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History Matters
Before “Moms For Liberty,” There Was “Daughters of the Confederacy”
The “daughters” fought to ban offensive textbooks, and wanted “proper” (whitewashed) history to be taught
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was founded in 1894. They had a twofold mission: to erect monuments to the “heroes” of the Confederacy and to make sure students learned the “true history” of the Civil War and the Southern way of life. They promoted the myth of the “Lost Cause” in schools all across the South. They did an excellent job of it.
Its echoes still linger to this day.
The mythological history they embedded in the education of US citizens is so tenacious that a candidate for president, Nikki Haley, had to hesitate to mention “slavery” when asked what caused the Civil War. She knew better, but she was also smart enough to know that to mention slavery would lose her votes.
The UDC still exists, by the way, just as the “Lost Cause” myth does.
As late as 2010, the Texas Board of Education removed slavery as the central cause of the Civil War and replaced it with states’ rights and secession. It wasn’t until 2018 that they put it back, but still insisted that slavery, secession, and states’ rights were equal factors.
Everything old is new again, as they say. Now, we have Moms for Liberty complaining about “offensive” books that make white people “feel bad” and demanding that history be taught properly.
UDC pioneered pressuring school boards, doing letter-writing campaigns (the ancient version of Twitter and social media trolling), leveraging political pressure to get their way, and yes, banning books. All done with a very particular (very white, shall we say) agenda.
Just like Moms for Liberty is the friendly feminine front face for the Proud Boys, former UDC member and Seattle chapter president Heidi Christensen (who quit the group in 2012) said “In some ways the UDC was the KKK’s more feminine, genteel sister organization.”
Flattery over facts
Because the “Lost Cause” myth is so fundamental to how Nikki Haley could say with a…
