“I am opposed to Confederate monuments anywhere, but if they insist on having them I am opposed to having them in public parks. Louisans were saying at the time, pulled from news accounts of the period: Louis women” had won their battle to plant a tribute to the Confederacy in Forest Park. Nearly 50 years after the Civil War tore the nation apart, “Southern organizations of St. 5, 1914 - when the band played “Dixie,” and the men in the crowd of 500 removed their hats and cheered. History, it seems, has circled back to the debate that preceded the monument’s unveiling on Dec. The Confederate memorial was unveiled in December 1914. Opponents back then expressed a viewpoint that has a familiar ring to it: That the 32-foot shaft of Vermont granite glorifying the Confederate cause did not belong in a public place, much less Forest Park. Louisans quarreled over the Confederate memorial that is once again under fire. What’s a monument like you doing in a place like this?Ī century ago, St.

We’ve included plenty of links to source material, if you’d like to know more. But this is a complicated topic, and we barely scratched the surface. We also read a lot of history and old newspaper stories. Louis Board of Education member who served on Slay’s committee to study options for the Confederate memorial. We also spoke with Silvana Siddali, an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University, who teaches classes on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Ron Jackson, a former St.

Together, they tell a story of how the Civil War played out in St. So, we took a closer look at the disputed memorial and at a couple of other statues in Forest Park that you’ll probably recognize, even if you’ve never gotten close enough to read their inscriptions. He suggested looking at the question through the lens of a current controversy: Mayor Francis Slay’s efforts to evict the 100-year-old Confederate memorial from Forest Park. Louis, who has researched and written extensively about the Civil War in St. We put Flick’s question to Louis Gerteis, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. “We just can't seem to be able to get beyond the Reconstruction Era in this state,” said Flick, a lifelong St. That was the intriguing - and very large - question that Steve Flick submitted to Curious Louis. 'Why does the Civil War still hold sway over St.

Civil War St. Louis by Louis S. Gerteis