The Anarchy of Toppling Lincoln, Abolitionists, Black, and Jesus Statues

Will President Lincoln and Mr. Alexander Be Toppled on June 25, 2020?

On June 23, 2020, DC delegate Eleanor Norton announced plans to introduce legislation to remove the memorial. That same day, protesters on site vowed to dismantle the statue on Thursday, June 25, 2020, at 7:00 p.m. local time.

The call is now out to a crowd to show up at 7:00 p.m., in Washington D.C., to take down the Emancipation Monument. The statue shows President Abraham Lincoln and a soon-to-be freed slave. There is a claim that the motive to tear this statue down is because it shows a white man subjugating a black man. But the reality is different.

President Trump has said he will "send in the troops" to protect the statue. Stay tuned.

The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group, and sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922, is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, with one fist clenched, shirtless and shackled at the president's feet.

Archer Alexander (c. 1810 or 1815 – December 8, 1880) was a former slave who served as the model for the emancipated slave in the Emancipation Memorial (1876) located in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. He was the subject of an 1885 biography, The Story of Archer Alexander, written by William Greenleaf Eliot.

In 1869, the author Eliot was working with a group to build a statue of Lincoln. Thomas Ball had an acceptable model made, but Eliot's group wanted to have a real freedman pose for it. Eliot gave Ball a photo of Alexander, and he was chosen as the model.

In 1876, the statue was unveiled, with a number of notable people in attendance, including President Ulysses S. Grant, members of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, other government figures, and Frederick Douglass, another former slave. However, neither Alexander nor Eliot was present.

Confederate Statues Reflect The Defeated

Edward Luce states it simply, on June 25, 2020, in Financial Times' article "Confederate Ghosts Still Haunt America": 

More than a century and a half after the south’s defeat, a Yankee president is sticking up for defeated Confederates. Those wishing to tear down their statues “hate our history, they hate our values and they hate everything we prize as Americans”, Mr Trump said this week. Not since Woodrow Wilson has a US president been quite so praiseworthy of America’s defeated enemy. The fact that Mr Trump can do so this boldly is a measure of the US civil war’s unfinished business.

The point has been made often during the George Floyd protests that have brought down many Confederate statues across America. When Germany was defeated in World War II, symbols of Adolph Hitler were torn down without any soul-searching. When Iraq's Saddam Hussein was defeated in the US invasion, the statue of Hussein was ceremonially toppled. 

Yet in the USA, the symbols of the Confederacy are found throughout the country. Only in recent weeks, not in 1865, have the flags, names, and statues been removed in great numbers - or considered for removal. 

As Luce concluded:

This month [President Trump] rejected calls to rename military bases that commemorate civil war enemies, such as Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. All 10 such bases are in former slave-owning states.

Mr Trump’s dismissal of a proposal backed by US military figures gives even optimists pause. The fact that the US still honours men who fought against the stars and stripes in a war that killed more Americans than in the two world wars combined is a reminder of what is at stake. Yet it works both ways. By making the stakes so explicit, Mr Trump is unwittingly offering America a once-in-a-generation chance to end its myopia on the Confederacy. “We de-Nazified Germany,” said Ms Anderson. “We never de-Confederalised the south.” 

Anarchy on the Horizon

What is cautionary and troubling is the over-reaction of the crowd, and the mindlessness zealous wave of statue toppling that seems unconnected to the people symbolized in the statues. The forthcoming confrontation over the Lincoln-Alexander statue in Lincoln Park appears a prime example.

Overturning statues for the stake of the power to be able to topple memorials is overtaking the demonstrations.

I started to notice this during the Albert Pike toppling, which occurred on Juneteenth. While, yes, Pike was a failed and fired Confederate general, the Lafayette Park statue and his "fame" was about his central role as the head of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. It seems the first of the "gray zone" statues.

Shomari Stone reporting for Channel4NBC stated on the video of the toppling the Pike statue that it was being done by an organized group different that the peaceful assembly he had witnessed earlier in the evening. He felt it was a planned removal of the Pike statue.

The defacing on June 22, 2020, of Lafayette Square's President Andrew Jackson statue seems similar. More symbolic than thoughtful. In office from 1829 to 1837, Jackson owned more than 500 slaves during his lifetime and was a key figure in the forced relocation of nearly 100,000 Native Americans.

