Posted on 05/22/2017 9:58:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the news last week, if we took a break from the daily Trump melodrama now playing in Washington, we noticed the reignition of an older, but still potent cultural firestorm, namely the push to remove Confederate-themed monuments from public properties. In New Orleans, last Wednesday, workers dismantled a monument to General P.G.T. Beauregard under cover of darkness, although supporters and opponents of the action came out to watch the spectacle anyway. The fault lines separating the opposing sides in these matters have been thoroughly explored and require no further explanation here. Suffice to say that this issue is heating up again, and not only in Deep South cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Charleston. It has now spread to the border cities, as well!
Last Wednesday, on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a once great American daily newspaper, a headline screamed, “Confederate Memorial Must Go, Krewson Says”. In this instance “Krewson” refers to Lyda Krewson, the recently inaugurated mayor of St. Louis, Missouri. The “Confederate Memorial” is a massive granite column, 32-feet-tall, and weighing 40 tons, which residents proudly point out as the site of the 1904 World’s Fair, and the first Olympic Games held in the Western Hemisphere. The statue was dedicated in 1914, and cost $23, 000, most of which was raised by the Ladies Confederate Monument Association.
Ms. Lyda Krewson, St. Louis’s first female mayor, and her supporters proudly congratulate themselves for “breaking the glass ceiling” and putting their lady in office, just as a former failed Democratic Presidential candidate hoped to accomplish. The real glass ceiling, though, in St. Louis city politics is the barrier that has kept Republicans out of the mayor’s office since 1946. Every St. Louis mayor for the last 71 years has been a Democrat. There have been some good ones, some mediocrities, and a few terrible mayors, but every last one has been a Democrat. Meanwhile, St. Louis has sunk from the nation’s seventh largest metropolitan area to the twentieth largest, and one-party government might be part of the problem. In any event, Ms. Krewson, a self-declared proud liberal, decided to pick this fight as the first public battle of her fledgling administration.
St. Louis has many pressing problems at this moment. The city’s violent crime rate is staggering, and on the rise. The Ferguson tragedy illustrated the area’s tense race relations. Political corruption in the city and municipal governments has long been the norm, and we recently lost pro football, too! Yet Mayor Krewson has chosen to ignore these real problems and play to her liberal base by leading the charge of those who insist on removing a monument from Forest Park.
Ms. Krewson has, predictably, found allies in the mainstream media. In the aforementioned Post-Dispatch story, the author, a reporter named Kevin McDermott, couldn’t resist the urge to lob a few cream pies at those who oppose removal of Confederate statues. He mentioned that supporters of removal object to the monuments because of their connection to slavery and white supremacy. He went on to state, “Opponents of their removal, including white supremacists, alt-right activists, and some Republican politicians argue that removal movement amounts to a purge…of American history.”
Here we see the mainstream media at work. No slander, libel, or defamation is too wicked to be tied to conservatives and/or Republicans. Mr. McDermott did not refer to those who support statue removal as politically correct liberal busybodies, or opportunistic Democratic politicians, like Mayor Lyda Krewson. No, the Post-Dispatch will never question the motives of their favored pressure groups but they simply assume the worst of their opponents, and bash them accordingly. Interesting coming from a newspaper that regularly laments the loss of “civility” in our public discourse.
The outcome of this controversy currently rests in limbo. The city does not have the money to move the statue, and they have refused to sell or donate it to the local Civil War museum. Certain voices of restraint in the matter have reasonably pointed out that a couple of hundred yards from the Confederate statue stands a likeness of General Franz Siegel, who took the regiments of St. Louis German-Americans into battle against the Southern forces, and that a statue of Frank Blair, the influential soldier-politician whose strong actions kept Missouri in the Union in 1861 sits a quarter of a mile away. They have suggested placing explanatory markers at all of the statues, noting Missouri’s complex role as a border state slave state, and the city’s corresponding role as a traditionally southern metropolis, but one undergoing permanent change with the arrival of large numbers of Irish and German immigrants in the decades before the war. This is well-intentioned, but unlikely to happen as long as there are cheap political points to be scored.
So, what does the future hold? In all likelihood, the statue will eventually come down. Mayor Krewson and her allies will celebrate another faux victory. We will then wait for the politically correct vandals to propose demolishing half of Mount Rushmore, leaving only the non-slaveowners, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt on the monument, although Father Abraham and TR were certainly not in line with modern thinking on racial matters. Finally, we will wait for someone to propose tearing down the Washington monument named for the slaveowning first President of the USA in the city that bears his name. He may have been first in the hearts of his countrymen, but that was a long time ago, before the veil of political correctness descended on this great nation. The beat goes on!
