Recently there have been public debates about which statues should be removed, if any, and which should remain. The question naturally arises: where to draw the line? Eugene Robinson, columnist for the Washington Post, addresses that question here.
He writes:
The solution to the problem of Confederate memorials is simple: Tear them down, all of them. If a few must be left standing for practical reasons — the gigantic carvings on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta come to mind — authorities should allow them to be appropriately defaced, like the graffiti-scrawled remnants of the Berlin Wall.
The question of monuments to other white supremacists is more complicated, but it’s still not rocket science. As a society, we’re perfectly capable of deciding together which must go and which can stay. This supposed “slippery slope” isn’t really slippery at all.
There is no earthly reason any of this nation’s public spaces should be defiled by statuary honoring generals, soldiers and politicians who were traitors, who took up arms against their country, who did so to perpetuate slavery, and who — this is an important point — were losers.
This was clear even to Robert E. Lee, who opposed such monuments. “I think it wiser,” he wrote in 1869, declining an invitation to help decide where to erect memorials at Gettysburg, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Lee understood that the South had lost and slavery was gone. Most Confederate memorials were erected decades later, when white Southerners were reestablishing their repressive dominion over African Americans through the imposition of Jim Crow laws and a state-sponsored campaign of terrorism led by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Confederate monument in my hometown, Orangeburg, S.C., was dedicated in 1893. It is a statue of a rebel soldier atop a tall column, and the inscription, attributed to “the women of Orangeburg County” — though presumably only the white ones — calls it “a grateful tribute to the brave defenders of our rights, our honor and our homes.” The “rights” in question were to own human beings, including my ancestors, and compel their uncompensated labor. The point of erecting the monument was to reassert those “rights.” If the statue is a homage to anything, it’s hate. Take it down.
“Oh, but you’re erasing history,” defenders of such memorials always say. Nonsense. The monuments themselves are an attempt to rewrite history and assert white supremacy. Put them in some sort of Museum of Shame, if you must, but get them out of the public square.
“Oh, but if you start toppling statues, where does it all end?” defenders wail, rending their garments. This is not a hard problem to solve: It ends where we, as a nation, decide to draw the line between those historical figures who deserve to be so honored and those who do not.
There is an obvious difference between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who founded our union, and, say, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, who tried to destroy it. The fact that Washington, Jefferson and other early presidents owned slaves should temper our admiration for them but not erase it entirely. They gave us a nation grotesquely disfigured by slavery, but they also gave us the constitutional tools, and the high-minded ideals, with which to heal that original, near-fatal flaw.
Davis, Jackson and the rest of the Confederates gave us war, destruction and suffering, all in the service of white supremacy and African American subjugation. They deserve nothing but our eternal scorn.
White Southerners who consider the memorials a matter of “heritage” should realize that many Americans have ancestors who made poor choices. Like the Germans of the Third Reich, they merit familial respect but not public honor.
What about non-Confederate historical figures who were white supremacists? If every statue of a racist were taken down, we’d mostly have empty pediments and plinths. It should depend on the person, the context and the memorial itself.
A good example is the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced will soon be taken down. The problem is not Roosevelt himself. He was relatively enlightened for his times: He invited civil rights leader Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, for which he was pilloried. And he did much to preserve wildlife (when he wasn’t shooting it) and our natural wonders.
The problem is the statuary itself. Roosevelt is astride a horse, and flanking him — on foot, thus beneath the great man — are a Native American man on one side and an African man on the other. The tableau amounts to a visual parable of white supremacy.
We put statues in places of honor to depict our heroes and our values. Overt racism is not an idea we honor — not in relationships and not in bronze and marble. Not anymore.
I think Eugene Robinson is unusually forceful here. And I find myself easy to persuade.
The issue of removing offensive statues and monuments goes far beyond political correctness and the matter of history being a one-sided tale told by victors.
I’m left to ask if anyone knows whether Germany has torn down all salutes to the champions of Nazism who brought genocide to the Fatherland and surrounding accomplice nations. If not, has Angela Merkel been asked to use her power to intervene?