Other examples are cropping up:

Several monuments depicting US president Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), have also been vandalized. He drew up the US Declaration of Independence but owned more than 600 slaves.

The bronze sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt, which has been at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for 80 years, depicts the former leader on horseback towering over a black man and a Native American man -- who are both on foot.

In Prague, a statue to Britain’s World War II leader Winston Churchill was covered in graffiti daubed with the words "Black Lives Matter" in solidarity with the anti-racist movement in the United States.

On June 23, 2020, demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin toppled two statues. They tore down the "Forward" statue and dragged it away from its base at the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol. The bronze allegorical statue, which is more than 100 years old, depicts a female figure standing on the prow of a boat, with her right hand stretched out while her left clasps the American flag. A short time later, the same group pulled down a statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg from the Capitol grounds and threw it into a nearby lake, according to WKOW. Heg was a Norwegian immigrant and abolitionist who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He led the predominately-Scandinavian 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment into battle against the Confederate Army until his death at Chickamauga in 1863.

On June 14, 2020, in Whittier, California, a statue of John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, abolitionist and Quaker the city was named after, was vandalized over the weekend. The still-unidentified vandal wrote “BLM” as well as an ”(expletive) Slave Owners” on the seated statue which is located at Central Park, 6532 Friends Ave. The suspect or suspects used different colors and spray painted the statue’s face, chest, bow tie, book and chair.

Mayor Joe Vinatieri said “He stood against slavery and racism...Many are upset about this including me because the city of Whittier is his namesake.”

“John Greenleaf Whittier did not enslave people, and indeed, was a leading anti-slavery activist in his time, in addition to being a renowned poet,” Celia Caust-Ellenbogen, archivist at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, wrote the Whittier Daily News.

Whittier was a delegate to the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Convention, edited anti-slavery newspapers, helped to establish the Liberty Party, wrote numerous poems supporting the abolitionist cause as well as an 1833 tract in favor of immediate and unconditional emancipation of enslaved people, according to Caust-Ellenbogen.

Some time before June 10, 2020, protesters have defaced a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin, dousing it with paint and spray-painting the word “colonizer” on the pedestal. The statue stands outside Philadelphia City Hall.

Born in 1795, Baldwin moved to Philadelphia from New Jersey at the age of 16 and rose from an apprenticeship at a local jeweler to establish a successful business manufacturing train locomotives. Baldwin argued for the right of Blacks to vote in Pennsylvania during the state’s 1837 Constitutional Convention, and helped establish a school for Black children where he paid teachers’ salaries for years.

Protesters also defaced Philadelphia’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors monument with graffiti reading “BLM.” That monument’s inscription reads, “All who have labored today in behalf of the Union have wrought for the best interests of the country and the world not only for the present but for all future ages.”

“The irony of vandalizing a monument to those who died to end slavery is lost on the morons who don’t know their history,” Joe Walsh, a member of the Friends of Matthias Baldwin Park said.

54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial Vandalized

A monument recognizing the first all-volunteer black regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War was defaced in Boston during May 31, 2020 protests, with BLM and other tags.

"A thousand men signed up just after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, just think about that," said Liz Vizza, executive director of Friends of the Public Garden. "These are men who, if they were captured in the south, would be enslaved or murdered. But this cause was so important to them, they signed up to go fight for their freedom."

The Shaw Memorial captures the likenesses of the first African American volunteer infantry unit – the 54th Massachusetts Regiment – that fought after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, advocated for the men to join the war because they desperately wanted to fight for freedom. If the soldiers had been captured in battle they could have been enslaved or killed. Their heroic story was recounted in the 1989 Hollywood film Glory.

The regiment gained widespread acclaim on July 18, 1863, when it spearheaded an assault on Fort Wagner, a key position overlooking the water approach to Charleston Harbor. The 54th Massachusetts numbered 600 men at the time of the assault. Of these, 270 were killed, wounded, or captured during the engagement. Col. Shaw was killed, along with 29 of his men; 24 more later died of wounds, 15 were captured, 52 were missing in action and never accounted for, and 149 were wounded. These casualties represented the highest in the history of the regiment during a single engagement.

One of the soldiers, Sgt. William Harvey Carney carried the American flag throughout the battle, never dropping it despite being shot 7 times. Carney was the first black American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for action.

