AG Wilson Flip Flops on Heritage Issue

The John C. Calhoun monument once stood on Marion Square in Charleston, SC., but Attorney General Alan Wilson refused to protect the 120 year old monument with the Heritage Act. In fact, Wilson has said that the Heritage Act only requires 50 percent plus one for Southern Heritage monuments to be removed, contrary to the intent of the SC State Legislature.

 

Letter to Editor

 

Dear Editor,

I received an email last week of a press release from the American Heritage Association, an ostensibly pro-monument group in Charleston. The heading read “AG Wilson joins the fight.”

Question: the fight against whom? AG Wilson?

 

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson has been the single-most destructive enemy of our monuments and the South Carolina Heritage Act. Now, based on his opinion of a road marker of a highway dedicated to Robert E. Lee, which was never built, we are asked to believe that he is pro-monument. If one believes that, he should be buying beachfront property in Montana.

Wilson’s lack of defense and proactive role in allowing the leftist city government in Charleston to destroy South Carolina’s greatest monument to South Carolina’s greatest statesman, John C. Calhoun, is well known. Wilson can scarcely be regarded as a pillar of strength on this issue. There are other grave issues surrounding Wilson.

 

The 75 million he paid to his old law firm and to Richard Quinn’s son-in-law, Ben Mustian, over the Savannah River Plant case is only one case in point. The legal fees were so inflated as to provoke the censure of Governor McMaster himself, also a former attorney general. Then there is also his attempted white wash of the corruption probe of his political ally Richard Quinn.

 

For Alan Wilson to be on both sides of the monument issue and the Heritage Act may appear clever in the short run. But in the long run, his behavior is politically disingenuous. And for the AHA to endorse it is more so. That is, unless we South Carolinians wish to become historical amnesiacs and relegate the patriotic love and self-sacrifice of our ancestors to the ash bin of history.

 

Richard Hines is a former SC State Legislator and businessman living in Maysville, SC.