Every single person reading this comment thread needs to read the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. Every American on Hubski has been indoctrinated using the same source materials as a child... source materials that intentionally glorify - and deify - the person, over their deeds. American history textbooks are specifically designed to create teflon heroes, and diminish their misdeeds in honor of a whitewashed version of their biographies. Everyone one of us Americans reading this has been indoctrinated in the same way, and we are powerless to de-program ourselves because they did it to us when we were children. Loewen makes the excellent point that elevating these fictionalized depictions of our "founding heroes" then makes it HARDER for children to visualize themselves excelling... because we are all failures in our own eyes; not teflon god-heads who stand tall and claim we chopped down the cherry tree. Some humans have good ideas that other humans want to embrace. That does not require embracing the originator of the idea, who - after all - is just a person that got it right, one time. Statues of individual human beings are solely for the purposes of whitewashing. Elevate the idea, not the man.