Should statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant be removed?

Great Debates
222

Are you suggesting that the people who defaced or damaged the Washington and Jefferson statues didn’t know that they were founders who also owned slaves? That the ones who knocked over the Columbus statues didn’t know his history with slavery and treatment of the indigenous population? Are you suggesting they chose those statues at random?

For the Frederick Douglass statue, what history do you think “they” are not aware of? Do you think it’s people with the same worldview as those who went after the other statues?

223

Also known as “reaping what you sow.” If one mob gets to tear down statues they don’t like, all mobs get to tear down statues that they don’t like. What is good for the goose-step is good for the gander.

224

Morally it’s completely different. Pro-slavery vs. anti-slavery.

And I’m sure you know that legal means were tried for years with no results to remove Confederate statues.

225

The conflation of Grant with Washington and Jefferson is quite odd.

226

So now let’s rename all town, cities, counties, Universities named for Slave owners…bub bye, Madison, Wis, Yale, Washington DC, Jacksonville,Fl. Etc…

227

Nobody is actually suggesting that. Except you. :slightly_smiling_face:

228

It’s next if mob rules than there is no rule. I’m out…

229

The conflation of those with Robert E Lee is odd too.

But hey, I am happy knowing that I am living in an era that, by pure coincidence, I’m sure, has the only good people to have ever lived in the history of the world. Funny how that worked out.

230

It would be quite impressive if a mob were able to rename a city or town!

231

But he does make a fair point: if the statues are to be removed, then that directive can come from a democratically-elected city council or state legislature, or an office acting under legislative oversight. I find the confederate statues repugnant and I understand the desire to see them gone, but anarchy is repulsive in its own right.

232

Well, then you get to debating whether popular uprisings, or popular demonstrations, are ever acceptable under any circumstances.

I think most people would say they are acceptable against unjust authorities, so it depends where you draw the line.

If you say that the majority is always right, and authorities elected by the majority must always be obeyed, then that’s tantamount to saying that minorities can be oppressed with impunity, and they don’t have the right to do anything about it.

233

No, I’m not at all saying the majority is always right. Uprisings and revolutions are sometimes necessary, but revolutions can go too far, and sometimes mobs use chainsaws when butter knives will suffice.

I’ve been pretty consistent in saying that the confederate statues should have come down a long time ago, and in the immediate aftermath of the post-Floyd outrage, tearing down old symbols with brute force kinda made sense even if I didn’t necessarily agree that it was the best way to remove them. But vandalism and property destruction eventually get old.

234

And that’s the problem with ignoring the people.

The people ask, and they ask, and they ask, and they ask, and they ask…

Then eventually, they don’t ask. And everyone seems surprised.

If you want to keep mobs from tearing down statues, then pay attention to the protests that protest them.

If you want to keep mobs from tearing down your city, then pay attention to them when all they are doing is tearing down the inanimate symbols of your power.

If you want to tear down statues to Frederick Douglas because others are pulling down statues to confederates, then you are supporting the confederate cause, and not the United States.

If you think that tearing down statues to abolitionist and those who worked the underground railroad is an appropriate response to the destruction of symbols of slavery and oppression, then you are either exceedingly ignorant, or are supportive of what the confederate statues stood for, and are opposed to what the abolitionist’s statues stand for.

“Reaping what you sow” would have been the ex-slaves in the South rising up and committing white genocide, killing every white person south of the Confederate border. It would have been the oppressed black people in Jim Crow south murdering the police who denied them the most basic of civil rights. If reaping what has been sown was followed, rather than sit in the Woolworth’s, they would have firebombed it.

Aren’t you glad that in every case, the black population had had the moral high ground, and didn’t use it to justify retaliation against those who had oppressed them?

These are statues to those who not only sowed, but cultivated the seeds of hate and racism. Them being torn down is just them reaping what they sowed.

Racists pulling down statues to abolitionists isn’t any sort of logical response, it is not reaping what has been sown, it is just trolling, pure and simple.

235

No doubt, but I will point out that nobody knows who pulled down Frederick Douglas’ statue. It could very well be the right and I would have thought that was impossible to have come from the left, but then again I’ve been surprised by some of their targets.

236

A little background on the Douglass statue.

