The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the removal of statues commemorating Confederate generals:
In our view cities can properly decide whether they wish to take down Confederate symbols, many of which arose in the Jim Crow years of white supremacy in the early 20th Century. But erasing a nation’s history is a bad idea. Mr. Trump is being ridiculed for suggesting that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson could be next because they were slaveholders.
We’re glad to have the clarifications on the false equivalence between Confederate generals and the Founding Fathers, but we hope these clarifiers will be around when campus demonstrators or even historians start demanding that the Founders’ legacies be repudiated because they owned slaves.
“Racist†is a powerful accusation to make against anyone, but it is heard today in an ever-widening set of circumstances, not just against Confederate generals. It might be useful if more people understood the role race has played in American history, as well as that history’s effort to get past discrimination based on race.
It might begin with Jefferson and Washington, who wrote the language and built the institutions of the bedrock American belief that “all men are created equal†and possess inalienable rights. Those words planted the seeds of freedom for the slaves, an idea that advanced through the awful Civil War and, not without setbacks, for a century after, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
That is a long and difficult history of progress, one that deserves to be known in its complexity, rather than not known or forgotten. Robert E. Lee spent the rest of his life after the Civil War, notably as president of what became Washington and Lee University, trying to heal the wounds between north and south.
That’s at least one legacy of Lee we can all celebrate because we can’t see much purpose beyond political symbolism in reopening the Civil War 152 years later. It won’t educate an inner-city child trapped in a rotten school, it won’t create more economic opportunity, and it won’t lead to more racial tolerance.
There have been calls here in Chicago to have Washington’s image and name removed. A statue of Lincoln was defaced here and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, presumably soon to be renamed, was spraypainted with expletives. There have been calls for the destruction of Mount Rushmore.
Now that a Lincoln monument in Chicago has been vandalized, how long before the MLK monument in Washington is defaced? Is there a single statue in all of America that does not offend someone? Perhaps we all should (will?) become eikonoklastēs.
My position is pretty much the opposite of Ben Wolf’s, I doubt there is a monument in the U.S. that I would want to see destroyed. James W. Lowewen wrote a book several years back “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong,” includes his personal list of the top 20 monuments deserving “toppling,” which is misleading because he doesn’t advocate their removal, just using them to teach the actual historical events.
Lee is no on his top 20 list, though his monuments are discussed elsewhere in the book. The top 20 has subjects like National Bedford Forrest, the faithful darkie, the Afro-Confederates, the Haymarket riot, and various Indian massacres.
using them to teach the actual historical events.
This seems right to me. If monuments are speech, we need more speech, not suppression of it.
That said, the events of this week have me reflecting on personal experiences with Confederate memorials. I was born in the northeast but moved to New Orleans just before my teen years and have lived in the South ever since. I remember feeling surprised, maybe even a bit scandalized, by the defiant attitudes held by many Southerners. It was expressed particularly by the statue of Lee that was a prominent landmark in Lee Circle-and if anyone mentioned the statue they often commented that his back was toward the North.
So although I’ve generally ignored these controversies (for stance in my current home state of GA we’ve had debate over the state flag and the Stine Mountain base relief carvings), I am rethinking my neutral stance. I am realizing that it has not been healthy or good for statues that promote a heroic view of the Confederate fighters to go unchallenged. I think rather than removal I’d prefer more context and somehow an expression of greater ideals that prevailed with Union victory and subsequent reunification and emancipation.
The POW camp grave sites are a different story though, as long as their isn’t an expression of support for the Confederate cause. The countermessage is already obviously on display.
CStanley–
Stone Mountain is a beautiful area completely marred by those ridiculous carvings. There are graveyards in the south filled with tombstones and monuments to the Confederacy that are solemn and beautiful. Sweetwater Creek has a husk of a factory burned by Union forces as they approached Atlanta. There are plaques explaining who built it–slaves–and what is was used for. It’s actual history.
Stone Mountain is the opposite. It’s not beautiful and it has nothing to do with history. Lots of black people visit it and i’m sure they enjoy going to the park, but those carvings are affronts to everybody except maybe Donald Trump, who would have had them inlaid with gold and fake gems.
Rushmore’s history is pretty awful. The same racist maniac who envisioned Stone Mountain put the faces of four presidents over land that was just taken in every way from the Sioux, who at least had some consolation in being able to kill Custer. American history is called ‘complicated’ because to describe the actual march west is to describe thousands of crimes.
I mostly agree MM but I am not for sandblasting and removal.
Also agree about the value of visiting the solemn sites. My neighborhood borders the site of one of the Cherokee removal forts but there is no marker to even point out exactly where it was. I should probably join a historical society and try to remedy that.
Here’s my opinion on this whole topic:
Communities should have the right to put up they statues they want. If the people of Charlotte, or any other place, want to take down Confederate monuments, more power to them. What I don’t care for are activists from both sides, who have no local connections, who want to come in and tell the people of Charlotte what is or isn’t acceptable.
I’m not concerned about these Nazi’s. There have always been and will always be a white extremist movement in this country and, really, in just about every country. This isn’t first or last rally they will hold. There is no danger of them “taking over” or any of the other scare-mongering that’s been going around. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be opposed or that people shouldn’t oppose their ideology – quite the contrary. But the Nazi’s are fundamentally weak, their ideology is bet met with expressions of free speech and non-violent opposition. There is no justification for restricting free speech or using violence as some are advocating for.
A Facebook friend linked this which I thought was good:
What I Saw in Charlottesville – Brian McLaren
…especially his prescription:
Basically you can’t claim “love trumps hate” on one hand and go around punching Nazi’s with the other hand. Winning requires organization. It’s one of many reasons why MLK’s movement was so successful while so many other movements fail.