America’s ‘cancel culture chorus’ welcomed the symphonizing talents of Rev. Carl Kline this summer, with his freshly kindled social justice inclinations against Mount Rushmore. Kline denounced Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, for being “friendly with the KKK and received some funding from them for his work,” and censured two of America’s greatest presidents featured on the Mount, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln (Brookings Register 7-6-20).
The four presidents carved into this incredible monument, in one way or another risked their lives and livelihoods, endured incredible hardships and laid bare their sacred honor to present and preserve the founding principles laid down in our Declaration of Independence – and to eternalize the “holy light of freedom,” which has sustained our nation for over 250 years.
The sacred ideals they championed have offered liberty, and hope, and blessings for people of all races, creeds, and cultures who have lived out their lives in America, and taken the time to understand and appreciate their significance.
Kline’s virtue signaling against Mount Rushmore is both nearsighted and politically-driven, as evidenced by his silence over the skeletons in his own Democratic Party’s closet.
Mount Rushmore was completed in 1941, and one year later in 1942 a young man named Robert Byrd, later to become a highly influential Democratic Senator from West Virginia, joined up with “the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan.” He described the organization as a group of “upstanding people” – doctors, lawyers, clergy, judges – who he thought could “provide an outlet for [his] talents and ambitions” (biography.com).
Democrat Byrd went on to become the “longest-serving senator and the longest-serving member in the history of the United States Congress.” While he later claimed that his membership in the KKK was “the most egregious mistake I’ve ever made,” he nonetheless went on to denounce civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, as a “self-seeking rabble rouser.” He worked to prevent passage of the “1964 Civil Rights Act, a landmark law that removed many barriers for Black Americans.” And he voted “against the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protected the voting rights of American minorities, making a 15-hour filibuster speech in an attempt to keep the legislation from passing.”
Two Princeton professors have further expanded America’s social awareness boundaries with a quality control exposé of Rev. Kline’s Democratic party (National Review 7-16-20). They include, Sergiu Klainerman, Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, a MacArthur fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the French Academy and John Londregan, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.
Their research reconfirmed, “Up to the 1960s the Democratic Party was the party of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, poll taxes, and literacy tests for voting.”
Woodrow Wilson, “the first Democrat in 16 years to occupy the White House in March 1913,” resegregated the civil service the following year, and “introduced the requirement that employment applications include a photograph of the job candidate, thereby greatly facilitating employment discrimination.”
Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during the early months of World War II, acting against the recommendation of his FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, “ordered that Americans of Japanese ancestry be rounded up and deported to concentration camps, where they were lent out to farmers as slave labor.” Many shops and farms owned by Japanese Americans were “auctioned off for next to nothing to their neighbors.”
Japanese-American Fred Korematsu, who was arrested in San Francisco and deported to Topaz, Utah, during this period “appealed his detention all the way to the Supreme Court… all six justices voting to uphold Roosevelt’s racist order were themselves Roosevelt appointees.”
Democrat Hugo Black, “a notorious anti-Catholic bigot and former member of the Ku Klux Klan,” wrote the opinion. The lone Republican appointee on the court, Owen Roberts, strenuously dissented, noting that Korematsu was “imprisoned in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry.”
On March 26, 1964, “18 of the 19 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act were Democrats… Time and again, they actively strove to impede or reverse progress on civil rights.”
Klainerman and Londergan concluded, “We simply want to shed light on the hypocrisy of cancel-culture advocates who fail to apply their own twisted logic to the institutions and causes they embrace. We hope and pray that people will reflect on the existential dangers of cancel culture – the course advocated by extreme social-justice warriors and their demagogic allies is bringing our nation to the brink of a chasm. But if the frenzy persists, then let the Democratic Party be the next to have its name swept into the dustbin of history.”
Christ had stronger guidance in such matters, and his timeless words remain today a positive force for all Americans, expressly for the teachers and reformers of our present age: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:5.