Perhaps, Auschwitz concentration camp and the words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” and the tracks leading to the gas chambers and crematoria there should be left intact. And a monument be erected, standing in front on a pedestal that says, “NEVER AGAIN.”
I have toured Auschwitz. It stands not as a monument to the Nazis but as a reminder of the horrors perpetrated there on men, women, and children. There is an exhibit of suitcases, brought by innocent people who thought they were going to a new life, not to gas chambers. There is an exhibit of thousands of shoes; someone once wore them. There are other personal effects, reminders of those brutally murdered there.
Yes, the Third Reich was incredibly well-organized, systematic and efficient. It had generals, judges and propaganda ministers to enforce the ideology of hate sprung from the head of it’s ego-maniacal fuhrer. It appealed to the masses by feeding it myths about a superior race and former greatness and grandeur that been stolen. Scapegoats were needed to restore the proper world order. And oppressive laws could be written, as required, to take away the rights of anyone who was disposable.
Some of us thought “It can’t happen here.”
It has happened here, Fred, as this insightful article argues:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/
Fred Smith,
What is being torn down are statutes which honor people who have done things that mean that they should not be honored with a statue.
That doesn’t mean that people can’t learn about the good and the bad those Americans might have done during their lifetime in a museum exhibit.
Auschwitz as a museum is completely different than having statues of the men who ran Auschwitz and oversaw the “work” being done at Auschwitz. Auschwitz as a museum is entirely different than having statutes of Nazi leaders placed in positions of honor throughout Germany.
NYCPSP
I think that’s what I said.
“Where to draw the line”… for consumers-
Doris Fisher’s GAP – Kanye West (Trump fan) has a new GAP brand, “Yeezy”.
The NAACP and BLM asked for a moratorium on charter schools ( the privatization plan of racist Georgia Gov. Talmadge to avoid court-mandated integration).
Doris Fisher funds the promotion of charter schools.
I know what I will think when I see Yeezy merchandise.
Monument, memorials, and commemorative sites serve important, I would argue, essential educational, cultural, and moral functions. They also reflect priorities and intentions of societies. Through the first third of the 19th century, they were exclusively reserved for military and political figures (at least in Europe and the Americas). They instilled a false reverence for militarism and raw power. In the late 1830s, statues were erected in Germany and Austria that focused on cultural figures (males, of course). The first two were to Schiller in Stuttgart and Mozart in Salzburg. But the one that had the biggest impact was the erected to honor Beethoven in Bonn, its building involved the cultural elite of Europe.
I’ve already gone over how Germany responded with memorials like Stolpersteine and concentration camp sites and museums. We have templates here as well. In DC there is a neglected statue to Samuel Gompers on Massachusetts Avenue near the intersection of 10 and L NW that few people notice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Gompers_Memorial). There are the Korean and Vietnam Memorials that don’t glorify war, but recognize history from below. And how many people know of the exquisite memorial to Japanese internees wedged between New York and Louisiana Aves and D St at the foot of Capitol Hill on the Senate side (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_Memorial_to_Patriotism_During_World_War_II)? Or the lynching memorial in Montgomery, AL or the Murrah Building memorial in Oklahoma City? We have memorials and monuments that point the way to the future to educate generations to come. Let’s learn from them and build upon them.
A good starting place would be to establish a museum or museums in Richmond, VA and Montgomery, AL, the two so-called capitals of the so-called confederacy that would house all the statues that are being removed. They should also house the damaged and vandalized statues that have been torn down. They should serve as educational sites to teach about the slavery, the people who tried to preserve it, reaction to Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and the just anger of our age. There should be concerted efforts to document and memorialize the victims of these injustices, both known and unknown. They should elevate the cultural contributions of great people like Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Jim Thorpe, and many, many others.
And there should be similar public policy responses away from militarism and violence. There should be a shifting of funding priorities from militarism and the police state toward real reparations–investments in minority communities, most especially Native and Black Americans. Proper memorials and monuments can serve vital functions for our futures. That includes a clear reckoning of our past that neither erases for glorifies falsely.
