Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Why there are Confederate statues in states that weren't in the Confederacy?
https://news.vice.com/story/confederate-statues-are-all-over-states-that-werent-in-the-confederacy
The inscription on the Confederate Memorial Fountain in Helena, Montana, says it “sits in longing tribute to our Confederate soldiers.” But there are a few things wrong with the monument, a granite fountain erected in 1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy: Montana didn’t have any Confederate dead. It didn’t have any Union dead. That’s because there was no Montana during the Civil War.
Helena’s fountain isn’t alone. As of 2016, at least 22 of the over 1,500 Confederate memorials scattered across the United States sit in areas that weren’t even part of the U.S. when the Confederacy existed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Dozens more live in states that operated under split governments during the Civil War, like Kentucky, which contributed half as many Confederate soldiers as Union soldiers to the fighting but which now hosts 56 Confederate memorials and just two Union ones (the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, is taking steps to remove two Confederate statues from the city).
But the existence of these monuments is less a testament to what actually happened in the Civil War or the heritage of the Confederacy than the fervor to rewrite the telling of the war decades after, when a flurry of monument-building filled the landscape with landmarks, even where they have a dubious connection to actual history.
“There was a really big systematic push to promote the history of the Confederacy and the so-called ‘‘lost cause’ that was largely engineered by women’s groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had a very overt and systematic plan to rewrite textbooks, to erect public monuments that would establish the ‘true’ history of the war,” said Kirk Savage, an expert on Confederate monuments and their role in collective memory.
The inscription on the Confederate Memorial Fountain in Helena, Montana, says it “sits in longing tribute to our Confederate soldiers.” But there are a few things wrong with the monument, a granite fountain erected in 1916 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy: Montana didn’t have any Confederate dead. It didn’t have any Union dead. That’s because there was no Montana during the Civil War.
Helena’s fountain isn’t alone. As of 2016, at least 22 of the over 1,500 Confederate memorials scattered across the United States sit in areas that weren’t even part of the U.S. when the Confederacy existed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Dozens more live in states that operated under split governments during the Civil War, like Kentucky, which contributed half as many Confederate soldiers as Union soldiers to the fighting but which now hosts 56 Confederate memorials and just two Union ones (the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, is taking steps to remove two Confederate statues from the city).
But the existence of these monuments is less a testament to what actually happened in the Civil War or the heritage of the Confederacy than the fervor to rewrite the telling of the war decades after, when a flurry of monument-building filled the landscape with landmarks, even where they have a dubious connection to actual history.
“There was a really big systematic push to promote the history of the Confederacy and the so-called ‘‘lost cause’ that was largely engineered by women’s groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had a very overt and systematic plan to rewrite textbooks, to erect public monuments that would establish the ‘true’ history of the war,” said Kirk Savage, an expert on Confederate monuments and their role in collective memory.
Many of these statues don't have any connection to local history and were put up many decades after the civil war ended. It's not like people who lose a war are rushing to build monuments to remember their crushing loss.
It's interesting that the state that elected the first woman to the US Congress also decided they needed a confederate monument around the same time. Montana didn't exist during the civil war. It wasn't even a territory then.
Wealthy racists can put these monuments in their private museums if they want.
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
