Racism, Revisionist History, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy
Mar 21, 2022
Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter
This week we’re going to talk about the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a neo-confederate group for women that began in 1894. The Southern Poverty Law Center defines neo-confederacy as “a reactionary, revisionist branch of American white nationalism typified by its predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America, typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession – in the specific context of the antebellum South – that rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.” Basically, the UDC is an exclusive club of upper middle to upper class White women with a revisionist racist ideology and enough power to alter textbooks and curricula, erect hundreds of still-standing Confederate monuments, and maintain solid membership numbers over a century after it was initially formed.
A few common themes arose in listening to, reading, and watching podcasts, articles, and videos about the UDC. One was that even the devil’s advocates think they are uniformly racist. Folx who perhaps always frustratingly present an alternative point of view to someone else’s truth about oppression – folx who believe that systemic racism magically ended some nebulous time in the last fifty years. Folx who call themselves “reasonable and capable of seeing both sides” and also have some deeply seated racist views of their own (present in the podcast link above, FYI). To be clear, I did not engage in far-right media about this and I know many people embrace UDC’s ideology and practices.
There is a definite, across the board, rejection of the UDC’s values and a distinct distancing that happens when other well-intentioned White people talk about them. A quickness to refer to them as traitors who represent the losing side of the Civil War, and a really interesting internal hierarchy that forms around them being clearly racist, while the person critiquing them is inherently less racist and perhaps not having “work” to do. Don’t get me wrong, these UDC women wear their racism on their sleeve, although they tailor that sleeve nicely enough to win support of politicians. Or perhaps what they do is less dressing it up pretty and more denying it’s there – as though so many of us are saying “hey, your racism is right there, clearly on your sleeve” and their response is “I’m not wearing any sleeves”, even when they obviously are. The UDC are really proficient at altering reality.
(Current day members from the "Rebel Joan of Arc" Chapter in Montgomery County, Texas, 2018. Local newspaper quote, "Members and their guests were treated to a beautiful evening." From: https://www.yourconroenews.com/neighborhood/moco/events/article/UDC-Rebel-Joan-of-Arc-Chapter-celebrates-first-13092074.php)
This labeling and rejection of the UDC isn’t wrong. They are, however, perhaps too easy a target. It’s similar to how I, long ago, described the profiles of White Womanhood and the subtleties between them. That Hannah, in an attempt to clear her name of racism and point out those other bad White people, is really quick to deride the Karens or the Miss Annes for their blatant racism. It’s a way of saying, “that’s really bad over there, and I’m not that so I must be doing fine.” I see the need to hold the UDC accountable for what they do, which I’ll get in to, and I also wonder how we can do that while still acknowledging the role that we play in creating an environment where the UDC can still have this active of a membership? It’s a spectrum, and we all have a part in addressing the most abjectly harmful pieces of it while also seeing that if we don’t look inward to see how we’ve contributed, then we are giving a sort of tacit permission for all of it to continue.
The other part that I grapple with is the “you lost the Civil War and are thus glorifying racist traitors” mentality. Yes, I suppose this is true. But why is that the go-to addendum response to why we shouldn’t preserve Confederacy culture? Firstly, Black people had been fighting for freedom and against slavery long before the Civil War began, so adhering to this mindset sort of assumes that fight started and stopped with the war. Don’t Black lives matter enough to warrant not celebrating the Confederacy regardless of the outcome of that war? I sure hope we would have the same vitriolic response even if the war wasn’t so explicitly about slavery. What’s more, while we don’t legally have slavery, we haven’t achieved a society yet where we all agree that everyone has the right to live freely and decently so I’m not sure why pointing to the South losing a war is so significant – it seems like we, as a society, haven’t really won anything yet. Painting Confederate soldiers as traitors, while accurate, glosses over some of the more profound reasons why we should all be working to ensure that the Confederacy-as-heritage mentality dies out. Don’t forget, the North wasn’t a beacon of Black freedom, justice, and equity after the Civil War, either.
We still have work to do, and the “you lost, take down your statues” refrain takes away from the very valid point that the statues aren’t actually there to preserve the honor of the Southern soldiers and generals lost during the Civil War. They aren’t there to promote dialogue, understanding, and unity, a way to look at both sides. They are there as a terrifying reminder for Black and brown communities about who has the right to memory, history, and public space.
(The 1922 wreath laying at the Arlington National Cemetery's Confederate Memorial. From: https://www.historynet.com/bitter-legacy-women-confederate-monuments/)
So, who are the UDC? I will let them tell you. They have a fairly extensive history, so I’ll summarize a few main points here. They were formally founded in 1894 as an auxiliary women’s group, after years of White women caring for Confederate soldiers through knitting circles, making bandages, and tending Confederate gravesites. In 1914, their membership had swelled to over 100,000 members in numerous nationwide chapters – that’s right, they don’t just exist in the South. In fact, they held their 1905 annual meeting in San Francisco. To become a member, one has to be a “lineal or collateral blood descendant of men and women who served honorably in the Army…of the Confederate States of America”. This person could not have given the Oath of Allegiance to the North before 1865 (meaning, they must have died or surrendered ever-faithful to the ideals of the Confederacy). They currently have about 20,000 members.
As Confederate veterans were dying out in the decades after the war, the UDC rose to prominence as way to preserve the Confederacy’s legacy. Before I get into exactly how, there’s a necessary point to make here that the UDC, and many other White women of the time, played to the defeat of White men during the Civil War, calling on them to protect and honor White women to resuscitate and demonstrate their masculinity. This was done in a few ways: By asking White men to donate space or money, or to help in making the UDC the keepers of tradition. There was a sentiment around White women demanding that White men prove themselves and protect the sanctity of White women. Remember the reporting Ida B. Wells did around the role that White women played in the lynching of Black men? The thousands of murders committed for the reason of protecting White women? The UDC was certainly an integral part in the creation of the culture that made it acceptable to murder Black men under the false presuppositions of White women’s purity.
