Posted on 01/15/2008 2:40:25 PM PST by Between the Lines
oops, I was thinking about a nickle.
Sounds good to me. We can start with Martin Luther King. That would sure as hell be interesting.
He also had a nephew who shot down the founder of The State newspaper, N.G. Gonzales, in broad daylight and cold blood, and got away with it. When we were dating, my wife lived just up from Gonzales' cenotaph in Columbia (Senate Street, between Sumter and Marion).
}:-)4
You notice how quickly they put up a new plaque on Strom Thurmond's statue? That's only because he was a Republican who had impregnated a black woman. And of course, there was no mention at all in the article of Tillman's life-long party affiliation.
No one is hiding anything. Tillman's racist past is in the history books for anyone to see.
What these people want is a disclaimer.
As far as shying away from shameful bits of our history, see post #8 and you might get an idea of why we do not change every historical monument according to political correctness or according to which way the wind is blowing today.
The author of this piece should have read.
Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past A new book written by: Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett has had a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the last ten years, and has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The National Review, and Fortune. He was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a treasury official under President George H.W. Bush.
In Wrong on Race, Bruce Bartlett sets the record straight on a hidden past that many Democrats would rather see swept under the carpet. Ranging from the founding of the Republic through to today, it rectifies the unfair perceptions of America’s two national parties. While Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” is constantly referenced in the media, less well remembered are Woodrow Wilson’s segregation of the entire Federal civil service; FDR’s appointment of a member of the KKK to the Supreme Court; John F. Kennedy’s apathy towards civil rights legislation;and the ascension of Robert Byrd, who is current President pro tempore of the Senate, third in line in the presidential line of succession, and a former member of the KKK. For the last seventy years, African Americans have voted en masse for one party, with little in the end to show for it. Is it time for the pendulum to swing the other way? With the Republican Party furiously engaged in pre-2008 soul searching, this exhaustively researched, incisively written expos will be an important and compelling component of that debate as we head towards November.
See my post #20. It does say the Democratic Party help erect the statue.
The plaque should read “I was racist and Democrat”.
It’s not an issue of PC from where I’m coming from. Tillman doesn’t deserve the honor of a statue, he represented one of the ugliest sides of politics, even by the standards of his era. He was a rank demogogue and violent thug. We wouldn’t honor an ugly demogogue of today, so why should we continue to for one from the past ? There are many more South Carolinians far more deserving of a statue than Tillman.
“You notice how quickly they put up a new plaque on Strom Thurmond’s statue? That’s only because he was a Republican who had impregnated a black woman. And of course, there was no mention at all in the article of Tillman’s life-long party affiliation.”
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Actually Thurmond was a Democrat when he impregnated a family servant. But back then Democrat (at least in the south) meant States Rights and were conservative. The Republican Party was the party of Northern Liberal Carpetbaggers who forced Blacks into state legislatures mainly to piss off the former confederates.
When soutehrn Dems began leaving the Democratic party over consistently liberal positions, it took a lot of soul searching to become Republicans as the party was hated. Thurmond even formed the Dixiecrats on a Segregation Plank to avoid being a Republican. Goldwater warmed the south up a little to the GOP but then Reagan, with the help of Lee Atwater, drove it home.
“The main room at the new $621 million U.S. Capitol visitor’s center will be called Emancipation Hall in honor of black slaves forced to help build the original building.”
I declare but that is a coincidence, isn't it?
There were distinctive wings of the Democrat party in the South. There were the Bourbon types. Those were more economic Conservatives and tended not to bother with racist demogoguery. The other were the Populist. These were the liberals, sometimes White trash, and were often world-class racists. Tillman was one of these.
"The Republican Party was the party of Northern Liberal Carpetbaggers who forced Blacks into state legislatures mainly to piss off the former confederates."
Blacks and Carpetbagger Whites were the only people loyal to the Union. Some would've been more than happy to allow ex-Confederates to take loyalty oaths to resume public service again (and some did), but many preferred more violent means to run Multiracial coalition Republicans out of office. They were "liberal" only in the sense that they wanted a swift return to being Union loyalists and operating a workable government. In actuality, there was a Liberal Republican party that briefly existed in the 1870s, and they were "RINOs" of the time aligned with the Democrats in opposition to the Radical Republicans wanting harsher measures imposed on the South.
"When soutehrn Dems began leaving the Democratic party over consistently liberal positions, it took a lot of soul searching to become Republicans as the party was hated. Thurmond even formed the Dixiecrats on a Segregation Plank to avoid being a Republican. Goldwater warmed the south up a little to the GOP but then Reagan, with the help of Lee Atwater, drove it home."
There was no GOP in SC in 1948 and there would've been no way for Thurmond to have switched, and with his positions at the time, the party would not have wanted him. There wasn't a racial supremacist or openly segregationist wing of the GOP. Conservatives and liberal Republicans alike abhorred these kinds of politics. In fact, it was racial issues that forstalled a joining of the Southern Democrat and GOP parties into one (an issue that was talked about from the earliest FDR days and gathered steam with time). While many agreed on certain issues, there was simply no reconciling the two over race. Thurmond was one of only a few politicians that ever made the transition over. Many of the old-line Southern Dems died as Dems.
I didn’t see mention of his party affiliation anywhere in the article. He was a DEMOCRAT.
Ben Tillman (1847-1918), an up-and-coming Democrat in 1896...
Have the Democrats apologized yet for Jim Crow?
Taney wrote the 1856 Dred Scott decision that stripped African-Americans of their rights as citizens and helped lead to the Civil War.
??? Not quite the way I learned it. Oh, well; my teachers & books must have been wrong, since they were also all gaw-gaw over a bunch of old, dead white men, too.
But basically true nevertheless. Scott v. Sanford did rule that free blacks were not and could not be citizens.
Likewise plaques on Martin Luther King’s many monuments could remind people that he plagiarized his doctoral dissertation (for a doctorate in theology, of all things). I wonder how many of the persons who demand that the whole truth be told about Tillman, negative too, would want such plaques to be placed on the monuments to King?
[Needed to help deflect the usual charges of racism] I supported the early civil rights movement back when doing so was not easy for a white South Carolinian. I saw enough of Jim Crow to despise it. Tillman was well before my time, but even in the context of his time I’m not an admirer. I look at that monument, though, as an historical relic. I don’t expect it to reflect current opinion. Also a monument isn’t the place to try to balance the positive and negative about a person, and especially not many years after it was erected. There’s plenty of negative about Tillman in the history books.
“I’d get rid of the statue altogether”.
I suppose you also would support the Taliban in blowing up Buhddist statues as well. What about the Iranian Regime trying to erase all of the pre-Islamic history of Iran?
Don’t you realize that this anti Southern “activity” is only the opening battle in the campaign to destroy and rewrite all of American History and Culture?
Dude, take it down a notch. I am a Southerner, but honoring Pitchfork Ben Tillman ? Gimme a break. The guy was a thug and a racist psychotic par excellence and used sheer force of mob violence to undermine legitimate biracial government. Have you read this guy’s biography ? He was really evil.
If I were Governor of SC, as a Republican, I’d have his statue taken out as a simple act of courtesy. Thanks to him, he turned SC into a one-party rodent regime that a third-world dictator would envy, which held for 3/4ths of a century.
“We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting]...we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” — Ben Tillman, 1900
Yeah, real classy. Those were Republicans he murdered.
Some comments on this thread focused on party affiliation, but the GOP’s history is hardly sterling. I’ve been reading about GOP activities in Indiana during the 1920’s - might make you think differently.
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