Another Sebesta masterpiece

Ed Sebesta, author, self-described "Leading National Researcher on the Neo-Confederate Movement," and all-around crank, has a new book entitled "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader." His latest blog entry attempts to promote that book and attack the United Daughters of the Confederacy. But then, everything Ed Sebesta does is an attempt to smear the UDC.

The post, Tennessee UDC praises the KKK and Anglo-Saxonism, is supposed to be a devastating revelation about the UDC:

In 1928, “The South in American Life and History,” by Fannie Eoline Selph was published. In the front piece it is described as “An effort of the Nashville Chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, approved by the Tennessee Division, to present the true spirit and achievements of the South’s civilization through the different periods of her history, …” Selph makes clear that the achievements of the Klan are the achievements of the Confederate veterans and a triumph of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.

In Sebesta's squirming mind, defending white culture is THE unforgiveable sin, and he imagines he's unearthed evidence that completely and forever condemns the UDC to everlasting shame. What he's actually done, however, is to once again demonstrate his utter lack of historical background. His collaborator on "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader," James W. Loewen, is a sociologist, not a trained historian. (But that hasn't stopped Loewen from writing history textbooks. He had to sue to force the State of Mississippi to use one of them.)

Rather than demonstrate that the UDC held uniquely unenlightened views of blacks and the KKK, Sebesta and Loewen have only documented that the ladies of the UDC held beliefs shared by most people at that time, including the educated and powerful.

Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote this about the Klan:

"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."

Wilson regarded blacks as an "ignorant and inferior race" that benefited from segregation. He once said this to a black leader from Boston:

Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen. If your organization goes out and tells the colored people of the country that it is a humiliation, they will so regard it, but if you do not tell them so, and regard it rather as a benefit, they will regard it the same. The only harm that will come will be if you cause them to think it is a humiliation.

Theodore Roosevelt also expressed the racial attitudes prevalent at that time. As president, he once stated, "As a race, and in the mass, [blacks] are altogether inferior to the whites." Teddy also agreed with his era's policy of forced segregation: “All reflecting men of both races are united in feeling that race purity must be maintained.”

So what was the UDC of the early twentieth century guilty of? Apparently, of living in the early twentieth century.