Stuff You Should Know - How Removing Public Monuments Work

Episode Date: January 16, 2018

Public monuments can be removed for a variety of reasons, from public sentiment changing, to governments being overthrown, to just being downright ugly. Learn all about this hot button topic today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

So this is Stuff You Should Know. Controversy edition. Yeah, there will be some of that in here for sure, but I also think it's important, when we're talking about removing public monuments, that it's not all about Confederate monuments. No, actually, I'm glad you said that because that actually brings up a pretty good intro.

There's some monuments in New York City. New York City? New York City. Yeah, that was such a great commercial, wasn't it? It's endured. There's four of them, actually, that are being targeted for removal by activists. Garibaldi?

No, although Columbus is one of them. I believe that. The Columbus Statue and Columbus Circle. One of Teddy Roosevelt. I think it's at the Museum of Natural History. Oh, interesting. And I was like, what's wrong with this one? What's wrong with Teddy Roosevelt?

And then if you go and look at the statue in this context, you're like, yeah, okay, I can kind of see that one. He's valiantly astride this horse and this African tribesman and this Native American chief are down on the ground on either side of him. Like he's just in charge of the show, right? Sure.

So I can kind of see that one. There's another one of a guy named J.M. Sims, I believe is his name. He's known as the father of gynecology. He... I don't know why I laughed at that. I just, I guess I'll just go ahead. So his...

What's the statue? That's why he had a statue. It's just him, just him, with a giant vulva right behind him. It's just him, like, you know, a normal statue honoring a man. And the problem is, is that, although he's the father of gynecology,

he's also known in the first half of the 19th century to carry out, like, experimental surgery on slave women with, like, zero anesthesia, obviously without consent. And he's been compared to Joseph Mengele, basically, as just this mad scientist with zero regard for human life. Wow.

And you might say, well, this is the first half of the 19th century, but some people argue that even at the time, what he was doing would have been considered by his contemporaries as unethical. Well, and as you will see as we go through this, so much of the conversation around this controversy is, do we look at it through the lens of when it was put up?

Why it was put up? Who it was put up by? Or do we look at it through the lens of, hey, it's 2018. Do we still need to honor someone now who we know did monstrous things? Yeah, those are all really great questions. Or should we leave it up as a cautionary tale

is another argument. Yeah, and we're gonna wait into all these waters. So the reason that we're even talking about this and the reason why you can, had you been around towns like Baltimore, New Orleans, Helena, Montana in the summer of 2017, you would have seen Confederate statues being removed. Sometimes in the dead of night,

the whole reason all of this started was actually back in 2015 when the Columbia, it was Columbia, South Carolina, it wasn't Charleston, right? It was Charleston. Yeah, the church shooter. Yeah, the church shooter, the Charleston church massacre where nine people died by an avowed white supremacist, right?

Really started up this idea that, and I think it woke a lot of the establishment up to the idea that there's all this iconography all around the country that a pretty large section of people have a real issue with and that everybody has just totally ignored their problems with it for decades, right? That really kind of woke a lot of people up

and it got a lot of city councils around the country reevaluating why they had these things up still. Was it worth just taking down and a lot of them did take some stuff down, right? Yeah. And then in the summer of 2017, I think it was, was it May or August? Was it August the Charlottesville rally was held?

I can't remember the month, but yeah. But it was 2017, the hotter months of 2017, there was a white supremacist rally in favor of the Robert E. Lee statue that was marked to be, well, it was controversial, this statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville and people had been talking about taking it down. So white supremacists met to support the statue,

counter protest, met the white supremacists and violence broke out, one woman died and it was just a bad scene. That created even more like a second wave of people looking at these statues and said, okay, not only are these possibly like creating an unfriendly public environment for people, like whole swaths of people that are Americans

here in the United States, but they can also serve as flash points for violence. Maybe we should really rethink these. And by the time the second wave happened, state legislatures around the country, especially in the South had intervened between the first wave and the second wave and started passing legislation that said,

you can't remove public monuments, especially ones that are dedicated to war heroes, wars that have been around for like 40 years or more. Basically putting an end to the easy removal of Confederate monuments around the country. And so all this has done is created this huge conflict. Well, it was already a conflict one way or the other, but the conflict is now both sides

are just budding up against each other. And when you push two masses together, they tend to go upward. And that's basically what's happening right now. Lava is going upward here in the United States as tensions are rising and it has never been more tense in my lifetime and probably your lifetime as well, Chuck, which are virtually the same thing.

