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United Daughters of the Confederacy

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This article is about the nonprofit organization. For Memorial Building of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, see Memorial to Women of the Confederacy.

United Daughters
of the
Confederacy
AbbreviationUDC
EstablishedSeptember 10, 1894; 129 years ago (1894-09-10)
Founders
  • Caroline Goodlett
  • Anna Raines
Founded atNashville, Tennessee
TypeVoluntary association
54-0631483
HeadquartersRichmond, Virginia
Membership (2015)
19,294
PublicationUDC Magazine
SubsidiariesChildren of the Confederacy
Websitehqudc.org
Formerly called
National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, also known as the UDC, is a hereditary association of Southern women established in 1894. The stated purposes of the organization include, among other things, the commemoration of Confederate soldiers, and one of its main activities has been the funding of the erection of monuments to these men; this and the organization's treatment of the Confederacy as heroic and slavery as harmless along with its promotion of the Lost Cause movement have been viewed by some as white supremacist.[1][2][3][4][5]

Formation and purpose

The UDC was established in September 10, 1894 at Nashville, Tennessee, by Caroline Goodlett and Anna Raines. According to the author Kristina DuRocher, the stated aims of the organization included "creating a social network, memorializing the war, maintaining a 'truthful record of the noble and chivalric achievements' of their veterans, and teaching the next generation 'a proper respect for and pride in the glorious war history'."[6]

In 1896, the organization established the Children of the Confederacy to teach the same values to the younger generation, through a mythical depiction of the Civil War and Confederacy designed to rewrite history. According to DuRocher, "Like the KKK's children's groups, the UDC utilized the Children of the Confederacy to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future."[7]

The communications studies scholar W. Stuart Towns notes UDC's role "in demanding textbooks for public schools that told the story of the war and the Confederacy from a definite southern point of view". He adds that their work is one of the "essential elements [of] perpetuating Confederate mythology".[8]

History

Early work

Monument dedicated by the UDC on August 8, 1908

Across the Southern United States, associations were founded after the Civil War, chiefly by women, to organize burials of Confederate soldiers, establish and care for permanent cemeteries, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor impressive monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition.[9]

The organization was "strikingly successful at raising money to build monuments, lobbying legislatures and Congress for the reburial of Confederate dead, and working to shape the content of history textbooks."[10] They also raised money to care for the widows and children of the Confederate dead. Most of these memorial associations gradually merged into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew from 17,000 total members in 1900 to nearly 100,000 by World War I.[11]

Monuments and memorials

The UDC was influential primarily in the early twentieth century across the South, where its main role was to preserve and uphold the memory of the Confederate veterans, especially those husbands, sons, fathers and brothers who died in the Civil War. Memory and memorials became the central focus of the organization.[12][13]

Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall argues that the UDC was a powerful promoter of women's history:

DC leaders were determined to assert women's cultural authority over virtually every representation of the region's past. This they did by lobbying for state archives and museums, national historic sites, and historic highways; compiling genealogies; interviewing former soldiers; writing history textbooks; and erecting monuments, which now moved triumphantly from cemeteries into town centers. More than half a century before women's history and public history emerged as fields of inquiry and action, the UDC, with other women's associations, strove to etch women's accomplishments into the historical record and to take history to the people, from the nursery and the fireside to the schoolhouse and the public square.[14]

Monument dedicated by the UDC on September 19, 1928

"The number of women's clubs devoted to filiopietism and history was staggering," says historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage. He notes two typical club women in Texas and Mississippi, who between them belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Daughters of the American Revolution, Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Daughters of the Pilgrims, Daughters of the War of 1812, Daughters of Colonial Governors, and Daughters of the Founders and Patriots of America, Order of the First Families of Virginia, and the Colonial Dames of America, as well as a few other historically oriented societies. Comparable men, on the other hand, were much less interested in historical organizations, and devoted their energies to secret fraternal societies, while they emphasized athletic, political and financial exploits. Brundage notes that after women's suffrage came in 1920, the historical role of the women's organizations eroded.[15]

Confederate Memorial Hall in 2006. Now known as Memorial Hall.

