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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lot's of great ones here, except Teddy Roosevelt and the bot troll from this morning.

I think for the finalists, in addition to Lincoln, FDR, MLK, Mr Rogers, Harriet Tubman, we could add Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt. And maybe not overall but of our time, John Lewis.[/quote]

I think Japanese internment & the continuation of Mexican repatriation which included 40-60 percent American citizens despite its less violent nature plus the choice to develop the nuclear bomb is too great a horrific mark on far's legacy.  politicians are all dirty and nasty in oneway or other, his personal character also left a lot to be desired.

my vote:  tubman, Frederick douglass, jane Addams, mr rogers.  [/quote]

FDR gets a lot of love for the CCC, government sponsored socialism. [/quote]

I've been working on talking through stuff like this with my older kid.  They talked about President's Day.  We talked about how people are complicated and it's okay to talk about the good and bad people did.  So Washington was a crucial figure in US History but also owned slaves (I'm not ready to dig into Jefferson with him yet).

My granddad absolutely loved FDR because his policies lifted my grandparents out of poverty post Great Depression.  My great uncle was one of the Bonus Army demonstrators. But my best friend's grandmother and her family was interned during WWII for being part Japanese.[/quote]

With respect to Washington and slaves, you are judging him by a modern set of morals. Yes, Washington did have personal concerns about owning slaves, but did not free them during his lifetime. In some cases, he wasn't legally allowed to free the slaves. However, what if he did? What awaited these slaves as free men in Virginia? They couldn't own land, and likely couldn't work either. Washington didn't have enough cash to send them up north either. Being largely uneducated, employment in the North would have been menial jobs. It was a practical solution to a difficult problem. [/quote]
This is a b!!ch-a$$ take. Lots of abolitionists had been opposing the slave trade and slave ownership for hundreds of years already, many at great personal cost to life and fortune. You know what Washington could have done? He could have given them freaking land, that's what. He was rich as fck and could have afforded to do so.

Listen, I'm actually a very conservative, right-wing kind of person on many issues. But these ridiculous founding father slaveholding apologies are ridiculous. There is still billions of dollars of family wealth floating around the south in white plantation families as a result of their investing slave labor. Reparations could be made on a forensic accounting basis. We know where the wealth came from, and we know the enslaved ancestors who created it, in many cases.[/quote]

Point me to this billions of dollars of family wealth in the south in white plantation families in 2026.

In 1860, the vast majority of southern wealth was tied up in land and slaves. The slaves were freed without compensation and the value of land collapsed. A staggering amount of real estate traded hands after the war due to the devastation of the post war southern economy. Keep in mind plantation wealth was barely a generation old, two at most, for large swathes of the South in 1860. Even for those who managed to hold on to land after the war, a persistent agricultural depression and the globalization of the cotton market in the 1870s onward meant land value remained deeply depressed. Lands went back to nature, sold for taxes, lost at foreclosure auctions. Previously few planters survived intact.

Other people, not directly tied to the old plantation classes, did manage to revive agriculture and become large land holders, but the idea there is some kind of class descended from planters worth billions today is flat out laughable and deeply wrong and ignorant. [/quote]

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