Update: Margaret Blough reminded me that the UDC has always maintained a strict code for displaying the Confederate flag. Their concern has always been that liberal use would disconnect it from the Civil War – a lesson the Flaggers and others should take to heart.
Looks like the Virginia Flaggers suffered a setback this week during their ongoing boycott of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for removing Confederate flags from in front of the Pelham Chapel. The trouble started after the group attempted to take a photograph in front of the national headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Apparently, a representative of the UDC explained to the Flaggers that their presence threatened their status as a tax exempt organization. Someone is going to have to explain that one to me. Interestingly, the UDC does not use the battle flag on their official insignia.
Has the UDC always used the First National as part of their logo or is this a more recent change? Somehow I doubt that their concern with the Flaggers has solely to do with taxes.
Since its founding in 1894, the First National Flag has been used on UDC insigna. It is our logo. It is the First, naturally, with 7 stars. It was chosen to symbolize the birth of the Confederacy and the Birth of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
It’s more basic than an argument over which flag best represents the Confedracy. The UDC leadership declined to get themselves drawn into a pissing match by the Flaggers against their next-door neighbor, the VMFA. After months of making that clear to Hathaway & Co., they warned her not to bring her group on their property. She ignored that, and played the victim when the UDC responded exactly as they said they would.
You are exactly right
Martha Rogers Van Schaick, President General of the UDC has responded to this event, with this explanation of events leading up to Saturday’s incident:
If this account of events is accurate, the Virginia Flaggers had been warned days in advance that they would not be welcomed, and the police would be called, and they did it anyway. Sort of like the Flagger who had the encounter with the VMFA security guard, and by a remarkable stroke of luck happened to be wearing a recording mic at the time.
Thanks again, Andy.
The UDC has used that emblem at least as far back as 1920, although whether that use has been continuous, I cannot say.
As I understand, the stated reason is that their 501(c)(3) status as a charitable organization — not just that they themselves don’t pay taxes, but that individuals can deduct donations made to them from their own income taxes — bars them from engaging in explicitly partisan, political activities. The Virginia Flaggers have, among other things, pushed the “Boot Elrod” campaign to defeat Lexington Mayor Mimi Elrod, and (as Brooks has pointed out) their group is also publicly supported by other groups like the SNN and the LoS with an explicit secessionist political platform and, arguably, an emphasis on white Southern identity. The distinctions between Confederate heritage remembrance, Southern nationalism and modern politics get very blurry, very fast when it comes to appropriating the memory of the Confederacy, and the UDC may simply have been trying to draw a bright line in keeping themselves apart from things outside their perceived mission.
It’s also possible that the folks at the UDC headquarters simply didn’t want to be associated with the Flaggers, and gave the tax status excuse because it was the easiest response at that particular moment.
Thanks, Andy.
My recollection is that the UDC has actually been pretty consistent in its opposition to the modern politicization of the battle flag even from the days of Strom Thurmond and his Dixiecrats. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t heavily invested in the Lost Cause and Jim Crow. UDC was the moving force behind the overwhelming drive to have Southern school districts name schools after Confederate leaders, especially generals, even when it was not what the residents (white only) of the school district wanted to name their school. However, they had a very strict definition of when it was appropriate to display the battle flag.
That sounds right to me.
Margaret, I think you’ve commented before on the “stab in the back” narrative about World War I that burbled up in Weimar Republic. There’s a certain amount of that going on now in the Confederate heritage movement (note the full title of the video clip), directed with particular vehemence at individuals and organizations like the MoC that the True Southrons should be trying to work with, not against. The rhetoric coming out just in the last few days against the UDC is of the sort normally reserved for, um, “anti-Confederate bloggers”:
. . . and so on. They haven’t suggested lynching the leadership of the UDC, as they have poor Waite Rawls, but it’s coming.
This foolishness will not end well for the folks who talk like this, because they’re actively, willfully, pushing themselves farther and farther outside the bounds of reasonable and rational discussion. With talk like that, they’re making themselves more irrelevant, and taken less seriously, with each breath. Like Edgerton, they win the wild applause of other true believers, but the rest of the world can only gape, and laugh. I don’t know why, exactly, the UDC pushed them off that organization’s property, but given their reaction to it, you can see why they’d want to keep them at arm’s length.
They thrive on the belief that they are under attack. How unfortunate given that there is so much room in which to creatively engage those who have an interest in learning and forging a meaningful connection to the past.
Kevin,
Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you!
Buck
Not sure what you mean.