Someone set the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters in Richmond on fire. https://twitter.com/jahdkhalil/status/1266951898323726336

The United Daughters of the Confederacy is exactly what you think it is; an organization of women who can trace their ancestry to a Confederate soldier. They consider this honorable. A thread: 1/

Nowadays, the UDC is mostly comprised of elderly women who never got over the end of legal segregation, but they still hand out scholarships & attempt to compete with the DAR as though being a descendent of traitors to the Union were a genteel & praiseworthy accomplishment. 2/

In its heydey, though, the UDC was a force to be reckoned with. It has two enduring legacies. First, local UDC chapters were responsible for fundraising & erecting most of the statues of & monuments honoring Confederate soldiers still found all over the south today. 3/

If your southern small town has a generic statue of a Confederate soldier on the town square that looks a lot like the generic statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the county courthouse a few towns over, it's probably there (no) thanks to the UDC. 4/

The Silent Sam statue at UNC protesters finally took down because the university wouldn't act? The UDC.

The hideous monument to the Confederacy at Arlington National Cemetery? The UDC. 5/

Wikipedia has a full list of these tacky monuments to evil organized by state for your perusal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_erected_by_the_United_Daughters_of_the_Confederacy 6/

The statues will rightfully be removed & destroyed or put in museums someday. Some may be destroyed tonight. But the second enduring legacy of the UDC is far more pernicious & harder to stamp out than a bunch of ugly statues: the mythology of the Lost Cause. 7/

The Lost Cause is the totally false myth about the Civil War that took hold in the post-war US thanks to the work of the UDC & others. It posits that both Confederates & Union soldiers fought for a noble cause & for home, and so both sides are honorable & so were all men. 8/

The problem, of course, is that one side fought that war *to preserve slavery.* The Lost Cause reframed the debate, suggesting that southerners fought for states' rights, not slavery. That the states only wanted the right to keep enslaving black people wasn't mentioned. 9/

As part of building the myth, the UDC also romanticized the memory slavery itself, claiming that enslaved people were treated well & happy under the evil institution. All those tropes about mammies who loved the babies they raised & happy black men working in the fields? Yeah.10/

These are ridiculous lies, of course, but they took hold in no small part because the UDC successfully lobbied for school textbooks to present the Lost Cause as truth, thereby poisoning the minds & lying to generations of Americans as to what the Civil War was actually about. 11/

The UDC had a huge, insidious influence on American history. Their monuments still pollute our communities, & the Lost Cause still has the power to make people think that flying the flag of a treasonous rebellion that failed 150 years ago is somehow patriotic & honorable. 12/

In sum, the United Daughters of the Confederacy is an organization founded for and by racist liars who continue to lie (albeit mostly to themselves) to this day. Of course, I don't condone arson, but, well, karma is a well-known b****. Just like the UDC. 13/

To learn more about the Lost Cause & how lies about what the Civil War was about came to be, I highly recommend David Blight's Race & Reunion. 14/14

For an excellent, critical history of the UDC, Karen Cox's Dixie's Daughters is the essential read. Be sure to get the new edition, which has a preface covering how the UDC's legacy still shows up in events like Charlottesville & beyond. 15/14