I mean sure, the ruling men of more then a century ago by our standards were terrible people. But goddamn teddy Roosevelt was a man fighting for shit you're still fighting for today and hell he got you closer to it then compared to you now.... You can lump him in with slave owners and child rapists FFS.
Teddy Roosevelt never said "The only good indian is a dead indian." That quote is typically associated with Philip Sheridan.
A number of sources claim a similar quote (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are...") alleged to be from an 1886 speech in New York, but this still goes against how he treated native americans generally and I can't find the original speech so I'm a bit suspicious of this as well.
303 natives were convicted and sentenced to death following the Dakota War of 1862. Lincoln actually commuted the sentences of 264 of those natives, allowing the convictions to stand only for those he believed personally engaged in the murder of innocent women and children.
Therefore, the last one is deliberately and intentionally misleading.
The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.
The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln's largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.
It's easy to pick on "the levels of bad", when you're not the one one enslaved in a priaon, but writing behind a screen.
"Fun fact": Mount Rushmore or Six Grandfathers was a sacred mountain for the Lakota to actively disrespect their beliefs
other "fun" fact: the man who defaced Six Grandfathers, Gutzon Borglum, was a member of the KKK
Gutzon Borglum
I refuse to acknowledge this is a real name.
Not to mention defacing a mountain by putting a bunch of faces on it
Defaced then refaced
Lincoln also commuted the sentence of 264 other Dakotans that had to be executed the same day. If he didn't intervene the executions would've been 303
My biggest complaint about Lincoln was the people he didn't hang.
Kinda like how the only thing John Brown did wrong on May 24th, 1856 was stop at 5
The history of Washingtons teeth is uncertain. The evidence that those were slave teeth seems to show that the teeth were purchased.
Internet pictures with words are fucking dumb.
Washington owned slaves. He was not some moral high ground individual. The only reason why they even got independence from Britain was that Britain wanted to stop the expansion of the territory and the people in the colonies wanted to continue it and kill all the natives.
Edit:
In 1784, Washington paid unnamed “Negroes” for nine teeth. We don’t know the precise circumstances, says Van Horn: “The president’s decision to pay his slaves for their teeth may have been a recognition on his part that teeth were something sacrosanct and personal.” On the other hand, being enslaved meant that any economic exchange was inherently not fair.
He literally took advantage of enslaved people to get their teeth and you consider it as just “bought”. Top tier cracker mindset. I guess that to you it was also fair for him to own his slaves because he “bought” them.
https://daily.jstor.org/were-george-washingtons-teeth-taken-from-enslaved-people/
I understand the point, but as an exercise, try to find four historical figures without glaring character defects. Eventually, I figure we’ll all be either judged or forgotten in time.
We only learn about the ones with defects, because they are the most interesting. Most people in history were fine.
One historic figure who had no known defects: Alan Turing
Its telling that your example is someone explicitly kept out of the public eye during his life. Basically any account of Turing is from personal friends or his professional work. He was a generally good person and great scientist that helped defeat the nazis, but he's only celebrated by progressives for his persecution as a gay man.
I struggle to find any major social cause he publicly championed or records of his views on controversial topics. I'd like to be wrong, but it's easy to not have a mixed record as a private citizen. Nobody was grilling him to free slaves or asking his opinion on systemic injustice.
Einstein is a contemporary comparable. He was a great scientist, opposed the nazis, and by most accounts a decent guy. He was even had to flee his homeland to escape persecution as a jew. Clearly lots of parallels. The main difference being he was an idol in his own day so we have way more first hand accounts.
Turns out he was a socialist with varying views on communism, had shifting support for zionism and wrote rascist shit in his travel diaries. You could probably find a quote like Roosevelt's and slap it on a picture of him, that doesn't sum up his life.
I can tell you that Turing is not only celebrated because he was gay. That man is one of the fathers of computer science as we know it today. His Turin machines are the basis for a lot of theoretical computer science
These are a little more than character defects... theres lots of historical figures who didn't rape and murder.
Obama bombed a wedding of civilians not to mention hid Afghanistan casualty reports, was a part of the death of half a million Iraqi casualties, was part of the Syrian hell that targeted mainly children with fatalities at 191,000 by 2014, then there was Yemen and saber rattling on Iran and full support of Israel. Carter sadly oversaw the East Timor genocide at 25% of the population or 170,000 killed.
Not pictured: the giant, shitty looking pile of rubble under them.
They just blasted chunks off the mountain and left the mess behind
Also not pictured: that the mountain is a spiritual site for the local tribes.
All four of them carved onto a sacred natural site known to the Plains Indigenous people of the area as the 'Six Grandfathers'
This is why I find it surprising when USAians say "This is not us." When talking about Trump. No bro, it was always you, maybe you just weren't paying attention.
As a Native American this attitude is so grating. People outside the US really don’t seem to understand that it’s 55 different states, districts, and territories, along with dozens of sovereign tribes, all being forced to pretend to be one nation. Many of us can and do claim “this is not us” in the same way many Europeans would say the same about Viktor Orban.
I hate the "it was a different time" excuse for these awful human beings. It falls apart if you do any reading from the time. Plenty of people wrote about how shit these people were AT THE TIME. Our morals haven't expanded somehow. Our systems of control have changed to be more sustainable. The ruling class learned that slavery was not sustainable. That's it.
Also, this doesn't give an excuse for the leaders of today. The slave owners of the past are not "less caring" than the current ruling class is. The current ruling class has just better distanced themselves from direct acts of violence while expanding their ability to perform mass violence. Slavery has evolved into mass incarceration for example. We've just normalized our violence into different systems and outsourced a lot of it to the global south.
If you're a Billionaire today you are the equivalent of a slave owner of the past with significantly more violence and control than a slave owner could ever dream of.
There's almost no national leader that is going to be a “good person”.