The feature image is from a 2015 campaign by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to erect a new memorial to the Confederacy in Texas.
This is the fourth and final installment of our series on the Sons of Confederate Veterans Confederate Heritage Defense manual. Read Part 1 on the SCV’s Confederate Heritage Defense Manual and Part 2 on the SCV’s claim that until the 1980s no one but Marxists had a problem with Confederate Flags, Statues, or “Dixie.” Part 3 is a deep dive into the “history” of the Civil War that the SCV manual relies on. It is not a history any scholar would recognize.
So far I have been looking at the historical distortions of the manual, but now I want to examine the tactics recommended in it. The manual was written in 2016, right after Dylan Roof massacred Black parishioners in Charleston, but before the more recent conflicts over Confederate monuments. Still it often advises members not to volunteer their affiliation with the SCV when contacting public officials or the press. This is unusual for organizations that participate in public life. It may indicate a self-awareness of the declining reputation of the organization.
A lot of what is in the manual about tactics is pretty mundane, Send out press releases, don’t talk about extraneous topics with the media, etc. there are some approaches that are unusual.
The manual makes a point of encouraging members to run for office so that they can keep Confederate generals’ names on schools and their statues on courthouse lawns. According to the manual:
We recommend SCV members run for any office for which they qualify. Being a
member of a school board might help prevent the removal of the names of Southern
heroes from school names in a district. Being on a county commission might prevent
the removal of a statue from the courthouse lawn. These are important efforts. All
should be encouraged to either run for office or support the right candidates. The
SCV should not be mentioned in the effort…
One reason that SCV members are encouraged to run for office is that they will then be able to keep Confederate symbols on official display. The manual advises:
Official flags and seals are the property of a governmental sub-division, such as a city
or county. These legal entities have the power to do as they please concerning the
symbolism of the jurisdiction. In these fights, having our members or supporters in
elected positions is paramount. Having our people run for elective office cannot be
overemphasized.
Imagine running for public office just to make sure a Confederate flag stays on the seal of your town?
While some aspects of the manual’s guide to press relations are common to all advocacy organizations (don’t tell a reporter something you don’t want to see in the newspapers the next day, for example), others are peculiar to an organization defending a “government” which made the defense of slavery its reason for being. For example, the manual gives this tip:
Don’t let a reporter form the issue as simply one of the South supporting slavery in the
19th century. Slavery has been common for many centuries and is larger today than
ever before. It was the Western world who finally ended it in their civilization. (Refer
to the “causes” section above.) It was about independence. Period. That is the reason
so many blacks supported the Confederacy.
The statement is illogical. It is essentially “Slavery was not the cause of the war, but everyone did it anyway, and it was white people who abolished it.” Of course, the white (and Black) people who abolished it in the United States were fighting against the Confederacy. Oh yeah, and Black people did not support the Confederacy, contrary to the claim in the manual!
With that I conclude my look at the SCV Heritage Defense manual. I never intended to write 8,000 words on it, and I am sure that for those who read all four parts, you never expected to read that much on an 18 page Heritage Defense manual! Thanks for sticking.
Here are all four parts. Read Part 1 on the SCV’s Confederate Heritage Defense Manual and Part 2 on the SCV’s claim that until the 1980s no one but Marxists had a problem with Confederate Flags, Statues, or “Dixie.” Part 3 is a deep dive into the “history” of the Civil War that the SCV manual relies on. It is not a history any scholar would recognize.
this reminds me of what a WW2 re-enactor group posted about their social media activities: ‘leave out the modern commentary and avoid anything that might be viewed as racist as one will garner great angst ….” -paraphrasing of course…. of course, this was for a WW2 German Security unit re-enactor’s group – German Security groups were the rear echelon units that took part in cleaning out partisan groups and those Jews who had not been killed by Einsatzgruppen… Obviously, the group had not done their homework… Not just another purely “military” unit…
yes