Criticism
In 2002, some reporters and a group of SCV dissenters criticized the SCV for its views of Civil War history and the organization's alleged association with neo-confederate individuals and organizations. Joe Conason, writing in Salon, and Jason Zengerle, writing in The New Republic, argued that the SCV had morphed from an apolitical organization dedicated to Civil War history to a politicized organization dedicated to preserving the "Lost Cause" version of the war and its era. The SCV says that "the preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution".
The Civil War historian James M. McPherson has associated the SCV with the neo-confederate movement and in 2007 described board members of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia as "undoubtedly neo-Confederate". He said that the SCV and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) have "white supremacy" as their "thinly veiled agendas". McPherson became considered a controversial figure among Confederate history groups; the UDC called for a boycott of his books and a letter-writing campaign against him. In response, McPherson said he did not mean to imply that all SCV or UDC chapters or everyone who belongs to them promotes a white supremacist agenda. He said that some of the people have a hidden agenda.
Read more about this topic: Sons Of Confederate Veterans
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)