Talk:Benjamin Tillman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.
Biography Portal
Start This article has been rated as start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]
This article is supported by the Politics and government work group.
Maintenance An appropriate infobox may need to be added to this article, or the current infobox may need to be updated. Please refer to the list of biography infoboxes for further information.

Ben Tillman also threatened black voters that if they voted Republican, he would kill them. He gained political office using the 'Hamburg Massacre' within his speeches as a means to gain support. I understand tht this occured during the reconstruction era, but is it fair to call Osama Ben Ladin a terrorist and not Benjamin Tillman? Is it not biased? I agree though that paramilitary is a objective word, but it is amazing and I dont hold you responsible that Ben Ladin is called a terrorist but not people such as Benjamin Tillman.

  • No he is merely the closest thing the U.S. has had to Hitler.. probably would have been worse if he had the same power that Hitler obtained!
    • We Americans should acknowledge that the most successful and one of the most violent terrorist organizations in history is the KKK. Tillman was a beast. 69.180.49.229 13:17, 8 December 2006 (UTC)Faveuncle.

[edit] Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman

I do believe he also threatened to impale president Roosevelt with a pitchfork once in a fit of rage. Since he was on the congressional floor, they couldn't do much about that one. There's no reference to this in the article. There is also a public domain political cartoon somewhere exemplifying this. Perhaps that would be a nice addition. I'd do it myself, except I'm hardly an expert on him. Perhaps a curator from a political museum in Columbia, SC would be a good resource for this.

Also, what distinguishes Tillman's tenure in congress isn't particularly his blatant racism (that was par for the course in those times), but his firey temper and hotheadedness. He stepped on a lot of toes, and didn't care who he made mad.

My two cents JD 04:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

There's also no source for that. It was added numerous times to various articles, but no source could be found that he actually made the threat: Tillman was also known as "Pitchfork Ben," either for his defense of farmers' interests or because he wanted to "stick" a pitchfork "into President Grover Cleveland" [1]. Though he "wanted to", it doesn't detail whether or not he actually made this threat, or just said he would "like to". More information would be appreciated, unfortunately it's 4:40 a.m. and I just don't have the drive to stick anything else in this article (pun intended). Zchris87v 08:39, 27 July 2007 (UTC)