After 1900 the UDC became an umbrella organization coordinating local memorial groups.[16] The UDC women specialized in sponsoring local memorials. After 1945, they were active in placing historical markers along Southern highways.[17] The UDC has also been active in national causes during wartime. According to the organization, during World War I, it funded 70 hospital beds at the American Military Hospital on the Western front and contributed over US$82,000 for French and Belgian war orphans. The homefront campaign raised $24 million for war bonds and savings stamps. Members also donated $800,000 to the Red Cross. During World War II, they gave financial aid to student nurses. The UDC donated $50,000 for the construction of a Confederate memorial hall on the campus of Vanderbilt University in 1935.[18][19] By August 2016, the university returned $1.2 million to the UDC after the board of trust, backed by anonymous donors, agreed to remove the word "Confederate" from the building.[18][19]

Memoirs

The UDC encouraged women to publish their experiences in the war, beginning with biographies of major southern figures, such as Varina Davis's of her husband Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. Later, women began adding more of their own experiences to the "public discourse about the war", in the form of memoirs, such as those published in the early 1900s by Sara Pryor, Virginia Clopton, Louise Wright and others. They also recommended structures for the memoirs. By the turn of the twentieth century, a dozen memoirs by southern women were published. These memoirs were part of the growing public memory about the antebellum years and the Lost Cause narrative, which critics[who?] have described as white supremacist, as they vigorously defended the Confederacy and its founding principles (which included the enslavement of African-Americans).[20][21]

Notable Members

Assessment

During the period 1880-1910, the UDC was one of many groups that celebrated Lost Cause mythology and presented "a romanticized view of the slavery era" in the United States.[3] Historian James M. McPherson has said that the present-day UDC promotes a white supremacist and neo-Confederate agenda,[23] saying "I think I agree a hundred percent with Ed Sebesta, though, about the motives or the hidden agenda not too deeply hidden I think of such groups as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. They are dedicated to celebrating the Confederacy and rather thinly veiled support for white supremacy. And I think that also is the again not very deeply hidden agenda of the Confederate flag issue in several Southern states. "[24]

Kirk Savage, professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in his book Monument Wars that the UDC has tried to legitimize Jim Crow rule in the American South.[25][need quotation to verify] Savage wrote in When Should the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop?, "In the 1890s, with the rise of openly white supremacist state and local governments, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) among others embarked on a systematic campaign of commemoration that extended from monument building to rewriting school textbooks and sponsoring rituals for white schoolchildren. While much of the overt indoctrination is now gone, the material traces of this campaign still permeate cities and small towns."[26]

Children of the Confederacy

The Children of the Confederacy, also known as the CofC, is an auxiliary organization to the UDC. The official name is Children of the Confederacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It comprises children from birth through the time of the Children of the Confederacy Annual General Convention following their 18th birthday. All Children of the Confederacy chapters are sponsored by UDC chapters.[27][28]

Current status

The name United Daughters of the Confederacy is a registered trademark, registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The organization was incorporated on July 18, 1919. The UDC is a nonprofit organization and it meets the requirements of the United States Internal Revenue Service Code 501(c)(3) as a tax-exempt organization. The headquarters is located in the Memorial Building to the Women of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.[29][30]

