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.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)