A California town’s effort to remove a statue of former President William McKinley shows that the leftist bent for erasing politically incorrect figures from the public square no longer is reserved for slave owners, Confederate generals and segregationists.
On the heels of the Confederate monument purge across the South, the town council of Arcata, California, voted to take down a statue of the 25th president, despite McKinley’s sterling record on civil rights.
Among other things, McKinley fought to abolish slavery in the Civil War, resisted demands to fire Catholic state workers as governor of Ohio and appointed a record number of blacks to federal positions as president.
But activists cite McKinley’s mistreatment of American Indians and policy of territorial expansion as grounds for the statue’s removal. McKinley signed the Curtis Act of 1898, an amendment to the Dawes Act, which broke up tribal governments in Indian territory and paved the way for Oklahoma to become a state in 1907.
David LaRue, a longtime Arcata resident petitioning the council to put the statue’s fate to a popular vote, said the wave of iconoclasm spreading across the country will “destroy a great deal of our nation’s monuments and historical displays” if left unchecked.
“It is an important fact that no one generation has the right to destroy history for future generations,” Mr. LaRue said. “It is a bad precedent to start tearing down U.S. presidents and U.S. history. The idea of ‘erasing’ history by removing the remnants of the past is wrong. Removing this piece of art will change nothing because you can’t change history.” – READ MORE
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