Rochester, NY, is home to the first statue known to be erected in the United States to depict a Black person. That person is Frederick Douglass, and the eight-foot statue went up in 1899. Governor Teddy Roosevelt attended the dedication at Rochester’s central train station.

That statue has moved twice since its original dedication, but it still stands and is one of Rochester’s proudest landmarks.

Two years ago, in honor of Douglass’ 200th birthday, an artist created 13 epoxy-and-fiberglass replicas of the statue at a slightly smaller scale, to be placed all around the city. It is one of these replicas that was vandalized.

It’s not the first time this has happened, either. One was vandalized I think last year, and the perpetrators had no known political motive. So it’s entirely possible that this year’s event was similar. It’s also possible that white supremacists were responsible. But as @Ashtura said, no one yet knows who was responsible or why.

Powers &8^]

237

It does seem as though most of the statues to slaveholders, people were quite open about their actions. Douglas’s statue didn’t get quite the same fanfair.

It is interesting that people complain about forgetting history when people pull down statues, but what actually happens is that history gets remembered. I knew that Grant was probably pretty anti-slavery, but he was also very anti-Native American. Pulling down his statue prompted me to learn about his genocide against the Lakota peoples.

I am learning quite a bit about our great men of history, most of which I did not learn in school. Those who want these statues removed seem to be much better educated about them than those who want them to stay.

So, which targets surprised you?

238

At first any of the Founding Fathers, really. I was told very confidently during the Confederate removal push that that removal of the FF’s was a slippery slope fallacy and that I was being silly. But, especially Grant.

239

Ah, who told you that? They were silly to believe that hey had control over the hundreds of millions of people in this country. What credentials did they give you that you believed that they could stop random people from acting out?

You do realize that it is not the same groups of people, right? If I say confidently that I just want this statue gone, and someone else takes down a different statue, does that make my statement any less true?

We put people up on a pedestal, we put a spotlight on them, and now we are apparently upset that they were flawed? I do think that the reasons for the creation of a statue is very important to whether the community should tolerate it, and confederate statues were put up specifically to push the values of the confederacy. Statues to the founding fathers were put up for completely different reasons, and that should be taken into account.

At the same time, they were flawed people, and I can understand why there would be those who do not think that they deserve to be honored in such a way.

And you are right, I was surprised at how evil Grant was, and how little I knew about the amount of murder and suffering that he caused upon the Native Americans. Pulling down his statue was very educational to me. Were you surprised when you found out about his intentional campaigns to wipe out the Natives in general, and the Lakotas specifically?

240

I can’t remember NOT knowing the Founding Fathers had slaves. The Jefferson/Hemmings stuff has been common knowledge for DECADES. I can’t remember NOT knowing that U.S. massacred Natives and threw them on Reservations. There’s been movies about that since I was literally a child, yes, sympathetic to the Natives. I did grow up on a reservation, so maybe I was a bit more precocious than most, but where the hell else did the land come from? I am completely shocked that people are acting surprised all the sudden that people in the past have conquered and killed people to get their land. That’s the history of the planet.

241

Bully for you then. If you believe that your experience is universal, and that everyone knows all these things, then I suppose that you are right that we should have never had statues to these people in the first place.

I knew Jefferson had slaves, I remember being rather disgusted by the idea of it when I toured Monticello as a child. It was a hard cognitive dissonance to at the one side, think of him as a great man and founder of our country, and on the other, know that he was a real POS. Washington at least seemed embarrassed by being a slaveholder, and did what he could to alleviate things, but he still didn’t free them till he died.

Grant, OTOH, there’s a right asshole. He went about systemic extermination of the native peoples. He intentionally drove the animals the Lakotas depended on as close to extinction as he could. I was not aware of the extent of the genocide that was perpetuated by him until I looked to see the reason for tearing down his statue.

You can put away your shock, it’s bad for your blood pressure. It’s not that people in the past killed people to take their land, it is that we still honor them for that murder and theft that we object to.

We can know the history of the planet, without having to romanticize or whitewash the bad parts. That’s what these statues try to do. I’m not going to go out and pull one down, but I am not going to lose any sleep about it.

Should I be shocked that people are acting surprised that people don’t want to honor murderers and thieves?