Neo-Confederates
Neo-Confederates are groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions during the American Civil War in a positive light.
Historian James M. McPherson used the term "neo-Confederate historical committees" in his description of the efforts which were undertaken from 1890 to 1930 to have history textbooks present a version of the American Civil War in which secession was not rebellion, the Confederacy did not fight for slavery, and the Confederate soldier was defeated by overwhelming numbers and resources.
In a book review, Leonard Levy (later a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1968) wrote: "Similar blindness to the moral issue of slavery, plus a resentment against the rise of the Negro and modern industrialism, resulted in the neo-Confederate interpretation of Phillips, Ramsdell and Owsley.
"[11] In the 1910s, Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the UDC, spearheaded the attack on schoolbooks that did not present the Lost Cause version of history.
Rutherford assembled a "massive collection" which included "essay contests on the glory of the Ku Klux Klan and personal tributes to faithful slaves".
[12] Historian David Blight concluded: "All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the white supremacist vision of Civil war memory.
"[13] In the 1930s, Seward Collins, a self-described "fascist publisher", provided an avenue for white supremacists and neo-Confederates to advance their ideology in The American Review, a literary journal openly sympathetic to European fascism.
[14] The connections and overlap between white supremacist, fascist, far-right, and neo-Confederate ideologies persisted, and remain in place in the present day.
[23][24] Neo-Confederates have been accused of downplaying the role of slavery in triggering the Civil War and misrepresenting African-American support for the Confederacy.
[33] Historian Nancy MacLean states that neo-Confederates used the history of the Confederacy to justify their opposition to the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Figures such as Absolom West, Leonidas L. Polk, and William M. Lowe went on to join the Populist movements of their respective times.
In their view its main consequence, and even its purpose, was to create a leviathan state that used its powers to suppress the most basic personal freedom, the right to choose.
[40]In a review of libertarian Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, in turn Hummel refers to the works by DiLorenzo and Adams as "amateurish neo-Confederate books".
It is akin to stating that the demands of sugar lobbyists for protective quotas mask their real worry: political influence.
Part of the problem was Woods' reliance on an earlier neo-Confederate work, Robert Selph Henry's 1938 book The Story of Reconstruction.
And Other Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham Lincoln: Some critics look at his careful and politically practical approach to ending slavery and mistake it for reluctance to help African-Americans.
These individuals often insist on the South's right to secede and typically hold views in stark contrast to mainstream academia in regards to the causes and consequences of the American Civil War.
[43][30] Zack Beauchamp of ThinkProgress argues that because of its small size, the libertarian movement has become partially beholden to a neo-Confederate demographic.
According to MacClean, this embrace of neo-Confederate views is not exclusively about race, but it is related to a pragmatic political realization that the "retrospective romanticization of the Old South" and secession presented many possible themes that could be used as conservatives attempted to reverse the national changes initiated by the New Deal.
[46] According to MacLean, after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and the successes of the civil rights movement, conservative leaders nationally distanced themselves from racial issues, but they continued to support a "color-blind" version of neo-Confederatism.
She writes that "even into the twenty-first century mainstream conservative Republican politicians continued to associate themselves with issues, symbols, and organizations inspired by the neo-Confederate Right".
The article quotes the chaplain of the Sons of Confederate Veterans as giving an invocation which recalled "the last real Christian civilization on Earth".