The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the UDC as a Neo-Confederate group with close ties to white supremacist groups.[31]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Cynthia Mills; Pamela Hemenway Simpson (2003). Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Univ. of Tennessee Press. ISBN 978-1-57233-272-0.
  2. ^ Elder, Angela Esco. "United Daughters of the Confederacy". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Georgia Humanities Council, University of Georgia Press.
  3. ^ a b Murrin, John M.; Johnson, Paul E.; McPherson, James M.; Fahs, Alice; Gerstle, Gary (2014). Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People. concise 6th ed.: Cengage Learning. p. 425. ISBN 1285545974. They refused to let go of the legacy of the defeated plantation South. They celebrated the Lost Cause by organizing fraternal and sororal organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), whose members decorated the graves of Confederate soldiers, funded public statutes of Confederate heroes, and preserved a romanticized vision of the slavery era.
  4. ^ "White women helped build the Confederate statues sparking conflict across the South". mic.com. Retrieved October 6, 2017.
  5. ^ Cox, Karen. "White supremacy is the whole point of Confederate statues". Washington Post.
  6. ^ DuRocher, Kristina (March 30, 2011). Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-3001-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  7. ^ DuRocher 2011, p. 88-89.
  8. ^ W. Stuart Towns: Enduring Legacy: Rhetoric and Ritual of the Lost Cause]
  9. ^ Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, eds., Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003)
  10. ^ Faust 2008, pp. 237–247.
  11. ^ Blight 2001, pp. 272–273.
  12. ^ Cynthia Mills, and Pamela Hemenway Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (U. of Tennessee Press, 2003)
  13. ^ Megan B. Boccardi, "Remembering in Black and White: Missouri Women's Memorial Work, 1860-1910" (PhD. Dissertation, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2011, online Archived July 15, 2015, at the Wayback Machine.
  14. ^ Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You must remember this': Autobiography as social critique." Journal of American History (1998): 439-465 at p 450. in JSTOR Archived July 15, 2015, at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920." in Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, & Bryant Simon, eds., Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton UP, 2000) pp. 115-39. esp. 119, 123, 131
  16. ^ Janney, 2012
  17. ^ H. E. Gulley, "Women and the Lost Cause: Preserving A Confederate Identity in the American Deep South." Journal of Historical Geography (1993) 19#2 pp 125-141
  18. ^ a b Tamburin, Adam (August 15, 2016). "Vanderbilt to remove 'Confederate' from building name". The Tennessean. Retrieved August 15, 2016. Anonymous donors recently gave the university the $1.2 million needed for that purpose; the Vanderbilt Board of Trust authorized the move this summer.
  19. ^ a b Koren, Marina (August 15, 2016). "The College Dorm and the Confederacy". The Atlantic. Retrieved August 15, 2016. Vanderbilt will return $1.2 million to the Tennessee chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the present value of the $50,000 the group donated to the school in 1933 for the construction of the dorm. [...] The $1.2 million payment will come from anonymous donors who gave specifically for the removal of the inscription, the school said.
  20. ^ David W. Blight (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press. p. 259. ISBN 0-674-00332-2.
  21. ^ Gardner 2006, pp. 128–130.
  22. ^ Binheim, Max; Elvin, Charles A (1928). Women of the West; a series of biographical sketches of living eminent women in the eleven western states of the United States of America. Retrieved August 8, 2017.Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  23. ^ Angela Esco Elder, "United Daughters of the Confederacy" in New Georgia Encyclopedia (Georgia Humanities Council/University of Georgia Press: original entry July 23, 2010; last updated October 12, 2016).
  24. ^ Goodman, Amy (November 3, 1999). "Democracy Now - interview with James McPherson, Ed Sebesta". Pacifica Radio Network.
  25. ^ Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape, (University of California Press, 2011).
  26. ^ https://hyperallergic.com/399061/confederate-monument-removal-op-ed/
  27. ^ Raleigh 1956, pp. 181–189.
  28. ^ UDC Handbook & March 2013, p. 5.
  29. ^ UDC Handbook & March 2013, pp. 3–5.
  30. ^ Minutes 2014, p. 12.
  31. ^ "THE NEO-CONFEDERATES". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved May 20, 2017.

References

  • Blight, David (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • Cox, Karen L. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (University Press of Florida, 2003)
  • Faust, Drew (2008). This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Gardner, Sarah (2006). Blood And Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.
  • Gulley, H. E. "Women and the Lost Cause: Preserving A Confederate Identity in the American Deep South." Journal of Historical Geography (1993) 19#2 pp. 125–141.
  • Janney, Caroline E. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies' Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2012)
  • Mills, Cynthia and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003)
  • Minutes of the Fifty-first Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Incorporated, Held at Nashville, Tennessee, November 21-24, 1944.
  • Minutes of the One Hundred and Twenty-first Annual General Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Incorporated, Held in Richmond, Virginia, November 6-10, 2014.
  • Rutherford, Mildred Lewis (1916). What the South May Claim. Athens, Georgia: M'Gregor Co.
  • The History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Volume I and II: 1894 - 1955. Raleigh, N.C.: United Daughters of the Confederacy. 1956. LCCN 94135238. OCLC 1386401 – via Edwards & Broughton Company.
  • UDC Handbook (6th ed.). Richmond, Virginia: United Daughters of the Confederacy. March 2013.

Further reading

  • Codieck, Barrett. "Keepers of history, shapers of memory: The Florida division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1895-1930" (MA Thesis, Florida State University, 2012).
  • Foster, Gaines M. (1987). Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Parrott, Angie (1991). "'Love Makes Memory Eternal': The United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, 1897–1920," in Edward Ayers and John C. Willis, eds. The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • Simpson, Pamela and Cynthia Mills, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (U of Tennessee Press, 2003).
  • The History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Volume III: 1956 - 1986. Raleigh, N.C.: United Daughters of the Confederacy. 1988 – via Edwards & Broughton Company.
Official
General information
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