But that's where we stand right now in January of 2018. Right, can we cover some history here though? Yeah, let's. All right, so this is nothing new though, as far as just taking down public monuments. The world since the beginning of time has erected monuments and then eventually had someone that wants to take down that monument.

Right here in America when we, one of the first things we did when the Revolutionary War kicked off was said, hey, let's go down to the King George III Statue in Manhattan and let's pull that thing down on July 9th, 1776. We just heard the Declaration of Independence for the first time. It really got him going.

Yeah, and let's take down that statue. And you know what? Let's not only do that, let's melt down that thing into 40 plus thousand bullets to fire upon them with. Yeah. That's pretty sweet. It's pretty, pretty ironic. You know?

Said, here's some King George for you, red coat. I think that's what they said. And this goes well, well beyond that of course. Spanish raised Aztec and other temples in the Americas. So Catholic cathedrals could be built. Like basically someone would take over, tear down those statues, put up their own. Yeah.

Then someone else would come along, tear down those statues. And you know, wouldn't always, a lot of times it was a good thing. So you would have like in Hungary in 1956, you had the Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. And they'd storm Budapest and tore down a statue of Stalin. Stalin had quite a few,

and Lenin, quite a few statues of themselves type all over the years. Yeah, wherever communism spread, if there was like a communist backed regime or country, or even just a non-backed but communist polarized country, you could probably find a statue of at least Lenin, if not Stalin too, in this country. Even like places like Ethiopia had them, right?

And so when there's an invading army, or a revolution, or a regime change, this is usually when you see a statue torn down. Yeah, it's a symbolic gesture. Sure it is, and it's almost like, but it's also like a part of the healing process, it seems like too. Or at least the transition process,

let's call it that, right? Yeah. And there's another type of situation where statues tend to get torn down, and that's when there's like a cultural shift. And that's kind of what we're seeing now with the Confederate monument controversies. Right, and what you've also seen in the 2000s

in Latin America, where in places like Venezuela, statues of Columbus started to come down and replaced with things like indigenous chiefs who once tried to fight off people like Columbus. Yeah, Goa'i Kaipuro. Yeah, which is a full shift from not only are we gonna not walk by this Columbus statue every day, now that we know we know,

but we're gonna put up a statue of people that tried to defend against him. Right, right. So it's almost like they are hundreds of years later throwing off the shackles of imperialism, I guess. The stank of imperialism? Right. Should we take a break?

I'm pretty worked up, yeah. Yeah, I feel like we need to go rub each other's shoulders for a minute. Okay. All right. Prepare for it. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know.

On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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Like that. Like that. Like that. Like that. Okay. So the, the place we find ourselves right now, well, how about this, Chuck? Why are there any public monuments anywhere anyway?

I think that's kind of the core of this, we have to get to. What is really being talked about here? Because if it's just some statue or something like that, especially in some places like Far Flung is hell in a Montana, what does the statue of the Confederacy have anything to do with? What does any statue have anything to do with? Yeah, well, first of all, according to Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 1,500 statues, flags, plaques, city names, county names, street names, and holidays, and even

military bases named after Confederate generals or dedicated somehow to the American Confederacy. And that includes everything from street names and flags and all that, there's 700 statues and monuments just on public property, so 700 of those are statues and monuments. And 32 of those have either been dedicated or rededicated since 2000. Right, so what these range anywhere from Confederate Avenue over on the east side of Atlanta, which is just a street name, to you drive through Atlanta and you see, if you pay attention, you see Civil War battle plaques all over the place. And these are...

I put these in a slightly different category because they are literally just historical markers. Like... They're very neutral. In this sonic parking lot, there once was a battle waged between this brigade and this brigade on this date and this is what happened here. Not even that sometimes, it'll be like the Confederate army thought about making camp here, but decided not to, so they did a quarter mile east of this spot.

