Statue of Former President Headed Towards Final Home
[All photos provided by the City of Arcata]
According to Karen Diemer, Arcata City Manager, “The Transporter arranged by the Timken Foundation on behalf of the Canton community arrived this morning to pick up the President McKinley Statue. They have shared that the Statue did start the journey back to Ohio today but will be brought to a restoration site in Ohio prior to its arrival in Canton.”
More photos of the move below: 
Earlier Chapter: McKinley Statue Removed from Arcata Square Early This Morning
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?He’ll be happier in Ohio.
If he likes the frozen tundra, the humid death, dirt weed, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame he should make it.
Either way you look at it, a museum is an upgrade from the Arcata Plaza, McKinley statue in the most appropriate place possible, his own museum.
Thing hasn’t even left the yard and already the base is broke. Fork lift driver’s blaming it on those damn hippies!
Jim,
agreed, they could at least try to get it out in one piece.
There seem to be a lot of people with very little to do.
On KIEM-TV there was an interview with one especially ignorant woman who said she doesn’t know why it took so long to get rid of it. To make her opinion crystal clear she said there had been a plaque on it but she never would read something on the statue of an old white man as “we” put up statues to lots of people “who didn’t derserve it” in those days.
Which is worse, the superficiality of a person who could, by her own admission, only parrot what someone else told her to think, the education systems that presumably graduated her with so little education or the news media that used that embarassment of ignorance in their own story? None of them apparently thinks it’s worth getting enough information to have a basis for their opinion.
Don’t you think knowing that people have certain opinions, no matter how ill-informed you think they are, is valuable?
Ill-informed versus uninformed : the former has an opinion based on poor or incomplete information and expressing that opinion gives rise for the opportunity to be corrected. That has value. The latter is just an expression of ignorance with no basis for either the opinion or a starting point to learn something on the subject. That has no value… in my opinion.
No I don’t think it has value unless the news piece is about the sad state of knowledge in the general public. On that subject this woman’s statement would be illuminating. And alarming. Or painfully funny.
As it is what is alarming is that was the only opinion expressed and that a news organization, even one as sketchy as KIEM, considered it worth the exposure or taking it seriously which they apparently did. That means their understanding is probably as limited and defective as the interviewed. That is indeed scary. Resistance to knowledge has become almost an impenetrable barrier when news organizations don’t even notice its absence.
It might have been good for all parties to remember the ugly part the press played (Hearst and Pulitzer both) in rousing the American public to weigh in against colonial Spain (Remember the Maine!) who then pressured McKinley into the action that became the Spanish American War and the Philippine American War. This was much less in McKinley’s head than on the head of the press and the American public the press leads around by their collective noses. Might make the both a little less self righteous and more cautious.
Get a life. The case of the William McKinley statue and White Supremacy vs. the residents of Arcata, CA has been concluded by way of two overwhelming Democratic elections, and the people of Arcata (and America generally) have won. If you’re upset about the results of these elections, then take a look in the mirror for once, “conservatives”. Why are you getting your collective conservative butts kicked again AND AGAIN? If you’re content letting Milquetoast Moron Michael Winkler lead y’all over the political cliff like a bunch of lemmings, that’s YOUR problem. Having someone as arrogant, unjustifiably self-righteous, and obnoxious as Michael Winkler as your spokesperson was an incredibly stupid thing to have done, if you actually wanted Arcata’s voters to side with you. Letting Winkler do your P.R., McKinley Cult Members, was the dumbest thing you could have done. Ask yourselves, why did you stand idly by and allow Michael Winkler to single-handedly sabotage the pro-McKinley argument locally? Answer that.
I’m asking this again, what exactly did McKinley do? I have Googled, read articles, asked friends, and asked on this forum. This seems like a fairly context free debate, other than a bunch of largely white people screaming “white man statue bad”. If this was a Confederate statue that was erected in the 50s, i could see the point. Historical facts please, not hysterical ideology (from either side). Show me some information about his policies and behavior so i can understand the “majority” opinion in regards to his removal.
If you paid no attention whatsoever to the EXTENSIVE coverage of BOTH sides of the McKinley statue debate last year, that is YOUR problem, not ours. Don’t blame your personal ignorance on us!
You can still read things that you were written during 2018, y’know? Will the wonders of the worldwide web never cease?
Erik,
I took your question as a learning opportunity. I don’t have anything invested in the debate of it. I fallback to the voting process that took him out as fine – and not in need of more debate.
Largely I think that descendents of Native American tribes look at the Westward expansion, and namely the “Manifest Destiny” era, as the end of the lives they lived for thousands of years.
As you know, we took land, committed mass-hangings, broke treaties and lied like a bunch of modern day Jussie Smollets to further our America into the West.
For instance:
….when President William McKinley advocated annexation of the Republic of Hawaii in 1898, he said that “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.” On the other hand, former President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had blocked the annexation of Hawaii during his administration, wrote that McKinley’s annexation of the territory was a “perversion of our national destiny”. Historians continued that debate; some have interpreted American acquisition of other Pacific island groups in the 1890s as an extension of manifest destiny across the Pacific Ocean. Others have regarded it as the antithesis of manifest destiny and merely imperialism.[80]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
Here’s more regarding the lower 48 from another source:
One of the last major armed conflicts between American Indians and the U.S. Army occurred during William McKinley’s watch.
