Who Counts as a Daughter? Post 4
Updated: 3 hours ago
A Federal Charter Is Not What You Think It Is
Who Counts as a Daughter? Bloodline, Belonging, and the Limits of Reform in the Daughters of the American Revolution · Part 4 · First published 16 October 2026
Updated 22 October 2026
In three years of argument over DAR membership, one phrase has done a lot of work: congressional charter. In comment threads, I've seen it used to mean that Congress oversees the DAR, that Congress has the final say over its members, or that the charter itself requires a women-only organization.¹ None of those is right. Before reading the DAR's own charter (that's the next post), it helps to know what this kind of charter is.
The claims below are documented in statutes and Congressional Research Service reports.
What Title 36 is
Title 36 of the U.S. Code collects laws on patriotic and national observances and organizations. Part of it holds federal charters Congress has granted to private nonprofits: veterans' groups, youth organizations, hereditary and patriotic societies, civic associations. More than ninety organizations hold one.² Congress recodified them all into Title 36 in 1998, "without substantive change."³ The DAR's charter dates to 1896.
What a charter does, and doesn't, do
A charter doesn't make an organization a federal agency or give it governmental authority. Chartered organizations are private bodies that elect their own officers and write their own bylaws. Testifying before a House subcommittee in the late 1980s, a Justice Department witness put it plainly: federal charters confer little in the way of legal benefits and are "almost entirely honorific."²
That's why, on 23 February 1989, the House subcommittee responsible for charters stopped considering new ones, citing the public's mistaken impression that a charter amounts to a congressional seal of approval.² The moratorium concerned new charters. The existing ones remain in force, which is why "Title 36 was made dormant" is misleading: the practice of granting charters went dormant, not the charters.
Can Congress change a charter?
Yes. A charter is a public law, and a later public law can amend or repeal it. Congress has repealed a charter outright once. This was the charter of the National German-American Alliance in 1918, during the First World War.⁴
It has amended charters many times, usually to raise property limits, add purposes, or protect names and emblems. Reaching into a chartered organization's membership rules is rarer. And we will discuss that later.
Where the federal relationship carries weight
If the charter is largely honorific, where does the DAR's relationship with the federal government carry real weight? Taxes.
The Society's exemption from District of Columbia real-estate tax on its headquarters rests on five separate acts of Congress passed between 1903 and 1924, each conditioned on the Society occupying and using the property, not on its membership rules.⁵ ⁶ In 1997, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced a bill to repeal congressionally granted D.C. tax exemptions for twenty-five organizations, the DAR, the Sons of the American Revolution, and the Colonial Dames among them. It didn't pass.⁶
That exemption has come up every time the Society's membership has become a public controversy. In 1939, after the DAR barred Marian Anderson from Constitution Hall, NAACP attorneys considered asking that the hall's tax exemption be withdrawn.⁷ In 1984, during the Lena Ferguson case, D.C. officials raised the same possibility.⁸ In 2023, the Society's treasurer told delegates the tax would exceed $1 million a year without it,⁹ and in 2026 a legal analysis given to delegates warned that adopting the resolution could put the exemption at risk.¹⁰
Notice what was invoked in each of those moments, and what wasn't. The tax exemption was discussed every time. The charter was not.
Update, 22 October 2026. The restoration campaign's newly released legal memorandum disputes the warning, mentioned above, that adopting the resolution could put the Society's tax exemptions at risk. It argues that the exemptions on the Society's historic properties were granted by Congress and cannot be revoked by D.C. executive action, and it acknowledges possible exposure only for discretionary exemptions on "a handful of newer buildings." The memo also presents the charter bills as "the cleanest path" to resolving the Society's exposure under the D.C. Human Rights Act, arguing that enactment would preempt that law.¹¹ As it stands, the charter does little, as this post explained. The memo argues that an amended charter would do a great deal.
Notes
Comments on Carmen Eckard, "I had the Daughters of the American Revolution on my list of things I might write about someday . . . ," Facebook, September 2026, https://www.facebook.com/carmen.eckard.
Henry B. Hogue, Title 36 Charters: The History and Evolution of Congressional Practices, CRS Report R47236 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, September 8, 2022), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47236.
Pub. L. No. 105-225, 112 Stat. 1253 (1998), https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/1085/text.
Congressional Record Services. Title 36 Charters: The History and Evolution of Congressional Practices. (R47236) Published 8 September 2022. https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/HTML/R47236.web.html. Citing: P.L. 65-206; 40 Stat. 917, repealing P.L. 59-113; 34 Stat. 928. See, also, U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on S. 3529, National German-American Alliance, hearings on S. 3529, a bill to repeal the act entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National German-American Alliance," approved February 25, 1907, 65th Cong., 2nd sess., February 23, 25, and 28, 1918; March 2, 4, 9, 11, 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1918; and April 1, 9, 10, 11, 13, 1918 (Washington: GPO, 1918).
An Act to Exempt from Taxation Certain Property of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, District of Columbia, ch. 342, 39 Stat. 514, 514–15 (1916). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-04411_00_00-122-2666-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-04411_00_00-122-2666-0000.pdf
District of Columbia Tax Revenue Nondiscrimination Act of 1997, H.R. 889, 105th Cong. (1997), https://www.congress.gov/bill/105th-congress/house-bill/889/text.
"Threaten DAR Color Ban Suit," Washington Afro-American, February 11, 1939, 1, https://www.newspapers.com/image/1134415861/.
Ronald Kessler, "Sponsors Claim Race Is Stumbling Block: Black Unable to Join Local DAR," Washington Post, March 12, 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/03/12/sponsors-claim-race-is-stumbling-block/7b342ef5-d066-4b37-b7fa-a4598b52ec8c/.
National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, "132nd Continental Congress, Thursday Business Session," June 29, 2023, video, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/live/SsvXtKnLtOw; author's transcription.
Hanna Jones, "Hold the Line: Tradition vs. Trans-Formation in the DAR," IW Features, August 20, 2026, https://www.iwfeatures.com/commentary/hold-the-line-tradition-vs-trans-formation-in-the-dar/, originally published in Townhall, August 15, 2026.
Palmer Williams, Brandon Smith, and Andy Wilson, Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky & Josefiak PLLC, to Daughters Advocating for Restoration Executive Committee, memorandum, "Legal Implications of Restricting Daughters of the American Revolution Membership Eligibility to Biological Females," 12 October 2026, released 20 October 2026, Daughters Advocating for Restoration Facebook page.
