“FRANK STEWART: JUST ANOTHER WHITE NATIONALIST” was spray-painted late last week on the steps at the base of the now-removed monument in New Orleans to the famous Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
What had Stewart, a retired businessman in the Big Easy, done to merit being called a “white nationalist” (which is one of the ways often used by progressive activists to slur someone as a racist)? Stewart was disturbed that the city government had recently taken down monuments to Confederate heroes President Jefferson Davis, General Pierre G.T. Beauregard (a native of Louisiana), and General Robert E. Lee.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu decided two years ago that the monuments were homages to racism, and therefore they had to come down, Taliban-style. No public vote was allowed, of course, so Stewart began circulating a petition to overturn the city ordinance and restore the monuments. Instead of debating Stewart in the arena of ideas, some vandals opted to follow the lead of the mayor and dismiss anyone supporting the monuments as “white nationalists” — the difference being that Landrieu did not spray-paint his charges of racism on Confederate monuments.
Interestingly, the only arrests New Orleans police have made involving the monuments was the one time when two pro-monument vandals spray-painted “Gen. Beauregard” on the base of what had been a monument to the Confederate general. Landrieu had removed the Beauregard statue during the night, as he did with the other statues honoring Confederate leaders.
Stewart has taken out ads in the Times-Picayune and other local periodicals charging that Landrieu is destroying history.
Just who is Stewart? Is he a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a Nazi, or a member of some other racist organization? Hardly. He is a board member of Xavier University, an institution he has supported financially, and of St. Augustine High School. Both are predominantly black educational institutions. But he does not parrot the liberal line that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves and thus Lee, Davis, and Beauregard were fighting to save slavery. In the eyes of left-wing politicians such as Mitch Landrieu and the spray-painting vandals, this makes Stewart just another racist.
Stewart does have supporters in New Orleans. George Peterson, a local talk-show host who is a monument supporter, verbally blistered those who want to emulate the Taliban and remove any statues they don’t like, declaring, “The Marxist led TEDN/Antifa NOLA are always good little Communists resorting to yelling ‘racist’ in an attempt to silence those who speak with the voice of reason against their disruptive ideology. Comrade Trotsky would be very proud of them.”
Confederate General Patrick Cleburne did not know about the Taliban, but he did predict an effort to alter the history of the Civil War, much in the style of the Taliban. “Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by our enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.”
To illustrate this point, I recall my recent trip to New Orleans to watch my Oklahoma Sooners play Auburn in the Sugar Bowl. During our vacation, my wife and I took a tour on a double-decker bus. The tour guide haughtily noted that the Robert E. Lee monument would soon be taken down, and proceeded to deliver a one-minute rant on the supposed evils of the general, charging that he was just some “slave-owning dude,” who had “never done anything for the city of New Orleans.”
The most charitable thing that I can say about these comments is that they are rooted in ignorance. While Lee had owned slaves that he had inherited, he freed them before the first shots were fired in the War Between the States. George Washington once owned slaves, too, that he freed. Does that make him just a “slave-owning dude”? Under the guide’s reasoning, we should knock down the Washington monument, change the name of our nation’s capital city, and change the names of the 7,000 streets in the United States named after the Father of our Country.
We should not be under any illusion that these types of monument removals, which resemble actions of Osama bin Laden, are the end of this effort. Those now attacking Confederate monuments will soon enough turn their guns on the rest of our shared American heritage. We can expect the flag and our National Anthem to increasingly be found in the crosshairs of the Left.
After all, the most memorable thing about Colin Kaepernick’s otherwise forgettable pro football career is that he wore pro-Castro shirts and refused to stand up for the National Anthem.
Photo: Lee Monument in New Orleans, prior to its removal