I haven’t traveled to Europe since the early ’70’s. Cold War years – 50 yrs ago, just 25 yrs after war’s end. But I retain very strong memories of a trip to W Berlin.
When we passed on the train from W to E Germany, the change was immediate. Part of it was the immediate perusing of one’s “papers” – something that had been routine at W Euro borders, but intimidating there: the demeanor of officials was intimidating. But much more impressive was the instant change in bldgs at the border… the Russian-dominated Germans had left wartime border- buildings intact: the bullet-strafings & occasional ruins told a story. All fixed-up in W Germany – decidedly NOT in E Germany.
Once debarked, E Germany was grim & gray compared to W Germany. One had the sense of a poor economy, & a grudge. Russian memorials to numberjs killed by Nazis proliferated.
On the Western side of the Berlin divide, political messages proliferated as well. The ones I remember: the equestrian statuary topping the Brandenburg Gate [separating W from E Berlin] had been reversed, so as to display horses’ asses to the Russians. And the W Berliners had built a modern “Lipstick and Compact” architectural creation amid the still-standing wartime ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (destroyed by Allies – a 9thC cathedral,still bearing bombed remains of a 19thC spire, renamed the “Hollow Tooth”). The message was mixed, ideologically, but clear, spiritually: “remember, and think,” it seemed to say.
We could take some lessons from the Germans (who have since peppered the landscape w/ memorials to Nazi slaughters). I’m OK w/the rebuilding of WTC. But the South could do w/some mixed messages.
I hope you can go back. You would be shocked by the changes. It is virtually impossible to identify where the border was. There are parts of the city where the former location of wall is marked by a brass strip in the ground which can be easily missed if one isn’t looking for it.
One of my my favorite memories is stepping in a bush near the Reichstag late one night having to relieve myself after one beer too many and realizing that an East German border patrol guard was observing me with binoculars. Couldn’t do that on the same spot today because there is a lot of traffic there. Berlin is a glorious city today.
Agree about Berlin. Amazing vibrant city today with great museums.
Hello GregB,
I’m wondering if we need to put these confederate statues in a museum at all. There are other ways to learn about the confederacy than looking at these statues. Are they important for learning about history? I’m not arguing for or against putting them in a museum or not. I’m just asking the question. 🙂
I would argue (strenuously so) that we do need these statues in a museum. They exist and existed. They were part of a historical time and place. That should be acknowledged and explained to future generations in the proper context.
The problem I see with taking down old statues is that it gives rise to suggestions of re-writing history that fuels conservatism. What we should do is move the statues a previous generation put up to a place where our past can be given real interpretation. Obliterating history or fictionalizing it is one of the first steps on the road to tyranny, as these statues and their beginnings in the rise of Jim Crow demonstrates. We should not forget that we did this once, even as we should not forget slavery itself. The issue is interpretation.
I know where there is a statue of Ayn Rand. She stands beside Ronal Reagan in an amusement park for kids that also glorifies Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers. I do not like that, but I would want the statue to stay there log after our nations comes to its senses.
This country was 100% white surpremacist when these statues went up. Roosevelt, mentioned above, was considered a “Liberal” because he met with Booker T. Washington. Very few Europeans believed their colonies were full of people of equal status to their own intellectual ability. We have been paying for this ever since. We do not need to forget it existed. Rather we need all to realize that their forbears participated in this mess, either as the perpetrators, bystanders, or recipients.
I’m w/you on leaving the Ayn Rand/ Reagan/ Jefferson et al statuary in an amusement park. What we need is a mixed message (as I said above): something thought-provoking to ponder.
