On an ordinary Monday in July, the Jackson County, Missouri, legislature voted 7 to 1 to begin the process to remove the statues of President Andrew Jackson from the front of its two county courthouses.
This took some moxie. Less than three years earlier, the voters of Jackson County – named after the aforementioned president – voted by a 65 to 35 percent margin to keep the statues in place.
The turnout was high, given that the statue referendum was on the ballot in November 2020, a presidential election year. For the record, Democrat Joe Biden carried the county by a 60-38 percent margin. As a reminder, this election was held months after George Floyd mania inspired our nation’s homegrown Red Guard to tear down statues of white men from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln. In the November vote, at least in Jackson County, sanity had reigned.