Because it's a little hilly, don't you think? Can you blame them? Yeah, and I put those in a different category because those are historical markers of where something happened. It's not saying, maybe some of them do, but it's not saying this is where the proud sons of the 18th brigade fought off the evil yanks in their bid to ensure slavery. Yeah, that tends to be... You'll find those more on monuments or statues, especially ones that were bankrolled by private

individuals or private groups who were just one in the same with the people who were running that little town at the time. Yeah. All right, so that's sort of the crux for me with this whole thing, is when and why were these things erected to begin with, and by whom, and in many, many cases, some private rich person paid for this thing to be put up as a definitive screw you to what was going on in the country at the time. And it's very rarely has it just been like, hey, you know what, we should just put up

a statue because we think Robert E. Lee is a great general. Time and time again, you see stories, for instance, Charlottesville, that statue of Robert E. Lee that was commissioned and paid for by a wealthy individual named Paul Goodlow McIntyre in 1917 when he also bought the surrounding park and said this is for whites only and let's put a statue of General Lee like the context of how that happened is key to me. Right. And actually, Chuck, that still goes on today.

A lot of the monuments that are erected to the Confederacy are erected through private funding on private land, which makes them wholly out of reach of any debate over whether they should be removed or not because that is covered by two very important American rights, which is the right to free speech, whether people like it or not, and private property rights. Right. You put those two things together, something is basically untouchable. Yeah.

And listen, we say all of this, like I'm not really weighing in, I think people probably know I feel, let's be honest, I'm not weighing in here one way or the other, but we say all that just to say that just because there is a statue that looks great and it was really expensive in a town square, it doesn't mean that it represented ever maybe or certainly now the wants of the community at large. Sometimes it may have just been a single individual that had enough sway and money to say I want this statue. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So it's a very, and I think who wrote this, was it Dave Ruse? Yeah. He put it best. He said, you know, what it represents is a very narrow historical record. Right. Especially at the time, it might have really not represented a lot of people.

In some cases, more people may feel represented by it now than they did at the time. Apparently, especially for some of these older ones, it was not a normal thing to erect some sort of memorial to the Confederacy immediately after the Civil War. For a couple of reasons. One is that there were plenty of Union veterans still around the country and they would not have been very happy to have seen something like that. And then secondly, the South was very, very poor for decades after the war. It was not a wealthy place.

There was not a lot of money running around four towns to put together enough money to erect a decent statue that would last for 100 years. Like you said, though, by the time that they did start to be erected, it coincided with some really important, something very important, which was the Jim Crow era. Yeah. Either Jim Crow, a lot of them, or the Civil Rights Movement. Yeah. So it's not an accident.

No. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization that tracks hate groups. And if you're a hate group, you probably don't put much stock into studies created by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But the SPLC did a study of Confederate markers, monuments, statues, street names, all that stuff around the country. And they found that the vast majority of these things were erected in like the Jim Crow era from like, say, 1890 till just after the First World War, that that's when most of

the statues to the Confederacy and monuments were erected. And this is a time when the South had gone through Reconstruction. The North had abandoned the Reconstruction Project. From what I understand, I didn't realize this before, but basically there was this period, what was called a period of healing between the North and the South, that the divisiveness between the two areas grew so deep that war broke out, and then afterward, the hurt feelings started to subside enough that there was this desire to come back together, to heal. And the North and the South decided that they would heal at the expense of the African Americans,

and they would find common ground by saying, yeah, I think we can all agree that whites are the supreme race. And the African Americans who had just recently been freed in the South and were carrying out Reconstruction said, wait, what? And this is the Jim Crow era, that kicked off the Jim Crow era. And this was the time when these monuments started to be erected. Like you said, it doesn't seem to have been much of an accident, the timing. And if you talk to some historians, they say, no, it's no accident whatsoever.

This was white saying you might not be under, by law, under white control any longer. But it's pretty plain and simple. We've just erected a monument to remind you about white supremacy and that that's the law of the land. Where's your statue and your monument? I don't see it anywhere, so I guess we win. Yeah. I mean, the Georgia State Flag Controversy is the prime example.

I remember when that was happening in the early 2000s, for those who you don't know, the Georgia State Flag from 1956 to 2001 was changed and had the good old Confederate stars and bars on the right half of it. And I remember at the time a lot of people saying, you know, this is our history. This is, you can't change our flag, you can't change our flag, erasing history. And I think many of them may not even have realized that that was not the original flag. They went back to the original flag after 2001, but they threw those stars and bars on there in 1956 and what was going on in Atlanta in 1956, you know?

