Replacement of our heroes is shortsighted

Re “So long, Thomas Starr King,” editorial, Sept. 7

So Thomas Starr King is about to be replaced in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol by Ronald Reagan. It seems that the Republican Party cannot wait for history to judge Reagan’s presidency, perhaps fearing that time might diminish its luster. So everyone else must go -- including George Washington, whose name no longer graces Washington’s Reagan National Airport.

California is now dumping King, “the orator who saved the nation,” all because state Sen. Dennis Hollingsworth (R-Murrieta) has no sense of California history but does have a fear of being left behind in the great Reagan naming race. Shame on him and shame on every legislator who throws out old history and heroes in favor of the expedient.

BARBARA MARCUS

Beverly Hills

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It is highly ironic that the great transcendentalist intellectual who literally exhausted his life to successfully end slavery and preserve the unity of this state and nation at the time of the Civil War will have his statue in the nation’s capitol replaced. King’s statue will give way to that of the actor-politician whose scripted speeches -- using racist attacks on California’s Fair Housing Law for people of color and his anti-intellectual (and even physical) attacks on students and faculty of UC Berkeley -- helped him rise to prominence. The festering problems he helped create are still with us, as the Sept. 7 article about the prisons becoming mental institutions reveals.

THE REV. PAUL SAWYER

Monte Vista Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Pasadena