Way back in the mists of time - that would be August of 2014 - I wrote in this very space a piece headlined thusly: Hypocritical Dems Rail Against 'Redskins', Raise Money at Dinners Honoring 'Indian Killer' Andrew Jackson. The issue at hand was then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s ranting and raving that the Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder had to change the team’s name. Why? Said Reid:
“Snyder says it’s about tradition. I ask, what tradition? A tradition of racism. That’s all that that name leaves in its wake. The writing is on the wall. It’s on the wall in giant, blinking, neon lights.”
I went on to point out:
“But there is another name out there not associated with sports - yet both more famous and powerful. A name entwined - with big money at stake - not only with modern Democrats but current-day America: Andrew Jackson.
Yes, that Andrew Jackson. The seventh president of the United States, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. The man whose statue sits directly across from the White House in LaFayette Park, and whose familiar image graces the twenty dollar bill, not to mention a portrait in the White House itself. The man who is seen by historians as the co-founder (with predecessor Thomas Jefferson) of the modern day Democratic Party.
But alas Jackson is also the man whose military career had him savaging Indians from the Creek Indian War of 1814 to the Florida Seminoles in 1818 - and more. Jackson was directly responsible for an episode in history known as the “Trail of Tears.” As president he championed and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which provided for the forcible removal of the Cherokee Nation from its lands in Florida and Georgia. Removing them to lands west of the Mississippi. Some 46,000 Native Americans from five tribes - the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminoles - were forced to leave their native lands during the “removal” , with 4,000 dying along what became known to history as the Trail of Tears. To this day, Andrew Jackson is anathema in the world of Native Americans. Unlike the name of a football team, which by definition is simply a name, Andrew Jackson was not only once solid flesh and blood - he personally is seen in the Native American community as a presidential practitioner of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the vernacular, as seen here Andrew Jackson is seen by activists as - their words - an “Indian killer.”
I should also note it is Jackson who appointed his Attorney General, the similarly slave-owing Roger Taney, as Chief Justice of the United States. And it was Taney who, as Chief Justice, delivered to America in 1857 the infamous Dred Scott decision. Let’s hear the late Judge Robert Bork on Dred Scott, Bork spending an entire section of The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law, his classic book on the judiciary, on Taney.
“Taney was saying (in his decision on Dred Scott v. Sanford) that there can be no valid federal law against slaveholding anywhere in the United States……He knew it because he was passionately convinced that it must be a constitutional right.”
In short, Bork says in lengthy legalese that Jackson’s appointee tried to write slavery into the Constitution.
Now. Now we shift gears to the decision by the Obama Administration to replace Jackson’s image with that of Harriet Tubman. Over here at a web site featuring Tubman (Hat tip to Daniel John Sobieski in the American Thinker) sponsored by her biographer Kate Clifford Larson is this listed fact about Tubman:
“Harriet Tubman carried a small pistol with her on her rescue missions, mostly for protection from slave catchers, but also to encourage weak-hearted runaways from turning back and risking the safety of the rest of the group. Tubman carried a sharp-shooters rifle during the Civil War.”
Not only was Tubman what today would make her an NRA icon, she was also a staunch anti-slavery Republican. Question: Will Treasury come up with an image of the slave-freeing Tubman holding her pistol?
While others may flinch at the political correctness involved in this switcheroo of faces on the twenty dollar bill? Personally I am thrilled. I can’t wait for the media to acknowledge that the removal of Jackson is an admission that American Left has long thrived on a culture of racism. A culture that began with the formation of the Democratic Party in 1800 and its devotion to slavery (as noted in Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Professor Gary Wills book Negro President’: Jefferson and the Slave Power) and has continued right on through to today, obsessing with every race-based, skin-color judging theology from yesterday’s segregation to today’s illegal immigration and Black Lives Matter. The political home of the American Left is in fact the Party of Race. The political base that had the slave-owning Jackson appointing the slave-owning Taney both to his Cabinet and the Court demanded fealty to racism.
And I especially can’t wait for the realization that Harriet Tubman, as with conservatives and Republicans today, was a staunch practitioner of the Second Amendment not to mention a color-blind America where “all Men are created equal.”
The Tubman-for-Jackson decision is but one of a recent string of embarrassed acknowledgments by the Left that their political heroes used the most primitive of racial appeals to fuel their political careers. No less than the editorial board of the New York Times recently took note of a move to strip Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Wilson’s name. Why? Because, as the Times decades late finally acknowledged of President Wilson in a fashion reminiscent of Glenn Beck’s long ago televised anti-Wilson tirades:
“He was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy.”
Yes. Yes. Yes! Decades late as an admission, but exactly, historically correct. To implement such Wilsonian programs as the creation of the Federal Reserve and a raft of progressive ideals, racism was used to be the political fuel that provided electability.
Then there is this from the Connecticut Democratic Party of today, as reported last year by Fox News: "Connecticut Dems strip Jefferson, Jackson names from fundraising dinner."
The story reads in part:
“Connecticut state Democrats voted Wednesday to remove the names of former presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual fundraising dinner, reportedly because of their ties to slavery.
…Connecticut Republican Party Chairman JR Romano called the move a liberal distraction, and noted his party ended slavery….‘the legacy and the history of the Democratic Party is tied to racism, segregation, and they’re trying to rewrite history. They can’t deny their roots,’ he told FoxNews.com. He said it was a shame that Democrats tout a dinner name change while Connecticut middle class families suffer.”
Chairman Romano has it exactly right. No word yet from Harry Reid.
So. What now for our liberal media friends? At long last the recognition begins to dawn in various quarters that, precisely as the Connecticut GOP chairman states, “the legacy and the history of the Democratic Party is tied to racism, segregation, and they’re trying to rewrite history. They can’t deny their roots.”
This dilemma is perfectly captured by the decision to replace Jackson with Tubman on the twenty dollar bill. By all means bring Harriet Tubman forward into the spotlight. A gun toting black Republican who risked her life to free slaves from their Democratic slave-masters does indeed deserve the spotlight. Maybe we should even give her an entirely new denomination of her own - and leave Jackson right where he is. Why? To remind the American people each and every day as they reach for a twenty (presuming, of course, the Obama economy ever improves enough for them to have a twenty in their wallet) just which political faith it is that was built on the backs of slaves - and continues its culture of race to this day.
I can’t wait for the media to report that story. Will they? What do you think?
