This week’s removal of General Robert E. Lee’s final statue from Richmond, Virginia represents the latest effort by the progressive movement to tear down our nation’s history.
Their judgment of historical figures such as Lee – whether one holds him in high esteem or not – is misguided, and the height of hypocrisy.
Upon the statue’s successful removal, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam triumphantly declared,"The public monuments reflect the story we choose to tell about who we are as a people. It is time to display history as history and use the public memorials to honor the full and inclusive truth of who we are today and in the future.”
This statement is problematic for a few reasons.
First, Northam was recently embroiled in a scandal when a picture surfaced from his medical school yearbook in which two men posed in blackface and a Ku Klux Klan uniform. Northam apparently does not know which of the two men is him, which is troubling in and of itself.
Second, the statement makes little sense. The only “story that we choose to tell” by the statue’s removal is that we whimsically eliminate any history that temporarily makes us uncomfortable with what our ancestors did nearly two centuries ago. “It is time to display history as history” and honoring “the full and inclusive truth of who we are today” is a complete paradox; what we are doing is removing history and censoring the truth.
The main problem is not that statues of Confederate leaders are being removed. It is that statues of other important historical figures – who were decidedly not proponents of slavery or racism – are being eliminated, while other racist politicians are being conveniently ignored.
During one of the more aggressive Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon late last year, mobs violently tore down statues of Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Arguably no other president has championed the rights of African Americans than Lincoln.
Worse, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot recently suggested monuments of Lincoln were up for review (in his own home state), along with monuments of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, and Benjamin Franklin.
The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune effectively encapsulates the ludicrousness of this endeavor:
“Apparently, some critics think every person we memorialize must be perfectly blameless by the standards of modern America. In that case, we’d have to raze just about every statue. If purity is the threshold — purity based on today’s standards against the cultural and political dynamics of our ancestors — there will be no monuments. A better approach is to weigh the good done by those who have been honored against their shortcomings, and in the context of their generation, not ours.”
In a similar vein, let’s take a look at some of the aforementioned Democrats who have escaped major criticism, who undoubtedly were larger proponents of racist ideology than many of those currently being targeted.
Woodrow Wilson, widely considered the father of the progressive movement, was a proponent of segregation and a racist.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal, could be seen as worse than Wilson. To date, FDR’sExecutive Order 1066– which sent more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps – remains the most overtly racist executive order ever signed.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was possibly the most racist modern president. Consider this excerpt from a letter Truman wrote to his wife, Bess:
“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n*gger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a White man from dust, a n*gger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, Yellow men in Asia and White men in Europe and America.”
Lyndon Johnson, the so-called champion of civil rights was also a champion of a certain extremely pejorative six-letter word.
According to groups like Black Lives Matter, Bill Clinton should be condemned for signing the 1994 crime bill ,which they claim disproportionately targeted African-American communities.
In fact, based on today’s ever-expanding definition of racism, Joe Biden and even Barack Obama could be considered racists.
Biden eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd, whom Obama also heaped praise upon, stating, “He was a Senate icon. He was a Party leader. He was an elder statesman. And he was my friend.”
Byrd was elected to the position of Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), before becoming a politician. In 1946, he wrote, “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”
Is it unfair to label Biden and Obama racists by establishing their connection to Byrd? Yes, I would say it is.
Unfortunately, many on the left lack similar grace.
The New York Times accused John McCain of“racially tinged attacks”in 2008 when running against Barack Obama for president, based on the McCain campaign’s usage of a photo of Obama juxtaposed against Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
During the 2012 election, Joe Biden accused Mitt Romney of racism based on the latter’s desire to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act. Biden told an audience in 2012, significantly comprised of African Americans, that Romney wants to“put y’all back in chains.”
Classy, Joe.
So, should we tear down the monuments of each of the leaders aforementioned, and prevent future monuments from being constructed in their honor? No.
Rather than going on an emotionally-charged quest to assault pieces of lifeless stone, let’s leave the statues be, rationally acknowledge that times have changed for the better, and erect new monuments to celebrate how far America has come concerning race relations.
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