Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How about naming it after "Stonewall Jackson"?? Will there be any outrage?
Andrew Jackson is over 20 Dollar Bill and I never heard any outrage or anything offensive about it. People should grow up. They are historic figures and those times were different.
Location: where you sip the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
8,297 posts, read 14,159,764 times
Reputation: 8105
The point of trying not to give more credit to President Jackson is NOT so much the fact that he owned slaves, it was the Indian Removal Act he helped write to relocate most Southern tribes out west beyond the boundaries of the United States - (that led to the Cherokee Trail of Tears where up to 4000 died because of not being prepared for the sudden enforcement of a law that had been nullified by the Supreme Court.)
How about naming it after "Stonewall Jackson"?? Will there be any outrage?
Andrew Jackson is over 20 Dollar Bill and I never heard any outrage or anything offensive about it. People should grow up. They are historic figures and those times were different.
Following your logic, would you be ok if we put Hitler on a new bill? After all, he is just a historical figure and those times were different?
Activists and "journalist" have been known to make incorrect assumptions and have a knee-jerk response before. Roadrat is correct, naval vessels have established naming rules. I seriously doubt they would have used an act of congress to make an exception for President Jackson. Although, I suppose if you really wanted to get ridiculous about this, you could argue the city was named after him, therefore the ship is named after him too.
Sheesh, we might as well blow up Mount Rushmore, rename the vast majority of cities and some states, start calling all public schools by numbers, and put nothing but trees on all our money. At this rate we are going to have to eliminate reference to any male born before 1950 because of their veiws on a woman's place in society.
You can not hold historic figures to the standards of today, their inability to conform with today's norms does not change the impact they had on history. Context is important. I say this as a member of a couple of the demographics whose self appointed leaders seem to be leading this charge. It needs to stop.
Why can't we hold historical figures to the standards of today? Mount Rushmore keeps getting brought up as some slippery slope that will have to be eliminated. All leaders have faults. But Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and to a lesser degree Roosevelt were all great. We can quibble about Washington and Jefferson's slave ownership but only with the pretext of we would not have a United States without them. Washington could not press the slave issue because that would have devolved the newly minted United States into sectional discord and cause it fall apart immediately. He just delayed the inevitable for "four score" years. Jefferson ultimately found his role as President of the United States so contemptible that it's not even mentioned on his epitaph.
Andrew Jackson on the other hand is not great. He was the first president to be elected under the guise of Southern appeasement, a delusional national strategy that rears its head every other generation in which at least a slight majority of Americans feel if we give into Southern social and political mores, they will stop complaining about succession and fall in line to become "regular" Americans. Not surprisingly, appeasement has never worked and still doesn't work:
Andrew Jackson, and his namesake continue to be circulated on money, ships, cities, public entitities, etc. because at least he won the Battle of New Orleans (after the peace treaty was already signed). To name something after any other Jacksonian Democrat who served in office or was part of bureaucracy leading up to the Civil War would just be globally embarrassing. Every one knows who the first seven presidents were. Everyone knows Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president. I defy the average non-history/political science major who can name 8 through 15 in order without Googling it.
Yet, Henry Knox was one of the greatest military and political leaders in American history. You could also quibble with his carrying out Washington's expansionist strategies into "Indian" lands in the Old Northwest. But why is Knox so forgotten in American history? Check out this excerpt from Wikipedia:
After failing to appease the Cherokee and Creek with a large cache of gifts in 1789, Knox eventually signed the Treaty of New York on behalf of the nation in 1790, ending conflict with some, but not all, Cherokee tribal units.[96] Of the genocide of the native populations in the nation's most heavily populated areas, Knox wrote, "A future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors."[97] Noam Chomsky claims that the nation's leaders "knew what they were doing", and often used language saying they were the natives' "benefactors", "philanthropists and humanitarians", when in reality they were engaged in the "genocidal practices" of extermination and "Indian Removal".[98] In fact, Knox said what the Europeans and Americans were doing to the native nations was so harmful that "our modes...have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". He went on to cite the fact that where there was white civilization, there was "the utter extirpation" of natives, or almost none left.[99] Regardless of whether the Americans wanted to obtain Native American lands by purchase, conquest or other means, "there would be no lasting peace while land remained the object of American Indian policy", which continued after Knox left office.
Seems pretty pragmatic to me. Of course this also makes Andrew Jackson who defied the Constitution and spawned the Trail of Tears to be outright slime. But why was Andrew Jackson elevated as some hero? To give Southerners in generations AFTER the Civil War a figure as a source of pride who actually wasn't a traitor to his country.
What about Benjamin Harrison? Despite being descended from one of the founding families of America (who landed in Jamestown in 1630), whose grandfather was President William Henry Harrison (for those claiming Jefferson will be removed from Mt. Rushmore, fun fact about Jefferson is that he actually defeated Territorial Governor Harrison's attempt to expand slavery into the Old Northwest because despite being a slaveowner himself, Jefferson wanted to end the institution in America), who was a Brigadier General in the Civil War, and was a one-term President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison has little or nothing named after him. This is what Benjamin Harrison had to say to Congress December 3, 1889, nine months after taking office:
The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us; they were brought here in chains and held in communities where they are now chiefly bound by a cruel slave code...when and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that quality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? ... in many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights. The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.