The purposes of the demonstrations have derailed if the memorials of Black Union soldiers, abolitionists, and Lincoln are being vandalized and toppled.

And what of the shout out to bring down...

Jesus Statues

On June 24, 2020, Snopes.com investigated the claim that the statues of Jesus were a target of toppling. They discovered that "racial justice activist Shaun King" had tweeted about this, and thus it was a "Correct Attribution."

President Donald Trump meets with Polish President Andrzej Duda in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, June 24, in Washington. He is saying, "Now they are looking at Jesus Christ, they are looking at George Washington, Thomas Jefferson ... Not going to happen, not going to happen.”

Stay tuned...

Lafayette Square, Druid Hill Park, and the Masonic Name Game Continues

Lafayette Square Again

On June 22, 2020, protesters defaced the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, Washington D.C., as they attempted to topple it outside the White House.

The Jackson statue remained on its pedestal. Videos posted on Twitter and other social media showed that the protesters had climbed on the statue and tied ropes around it, then tried to pull it off its pedestal.

When asked about reports of pepper spray being used in Lafayette Park, a National Park Service spokesperson told NBC News: "I am still gathering information, but it is accurate that pepper spray was used to disengage the protesters from the statue and clear the area."

Interior Secretary David L. Bernhardt said in a statement that he had just left the scene at Lafayette Square "where another so called 'peaceful protest' led to destruction tonight. Let me be clear: we will not bow to anarchists. Law and order will prevail, and justice will be served."
Jackson was a Tennessee slaveholder and signed a law that led to the expulsion of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River in which they were forcibly moved west by the federal government. According to the Library of Congress, about 4,000 Cherokees died on the march which became known as the "Trail of Tears."
Trump has previously expressed admiration for Jackson, who was a populist, including during a visit to the Hermitage, the seventh president’s plantation in 2017. According to the Hermitage, Jackson owned about 150 slaves at the time of his death. NBC News.

On the morning of June 23, 2020, President Trump talked about the "attack on the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Square" as he was on his way to board a helicopter to go to Arizona to inspect the "wall." He said he was going to sign an executive order protecting statues and monuments later.

The Fayette Factor - Name Game has been discussed here at the Twilight Language blog often. See here in 2004, here in 2007, here in 2012, here in 2018, and here in 2020.


Druid Hill Park

In Baltimore, on June 21, 2020, a statue and memorial to George Washington in a city park were vandalized with red paint. The Baltimore Sun reports that the memorial in Druid Hill Park in northwest Baltimore also had the words “Destroy Racists” and the initials for the Black Lives Matter movement written on the base.

Druid Hill Park is a 745-acre (3.01 km2) urban park in northwest Baltimore, Maryland. Its boundaries are marked by Druid Park Drive (north), Swann Drive and Reisterstown Road (west and south), and the Jones Falls Expressway / Interstate 83 (east).

Inaugurated in 1860, under the administration of city Mayor Thomas Swann, Druid Hill Park ranks with Central Park (begun in 1858) in New York City, Fairmount Park (1812) in Philadelphia and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco as the oldest landscaped public parks in the United States.

The land was originally part of "Auchentorlie," the estate of Dr George Buchanan (1696–1750), one of the seven commissioners responsible for the 1729 establishment of Baltimore Town, which was laid out by the commissioners the following year. Buchanan's country estate northwest of the town, and on the west bank and overlooking the Jones Falls stream running south to "The Basin" (today's Inner Harbor) of the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River and future Port of Baltimore, included 579 of the 745 acres that comprise Druid Hill Park today. Renamed "Druid Hill" by War of 1812 Colonel Nicholas Rogers (1753-1822), and then his son War of 1812 veteran (September 20, 1788 - November 12, 1860)  who married Eleanor Buchanan, it was purchased in 1860 by the City of Baltimore from family descendant Lloyd Rogers. 

Icons of American Architecture (2009) notes "local dilettante architect Nicholas Rogers—one source hints at a 'Masonic edifice'."

August 4, 1753, George Washington, a young Virginia planter, becomes a Master Mason, the highest basic rank in the secret fraternity of Freemasonry. The ceremony was held at the Masonic Lodge No. 4 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Washington was 21 years old and would soon command his first military operation as a major in the Virginia colonial militia.

