Since the Lee monument was FINALLY removed from the Capital today, I thought it would be fun to look back at the moment of national unity in 1910 that brought it there in first pla- oh, wait, no, the opposite happened.

Here's New York's GAR with a WTF and a GH Thomas namedrop

Here's Indiana, New Jersey, South Dakota, Delaware, New Mexico, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania with a double shotted "aw hell no"
Vermont with a "get lost"
https://t.co/WdaJaPto0U
From the same article, Kansas nearly sending a John Brown monument, which would've been EPIC:
The debate was pretty hot in the GAR encampment of 1910 ( https://t.co/f88VlJVeyd some were for letting bygones be bygones.. The nation was united now, right? Then this dude from Georgia spoke up:
Albert Sholes - who'd served with two Rhode Island units in the war - went on to quote this letter from a son of a Confederate officer. The Lost Cause was growing fanatical in the second generation:
One reason this was a divisive issue was because the idea of a pension for US Army Civil War veterans was going through Congress, and many GAR members didn't want to rock the boat, such as this one:
Kansas striking back again:
Some GAR representatives were saying that if the GAR made a fuss about the Lee monument, it might be a rough time for the GAR members in the south, to which Indiana replied:
I'll leave you with the words of the representative from Illinois, Jasper Darling, who prophesied what compromise and "reconciliation" would bring:
Darling, a soldier from Massachusetts in the war, was an adamant opponent of the Lost Cause narrative and was NOT a fan of Lee, btw. Here's a sample:
https://t.co/nrPFFebkeE

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.

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