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University at Buffalo to remove Millard Fillmore’s name from campus because of “systemic racism”

Aug 6, 2020 7:00 pm By Robert Spencer

It isn’t surprising that this ugly little episode in the Left’s ongoing efforts to erase our history and make us ashamed of being Americans would happen at the University at Buffalo, where everything that is wrong with academic life in America today thrives and is praised. I spoke there a few years ago, or tried to. What actually happened was that I was screamed at by self-righteous Leftist fascists for an hour and a half while university security personnel stood by and watched, and made no attempt to do anything to create the basis for a civil discussion. But the University at Buffalo is no outlier. It is all too typical.

My latest at PJ Media:

Having successfully taken down monuments to those notable defenders of slavery Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass, the outraged mob of our Leftist moral superiors has now prevailed against a lesser light of the bad old, not yet “fundamentally transformed” America. The College Fix reported Tuesday that “the University at Buffalo will be removing former U.S. President Millard Fillmore’s name from campus, citing ‘systemic racism’ and his support of the Compromise of 1850.”
This will require the renaming of the Millard Fillmore Academic Center, “which contains several academic departments, student dormitories, a theater, and other services,” and which “will now be referred to as simply the Academic Center.”In this case, the mob behind this latest act of historical vandalism is made up of university administrators, who announced that “#UBuffalo will remove the names Millard Fillmore, James O. Putnam and Peter B. Porter from four locations at UB, a decision that aligns with the university’s commitment to fight systemic racism and create a welcoming environment for all.” UB President Satish Tripathi said: “Clearly, historical namings on our campus—whether academic buildings, residential halls, interior spaces or thoroughfares—carry important symbolic value. We want to ensure that these symbols align with our mission—namely, that we are a diverse, inclusive scholarly community.”Tripathi either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the fact that Fillmore actually said: “God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.” Despite this, however, as President of the United States, he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law requiring antislavery Northerners to return escaped slaves to their owners in the South.Fillmore did this not because he thought slavery was wonderful, but because he was constrained, as all presidents are, by the political exigencies of the day….

There is an antidote to the Left’s assault on our history. Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster is an evaluation of the Presidents of the U.S. from an America-First standpoint, and a brisk reminder of what has made America great. When the authoritarians, totalitarians, and fascists are attacking our history, it’s all the more important that we know and cherish that history.

There is much more. Read the rest here.

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Filed Under: academia, Featured, Useful idiots Tagged With: Millard Fillmore, University at Buffalo


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Comments

  1. Keith O says

    Aug 6, 2020 at 8:09 pm

    The loony left don’t care about history that doesn’t feed into their demented story line.
    Erasing facts means that they can then invent a new story and god help anyone who disagrees with them.
    This is why Marxist countries have “re education camps”.

  2. Loren Rosson says

    Aug 6, 2020 at 8:32 pm

    Nice article, Robert. I’m always astounded at how Fillmore is lumped with the doughfaces who followed him (Pierce, Buchanan), when in fact he was a pretty damn good president. You note that he signed the Fugitive Slave Act because he was constrained, and along with Campbell’s points I think we can be stronger than that:

    (1) Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, the hunting of slaves was made more visible to people in the north, which woke people up and caused outrage. Turning people in the north against slavery was a good result of Fillmore’s presidency, not a bad one. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which had profound effects on northern passions. But the Civil War itself wasn’t inevitable at this point, contrary to what many historians say in censuring Fillmore.

    (2) The North was actually the slam-dunk winner in the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act was the only Southern-friendly part that meant anything. The other parts of the Compromise either favored the north or threw the south crumbs. Slavery would be allowed in New Mexico and Utah, but slavery had been outlawed by the Mexican government, so there were no slaves around there at the time, and the land was badly suited for slavery in any case. No one operating in real-world politics can call the Fugitive Slave Act a sell-out to the south with a straight face.

    (3) Historians often say that Fillmore shouldn’t have put slavery in a Constitutional framework, but a moral one. I find that impossible to take seriously, given that these same historians never hold the twelve presidents before Fillmore to the same standard. Fillmore was a man of his time, just like his predecessors.

    Fillmore should be commended for the Compromise. As Robert says, he personally loathed slavery, but as president he knew it was his job to uphold the laws until slavery could be peacefully abolished — and to get us much for the north as possible. That’s exactly what the Compromise of 1850 achieved.

    I’m also puzzled at how, on the one hand, leftist historians (correctly) deride James Buchanan a failure for doing nothing when states started rebelling and seceding from the union, and yet they (wrongly) treat Millard Fillmore as “another Buchanan”, when in fact Fillmore faced down rebellion not once, but twice, in Texas and Southern Carolina.