A druid was a member of the high-ranking class in ancient Celtic cultures. Perhaps best remembered as religious leaders, they were also legal authorities, adjudicators, lorekeepers, medical professionals, and political advisors.

Firework and Sirens

Fireworks are reported going off in cities throughout the USA. Police sirens and ambulances sirens going up and down Harlem's streets in parades at 3 AM. What's going on? (See video here.)

Cities across the US are experiencing a boom in the use of fireworks, with pyrotechnic-related complaints in New York City alone jumping 236 times higher than usual during the first three weeks of June.
Gothamist reported there were 6,385 calls to police about fireworks from 1 to 19 June, compared to 27 in the same period last year.
The New York Times attributed the spike in explosions to, “a release after months of boredom and seclusion in cramped apartments,” as well as “a celebration of hard-fought strides made during the demonstrations, and a show of defiance toward the police.” Other than sparklers, fireworks are illegal in New York.
***
Police in Hartford, Connecticut, who said they had been getting around 200 complaints each day about fireworks, called on people to be mindful of “those with PTSD, babies, children, elderly, & pets”.
Police in Salem, Boston, have started patrolling for fireworks after complaints increased 2,000%, CBS Boston reported.
In Pasadena, California, fireworks-related complaints have increased 400% in June, CBS Los Angeles reported, and last week, the LA County sheriff’s department seized a truckload of illegal fireworks valued at $10,000. The Guardian

For those tempted to connect the fireworks to the protest, Phantom Firework’s sales uptick began two weeks before the May 25 killing of George Floyd.
***
“It’s happening across New York City. It’s happening in California. It’s happening in Illinois. It’s happening in North Carolina, in D.C.,” he says. It “could be a strange coincidence, but I need an explanation.” Source.
***
The author Robert Jones Jr., in a tweet thread that received tens of thousands of retweets, proposed that the fireworks were “a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces; an attack meant to disorient and destabilize the #BlackLivesMatter movement,”he wrote.

Trump and Lincoln

This is what is called a political cartoon, a type of editorial cartoon, which is a graphic with caricatures of public figures, expressing the artist's opinion. They first appeared in 1734. Today they are a prominent form of editorializing.

The cartoons frequently speak more truth than the individuals in the panels.

J.D. Crowe on alabama.com wrote: "This is an opinion cartoon."

Then he captured why it was drawn. And remember, this was before the explosion of George Floyd demonstrations across the country.

On May 3, 2020, Trump held a "Fox News virtual town hall" in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial, with no one there.

Crowe said, 

Trump was using the power and dignity of the most lauded president in history for ... something. The word parasite came to mind as I watched Trump, dwarfed by Lincoln, talking with two Fox News commentators. They invaded the sanctity of arguably the most revered president in history - for a political campaign, yes. But for what reason, exactly?

“If it seems odd to stage a town hall with no in-person audience at the Lincoln Memorial, a site for huge rallies and events in more normal times, you’re missing the point: President Trump’s plan for Sunday night is packed with strategic signaling,” Axios reports.

“We wanted a powerful image of American strength and the idea of what reopening looks like,” a White House aide told Axios.

Trump, The Great Divider, often compares himself to Lincoln, The Great Uniter. He claims contending with the coronavirus pandemic makes him a “war time president", just like Lincoln as he kept the country together through the Civil War.
And then it came.

“I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump claimed, in response to a question about why the president often bullies the press. What can’t he just answer their questions without all the hysterics?

“The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” he said while pointing at Lincoln’s statue. “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”

Yep. With Lincoln as the backdrop, 45 whined that he is treated worse than the 16th president - the one who was assassinated.

To Trump, having to answer reporters’ questions must be a fate worse than death.

On June 12, 2020, as Deadline headlined: "Donald Trump, In Fox News Interview, Has Puzzling Exchange Over Abraham Lincoln’s Legacy: 'He Did Good, Although It’s Always Questionable.'"

Asked about what Trump had done for Black people, he told Harris Faulkner:

I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president. And let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, because he did good, although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.

Harris responded, “Well, we are free, Mr. President. He did pretty well.”

“We are free,” Trump answered. “Well, you understand what I mean? You know, I got to take a pass on a Honest Abe, as we call it.”