…….
Timber companies, exploiting a loophole in the law that allowed them to take dead pine and pay a fraction of what it was worth, were setting brush fires on the reservation to make the trees appear dead and harvesting the wood on the inside.
Frustrated, Ojibwe leaders at Leech Lake sought redress from the government. In late September 1898, they petitioned McKinley to stop the practice.
“Our people are carrying a heavy burden, and in order that they may not be crushed by it, we humbly petition you to send a commission to investigate the existing troubles here,” they wrote in a letter. “We now have only the pine lands of our reservations for our future subsistence and support, but the manner in which we are being defrauded out of these has alarmed us.”
McKinley did nothing to intervene.
………..
McKinley took office as the Dawes Commission, headed by Henry Dawes, was dismantling the Five Civilized Tribes. Established in 1893, the commission was charged with convincing the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole and Cherokee to accept individual land allotments and register with the federal Dawes Rolls.
Prior treaty agreements exempted the Five Civilized Tribes from the Dawes Act of 1887, which allowed the President to break up reservation land and reassign it to individual allottees. But the Curtis Act of 1898, whose purpose was to dismember the sovereign status of the Five Civilized Tribes, overturned those treaties and abolished the tribes’ governments, invalidated their laws and dissolved their courts.
More formally known as An Act for the Protection of the People of the Indian Territory, the Curtis Act also extinguished land ownership claims, allowing the President to break apart tribal lands into smaller portions and open “surplus” lands to white settlers.
A proponent of assimilation policy and the allotment program, McKinley signed the act in June 1898. Six months later, he told Congress that the Five Civilized Tribes were showing “marked progress.”
The act was “having a salutary effect upon the nations composing the five tribes,” he said. “The Dawes Commission reports that the most gratifying results and greater advance toward the attainment of the objects of the Government have been secured in the past year than in any previous year.”
During his four and a half years in office, McKinley prioritized his goals of expanding U.S. territory and increasing trade agreements in the Far East, said Lewis Gould, emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. McKinley wanted control of the Caribbean and the Pacific, and in early 1898, he led the nation into war with Spain over the issue of Cuban independence.
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/william-mckinley-dismantled-five-civilized-tribes-ErPV1AKTc0ybrRsO_jZ-eA/
Thank you Brian, excellent as usual. The second two sections were what i was looking for, i was probably not being specific enough whith my search tearms. I knew the Indian wars were wrapping up during that time, i just couldn’t find specific policies and actions (or lack thereof) by him regarding Native American issues. I got partially high centered on wikipedia which obviously has an incomplete picture of his presidency. I need to visit Indian Country Today more, it was a good site for news during the water protectors (NODAPL) actions.
Then you need to read a bit farther as it was not so simple an issue as stated above without knowing more. Cleveland did indeed find the unauthorized takeover by a small group of plantation owners of the Hawaii monarchy by force wrong and started an attempt to restore it. That idea was not implemented during his administration. Nor was it done during his second term. “Cleveland was inconsistent in his social views. On the one hand, he opposed discrimination against Chinese immigrants in the West. On the other hand, he did not support equality for African Americans or voting rights for women, and he thought Native Americans should assimilate into mainstream society as quickly as possible rather than preserve their own cultures. He also became unpopular with organized labor when he used federal troops to crush the Pullman railroad strike in 1894.” https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/grover-cleveland
When McKinley was elected, he tried to avoid what became the Spanish American War but was overtaken by the explosion of the Maine (portayed by the of press as a declaration of war by Spain) and no longer resisted the press’s and public’s demands that the US send in troops. At that point Hawaii was feared to become a base for Spanish ships to prosecute the war (a questionable claim in hindsight) and that is why McKinley declared them vital. All the skullduggery in Hawaii had been done while Cleveland and Harrison were in office and, despite the rhetoric about imperialism, never repaired.
Of course, while McKinley was vociferous about equal rights for African Americans, he, like earlier Presidents, never took much risk in implementing practical equality. The same was true with Indian relations. The dismantling of the tribes started under Cleveland, who believed in assimilation, and McKinley did just go along with what had started then by signing off on the negating of treaties and handing over land to individual Indians where of course it was subsequently bought off piecemeal and removed from Indian hands.
Thank you Guest, i had read a bit about McKinley and Hawaii, but the background on Grover Cleveland is informative. Labor and African americans at the time seemed to support McKinley, but in the end he wasn’t the savior they hoped for, not horrible but not much substance. And than some anarchist dude inspired by Emma Goldman shot him. I always kind of liked Emma, especially in the context of her time and place, but shooting the president twice in the belly is just rude.
Now that i think about it, you could have a statue of the shooter at one corner of the plaza holding a revolver aimed at a statue of McKinley at the other corner whith his hands up and two holes in his stomach. Every year folks could gather at their statue of choice, listen to some speeches they approve of respectively, and than engage in an all out brawl in the middle of the plaza (no weapons). This would be an enactment of the giant partisan shitshow our country has become politically, and cathartic all at the same time.