P.S… Do you really believe the country was 100% “white supremacist” when those statues went up in early 20thC? I think it was more complicated than that. 50 yrs after Civil War ending, DC was throwing cultural bones to South, winking at Jim Crow – political punting, still trying to draw country together. The growing unrest in Northern cities 1910-30 was racist, certainly, but not precisely “white supremacy.” More like economic anxiety, restiveness. Ag towns withering from the draw of mfg centers. Immigrant communities who just got a toehold against discrimination & began bldg towns on edge of urbs (ethnic ghettoes), suddenly confronted w/competition from blacks fleeing Jim Crow, willing to work for less. Very similar to today’s situation…
It was, of course not 100% anything. I was just using hyperbole. Still, I would submit that the silence from the country at large about lynchings (famously decried by Mark Twain) suggests that the European attitude that existed in the world of imperialism all over the world was very much held by a large portion of the Europeans in the United States. This included most of the people who lived in the north as well as the south.
Suggesting that Northern reaction to the appearance of Blacks in northern cities was somehow more explicable economically than white supremacy in the south ignores the rise of the KKK in northern cities. Moreover, economic conditions in the south post civil war were essentially third world. The post-civil war colonialism that kept the region in a constant depression was one of the major contributors to white supremacist attitudes.
The major change in public memorials came from Maya Linn’s Vietnam Memorial. It was not her only effort and it was resisted by literalists. Please undersand that she broke the mold in thinking about public monuments. She was among speakers at a conference I organized in 1987 focussed on women in the arts. Also on the program were others who had created complelling public monuments, including Elizabeth Catlett. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maya-Lin
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Jon Meacham suggests we pose the following question when deciding whether to erect or take down a monument to a person or institution and that is was the person or institution ultimately devoted to the formation of a more perfect union? I think it’s a good question but it still leaves open a lot of discussion. What is a “more perfect union?” We’re still trying to decide that to this day. In a general sense, I’m not sure I like the “they (Confederate soldiers) were the losers” argument. There have been many so called “losers” in history who fought for good causes. I’m not saying that’s the case here, but I’m just speaking of this argument generally. I think we have to see people in the times in which they lived, the societal constraints they had to deal with, and the level of consciousness with which they lived their lives. Every human being, in my opinion, is made up of a variety of contradictions and paradoxes. We are all constantly changing. Everything is always in motion – our individual development and the development of our societies. We can’t separate ourselves from the time in which we live and we can’t separate our founders from the time in which they lived. I think we have to understand them in their context and accept that they were human with all that entails. When I think of some of our founders, I think of the great ideals they had but also how deeply flawed they were. And isn’t that a great lesson to all of us?
Mamie,
Everyone is imperfect. We all live in our time, and we don’t know how history will judge us. Maybe at some point in the future, it will be a crime to eat meat. But knowing how uncertain life is and not knowing how we will be judged in the future, we can say today with certainty that there should be no public monuments for those who took up arms against our nation to preserve a caste system. It was wrong then and it is wrong in retrospect.
Hello Diane,
Thank you. Funny you should mention that particular point about eating meat. I was thinking the same thing. Just to extrapolate a bit, I think of the great arc of history and how much has changed and how our consciousness has changed – and how much it has stayed the same. I remember learning in Latin class about how the father of the family had life and death control over his wife, children and slaves- an idea abhorrent to us today. In so many biographies I read about the “great men” of history, I see how there were great women, often their wives, who had to sacrifice their own ambitions, interests and talents because it wasn’t proper for them to pursue those things. I think of great women writers and artists who could have done so much more if it had been possible and accepted in their time. Even today, this country can’t pass something as obvious as the Equal Rights Amendment. These are just examples. So many groups have been marginalized, oppressed and unable to seek their own fulfillment in their societies. But it’s all changing all the time and we do make progress and regress. This is one of the ways I see the slavery issue – in a context of history that is moving and changing and in relation to other groups and who have struggled. But in the end, I agree with you about Confederate statues.
Great points. I’m starting to see that the decision about who merits a statue or hall of fame honors has many facets. I believe, however, that no one who changes their positions situationally deserves such laurels. (See 99% of our politicians.) If anything, the monument to each should be a weather vane.
Is that vane or vein? As in, “You’re so…”
vain! WordPress! Curses!
I didn’t know Eugene Robinson was from Orangeburg. People should read The Orangeburg Massacre by Jack Bass and Jack Nelson.