“They conducted a war on the United States.” That’s what Ravenman was boggled by. I’m just pointing out that we were supposed to be all over that by the time we were training the doughboys.
For accuracy’s sake:
Nathan Bedford Forrest was not “a founder” of the KKK.
If you want to hate Forrest, you have plenty of ammunition without inventing facts.
Who has named anything after Forrest in the past 50 years? You talk as though people are out there erecting monuments and naming schools after the guy willy nilly.
And again, Forrest was not a founder of the KKK, and nor are monuments to him “code” for anything other than a fascination with the Confederacy generally.
Actually, if you investigate, I think you’ll find that most monuments to Forrest (such as the one in Rome, Georgia) were put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy around 1900 to 1910, a time when they were honoring other Confederates with monuments as well. The reason for the timing is mostly that Confederate veterans were beginning to die, and their children wanted to preserve their memories.
The KKK was not even active in that time frame, so why would the UDC have even cared about Forrest’s KKK associations? The Klan essentially has had three incarnations: The first Klan, 1865-1874, the second Klan 1915-1944 (which was inspired by the film Birth of a Nation), and a third incarnation which became active during the Civil Rights era. From the 1870s to 1915 the Klan was basically a dead letter.
So why would the UDC from 1900-1910 have even cared about an organization that had been dead for years? Maybe they just really liked their Confederate heroes, as the name of the organization suggests.