Saturday, August 19, 2017

Lex Anteinternet: "The Confederate Monuments and Contemporary Strife...." Taking Down The Monuments, in Helena?

When I posted this last week I didn't think we'd see memorials coming down so fast, or maybe at all:
Lex Anteinternet: The Confederate Monuments and Contemporary Strife....:     The Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg .  This impressive memorial was only dedicated in 1917. I run more than one blog, which some ...
Well, since then they've started to.  First Baltimore, Maryland, and now Helena, Montana.

Helena Montana?

How on earth did Helena get a Confederate monument of any kind?  During the Civil War it was Indian Territory.  Fort C. F. Smith, established right after the Civil War, barely managed to survive the Hayfield Fight. What the heck?

Well, did have one. It was a fountain.  I don't know if the folks in Helena realized it or not, but it was a fountain of the horse watering type, which have featured on this blog before, and which were once fairly common all over the US.  A lot of them remain, with people in their respective towns having no idea what they were for.  Denver, for example, has one.

One local Montana resident, before it came down, expressed the same view I basically have:
“Rather than just destroy it and pretend like it never existed, we should use it as a teachable moment,” he said. “Kids should understand those things that we find so objectionable now, and the sins of the Civil War. … I don’t know how you do that without something to point to."
The fountain was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and dedicated in 1916.
Attardo acknowledged that the fountain may have been donated as part of the UDC’s attempt to rewrite the history of the South, but she believes it should be explained instead of removed. That is why she has been working with the city for the last two years to explain the fountain’s origins through a sign that would have been placed near the monument, an idea she proposed and the city commission approved in 2015.
“I wanted people to know: Why the heck did we have a Confederate monument in our park? Who put it there? And the national significance of it was, it was actually part of a larger campaign,” she said.
A sign would have been a good approach.  Indeed, I noted that approach in my entry of a few days ago.

But how did it get there?

I've noticed a few older graves in our local cemetery where it appears the deceased had Confederate service. Quite a few more had Union service.  I suppose it must be something like that.  And Montana went through a real period of nativist anti immigrant activity about this time, mostly directed at Slavic immigrants who were well represented in the mining population. Was that related in some fashion to this?  The rise of the KKK in the early 20th Century was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants in the nation, allowing it to spread up into the north. Montana and Colorado both had signficant Klan presence at this time.  Perhaps a teachable moment indeed.

I wonder what will become of it?

1 comment:

LeAnn28 said...

Quite interesting. Thanks for sharing. I agree that we need to explain the monuments in context not only of who the monument is of but, as you state, the context of who put it there and when and why. This would explain A LOT!