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You and I agree in principle on that. I've had a front row seat on the removal of confederate statues in Alabama, so perhaps I see more sides to the issue of removing names and statues than some others. Also..
In Vermont, where I grew up, there was similar angst:
As Ozymandias never learned, fame and appreciation is fleeting, works are best examined within the context of the time and culture.
Great work, " Abenaki educator lobbied the Vermont Department of Libraries to pull Fisher's name from the children's literature" (link in quoted post). Now Vermont children will not have the opportunity to learn of a great but flawed person in Vermont's history. </sarcasm> Thanks for the education and the link.
Great work, " Abenaki educator lobbied the Vermont Department of Libraries to pull Fisher's name from the children's literature" (link in quoted post). Now Vermont children will not have the opportunity to learn of a great but flawed person in Vermont's history. </sarcasm> Thanks for the education and the link.
Fisher's championing causes included women's rights. There is a certain irony to her being painted with a broad brush of non-PC. The whole issue of eugenics pre-WWII was tied in with costs to society, which society was unable and unwilling to pay. (Ship the kid off to the poor farm.) Institutions were costly but needed when the poor farm model failed miserably. Eugenics and birth control seemed an answer at the time. (Remember that life expectancy was short, and the lives of the disabled and mentally ill could be even shorter and more wretched.) We see remnants of that attitude of not caring today in the large homeless population, failure to provide mental health services, and so on.
I've studied the history of Vermont pretty deeply, and the Abenaki were a minor tribe at best, in a buffer area primarily around Swanton and north. The area around the Finger Lakes of N.Y.. and up by Quebec City were much more active. Vermont itself was barely populated when the first settlers arrived. I wouldn't call the group heroic, but more isolated low-key survivors of the huge native wars and movements that happened all around them.
I tuned in to some of the argument about Fisher on the Vermont tv station, back when it first came to light. I wasn't particularly impressed, but Burlington has become a strange place in the past few years.
Again, my larger point is that shifting of myth is part of any society over time. If you have drilled down to actual historical fact, and know what really happened and what the "heroes" were like in real life, the emotional impact of myth changes just isn't there. I will often say to myself after some defacing of property "well THAT was stupid." but without it being a battle worthy of fighting. Why?
Because the fights are not about history or truth, but are so much foam rising to the top about political positioning, crude attempts at power play, and airing of long past grievances. Those all thrive on emotion, hatred, retribution, and other negativity.
The American Dream in the 17th and 18th century was 40 acres and a slave for many of the early settlers. We have conveniently erased that part of our history. The majority, perhaps 3/4, of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. It was so common that one of my 18th century NY ancestors was given a slave as settlement payment in a lawsuit, like legal tender.
Samuel Adams, of Revolutionary fame, was much opposed to slavery but when he married his 2nd wife she came with a slave. The girl was technically "titled" to the Adams family and was later emancipated but continued in household service, more or less as part of the family. So, was Samuel Adams a slaveowner?
This is a very slippery slope. The institution didn't melt away and become just a southern thing until the 1800s. The righteous indignation of the north at the time was a bit too cute and hypocritical. They were eager to utilize and embrace the products of southern slavery. The current day attitude of shock and dismay that the founders had slaves is silly and simply underscores how poorly informed we are and how history has been manipulated and sanitized in our popular culture.
The only merit to your post is that it's true the status of slavery in the 18th century was more complicated than a strict binary of slaveowning South and free North.
However, the simple fact that is indisputable is that the vast majority of American colonialists, and later American citizens, did not and never owned slaves, both North and South (more in the South, yes but nowhere near a majority). Your claim that "the American Dream" was 40 acres and a slave is hogwash, no doubt gleaned from your favorite twitter warrior with no understanding of history, as is the case for most righteous woke people these days who are merely the twins of the neo-confederate revisionists.
In the North itself, slavery was contentious from the early days. While slave populations never grew in sizable numbers in the North, there had been a small presence, primarily household servants. The Northern colonies did try to regulate and even ban the importation of new slaves prior to the Revolution but were frequently overturned by the royal governors. But once the Revolution took sway, the North moved very quickly to ban slavery (specifics of policies and timing varied from state to state but the abolitionist movement was firmly underway by the Revolutionary war and became very much part of the post-Revolution consensus in the North). However, I will be the first to agree this movement was also not tantamount to true civil equality, which is a different topic.
