Confederate statue replacement blocked

TALLAHASSEE — A state representative who opposed removing a statue of a Confederate general from the U.S. Capitol is now blocking its replacement, apparently because he isn’t happy that Walt Disney won’t be representing the state of Florida.

Republican Rep. Scott Plakon blocked a bill to replace the statue Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with one of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, who wrote “The Everglades: River of Grass” and is credited with helping create the national park that preserves 1.5 million acres of wetlands in southern Florida.

Why? He said the process to pick a replacement was flawed.

“My personal preference would be is we hit the reset button and look at all the options again,” said Plakon, who last year voted against the bill to remove the Smith statue. “If it’s only up to me, I would say scrap what we’ve done.”

But Republican Rep. Jose Felix Diaz, who sponsored last year’s bill to remove the Smith statue and is sponsoring this year’s bill to have Douglas represent Florida, said he’s discussed this with Plakon, and the real reason is, “He was really stuck on Disney.”

Congress lets each state send two statues to the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Florida’s other statue is of John Gorrie, whose inventions led to modern-day air conditioning.

The Legislature agreed last year that a Confederate general shouldn’t represent the state, especially one who moved away from Florida when he was 12.

Smith is famous largely as the last Confederate officer to surrender a significant force at the end of the Civil War, nearly two months after Gen. Robert E. Lee gave in to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia and formally ended the war on April 9, 1865.