Right. The civil rights there, a desegregation or desegregation, I should say. Yeah, and it was just very plainly a middle finger to desegregation. And once again, a reminder, we're going to fly this flag now that has the Confederate battle flag on it and, you know, 50 something years later in the 2000s. Maybe a lot of people will forget that this was not the original flag and that's exactly what happened. Man, it happened in ACES too.

Yeah. And that, so the SPLC study found the same, found what you were saying, that there were basically two big, and there were always Confederate monuments and statues being erected or streets being named that or flags going up, but there were two periods, the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights era, where they really increased. And the fact that those statues and monuments really increased and coincided with these times of struggle for white supremacy really provides a pretty compelling case that those Confederate monuments and those rebel flags on those state houses are meant to express

white supremacy. Yeah. It's tough to look at it any other way when you look at this timeline like that. And that's what's at issue, you know? What is the meaning of the Confederate flag on a state house? What is the meaning of a Confederate monument or statue in a town square? What is it ultimately trying to say? And that's really at the heart of this controversy is, what are you trying to say with that thing?

What are we now as a society in this small little town in Georgia, Alabama or Louisiana or wherever? What are we saying by fighting over keeping this statue or this flag flying? What's the argument here? Well, yeah, people in favor of keeping them will say that it's dangerous to erase history. We can learn from these things. They can serve as reminders of how not to be, maybe. But at the very least, you can't erase history, so don't even try to erase history.

So that's basically one of the main arguments against taking these down. Right. You can't whitewash history. You can't erase history. Right? So that's one. Another one is, and this is a big one that's really kind of kept a lot of these things up so far, is that the Confederate monuments, the Confederate statues, the Confederate flags

are not meant as symbols of hatred or slavery or oppression. They are, you'll see people say that it's heritage, not hate, right? Right. And what they mean with that is this thing called the lost cause narrative, right? Right. So the lost cause narrative is this idea that, well, actually I found that there's like six parts to it. All right.

You ready for these? Yes. Because I'm going to lay them out. So the lost cause is basically this narrative that says that the South, the Confederacy, the Civil War, none of it had to do with slavery, or if it did, it had very, very little to do with slavery, that really the Civil War was the war of Northern aggression. There was the North that started it. The South just wanted to secede from the North, just wanted to get away from this federal

government that cared not about states' rights, that cared not about the South and its economy or its antebellum mansions or anything like that, that really was a war of Northern aggression and that the Confederacy was just protecting their homeland, protecting their way of life, and that it was secession, not slavery, that was at issue here. And a lot of people say, well, what was the South seceding from if not the state right to have slaves? Right. Exactly.

Right. There's some other tenants to it too. This is very important. This is an important part of the lost cause narrative, is that actually slaves were happy to be enslaved. They were happy with their servitude. They didn't have to think about what to do with life. They didn't have to worry about wondering what they were going to do, and they were

maybe too shiftless to really be responsible to manage their own life anyway, so they were actually happier under the antebellum plantation system of slavery than they were free. That's a huge tenant of the lost cause. And then the other part of it, and the whole reason that it has the name the lost cause, is that the only reason, the only reason that the Confederacy lost the Civil War was because the North was just so vastly richer with resources, manpower, industry, that the South from the beginning was destined to lose the war. It just couldn't compete in that respect, hence the name lost cause.

The South's cause was lost from the outset. So if you are a defender of Confederate monuments, this is probably the reason you're giving for defending them, that these things are not up to intimidate anybody, that the people who are intimidated by them, the people who are taking them as white supremacy, are simply taking them the wrong way. And then Chuck, there's one other thing that is a question that has to be answered around this whole thing, and that is that if it's true that the original Confederate monuments that were put up around the 1890s or up to the 1920s or something, if those things actually

were put up out of respect for the people who fought for their homeland, and for family members who have just recently died, and was actually out of this respect for heritage rather than as a symbol of hate and oppression, isn't it possible though that those same monuments could develop racist symbolism over time for some people? And if that's the case, then if you are somebody who believes in them as a point of heritage, and pride, how do you reconcile that? For other people, they're saying, hey, yeah, white supremacy buddy, I'm with you on that. How do you separate those two?