The UDC has done a lot and they will continue to. They moved Confederate remains from mass graves to their own graves, and they erected many of the Confederate statues still around today, including one 1926 monument to the KKK in the city of Concord, North Carolina. “The United Daughters of the Confederacy totally denounces any individual or group that promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy”, claims their current president, Linda Edwards. In 1906, the UDC raised funds to erect a Confederate memorial in the Arlington Cemetery, with President Taft’s approval. Some argue that they have been the single most effective advocates for ensuring that Confederate statutes remain. Even after they have been purportedly removed, some Confederate statues were given back to the UDC to store or maintain in their museum. While the UDC is technically a nonprofit organization, they do receive some funding for the maintenance of the Confederate graves – since 2009, Virginia taxpayers have paid over $800,000 to the UDC.
The group frustratingly still wields enormous influence in the discussion around naming public space and discourse around Confederate memory. In 2016, Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University decided they wanted to change the name of their Confederate Memorial Hall, constructed in 1935 with the help of a $50,000 donation from the UDC. The UDC sued Vanderbilt for their desire to change the name, charging that Vanderbilt either keep the name of building as is, or repay the UDC for their contribution at its current fiscal value: a whopping $1.2 million. It was a complete lose-lose for Vanderbilt, which has plenty of other racistly-named buildings on campus, so this is definitely a reckoning that continues.
(Confederate Memorial Hall, Vanderbilt University. From: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/16/vanderbilt-pays-back-donation-daughters-confederacy-so-it-can-remove-confederate)
The UDC is also one of the most effective purveyors of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. This narrative has a few basic components: the Civil War was a war of Northern aggression and slavery had nothing to do with it; enslaved people were well treated, faithful, and happy for the opportunity to be morally uplifted by their righteous work; the North won the war only because of its military might; and Confederate soldiers and Confederate women are really virtuous and honorable. Please take a moment to read this piece. If you are feeling like this is eerily similar to the violent whitewashing that we’re witnessing today in the Critical Race Theory and parental rights debates, then you’re on the right track.
In 1919 (the year of the Red Summer), UDC member Mildred Lewis Rutherford, in conjunction with the UDC and the United Confederate Veterans, published The Measuring Rod, a 23-page pamphlet detailing what acceptable historical facts would be allowed in library books and educational materials across the South. The short video below describes the impacts that this has had on textbooks, some of which, up until recently, referred to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression”. Essentially, this pamphlet instructed various school boards and learning institutions across the South to reject any books and materials that did not give full “justice” to the cause of the South, including recommending that they deface such books with the words “Unjust to the South”.
The intent here is to educate White youth with the Lost Cause mentality. Something to keep in mind: youth educated with these materials in the 1920s would become fully grown supporters of the Lost Cause right when the Civil Rights Movement was happening. And the cycle continues. But, the UDC didn’t just stop in 1919 with this guide. They have a full-on children’s education branch, titled Children of the Confederacy, or CofC. Probably one of the more Orwellian aspects of the CofC are their “catechisms”, in which the children memorize and “Recite basic beliefs and elements of Confederate history”. Here is a sample of the 1904 Catechism for Children from the Texas UDC chapters. Question 13 reads: How were the slaves treated? Answer (remember, this is recited by children): With great kindness and care in nearly all cases…” Question 14: What was the feeling of the slaves toward their masters? Answer: They were faithful and devoted and always ready and willing to serve them.
Take a minute to think about the consequences of this. They are too many to count. This is not isolated in the past. This is absolutely violent revisionism that leads to entire swaths of the population severely distorting the truth in ways that have real human and structural impacts. While extreme, this type of re-writing and cause-justifying does not extend to this group alone. They are diluting and disregarding the violences of the past that they have a direct link to and that still create palpable divisions to this day.
(One of the Children of the Confederacy chapters. From: https://www.leadingwomenoftomorrow.com/blogposts/2020/9/7/the-united-daughters-of-the-confederacy-using-lost-cause-history-to-shape-americas-future)
We continue to live in a political moment that disregards the real, complicated, painful truth. Negating that history negates the current realities that so many of our community members have experienced. It denies the fullness of humanity and denies our children and ourselves the chance to expand, to learn, to grow, and to ultimately not replicate the same mistakes. There is a certain deprivation of joy that comes along with this, too, one that often doesn’t get spoken about. By denying us the chance to learn about our history, or the chance for our children to fully express themselves (these two endeavors are very closely linked), we deprive our nation of that feeling of working really hard at something that was really difficult and that tested our self-worth. Great grief can bring great joy and addressing that our wounds exist is the only way to heal them, and to embody that sense of joy, loss, and resilience in the act of healing. If we can’t do that, we relegate ourselves to continuing to live in the two-dimensional reality that was ill-thought of 400 years ago.
Additional Resources:
Read this for a more nuanced look at the space the Confederate flag occupies in our current cultural memory.
This article outlines other women who are active in the present day far-right White Supremacist movement. I was struck by how many followers some of these women have on social media, although maybe I shouldn’t have been.
This clip from the Golden Girls shows Blanche and actor Don Cheadle in a few scenes from an episode where we discover that Blanche is a member of the Daughters of the Traditional South. It’s meant to end on a feel-good note.
This article and this podcast both provide a much more in-depth historical analysis of the UDC.