There's a great deal of willful misunderstanding and deliberate shaming of history to suit modern day grievances. In the world of the 17th and 18th century, slavery was an institution as old as history, and found in just about all civilizations across the world and in varying guises. The vast majority of the global population were really not "free" people in any meaningful sense, certainly not as we consider it today. It's probably best to think of it as degrees of unfreedom. There was preciously little to differ between the day to day lives of slaves and the serfs that still existed in Russia or the peasants of China or the poor of much of Europe who had no real rights (or even settlers living precarious existence in the new colonies). And there were many levels of bondage. It was commonplace for young boys to become bonded journeyman to a master, effectively under that master's control for many years as part of his training. Quite a few migrants to the American colonies came in as indentured servants, who were effectively slaves for the period of their indenture (when you get down to it, the clear majority of early settlers in American colonies were actually in some form of bondage).
All the above is merely to point out that the arrival of slavery into the American colonies was not an unusual thing by global standards of the 17th century. No one would have blinked an eye. It was not unique to Europeans either (or even to the New World, as existing cultures among the Native Americans certainly practiced their own versions of slavery).
But something did radically change in the subsequent 150 years from the first colonial settlements, which is what the modern day woke warriors steadfastly ignore, is that slavery transformed from an uncontentious historical fact of life into a horror. And it happened here in the United States. The first real abolitionist movement in history happened in America. The first abolitionist society in the world was founded in Pennsylvania in 1775, and included Ben Franklin among its members. And this followed several generations of growing cries for turning slavery from an accepted fact of life into a something that was widely seen as a moral wrong (some of the earliest denouncements against slavery were among the Pennsylvanian Quakers in the late 17th century).
What happened in America was the American Revolution. The badly educated woke warriors these days merely dismiss the Revolution as a rebellion against the British monarch. But the Revolution was far more than just cries of self-government. The Revolution was also the product of the Enlightenment movement and the growing belief that all men were autonomous beings with independent free will and equal to one another. This itself was a hugely radical transformation. The line from the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness was an enormously radical declaration at a time when most of the world, including the British, firmly did not believe in any such thing as the equality of men (outside a handful of crankpot theorists and philosophers) and societies were strictly organized into hierarchies of rank and privilege and bondage. That was the true revolutionary impact of the American Revolution. And it utterly and completely transformed America itself as well.
I'm not going to write a dissertation here as there are plenty of excellent books by wise historians on the subject. But an intelligent person here can see that there was a problem, too. The American colonies had also inherited the legacy of slavery, a byproduct of the old world it was trying to reject at the same time. The cries for revolutionary equality quickly overtook America and most of the old forms of bondage and rank were quickly abolished (journeymen, indentured servitude, as well as legal powers of fathers over sons or legally established social rank and precedence). The North moved quickly to abolish slavery and end the slave trade. Many of the slaveowning founding fathers, like Washington, called for a day when the South would follow suit, and freed their own slaves in due time. But History is rarely ever so neat. Slavery itself, as it was a defined form of property, was a much thornier problem and not one quickly resolved because of its dominant role in Southern agricultural economies, but it did simultaneously introduce an enormous source of tension in America that was to dominate the country from the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War.
Contrary to what the woke warriors of today want to believe, the story of America is not one of hiding slavery, but abolishing slavery and truly establishing, for the first time in human history, a land of free and equal people. It was a huge and ongoing struggle. It didn't happen overnight. Many tragedies surrounded it (including a brutal and devastating Civil War).
Who knows what the real story is behind Johns Hopkins and I suspect it's not one of a gleeful enslaver but something much more different (especially in the context of everything else we know about Hopkins), but the attempt to impose a 21st century moral binary on past history that is not alive to defend itself is childish, reflects an infantile mindset and only shows more interest in the rush to be righteous than anything sincere. The latter summarizes the modern day revisionist movement more than anything else and also underscores the intellectual bankruptcy at its heart.
When slavery was introduced in VA, it was done gradually. As it was introduced, it was not something new to them. England had slavery reintroduced under the Vagabond Act of 1547 - repealed later - and even children were bound for up to age 24. Scotland had a form of slavery for those working in coal mines up until 1775. The outrage about the Founders and Framers perhaps shows how poorly a job we have done to educate our nation about this legacy. In VA, slavery in 1650 was different than in 1705, and different than in 1780, 1790 the 1830's. As it morphed, it became more repugnant to our eyes. When Mary Washington (George's mother) was a widow, it was common to include when bequeathing a slave to also bequeath their future "issue" (children). That was a far cry from when slaves were bred in VA after 1800 - an unintended consequence of stopping the slave trade.
But once we tear down these statutes, are we going to next tear down the churches that told them it was Biblically sanctified?
Its hard to wrap one's head around the contradictions in our history, but life is full of them. I have given up trying to understand how the loving grandmother I knew was also a racist. Who knows how we will be judged in 250 years when the future looks back at our contradictions.
Contrary to what the woke warriors of today want to believe, the story of America is not one of hiding slavery, but abolishing slavery and truly establishing, for the first time in human history, a land of free and equal people. It was a huge and ongoing struggle. It didn't happen overnight. Many tragedies surrounded it (including a brutal and devastating Civil War).