Guest,
Your bit on McKinley, where do you get that?
Even wiki disagrees;
There was strong American support for annexation, and the need for Pacific bases in wartime became clear after the Battle of Manila.[160] McKinley came to office as a supporter of annexation, and lobbied Congress to act, warning that to do nothing would invite a royalist counter-revolution or a Japanese takeovers.[160] Foreseeing difficulty in getting two-thirds of the Senate to approve a treaty of annexation, McKinley instead supported the effort of Democratic Representative Francis G. Newlands of Nevada to accomplish the result by joint resolution of both houses of Congress.[161] The resulting Newlands Resolution passed both houses by wide margins, and McKinley signed it into law on July 8, 1898.[161] McKinley biographer H. Wayne Morgan notes, “McKinley was the guiding spirit behind the annexation of Hawaii, showing … a firmness in pursuing it”;[162] the President told Cortelyou, “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.”[163]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McKinley
Erik- the point I want to make is that we are all creatures of our times with the understandings, limits and constraints of the world around us. To attack a long gone person- any person- for not living according to the world as it is today is stupidity. In fact it is such a stupidity that it leads to acting just as arrogantly to not understanding the complexities of today’s problems and screwing up life for our own posterity. If they don’t understand how things happened in the past, they surely will not understand what is going on today when issues are much less clear. No one has a right to be so damned dumb and still effect the lives of other people.
Of course the Native Americans got horribly abused by the American government but no one living today can stand with their feet on American soil, Indian or otherwise, and say they are so magically superior to our ancestors that they could have done any better. There is infinitely more wisdom in recognizing that we are the same creatures who only have the gift of our ancestors’ history to try to work past our own defects.
Sorry Guest,
I must call you out as too one-sided.
At times you say “If we don’t know history, we’re doomed to repeat it.”
And you’ll generally say that to someone who you disagree with for something generally relating to being too one-sided.
But now, it’s “attacking people” of history equals “stupidity”. When no one is being attacked here, a statue is being removed to represent MORE history.
Am I wrong in seeing this inconsistency?
Brian- it’s all too nonsensical to treat seriously.
I agree, though I did learn some stuff through these discussions.
I would have never given 2 squats on this subject if you and so many others hadn’t stirred the debate pot by saying this is “erasing history “.
But thanks for pushing me to learn something re dead Presidents.
A person who thinks in personalities, in rankings of blame, in lieu of ideas can never understand much of anything. They are the Jerry Springers of the comment section.
CIC,
Lemmings. Wait a minute. People’s perspective of an animal leaping to certain death, is far different than researching and concluding that etched in the lemming’s DNA is the fact that there used to be land visible from their jumping-off point.
Lemmings just are so motivated by their genes migrate that they take nonviable risks. That is of course a more precise simile to Progressives. It’s not that they WANT to commit suicide but that they intrinsically don’t recognise what has never worked. Too bad there isn’t a racial memory of bad political ideas.
Well said, Guest & Ullr Rover. Well said.
They need to wrap him better than that, so he makes it to Ohio in one piece.
I love the older baby boomers that look at everything in conservative and liberal. I am a very conservative person who leads a lifestyle of liberal consumptiob whenever i see fit.. Its not so black and white and as a 30 year old the problem as i see it is all you baby boomers and up who are so close minded to anythinf but your labels.. Shit my generation too doesnt even know what gender to call anything. Yall get on here and point fingers at people and their grammar and say conaervatiam is corruption.. What the hell kinda yuppie world do yall live in? I smoke pot and do drugs but also raise a family and most of my own food and work jobs and save money and am buying land and dont throw away anything useful and i evem conserve water and dont like to drive much or use gas much and i hate our government but i love gay and black people and i love to shoot my gun and smoke a spliff and eat acid and watch jerry and say dont tread on me… Theres gotta be a label for me? Deadhead. The only true american label
Everything else is just a waste of breath. Go listen to music.
Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but you’re a Libertarian. Welcome to the only club whose members refuse to be members.
And thus will never run a government. The best that can be expected is, if there are enough who refuse to go along for the ride, the drivers can not so easily take everyone with them when they head the bus over the cliff.
Cynicism mushroomed after Ron Paul was treated so poorly (with contempt and libel) and the movement absorbed by the neocons that libertarians reasoned a big middle finger to the status quo was the only response.
Well now I can relax knowing everything’s going to be just fine with the next generation!
Hahaha, fuck yeah. Love it, well said 🙂
Mike drop.
Arrogant and ignorant has always been a demographic of any population. Anyone who stereotypes “baby boomers” to fit their agenda is certainly part of that subgroup. But I’m generous and sincerely wish that you live long enough to wise up.
Looks like McKinley got ‘tired’! (Drum roll please! 🙂 ).
Did Ohio pay for the statue? Or was it donated by Arcata?
I was trying to come up with a “president, two rubbers and a pallet” joke.
I think you’re on a better track with yours so we can be kid-friendly.