Today’s blacklisted American: 19th century poet Walt Whitman
Great poets like Walt Whitman
now banned at Rutgers
The onset of the modern dark age: Ivy league college Rutgers University in Camden New Jersey is now removing its monument to 19th poet Walt Whitman because of petitions and slanders against him by today’s blacklist culture.
Rutgers University-Camden will remove a statue of the famous poet Walt Whitman from the center of campus as a result of activists’ petitions and a recommendation from a committee of scholars. The statue of Whitman, featured prominently in the front courtyard of Camden’s Campus Center, will be “relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,” interim Chancellor Margaret Marsh recently announced in an email to students and employees.
That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.
A petition circulated last year stated that “the statue of Walt Whitman glorifies a man who we should not hold such a place of honor on our campus. … He instead stood for white supremacy and racism against Black and Indigenous Americans.”
In other words, because Whitman was a man of his time and not perfect, his memory must be wiped from all history, his poems burned, and all effort to teach his poetry ended forthwith.
This effort is quite symptomatic of the entire modern leftist effort to slander all of American history.
No discussion or memory of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and all the great humans of American history can be allowed, because these human beings might have once done something that someone today doesn’t like. Everything from western and American culture, from Cinderella to Peter Pan to Shakespeare, is racist and advocating white supremacy, simply because these great works of literature did not care about race. That they were simply telling stories about people who happened to be white, and included no minorities, proves they were bigoted, and must be banned forever!
Of course, we must not question the absolute perfection of the sainted radicals today who demand these high and unreasonable standards on past great Americans and its literature. Today’s radicals must be worshiped blindly, because they have no flaws, and if you dare suggest that they might be wrong, in the slightest, then you too are evil and must be blackballed also.
As noted by Kelly Scott Franklin, a professor of English literature at Hillsdale College and a scholar of Whitman,
“What this new movement of censorship really wants is to do away with the very act and process of education, because education is complicated and it’s hard work. It requires a lot of sifting to find beauty, truth, and goodness,” he said. “It requires compassion and a willingness to try to see the world as others did in their time and place. It requires acts of magnanimity toward flawed and wounded human beings, even if we disagree, and even if they’re in grave error. Those activities are hard–in the classroom and in everyday life. So it’s much simpler just to silence, cancel, and destroy.”
That so many ordinary Americans are now so quick to bow to this campaign of censorship is our real problem. Rather than stand up to these bullies people now run in fear. If decent Americans do not start ignoring the insane demands of these thugs soon, then all of our history and literature will be destroyed. The only past that future generations will know will be the distorted hate advocated by these Marxists and bigots.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Great poets like Walt Whitman
now banned at Rutgers
The onset of the modern dark age: Ivy league college Rutgers University in Camden New Jersey is now removing its monument to 19th poet Walt Whitman because of petitions and slanders against him by today’s blacklist culture.
Rutgers University-Camden will remove a statue of the famous poet Walt Whitman from the center of campus as a result of activists’ petitions and a recommendation from a committee of scholars. The statue of Whitman, featured prominently in the front courtyard of Camden’s Campus Center, will be “relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,” interim Chancellor Margaret Marsh recently announced in an email to students and employees.
That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.
A petition circulated last year stated that “the statue of Walt Whitman glorifies a man who we should not hold such a place of honor on our campus. … He instead stood for white supremacy and racism against Black and Indigenous Americans.”
In other words, because Whitman was a man of his time and not perfect, his memory must be wiped from all history, his poems burned, and all effort to teach his poetry ended forthwith.
This effort is quite symptomatic of the entire modern leftist effort to slander all of American history.
No discussion or memory of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and all the great humans of American history can be allowed, because these human beings might have once done something that someone today doesn’t like. Everything from western and American culture, from Cinderella to Peter Pan to Shakespeare, is racist and advocating white supremacy, simply because these great works of literature did not care about race. That they were simply telling stories about people who happened to be white, and included no minorities, proves they were bigoted, and must be banned forever!
Of course, we must not question the absolute perfection of the sainted radicals today who demand these high and unreasonable standards on past great Americans and its literature. Today’s radicals must be worshiped blindly, because they have no flaws, and if you dare suggest that they might be wrong, in the slightest, then you too are evil and must be blackballed also.
As noted by Kelly Scott Franklin, a professor of English literature at Hillsdale College and a scholar of Whitman,
“What this new movement of censorship really wants is to do away with the very act and process of education, because education is complicated and it’s hard work. It requires a lot of sifting to find beauty, truth, and goodness,” he said. “It requires compassion and a willingness to try to see the world as others did in their time and place. It requires acts of magnanimity toward flawed and wounded human beings, even if we disagree, and even if they’re in grave error. Those activities are hard–in the classroom and in everyday life. So it’s much simpler just to silence, cancel, and destroy.”