Think he was re-elected? There is absolutely nothing wrong with judging men of the past by today's standards because American history is replete with great men and women who would be judged as great by the standards of any day. This "judgment" postulation is just excuse to suppress the leaders who were truly great for this country and elevate those who were "notorious" rather than great and continue to support modern conventions of discrimination, violence, and divisiveness (see: Andrew Jackson).
Why can't we hold historical figures to the standards of today? Mount Rushmore keeps getting brought up as some slippery slope that will have to be eliminated. All leaders have faults. But Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and to a lesser degree Roosevelt were all great. We can quibble about Washington and Jefferson's slave ownership but only with the pretext of we would not have a United States without them. Washington could not press the slave issue because that would have devolved the newly minted United States into sectional discord and cause it fall apart immediately. He just delayed the inevitable for "four score" years. Jefferson ultimately found his role as President of the United States so contemptible that it's not even mentioned on his epitaph.
Andrew Jackson on the other hand is not great. He was the first president to be elected under the guise of Southern appeasement, a delusional national strategy that rears its head every other generation in which at least a slight majority of Americans feel if we give into Southern social and political mores, they will stop complaining about succession and fall in line to become "regular" Americans. Not surprisingly, appeasement has never worked and still doesn't work:
Andrew Jackson, and his namesake continue to be circulated on money, ships, cities, public entitities, etc. because at least he won the Battle of New Orleans (after the peace treaty was already signed). To name something after any other Jacksonian Democrat who served in office or was part of bureaucracy leading up to the Civil War would just be globally embarrassing. Every one knows who the first seven presidents were. Everyone knows Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president. I defy the average non-history/political science major who can name 8 through 15 in order without Googling it.
Yet, Henry Knox was one of the greatest military and political leaders in American history. You could also quibble with his carrying out Washington's expansionist strategies into "Indian" lands in the Old Northwest. But why is Knox so forgotten in American history? Check out this excerpt from Wikipedia:
After failing to appease the Cherokee and Creek with a large cache of gifts in 1789, Knox eventually signed the Treaty of New York on behalf of the nation in 1790, ending conflict with some, but not all, Cherokee tribal units.[96] Of the genocide of the native populations in the nation's most heavily populated areas, Knox wrote, "A future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors."[97] Noam Chomsky claims that the nation's leaders "knew what they were doing", and often used language saying they were the natives' "benefactors", "philanthropists and humanitarians", when in reality they were engaged in the "genocidal practices" of extermination and "Indian Removal".[98] In fact, Knox said what the Europeans and Americans were doing to the native nations was so harmful that "our modes...have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". He went on to cite the fact that where there was white civilization, there was "the utter extirpation" of natives, or almost none left.[99] Regardless of whether the Americans wanted to obtain Native American lands by purchase, conquest or other means, "there would be no lasting peace while land remained the object of American Indian policy", which continued after Knox left office.
Seems pretty pragmatic to me. Of course this also makes Andrew Jackson who defied the Constitution and spawned the Trail of Tears to be outright slime. But why was Andrew Jackson elevated as some hero? To give Southerners in generations AFTER the Civil War a figure as a source of pride who actually wasn't a traitor to his country.
What about Benjamin Harrison? Despite being descended from one of the founding families of America (who landed in Jamestown in 1630), whose grandfather was President William Henry Harrison (for those claiming Jefferson will be removed from Mt. Rushmore, fun fact about Jefferson is that he actually defeated Territorial Governor Harrison's attempt to expand slavery into the Old Northwest because despite being a slaveowner himself, Jefferson wanted to end the institution in America), who was a Brigadier General in the Civil War, and was a one-term President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison has little or nothing named after him. This is what Benjamin Harrison had to say to Congress December 3, 1889, nine months after taking office:
The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us; they were brought here in chains and held in communities where they are now chiefly bound by a cruel slave code...when and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law? When is that quality of influence which our form of government was intended to secure to the electors to be restored? ... in many parts of our country where the colored population is large the people of that race are by various devices deprived of any effective exercise of their political rights and of many of their civil rights. The wrong does not expend itself upon those whose votes are suppressed. Every constituency in the Union is wronged.
Think he was re-elected? There is absolutely nothing wrong with judging men of the past by today's standards because American history is replete with great men and women who would be judged as great by the standards of any day. This "judgment" postulation is just excuse to suppress the leaders who were truly great for this country and elevate those who were "notorious" rather than great and continue to support modern conventions of discrimination, violence, and divisiveness (see: Andrew Jackson).
9 paragraphs about presidential history, But by the Navy's own admission the ship was named after Jackson,MS not President Jackson.
Some people have got way to much free time on there hands.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with judging men of the past by today's standards because American history is replete with great men and women who would be judged as great by the standards of any day. This "judgment" postulation is just excuse to suppress the leaders who were truly great for this country and elevate those who were "notorious" rather than great and continue to support modern conventions of discrimination, violence, and divisiveness (see: Andrew Jackson).