    • Eli says

      Aug 6, 2020 at 9:44 pm

      A good article and a good response Loren. The Socialist Democrats are now the pro Communist Party, and the Communist Manifesto, says to “Destroy all history and culture, until it is only what they want us to think it is and nothing more.” This doesn’t make sense. Anyway, Biden was considering a Democrat Party leader Karen Bass, who said “he was a mentor to her.” Communism appears to be anti church, anti-Bible and anti anything, that disagrees with them, like Islam. They will do whatever it takes to remove American history, if they are not stopped. President Trump and his team have been making the effort. Americans need to be made aware of this. I hope we have been able to remove some of the Communists in our congress, but people aren’t paying attention.

      • Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says

        Aug 7, 2020 at 12:31 am

        Hello, Eli.
        You say that the Communist Manifesto says to “Destroy all history and culture, until it is only what they want us to think it is and nothing more.”

        https://www.fulltextarchive.com/pdfs/The-Communist-Manifesto.pdf
        gives the text of the Communist Manifesto. As you can verify, the string “history and culture” appears nowhere in it.

    • gravenimage says

      Aug 6, 2020 at 10:32 pm

      Fine post, Loren.

      And are you new here? Welcome to Jihad Watch!

      • Loren Rosson says

        Aug 7, 2020 at 4:51 am

        Thanks. I’ve been mostly a lurker, for many years, but post occasionally.

        • gravenimage says

          Aug 7, 2020 at 10:59 pm

          Thank you, Loren. Hope you post more in future.

  3. revereridesagain says

    Aug 6, 2020 at 9:01 pm

    The self-righteous leftist fascists deserve to have to live under Sharia rule. The rest of us do not. Pity we can’t find a way to deport the whole lot of them to Pakistan, Iran, any other Islamic hellhole of their choice.

  4. Niemoller says

    Aug 6, 2020 at 9:23 pm

    Wikipedia says this about Satish Tripati, a native of India: “during his tenure as UB provost, he secured important partnerships in India”.
    Well of course he has to funnel that US money back to his native land. That’s very unethical and should be investigated.
    It’s also very racist for someone born in India to be given opportunitiies in the USA he could never get in India, then turn around and distort, erase and negate the history of the USA.

    • gravenimage says

      Aug 6, 2020 at 10:45 pm

      And Tripathi condemned Trump for trying to protect Americans with his “Muslim ban”.

      • Niemoller says

        Aug 7, 2020 at 7:21 am

        I bet dollars to doughnuts that money went to his business partners and associates in India, and he got a nice kickback.

        • tinman says

          Aug 7, 2020 at 9:23 am

          You want to talk about dollars? Just watch and see how many former students cough up dollars every year after this boondoggle!

  5. gravenimage says

    Aug 6, 2020 at 10:38 pm

    University at Buffalo to remove Millard Fillmore’s name from campus because of “systemic racism”
    …………………

    Does it matter that Fillmore *hated slavery*? Apparently not.

    Fillmore also said, “It is not strange… to mistake change for progress”. God knows, this quote is salient for today.

    • James Lincoln says

      Aug 7, 2020 at 9:20 am

      gravenimage says,

      “Fillmore also said, “It is not strange… to mistake change for progress”. God knows, this quote is salient for today.”

      Thanks for sharing the quote by Pres. Fillmore. Surprisingly, I did not know that he had said that.

      Salient for sure…

      • gravenimage says

        Aug 7, 2020 at 11:00 pm

        Thanks, James. A great quote.

  6. libertyORdeath says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 5:45 am

    If you closely examine ANYBODYS past, including these “morally superior” hippies there will always be unsavory details.

    First they came for our ancestors, then they came for our institutions. How long before the purity police come knocking down your door?

  7. Idol and Icon says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 6:06 am

    Doesn’t the left argue we can’t apply 21st moral standards to former times? Rationality and consistency, though, is not part of their ideology.

  8. Clinton Parks says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 6:55 am

    Sad to say but welcome to 1984 where History is being removed

  9. CTTV15@Hotmail.com says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 7:43 am

    And, none of these fools will ever discuss the hundred and fifty or so, and extremely wealthy, Black Slave Owners and ‘Breeders” in the South, like ‘April Ellison’ (‘Ellerson’)..

    An ‘inconvenient TRUTH’ I suppose..

    This country is in the throws of a literal group think collective madness..

