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Should a man who:<\/p>\n
was a member of the Nazi party,<\/p>\n
pressured ghetto-confined Jews to sign over title to their factory,<\/p>\n
used ghetto-confined Jews as labor without paying them a wage, and<\/p>\n
sold wares to the German military,<\/p>\n
be honored as a \u201crighteous man,\u201d not merely by means of a statue but a movie celebrating him, a movie used to teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren?<\/p>\n
We all know the rest of the story \u2014 that Oskar Schindler came to see the injustice of the Nazi treatment of Jews, and his care and concern increased from small acts of humanity in his factory to the construction of a subcamp to protect his workers, to the rescuing of an entire factory\u2019s worth of workers, and even a trainload of Jews near death, in such a fashion as risked his own life.<\/p>\n
But the new \u201cone drop\u201d rule, as applied to Americans in history, erases that history.\u00a0 Yes, in the same way as \u201cone drop\u201d of African ancestry-blood was deemed sufficient to deem one \u201cblack\u201d and subject to all applicable Jim Crow laws of discrimination, so, too, one act of discrimination or one connection to slaveholding suffices to erase any other good one may have done.<\/p>\n
And, no, I\u2019m not even speaking of the legacies of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, but of Ulysses S. Grant and Albert Pike.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the reporting on Grant at the Mercury News<\/em> on Saturday<\/a>:<\/p>\n Protesters in Golden Gate Park toppled statues of Fr. Junipero Serra, Francis Scott Key and President Ulysses S. Grant on Friday night, spurring a national debate over the complex legacies of those historical figures amid a broader movement to remove what critics say are monuments to white supremacy.<\/p>\n A group of roughly 100 people pulled down the monuments displayed in the park\u2019s Music Concourse near the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences, an eyewitness said. Police were called to the area just after 8 p.m., and said people in the group threw objects at the officers. The crowd dispersed around 9:30 with no arrests or reports of injuries. . . .<\/p>\n With that backdrop, the toppling of Grant\u2019s bust in particular had by Saturday morning garnered national attention, with even some who supported removal of Confederate monuments questioning whether it was appropriate to do the same with Grant. As president, Grant supported the 15th Amendment giving Black Americans the right to vote \u2014 though that right could not be exercised in many Southern states for nearly another century \u2014 as well as other pieces of Reconstruction-era legislation meant to stop the white supremacist terrorism that followed the Civil War.<\/p>\n But before the war, Grant had married into a slave-holding family and briefly owned a man named William Jones, who Grant emancipated in 1859, according to the American Civil War Museum.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I will also observe that this article was revised since I first read it on Saturday morning; in that original version, the article simply said, \u201cGrant was a slave-owner before the war.\u201d<\/p>\n But even this revised version, with its attempt at being even-handed, isn\u2019t.\u00a0 Even a simple read of Wikipedia<\/a> reveals that Grant came from an abolitionist family but married a Missouri slave-holding family not as a sign of support for slavery but because a West Point classmate happened to have had a sister.\u00a0 He served in the Mexican-American War but \u201cwrote that the Mexican war was morally unjust and that the territorial gains were designed to expand slavery.\u201d\u00a0 After the war, in 1854, he left the army but had no trade with which to support his family.<\/p>\n In 1855, Grant farmed, using Julia\u2019s slave Dan, on his brother-in-law\u2019s property, Wish-ton-wish, near St. Louis. The farm was not successful and to earn a living he sold firewood on St. Louis street corners.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In 1858,<\/p>\n Grant acquired a slave from his father-in-law, a thirty-five-year-old man named William Jones. Although Grant was not an abolitionist, he was not considered a \u201cslavery man\u201d, and could not bring himself to force a slave to do work. In March 1859, Grant freed William by a manumission deed, potentially worth at least $1,000, when Grant needed the money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In 1860,<\/p>\n He was torn between his increasingly anti-slavery views and the fact that his wife remained a staunch Democrat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Does this prewar history truly merit condemnation as tainted by slave-holding?<\/p>\n And after the war, Grant\u2019s legacy was that of strong support for the newly-freed blacks in the South. He destroyed the Ku Klux Klan. During the Reconstruction period the former slaves were not only granted the right to vote but did indeed exercise it effectively \u2014 the Mercury News<\/em> gets this wrong \u2014 and only lost it when the Reconstruction period came to an end, that is, when Republican rule in the South was overturned and the federal government had grown weary of intervening (yes, in much the same way as American forces are now preparing to leave Afghanistan, resigned to the fact that, however much injustice Afghan women will face upon our departure, our best efforts to impose a more just system have failed and we cannot continuously occupy the country).<\/p>\n And what of Albert Pike?<\/p>\n Never heard of him?<\/p>\n Yeah, I hadn\u2019t either.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the report in Politico, again on Saturday<\/a>:<\/p>\n Protesters toppled the only statue of a Confederate general in the nation\u2019s capital and set it on fire on Juneteenth, the day marking the end of slavery in the United States, amid continuing anti-racism demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n Cheering demonstrators jumped up and down as the 11-foot statue of Albert Pike \u2014 wrapped with chains \u2014 wobbled on its high granite pedestal before falling backward, landing in a pile of dust. Protesters then set a bonfire and stood around it in a circle as the statue burned, chanting, \u201cNo justice, no peace!\u201d and \u201cNo racist police!\u201d . . .<\/p>\n The Pike statue has been a source of controversy over the years. The former Confederate general was also a longtime influential leader of the Freemasons, who revere Pike and who paid for the statue. Pike\u2019s body is interred at the D.C. headquarters of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which also contains a small museum in his honor. . . .<\/p>\n A proposed resolution calling for the removal of the statue referred to Pike as a \u201cchief founder of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan.\u201d The Klan connection is a frequent accusation from Pike\u2019s critics and one which the Masons dispute.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n