The woke warriors are now onto finding that Abe Lincoln was not sufficiently antislavery.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DXBtoFL
Who knows what the real story is behind Johns Hopkins and I suspect it's not one of a gleeful enslaver but something much more different (especially in the context of everything else we know about Hopkins), but the attempt to impose a 21st century moral binary on past history that is not alive to defend itself is childish, reflects an infantile mindset and only shows more interest in the rush to be righteous than anything sincere. The latter summarizes the modern day revisionist movement more than anything else and also underscores the intellectual bankruptcy at its heart.
The woke warriors want to delegitimatize the U.S. the same way they seek to delegitimatize the State of Israel and every Western country. Let's see how they feel if they had to move out of Mama's shelter and face the world on their own without making compromises or being pure hypocrites.
Contrary to what the woke warriors of today want to believe, the story of America is not one of hiding slavery, but abolishing slavery and truly establishing, for the first time in human history, a land of free and equal people. It was a huge and ongoing struggle. It didn't happen overnight. Many tragedies surrounded it (including a brutal and devastating Civil War).
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
The woke warriors are now onto finding that Abe Lincoln was not sufficiently antislavery.
The woke warriors want to delegitimatize the U.S. the same way they seek to delegitimatize the State of Israel and every Western country. Let's see how they feel if they had to move out of Mama's shelter and face the world on their own without making compromises or being pure hypocrites.
What I object to is those who would completely ignore all the good someone has done and focus entirely on the bad. (And, btw, I am referring to the geniuses, philanthropists, and the nation's founders, but NOT to those individuals with many convictions for assault of various kinds whom some of those on the extreme left attempt to have us believe were almost saint-like before they were killed.)
I do not understand why flawed historical figures -- (and, honestly, aren't we ALL flawed in some way?)-- cannot be presented as human beings who did do some bad things, but also accomplished much that was good?
Last edited by katharsis; 12-20-2020 at 11:48 AM..
What I object to is those who would completely ignore all the good someone has done and focus entirely on the bad. (And, btw, I am referring to the geniuses, philanthropists, and the nation's founders, but NOT to those individuals with many convictions for assault of various kinds whom some of those on the extreme left would seek to have us believe were almost saint-like before they were killed.)
I do not understand why flawed historical figures -- (and, honestly, aren't we ALL flawed in some ways?)-- cannot be presented as human beings who did do some bad things, but also accomplished much that was good?
Exactly. Benedict Arnold is Exhibit "A" for this, since he was both praiseworthy and later a faithless traitor. He got his just deserts; see the last paragraph of this post.
About one year ago, I read Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor (Paperback) by Willard Sterne Randall. Benedict Arnold is best known for his vicious turn against the American Revolution. His name is a synonym for betrayal, for total faithlessness. This book puts his turn from glorious heroism into the context of its time. The American revolutionaries were a ragtag group of rebels. The one thing that what became the United States was not was a country. What Benedict Arnold betrayed was a rebel movement. History being written by the victors, the U.S. is treated by many as a country as of July 4, 1776, not 1787 when the Constitution was written, or when George Washington took the oath of office in New York City on April 30, 1789.
Benedict Arnold was an undoubted hero from 1774 when he took up arms for the Revolution for a bit more than four years, when the betrayal started. The betrayal came to a head in September or October 1780 when he attempted to turn over West Point to John Andre, a British officer. During the "heroic" period he was grievously wounded not once but twice. He spearheaded an invasion of Quebec City from Maine that nearly took what is now Canada for the revolutionaries.
He and Ethan Allen are rivals for credit for seizing Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and then helping win the crucial Battle of Saratoga in 1777. That battle, in turn, led directly to French and Dutch recognition and military and financial support for the Revolution. In short it is possible that "no Benedict Arnold, no United States." This is rarely remembered. In no way is Benedict Arnold another Vidkund Quisling, Pierre Laval or Julius or Ethel Rosenberg.
The "thanks" he got from the Continental Congress and corrupt military leaders was to go unpaid, unthanked and passed over for credit and promotion. He advanced considerable resources to pay soldiers and for military supplies. In his mind, at some point, "enough is enough." Part of the factor seems also have been a steamy affair leading to his second marriage, to Peggy Shippen. Peggy was part of a well-known and wealthy Loyalist Family.
None of this, in my mind, excuses treason. But some leaders should know that when "no good deed goes unpunished" the results are often not good.
Not surprisingly, the British gratitude for Benedict Arnold's turn against the Revolution was fleeting. They did not honor their promises to Benedict. The main moral of the story, I suppose, is that loyalty is a fundamental value, abandoned at peril.
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