And if that is the case, if you do agree that there are people out there who you have nothing to do with, who view these things as a symbol of white supremacy, then isn't your beef with them rather than the people who were offended by that and want to take those things down? That's a good point. I don't have the answers, of course. Well no, I don't either, but this is just such a hornet's nest, it's just a ball of worms writhing around. Yeah, it's complicated with 700 plus literal statues each with their own back story.

It's kind of hard to make some huge generalization probably. For sure. For sure, it's true. All right, well let's take another break. Let's take our final break, and we'll talk a little bit about just the ins and outs, like the sort of the mechanics of really removing these and how that works, and the counter argument to lost cause legally, which would hinge on the equal protection argument right after this.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So, um, here's how these things are generally, um, not only taken down, but how they're put up to begin with.

We already mentioned the private, wealthy citizen who, um, just wants to do something like this. It's obviously one way it can go down. The other way is a lot of cities now, um, starting in the 1990s have commissions for approving these monuments. Um, they use Savannah, Georgia, very historic city in our own state as an example. They have a historic site and monument commission, they meet every month, they look at applications. Most cities will have an application process that you fill out that has to prove certain

criteria to, uh, if you want a public monument. Um, and they look over these all over the country all the time and either approve them or not. Um, I always thought it was funny that one of the big parts is usually like, what's this going to cost us? All right. Exactly. You know, like upkeep.

Like, what are we looking at here? Um, and like I said, these are pretty new starting mostly in the 1990s and later. Um, but it's generally to ensure that newer monuments has public support, whereas many of these older monuments didn't, may not have had wide public support, but it was influential wealthy few that decided what went up. Right. Right. Yeah.

So like, like we said, the, um, the massacre at the church in Charleston really set off the first wave and then the, the, um, Charlottesville protests set off the second wave of stature removal, but in between a lot of state legislatures intervened and said, no, you guys, you towns and cities, you're in our state and we're the law of the land. So we're saying you can't remove these monuments without our approval and we're not going to give our approval to these things. Right. But previous to that, when the states previous to them reacting to that and making these

laws, it could be the city that decided or the county or whatever the local government was, or if it's on state owned land, obviously it would be the state legislature. Yeah. So I mean, there's a lot of ways that like if the state hasn't intervened and created a state law that says you can't remove that. Yeah. If you're a city council or a board of commissioners in a county or something like that, you have full authority to remove these things.

And you can remove them for all sorts of different reasons. There was this, the article sites, the statue in New York, the scary Lucille ball statue. You remember that? I do. Man, I went back and looked and I feel so bad for that sculptor, the first guy and Lucille ball. The second lady nailed it. I mean, she did such a good job.

I didn't see the second one, man. The first. Oh yeah, I did see the second one. It's just when you see him side by side, one looks like Lucille ball and one looks like Lucille ball, got zombie Lucille ball. Yeah. You were drawn by Ralph Steadman or something weird like that, you know? Yeah.

So... I don't see nothing like her. No, it really doesn't. So the city council of Seller on New York, Lucille ball's hometown said, we don't like the statue. It's terrible. We're going to take it down. It's scaring the kids.

So they took it down because it was an ugly statue, but a city council could say we're going to take it down because we've heard from enough of our citizens that they're intimidated by it or they think that this is... It's creating an unsafe place, like it could be a flashpoint for violence, or it's in the way of the new whole foods that our town's getting. So let's get rid of this monument. So they can do this stuff unless the state has said, you guys can't move those things. This is where the state and you guys can't move these monuments, even on city land.

Right. Right. So there's been, I think in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, at the very least, and I think several other states, they have passed these laws that say you can't remove these things. So some states have had, or some cities have had to get creative where their will has continued. Their desire to take these statues down has continued even after the state said they can't. So the city of Memphis, which had a couple of statues that wanted to take down, one of Robert E. Lee and one of Nathan Bedford Forest, who was one of the early leaders of the Klan,

they wanted these statues taken down, but they couldn't take them down because they resolved to take them down after Tennessee passed its protection law. So the city of Memphis sold the land that those two statues were on to a non-profit, and the non-profit just immediately took them down. Yeah. That's a workaround. So, as I mentioned before the break, we talked about the lost cause narrative and the flip side of that legally is the equal protection argument.

