President bemoans removal of statues
WASHINGTON — The Civil War has been over for more than 150 years, but a new pitched battle over the statues commemorating that bitter conflict is only escalating.
Two days after reigniting the furor over his response to the violence during a white-supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump lamented the loss
of monuments such as the ones taken down this week in Baltimore.
In a series of tweets, the president said: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”
The burgeoning controversy, started last weekend by a protest rally near a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, stretched from Trump’s cellphone to Capitol Hill to Columbus.
In a tweet Wednesday evening, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther referred to the statue of a Confederate soldier at the Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery on the Hilltop, a federally owned site on the National Register of Historic Places. About 2,200 Confederate soldiers are buried there.
“I stand with mayors across the country as they remove statues and monuments that celebrate leaders of the Confederacy,” Ginther wrote. “At the same time, we must remember our past including the bloody war over the future of slavery — a battle won by and for our Union. As we saw in Charlottesville, that past is still relevant because the threats of overt and systemic racism are still very real in our country.”
He said he would “look to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for guidance as they consider the appropriateness of historical cemetery markers that remind us of the terrible costs of the Civil War, but do not celebrate the indefensible Confederate cause.” But the statue will stay. “Monuments to Confederate soldiers stand only in cemeteries where Confederate soldiers are buried or memorialized, and we have no plans to disturb those gravesites or monuments,” Curt Cashour, press secretary for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in a statement.
In Washington, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said he would join a bill from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., to remove statues of at least a dozen Confederate politicians and soldiers in the Capitol.
“Symbols of the confederacy should be removed from taxpayer-funded public property and put in museums where they belong,” the Ohio Democrat said in a statement.
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan echoed that call.
“Statues of Confederates or Confederate sympathizers have no place in the Halls of Congress and should be removed immediately,” the Niles Democrat said. “Taking down monuments of Confederate leaders and sympathizers is not erasing history; it is taking a stand against the glorification of those who fought to end our nation as we know it for the purpose of subjugating an entire race of people.”
During his remarks Tuesday and again in his tweets Thursday, Trump argued that Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson are important and admired historical figures in the South. He said they could be equated to Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves and thus could potentially be subject to a modern-day backlash that would tarnish their legacies.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said in interviews this week that he relishes a fight with Democrats over cultural issues because it will allow the president to “crush” his rivals by focusing on the economy.
“The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em,” Bannon told The American Prospect. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
Still, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D–Calif., called the statues “reprehensible.”
“The halls of Congress are the very heart of our democracy,” she said, calling upon Speaker Paul Ryan to remove the Confederate statues “immediately.” “The statues in the Capitol should embody our highest ideals as Americans, expressing who we are and who we aspire to be as a nation.”
Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, said he agreed with Ohio’s recent decision to replace the statue of former Gov. William “Earthquake” Allen, a slavery sympathizer, in the U.S. Capitol with one of inventor Thomas Alva Edison. But he said states should have a choice over the two people chosen to represent them in the Capitol. President James Garfield is Ohio’s other statue.
“This is a process any state is able to do if they feel their statue no longer represents the values of their citizens,” Stivers said.In an interview with The New York Times, Bannon defended Trump’s comparison of the Confederate generals to the Founding Fathers, saying it “connects with the American people about their history, culture and traditions.
“The race-identity politics of the left wants to say it’s all racist,” Bannon added. “Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”