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Thread: America Has Been Fighting Over Statues Since the Founding

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    Chris's Avatar Senior Member
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    America Has Been Fighting Over Statues Since the Founding

    Time for some perspective.

    America Has Been Fighting Over Statues Since the Founding

    [It's] a clash that is literally as old as the nation itself. It began more than 200 years ago with a vicious debate over how the country should celebrate the founding of the American Republic—a debate that continued well into the 20th century.

    The controversy started the moment Thomas Jefferson opted to form an op position party to contest the policies of the George Washington administration, particularly those of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, whom Jefferson believed was a monarchist, if not an outright British agent. Over the ensuing years, Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans battled it out—not just over whose party should govern the country but also over which side’s principles had been most instrumental in and representative of the birth of the United States.

    ...While Jefferson and his followers tended to oppose monuments devoted to any of the nation’s founders—such effects were were trappings of monarchy, Jefferson maintained—they were positively apoplectic over any suggestion that Hamilton was worthy of commemoration. In the aftermath of Hamilton’s duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in July, 1804, Jefferson and his lieutenants were concerned that the emotional response to Hamilton’s death might lead to the erection of statues celebrating a man they despised. John Armstrong, a Jeffersonian lieutenant, reported to James Madison from New York City four days after the duel that “the public sympathy is a good deal excited for Hamilton and his family, whether this is spontaneous or artificial I do not know, but it probably partakes of both characters.” The city of New York “took the direction and assumed the expense of his funeral, and the English interest talk of erecting a statue to his memory,” Armstrong reported.

    Armstrong’s dreaded “English interest” succeeded in erecting a marble statue of a toga-wearing Hamilton in 1835. The sculpture was placed in the rotunda of the New York Stock Exchange, and was the first marble statue produced in the United States. In the minds of Jefferson’s heirs, the fact that a statue of Hamilton graced the New York Stock Exchange simply confirmed his role as the founding plutocrat. The idea that Hamilton was the champion of wealth and privilege would be invoked for decades by Democratic Party politicians long after Hamilton’s death.

    ...n the early 20th century, the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton surfaced again, this time at Hamilton’s alma mater, Columbia University (known as King’s College in Hamilton’s time). The college unveiled a statue of Hamilton in 1908, at the behest of Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, who believed that Hamilton was “our master statesman.” These accolades for Hamilton did not sit well with Joseph Pulitzer, who, before he passed away in 1911, insisted in his will that a statue of Jefferson be built outside the school of journalism he funded and that opened in 1912. Pulitzer revered Jefferson, and despite the fact that the Sage of Monticello lacked any connection to Columbia, a statue of Jefferson was indeed erected in 1914 and still sits outside the nation’s first school of journalism.

    In 1923, President Warren G. Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon dedicated a statue of Hamilton on the grounds of the Treasury Department, one of the few memorials to Hamilton in the nation’s capital. Sculptor James Earle Fraser, the designer of the Indian-head nickel, wanted to express “the force of a man who wore lace ruffles and yet had to combat Jefferson and Madison.” Democrats retaliated in 1927 by proposing that a statue of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s treasury secretary, be placed in a more prominent location on Pennsylvania Avenue. A Republican-controlled Congress refused to appropriate public funds for the Gallatin memorial, but after a lengthy private fund raising campaign the Gallatin statue was erected in 1947 at the height of New Deal and Fair Deal hostility to Hamilton.

    It was President Franklin Roosevelt who did most to elevate Thomas Jefferson into the pantheon of American immortals and tried to airbrush Hamilton out of the founding. Roosevelt campaigned against President Herbert Hoover in 1932 by presenting himself as a 20th century Jefferson running against the Hamiltonian Hoover. Roosevelt led the effort to erect the beautiful Tidal Basin memorial to Jefferson and insisted that the sage’s face adorn both the nickel and a popular U.S. postage stamp.

    ...
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    RollingWave (11-29-2017)

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    One should also be very wary that , especially domestically (but internationally as well) framing one side of the struggle against another in pure good and evil terms , and then trying to destroy the other side's monuments , usually ends up being very hypocritical and dangerous.

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    Chris (11-29-2017)

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    It's telling that Hamilton's statue was erected on Wall Street as a monument to big finance. It's also ironic since most modern "liberals" can trace their political heritage back to the elitist Hamilton.
    Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak. And that it is doing God service when it is violating all His laws.
    --John Adams

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