Then Faulkner replied, “But you say you say you’ve done more than anybody.”

Trump went on to talk about signing criminal justice reform legislation in late 2018.

“Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could. I’ve done it. I did it,” he said. “I didn’t get a lot of notoriety. And the fact the people I did it for then go on television and thank everybody but me and they needed me to get it done. And I got it done.”

As the Twitter commentator TJ noted, 

Trump's wavering re Lincoln [above] actually makes perfect sense (in his world). He's saying the end result (freeing the slaves) was good, but by also saying what Lincoln did was "always questionable," he's pandering to the Confederacy folks in his base, implying without actually saying anything that Lincoln could have done something different to get that result. He's trying to say "slavery bad" but not "Confederacy bad," despite the fact that the point of the Confederacy was ensuring states' rights to have slavery.

 

+++

As we have moved through the last few months, Trump has used Lincoln often and editorial cartoonists are using this raw material in their cartoons. Some examples are below.

Remember, these are "opinion cartoons."

Fayette Factor: Buffalo

The Fayette Factor 2020 marches on.

Early on the morning of Friday, June 4, 2020, I tweeted notice of the significant "on this date" 195th anniversary of the naming of Lafayette Square in Buffalo. I noted the link, "George Floyd and the Fayette Factor: Fayetteville to Lafayette Square, from June 2, 2020, in my tweet.

Buffalo Incident

Lafayette Square is laid out in Joseph Ellicott's Buffalo city plan. The square is located three blocks east of Niagara Square and is the second most important space in downtown Buffalo. In 1825 American Revolutionary War veteran and French General Lafayette visited this square during his historic tour of the United States and gave a speech in the square. He spoke on a platform in front of the Eagle Tavern, a highly regarded hotel in its day, on June 4 as part of ceremonies to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war. 

That same year, 1825, Buffalo carried out its last official public hanging when brothers Israel, Isaac and Nelson Thayer were hanged for murdering John Love, which some accounts say occurred in the square, while others say it was at Niagara Square. 

June 4 would turn out to be an important date for Buffalo in terms of the nationwide demonstrations.

On June 4, 2020, during the George Floyd protests in New York state, a curfew began in Buffalo, and police formed lines to sweep through the area.
At the Niagara Square, two Buffalo police officers shoved a 75-year old man who approached them. The man stumbled backwards and fell. The back of his head hit the pavement, knocking him unconscious, as blood flowed from his head. Nearby police appeared to walk past the injured man. The victim was taken to a hospital in serious condition where he was treated for a concussion and laceration.
The department issued an initial statement claiming that during a "skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell". Video of the incident was uploaded to Twitter and quickly became viral.
Police Commissioner Bryan Lockwood suspended two police officers without pay, and Mayor Byron Brown initiated an investigation.
As a result of the suspensions of the two officers, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, a police union, expressed its displeasure by declaring on June 5 that it would not pay any legal fees to defend any other Buffalo police officers for incidents related to the protests. The police union's president claimed that the suspended officers "were simply following orders" and "simply doing their job", while also saying that the victim "did slip".
All 57 police officers from the Emergency Response Team resigned from the team, although they did not resign from the department. According to the police union's president, the mass resignations were a show of solidarity with the two suspended officers. Source notes citations.

Niagara Square is located three blocks from Lafayette Square, Buffalo, New York.

The Lafayette Square Photo Op

Police, military police, park police, and rangers clear out the peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square, for the photo op walk and Bible posing.

The Buffalo incident followed the widely discussed and photographed events at Lafayette Park/Square in Washington D.C. 

On June 1, 2020, President Trump went to the historic St. John's Episcopal Church, whose basement had been damaged by fire, and posed for pictures in front of it holding up a Bible. To clear the route so that he could walk there, police and national guardsmen had used tearing agents in smoke devices (perhaps "tear gas"), rubber bullets, and flash grenades to clear a crowd of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, resulting in significant news coverage and denunciation by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

See also, "The battle of Lafayette Square and the undermining of American democracy," Robert Kagan, Saturday, June 6, 2020, Brookings Press.

As of June 7, 2020, at least 19 people have died during the protests. Sixteen of the casualties died of gunshot wounds. Wikipedia is keeping a running total of deaths and injuries to the protestors, here.