So we're talking about the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship and equal rights to former slaves, and this, to be clear, has not been used successfully yet in court as an argument to have a statue removed, but it is what groups like the ACLU or does the Southern Poverty Law Center, they actually argue cases like this? Probably, I'm sure. This is what they would try to use most likely as a legal argument or a tactic at least to say that this isn't right because basically what it means is what you were saying earlier is it would be under the guise that this was erected as an expression of white supremacy,

and that's why it was erected. That's why it's there. State-supported racism that's still there to make people feel unequal, and the 14th Amendment says we can't do that. Yeah. That's the approach that there will be some test case at some point in the next year or two that will make it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will probably rule on that, and then that will either open the floodgates

or shut down that legal argument one way or another. What's interesting to me though is that historians are probably going to come into these lawsuits. If you ask just about any professional historian what started the Civil War, the consensus is and has been for a long time that it was slavery, that all the other stuff, the ability to secede states' rights, the hatred of Lincoln, all of these other things follow slavery. The South's desire to continue a slave-based economy. If you ask the general public what caused the Civil War, apparently something like 48% will tell you that it was secession, and only 23% will say slavery.

Here's the problem with that. This is part of a larger trend that we've been seeing the last five years or so, maybe less, where there's just been a loss of faith in expertise. The people who we used to turn to for answers, we have just kind of tossed to the wayside and said, just shut up. We don't want to hear what you have to say any longer. We'll decide what's true on our own. When that happens with enough people, then history has a chance of being rewritten just

by sentiment. It can have nothing to do with reality, but everybody can decide that they're going to collectively remember things a certain way, and brother, that's history. That becomes history, whether it's fact-based history or revisionist history or not. That's a problem. We have to remember history, whether it is enjoyable, whether it's something that stands as a cautionary tale, whether it's something that is painful, whether it's something that's inspiring.

We have to remember our history. We just have to, or else we're going to lose a lot of valuable lessons. The question that still remains is whether we have to remember that history through monuments and statues, or if we can in other ways. It's weird. There's a defensive history, but there's also a loss of faith in historians and their reading of history. Yeah.

It's pretty interesting. It's a bizarre and it's a weird place to be right now here in the States. It is. That's why I'd never buy the Euro-Racing history argument, because it's not like the Civil War plaque that just says, this thing happened here. To me, that is a historical marker that just says this action took place. It's not a monument glorifying the thing. Yeah.

There's a difference. There's a monument in Rossville, Georgia, which is close to Andersonville, South Carolina. It's a monument to a guy named Henry Wers, who was one of the few executed war criminals from the Confederacy. He ran Andersonville Prison and basically ran like a concentration camp. He was executed by the North publicly. He was hanged. Very quickly, within a couple of decades, I think the daughters of the Confederacy erected

this monument to him and basically explained that he had been unfairly tried, that evidence against him had been faked and that he was actually a war hero, not a war criminal. Interesting. Yeah. That's kind of like not the neutral plaque that you're talking about. It's the antithesis of that. Well, I certainly don't have the answers. It's a complicated thing, and there's so many of these and things, and there's a whole

can of worms argument that like, then where does it stop? Do we blast off the face of Stone Mountain or Mount Rushmore? A lot of people think we should. Yeah. At least the Stone Mountain one for sure. Yeah. Or where does it stop with the Founding Fathers? Because at the time, some of them are slaves and this and that, I don't purport to have

the answers. My advice would be to encourage people to just for a moment to walk in someone else's shoes and think about what, how some of these monuments might make you feel in 2018, 20,000? That's way in the future. In 2018, just maybe step outside yourself for a minute and walk in someone else's shoes. That's just Uncle Chuck's advice. I think it's good advice no matter what. I think what this is is a symptom of the need to, a society that needs to heal and is not

healing in productive ways right now is what I think. I don't have the answers either though and I certainly don't purport to, so I agree with you on that. I look forward to hearing all sides in email. Yeah. No death threats, please. No death threats. Oh, quickly we should talk about very famously in the Iraq war when Saddam Hussein's statue

was toppled on television and there was always a lot of speculation like, this really reeks of something America cooked up as a bit of a rah-rah thing and apparently pro-publica looked into it along with the, in the New Yorker magazine, where the piece was, said it was a crowd of Iraqis and it was, it happened to be a statue in front of the Palestine Hotel which is where a lot of the journalists were, so that's why it got the coverage and they, there were Americans and they were saying, hey, can we have that sledgehammer, can we have, will help, can we use that crane on that Humvee? Now that we think about it, will you guys just go ahead and do it for us?

