Where Will the Removal of Confederate Monuments Stop?An eminent historian explains why taking down Civil War statues doesn’t erase history—and why statues to slaveholding Founding Fathers aren’t next.
DAVID A. GRAHAM 8:06 PM ET IDEAS 2017
Perhaps not since the collapse of the Soviet Union has there been such a vogue for tearing down statues. …
But what about the idea that once the Lees and Stonewall Jacksons and P.G.T. Beauregards are pulled down, the revisionists will inevitably start agitating for pulling down monuments to slave-owning Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But Gordon-Reed, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, said it was not hard to draw a bright line separating Jefferson’s generation of Virginians from the ones who tried to secede.
“We can distinguish between people who wanted to build the United States of America and people who wanted to destroy it,” she said. “It’s possible to recognize people’s contributions at the same time as recognizing their flaws.”
“You’re not going to have American history without Jefferson,” Gordon-Reed said. Alluding not to the demise of the Lenin statutes but to the infamous deletion of disgraced figures from Kremlin photographs, she added, “It’s not the Soviet Union.”
So a tenured professor at Harvard says there’s no need to worry because no future SJWs will ever push harder along the iconoclastic path that helped her win tenure at Harvard …
In Palo Alto, the Father of Silicon Valley, Fred Terman, just got his named stripped off the Terman Middle School because of his hereditary taint of being descended from a Known Eugenicist, Lewis Terman.
Eisenhower’s statues will fall over his Operation Wetback deporting illegal immigrants. Ben Franklin will go because his Observations Concerning the Increase in Mankind was anti-Open Borders.
Heck, even FDR’s days are numbered.
Professor Gordon-Reed and Mr. Graham must not read The Atlantic much because The Atlantic’s most strenuously celebrated writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, goes on and on about FDR’s redlining being a vast crime against today’s African-Americans.
I’d say there is a higher chance that FDR’s statue on the Mall is melted down for the coming Emmett Till / Trayvon Martin / Michael Brown Memorial than that the current controversy over Confederate statues stops with Confederates.
Jefferson? How is 
