The Ideologues - 2004-12-21

The Ideologues December 21, 2004, Heidi Beirich, Southern Poverty Law Center

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The contemporary neo-Confederate movement grew largely out of the ideas of a very specific set of Southern intellectuals, many of them professors at Southern universities and colleges.

Even before the movement began to take organizational shape with the 1994 formation of the League of the South (LOS), several members of this group of mainly white men were well along in an attempt to dramatically revise mainstream historical thinking about the culture and politics of the South, the nature of slavery, the causes of the Civil War, and the role of the federal government.

As a general matter, most of the thinkers profiled below support the South's right to secede; believe the North started the Civil War over tariff issues or states' rights, not slavery; say that President Lincoln always secretly intended the war as a way to rob the states of their power and create a federal behemoth, and only used the slavery question as an excuse; and, in at least some cases, see the civil rights era as an evil because it had the effect of increasing federal power relative to that of the states.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Heidi | last = Beirich | author2 = Mark Potok | title = The Ideologues | url = https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/ideologues | work = Southern Poverty Law Center | date = December 21, 2004 | accessdate = November 30, 2021 }}