Well apparently there was an official request submitted by the Army Sergeant saying, hey, they want to use our crane, can we do this? And they got the go ahead to do it, so that is the, the party line story at least. Yeah. Take it or leave it. Yeah. But very indelible image, you know, when that statue was taken down. Oh yeah, it definitely was, like it, it fell pretty hard and Saddam was still alive at

the time too, which made it even more shocking. He's hiding in a hole. Kind of an interesting time, like I said, to be in America, weird, weird time. Well, I've seen other people call for saying like, maybe don't take it down, maybe erect another statue next to Robert E. Lee of Rosa Parks or something and maybe add to the Stone Mountain Monument and make it a history of Atlanta and add Martin Luther King to it and make it more of a diorama and more inclusive. So it's, I've seen arguments all over the place with all kinds of suggestions because

with 1500 Confederate markers of some kind, I mean, that's a lot of, it's a lot of stuff. A lot of statues to balance things out that we'd have to erect, that kind of thing? Or a lot of statues to tear down. I mean, obviously it's going to come down to and should come down to whatever they want to do locally, but we have one right here in Decatur, Georgia still, you know? Which one? I can't remember the name of it, but it's right there in the town square and there's been a lot of talk in the, obviously in the last couple of years about getting rid of

that, so. Yeah. And then also like some people dig in so much to leave that statue there. They take it down and then a week later, like, has your life really changed materially? Is it that big of a deal that that's not there anymore? I don't know. I don't know. I think this whole, I think this is all just innuendo nuance and illusion and allegory

and nobody's really talking about, or most people aren't talking about what's really being discussed here. Right. It's weird, weird time, man, such a strange time. It's a sad time for America, but it's also a very hopeful time, too, if you really think about it in the right way. It is. And you know what?

I know this is going to be a lightning round in some ways, but I am happy we're a part of this conversation in some way. Nice. Again. Just throwing it out there. No death threats, please, everyone. No one likes to get those. Put yourself in our shoes.

You wouldn't like getting them. If you want to know more about Confederate monuments, monuments in general, and possibly removing them, go type those words into the searchbar at howstuffworks.com and it'll bring up this article. And as I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this, well, this one's pretty current. So I'm going to call this current clearing up of accordion definition. Oh boy.

That's a good choice, Chuck. Okay. So this is a day or two late, guys, but I just had a chance to listen to the great Mary Celeste episode and I figured I'd be remiss if I didn't heed the call of the alluring weird Al Yankovic shout out because everyone loves weird Al. And so now comes the part where I say that I don't actually know anything about accordions, but I think Josh pretty much nailed it the second time through according to my sources. In general, Melodion is an accordion with buttons and an accordion technically known

as a piano accordion is an accordion with piano keys, not unlike the style played by both Alfred and Frankie Yankovic. No relation, believe it or not. No way. Yeah. Basically all Melodians are accordions, but not all accordions are Melodians. So that in a nutshell is how Melodians work, not to be confused with the concertina pictured here.

And that is the literal handheld thing that you might think of an old Italian man playing in the 1800s that you just, there are no, well, there may be buttons. It's a squeeze box like the who talked about see mama's got a squeeze box. Yeah. And that is from anonymous. Is it really? You're not going to say who it's from? Huh?

Wow. I don't know that anonymous. I have no idea who it's from. It's just some, some weird, weird Al fan. That's funny. No, my, my exclamation of surprise was that Alfred and Frankie Yankovic have no relation to weird Al Yankovic. That's beyond bizarre.

Yeah, and I don't even know who Alfred and Frankie Yankovic are. I don't either, but surely every Yankovic's related to weird Al Yankovic. Right? Yeah, but I also have a feeling that like 38% of Yankovic's play the accordion. Right. Well, weird Al, please, please, as is custom, we end every episode like this, please get in touch with us and let us know how you're doing. Okay.

If you're weird Al Yankovic and you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us, I'm at Josh Clark and you can also hit up the official SYSK podcast one. You can join Chuck on facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or slash stuff you should know either one. You can also send us an email and Jerry too to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and weird Al join us as always at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.