That so many ordinary Americans are now so quick to bow to this campaign of censorship is our real problem. Rather than stand up to these bullies people now run in fear. If decent Americans do not start ignoring the insane demands of these thugs soon, then all of our history and literature will be destroyed. The only past that future generations will know will be the distorted hate advocated by these Marxists and bigots.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
But, wasn’t Walt Whitman gay?
They can not ban someone who was gay, can they?
“They” in reality can do what ever serves their purpose.
Here is and example: https://youtu.be/xbPTir23w58
I just wonder when the book burning bonfires start.
“I just wonder when the book burning bonfires start.”
Starting, no doubt, with Leaves of Grass
“That new location has yet to be announced by campus officials.”
How about behind the public restrooms?
As if it will EVER be re-erected. Once it’s down, where is the constituency to have it put back up?
Minor correction of a common misconception: Rutgers is not in the Ivy League.
Well my alma mater a Public Ivy W & M who gave the fired FBI director a job teaching. ugh ?
Has it’s New President a 40ish woman ? whom I expected would bow to the Black Listers and Remove the Name of a Confederate General Ewell from one of the Oldest Buildings after it was just remodeled, per their requests.
But wonder of wonders she just announced that the College would keep the Name on the structure.
Ewell served as President after the Civil War, a time when the College had zero income, students, faculty or staff until 1871 when he talked the State of Virginia to issue $10,000 to train the regular school teachers that the Commonwealth badly needed, thus the College and the oldest academic building in the USA (the Wren started 1693) was saved from destruction.
Maybe, it was the effort of the Nineties and early 2000$ – when the President (WM class of 1980) did strike the College’s sports teams moniker ‘ the Indians’ per the NCAA rulings even after the Five state Indian tribes ALL stood up to keep the Indian association with the teams. W&M was the first and for over a century and only College that would accept Indians, issuing degrees as early as 1705.
Next the Wren Cross which had always stood on the Wren Chapel ? alter was attacked and targeted for removal, with President Nichols approval. That caused a war that was built by a lowly little website called – Save the Wren Cross-. After a super storm F5 hit the College, over 30 million in ongoing donations by several alumni came to a halt, donations from the regular Alumni ground to a near halt, only 19% of regular take. The College board met several Times. The ending…the President resigned and took his wife who had been given an endowed chair at the Marshal-Wythe Law School both decamped and returned to the former Professor ships at Chapel Hill North Carolina.
So Changes can happen when the People and Alumni go on the warpath…..
W&M still uses the name of the Tribe for it’s self and our sports teams to this Day.
““. . . relocated to a historically relevant site on campus and contextualized,”
I am thinking of a contextualized, and relevant site, to put my foot.
Thanks for the post. I’m a New Jersey guy. This is mystifying, but not surprising, given the times we’re in.
(But Rutgers is not in the Ivy League. Princeton is the only NJ school in the Ivies)
Check out my website if you get a chance and let me know what you think. I came across your website this year from links on Instapundit.
Good luck and have a good day.
What is with these bug-eyed fanatics and this awkward totalitarian duckspeak. I don’t even have to know what they’re talking about – the verbal signature gives them away (great for skimming past non-thought when you’re looking for an actual human to read). “Contextualize” – things like that. It just oozes disingenuousness. There isn’t any apparent embarrassment about using this kind of language, which is sort of odd, isn’t it?
YAWP!
Some day this insanity and intellectual dishonesty will pass. Some day Rutgers professors will tell their students the horrible truth that people who lived in the past had different beliefs, different scientific understandings, and basically lived in a different world than ours. Their beliefs about race are beliefs of their time. And most of them–Emerson, Whitman, many–held contradictory beliefs. Read Whitman’s poetry, and you will hear more voices than you can imagine. And they are Whitman. Whitman is a great American and a great poet–too great for our times.
What will these young people do when they have to think of different eras in a truly historical way. If they don’t grow up, and we allow them to destroy the past rather than understand it, where will we be? In China in the 1960s? In the Soviet State? Among the 100s of millions slaughtered in the revolutions, trying to wipe history clean?
Apparently the author of this article never read “The Sleepers” by Whitman, where he does indeed include minorities. You know, I’m tired of people spinning this and in doing so providing misinformation. Unfortunately, it is on all sides. If you must report something in opposition to something, at least do it honestly and be informed.