Does Columbus, NM, have a statue of Pancho Villa?
If one wants to read about the Civil War, they can access various source documents from that era, including transcripts of speeches, the various declarations of secession or legislation and orders generated by the Union and Confederate governments.
Those source documents will always exist.
“Those source documents will always exist.”
Are you joking?
Try to read Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from a library that banned the book. I hope you do know that Huckleberry Finn has been banned by hundreds of libraries.
To keep the Civil War books and papers viable and available, we’ll need to threaten to stomp liberals’ nuts into the concrete. Leftists understand violence and nothing else.
One or two libraries may have banned Huckleberry Finn and to Kill a Mockingbird, the great majority have not and you are free to check out those works.
As for the Civil War era documents, they can be found in every library, many history books and on the internet.
I doubt there is anyone who would argue in favor of banning students from reading CSA Vice President’s Cornerstone Speech.
Not like the Communists as Muslims are doing, it hasn't.
Not very observant, are you? The leftists are trying to erase history. Apparently that past your comprehension.
Let me ask you a question. What did Sherman mean when he said he was afraid the Negro could not provide for himself?
But the point is history is being rewritten here just like the Taliban and Stalin etc. If there are no reminders, it didn’t happen. And those history books are being changed every year.
High-school history teachers nationwide will give their top students a dark retelling of U.S. history this fall, courtesy of the College Board, a nonprofit college readiness firm led by Common Core architect David Coleman.
The College Board – which administers AP (advanced placement) courses and tests – is rolling out a revised curriculum framework for AP U.S. history, offering the 450,000 students who take AP U.S. history classes a hero-free account of America’s deeply stained past.
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, calls the new AP U.S. history framework “a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past,” one which “weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”
The new 124-page history curriculum is a dramatic departure from the five-page outline previously supplied by the College Board to guide AP U.S. history instructors. A much more detailed “history from below,” it focuses on how native Indians and Africans suffered at the hands of Europeans in the New World.
Founding Fathers omitted
It deletes the Pilgrims, John Winthrop, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and other long-celebrated figures central to America’s founding and growth.
http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/u-s-history-takes-drastic-left-turn-this-fall/
This is the accurate, and I believe the official, name.
Read the College Board AP History Curriculum Framework for yourself
“Founding Fathers omitted”
“It deletes the Pilgrims, John Winthrop, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and other long-celebrated figures central to America’s founding and growth.”
That’s odd.
Tocqueville and Winthrop were not “Founding Fathers.”
As for Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln, they are ALL covered in the actual AP® United States History Curriculum Framework.
WND may want to check their sources prior to claiming that the AP U.S. History curriculum does not cover Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln.
Thanks for the laugh!
“And those history books are being changed every year.”
Source documents do not change.
> WND may want to check their source...
Cute.
I provided a link to the 2014 College Board document and it supports the claims of the article, written in 2014. A future version of that document may differ.
> Tocqueville and Winthrop were not “Founding Fathers.”
That claim was never made. It is a section header, it indicates an important point in the following section. It does not mean the section is confined to that single point.
You’re being incredibly obtuse. The point is, history was being re-written. It is only due to the efforts of citizens like me, and not like you, that it was pushed back. They will try again, they have been at it for decades.
Stick Johnny Reb. So what are the commies going to do? Set the wayback machine for 1861 and change the history? No wonder you Rebs lost. You’re too stupid to be idiots.
For example the Great Depression of the 1930's. Before 1960 and before the globalist mercantilists took over the Republican Party, history books never mentioned trade or Smoot-Hawley Act as a cause or even an aggravating factor concerning the Great Depression. This is the truth because trade was a tiny part of the overall economy in the 1930's. Now, you enter into a conversation about trade and tariffs and the first thing you hear is Smoot-Hawley CAUSED the Great Depression! What a preposterous lie and re-write of history.
It happens all the time.
Ever see the Confederate supporters on some of the Civil War threads around here? Been there, done that.
I believe your statement is personally motivated. Both sides of my family has been in this country since before the Revolutionary War and my ancestors were on the Mayflower. I have a CAR membership. Regardless of my families history this nation has a Bill of Rights that states the opposite of your ACLU type BS.
Stay up north in your rust belt, punk, and keep electin”’ them thar commies. You Yankees are still losers and always will be. You stay there and we’ll all be happy. You in your filthy, rat infested cities and we “reb$” in the sunny South.
Of Course, I’m only assuming you do know what a punk is.
Source documents don’t change. But they must be available for reading. Then there’s the old saying “consider the source”.
Wow, maybe we could sell ours to them!
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