  10. OLD GUY says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 10:22 am

    Wait until history discovers their drug use, sexual preferences and murder through abortion policies. And then again they maybe erased from history due to their destroying mans most freedom loving country ever. The majority of these protestors and rioters are clueless about the history of the world and are being hoodwinked into believing that America is a terrible place to live. Yet they have no experience in actually traveling the world to see the poor living conditions in many of these socialist lead countries.

  11. Wellington says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 11:49 am

    More obliteration of history. Fillmore, becoming President once Zachary Taylor died in July of 1850, by his behind-the-scenes dealings (and aided by others like Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas) assured the success of the Compromise of 1850 which had five parts to it: 1) California coming in as a free state; 2) New Mexico organized as a territory with the right of those in that territory to make up their own mind about slavery, commonly called popular sovereignty (though the timing of when this was to be done was deliberately left obscure) and Texas’ boundary adjusted; 3) Utah formed as a territory just as New Mexico was; 4) the slave trade but not slavery abolished in Washington DC; and 5) the Fugitive Slave Law.

    As Loren mentioned above, this was a credit to Fillmore, a self-made man who was a fine lawyer from New York. Had President Taylor not suddenly died, being far more belligerent than Fillmore and not ready to compromise, there was the possibility of civil war in 1850 rather than breaking out as it did in 1861. The Nashville Convention in June of 1850 served as a sign of many southern states (9) possibly ready for some kind of action were President Taylor to get his way about New Mexico coming in as a free state right away. Had civil war broken out eleven years earlier than it did, the North was not nearly industrially prepared to fight a war as it was a decade later—and if the North had lost then a united United States would have ceased to be with all kinds of deleterious consequences for the world at large come the 20th century.

    Fillmore helped give the Union ten more years and this was a great achievement. And, like Lincoln, he personally detested slavery, which existed all across the world in the 19th century, including in Africa and throughout the Islamic world. What the University of Buffalo is about to do is a disgrace and a way of bastardizing history by holding people in past times to the worldview of the present.

    Finally, I will end on a lighter note. After his Presidency, Millard Fillmore was offered an honorary doctorate by Oxford University. He turned the honor down for a specific reason: He could not read Latin (like Lincoln he was born in a log cabin and had virtually no formal schooling) and the degree was written in Latin and Fillmore said that one ought not to accept a degree that they cannot read.

    • James Lincoln says

      Aug 7, 2020 at 1:32 pm

      Wellington,

      Much thanks for pointing out the importance of Pres. Millard Fillmore, especially vis-à-vis the likely 11 year postponement of the Civil War…

      • Wellington says

        Aug 7, 2020 at 3:43 pm

        Your welcome, James. I do believe Fillmore’s reputation has suffered somewhat (not counting the nonsense going on in our time) because he was the Presidential candidate for the Know-Nothing Party (formally the American Party) in 1856. It was an anti-Catholic party but it should be noted that many Protestants for centuries looked upon Catholics as having a dual loyalty because the Pope was also a territorial prince in central Italy due to the Papal States, which effectively ceased to exist in 1870 minus the some one hundred acres of Vatican City, now the single smallest nation in the world since the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

        As much as I admire aspects of Catholicism, it took the Protestant portion of the Christian world to create America because the Protestant Reformation bared man directly to God without all the intermediary aspects of Catholicism. I see the creation of America as the single greatest achievement of the Protestant world, something the Catholic world with all of its hierarchical structures could have never created. Thus, it is understandable that many American Protestants in the 19th century saw the millions of German, Irish, etc. Catholics pouring into America as a possible threat to the American Republic. To the credit of the Catholic Church, it largely adapted to democracy, especially after Leo XIII became pontiff in 1878. But it is easy to castigate Protestants for believing what they did. Seen from the perspective of their time, though they would ultimately be proven wrong they were understandably wrong.

        Ah, how important it is to view the past not though the lens of the present but rather through the lens of the time one is studying. This of course is lost on the self-righteous ignoramuses in our era intent upon destroying traditional America by having no regard for what I have just mentioned. Put another way, whatever faults Fillmore had, he was still way ahead of loathsome people like AOC, Omar, Pelosi, Schiff, Schumer, Obama, Biden, Harris and horrible phenomena like BLM and Antifa.

        Time for a beer. Take care, my friend.

    • gravenimage says

      Aug 7, 2020 at 11:01 pm

      Good exchange.

  12. DRH says

    Aug 7, 2020 at 4:21 pm

    These enemies of discernment seem to think symbolic acts done to elevate one’s personal identity are the most important function of government. Tearing down statues is kiddy stuff. It gets serious when “your” government takes over your business and runs it into the ground, as they often do.

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