failure to reply directly to our letter is inexcusable. Yet, our letter did have an impact. Although a wreath was laid at Arlington, Obama took time to change the presidential memorial tradition in response to our letter; he took time to modify his speech in response to our letter; and, the White House took time to tell the press that they were going to ignore our letter's suggestion that no wreath be placed at the Arlington Confederate memorial.

When dealing with issues of race so far in his Presidency, Obama does have time to have beer with Sgt. Crowley, the officer who arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates at his home recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has also countered Jimmy Carter’s statements that the intensity of the hostility against him is based on race. Yet, he doesn’t have the time to answer a thoughtful letter concerning the continued display of white supremacy evident in the USA's very landscape.

In the 1950s, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. Senator, responded to Blanch Ames Ames’ letter complaining about his white supremacist views of Reconstruction in his book, “Profiles in Courage,” specifically in regards to Aldebert Ames, Reconstruction-era governor of Mississippi. She merely was a single prominent individual. As President, Kennedy had a White House counsel respond to a follow up letter by Blanch Ames Ames complaining about a forthcoming TV series based on his book.[18]

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the time to reply on August 18, 1960 in a letter to a letter by a Dr. Scott criticizing his having a portrait of Robert E. Lee in the White House.[19]

In contrast, the White House announced that Obama was going to ignore the message of Confederate symbolism and white supremacy at the Arlington monument that our letter described because, I believe, he had no good answer to the points raised our letter. I could be wrong, but because Obama has chosen opacity over transparency, that is, chosen to ignore us, and not to reply to us, by necessity we have to rely on our own speculations as to his motives.

FUTURE PLANS

I plan to send another letter next year to President Obama or take some other action and have started a blog: http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/.

However, there are several possible avenues of action to pursue the issue of presidents sending wreaths to the Arlington Confederate monument and the Federal government’s support of neo-Confederacy. I solicit input from the readers of this report.

One possible action is another single letter for 2010, with co-signers with a different focus and scope. It could be the various ways the Federal government supports neo-Confederacy (including the wreath sent to the Arlington Confederate monument) or the historical opposition of African Americans to Confederate memoralization.

Another possible approach is to not have one letter, but different letters, some with and some without co-signers sent to President Obama. Having more than one letter accommodates differing viewpoints on how to approach the subject. I would though very much like to have a copy of all letters.

Perhaps there could be a panel on the issues involved with Civil War memoralization could be conducted in Washington, D.C. with an invitation to President Obama. These suggestions are not mutually exclusive.

I would be interested in suggestions as to what future course of action should be taken. If you have suggestions please email them to me. I hope to have an effective effort in 2010. I hope to have the support of the signers of the 2009 letter.

ARCHIVING:

Finally, I have carefully archived in a file box, the letter, the records of faxing, signature forms, mailings, news articles, White House web pages, neo-Confederate web pages, blog pages, and all the historical records that I was able to find concerning the Arlington Confederate monument, and anything else relevant regarding our efforts to ask President Obama to not send a wreath to it in May 2009.

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-11/joe-wilsons-rebel-yell/; http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=258; I don’t agree with these sources that the SCV was formerly focused on “heritage,” but later became a racist organization, my own research shows otherwise.
[2] http://www.scv.org/pdf/2009CFCapprovalLetter.pdf
[3] http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html, the information in this article about the UDC is accurate, I supplied it myself.
[4] I have tracked this practice back at least back to 1967. In the May 2009 issue of United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine, the President General lists a Robert E. Lee award at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis; the Lt. Gen. Claire L. Chenault award at the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs; the Matthew Fontaine Maury award at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point; the Stonewall Jackson award at the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington; and the William Porcher award at the Citadel, Charleston.
[5] http://www.blackcommentator.com/274/274_clinton_udc.html, I also supplied copies of Bill Clinton’s letters.
[6] http://sonsofconfederateveterans.blogspot.com/search?q=Jrotc, it is item No. 12 on the list.
[7] No author, no title, Confederate Veteran, Vol. 64 No. 3, May/June 2006, pp. 39, lower left corner.
[8] Kirk Savage, Washington Post, May 23, 2009, “The President and the Confederacy,” www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/22/AR2009052202999.html, printed out 5/23/09.
[9] Cable News Network, “Obama asks Americans to remember fallen troops,” http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/25/obama.memorial.day/index.html?iref-newssearch, printed out on 5/21/09.
[10] Barack Obama, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Memorial-Day/, printed out 5/24/2009/
[11] See: http://sonsofconfederateveterans.blogspot.com/2009/05/scv-pleased-with-obama-sending-wreath.html
[12] Rev. Robert Slimp, “Americans Face The Worst Presidential Candidates in History,” Southern Mercury, Vol. 6 No. 3, May – June 2008, pp. 28-33. As it became apparent that the next president would be Obama, Slimp had published in the same periodical, “Will The 2008 Election Bring the End of the America We Know?,” Vol. 6 No. 4, July – August 2008, pp. 34-37.
[13] Yvonne Wenger, The Post and Courier, May 29, 2009, “State NAACP leader blasts Obama,” www.postandcourier.com/news/2009/may/29/state_naacp_leader_blasts_obama84128/, printed out 5/29/09.
[14] http://hnn.us/articles/87913.html
[15] http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/92074.html
[16] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-maxwell/on-the-occasion-of-presid_b_212674.html.
[17] http://stephendleeinstitute.com/video/arlington/
[18] Blanche Ames Ames, “Adelbert Ames: Broken Oaths and Reconstruction in Mississippi: 1835-1938,” Argosy-Antiquarian Ltd., New York, pub. 1964, pp. 556-62, 566-67.
[19] Rachel C. Larson, et al., authors, “American Republic for Christian Schools,” 2nd Edition, Bob Jones University Press, Greenville, South Carolina, pub. 2000, pp. 328. In this text book, Eisenhower’s having a portrait of Robert E. Lee and defense of Lee, is used by the text book to defend and glorify Lee. John Hope Franklin in a letter to me in 1991 told me that he had written a letter published in the Washington Post criticizing Eisenhower for his portrait of Lee in the White House. I spent some houses going through microfilm but have not found Hope’s letter.

Essay by James Lowen on Obama and the Arlington Confederate monument online at the History News Network

2009-05-28T17:29:00.001-07:00

The essay by James Loewen is online at:

http://hnn.us/articles/87913.html

Currently I am covering the developments regarding the letter to Obama concerning the Arlington Confederate Monument at my other blog.

2009-05-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

You can read the news concerning the letter, the letter itself, and other developments at my other blog Anti-Neo-Confederate. http://newtknight.blogspot.com/.

I am going to reduplicate the information at this blog. The campaign for next years letter to Obama will be reported in this blog.