About those Confederate monuments

So let's talk about Robert E. Lee. Certainly he was an important historical figure as the leading general of the Confederacy. And by most accounts I've read, he worked honorably after the war, both as president of what is now Washington and Lee University, and toward the cause of reconciling the union. He is reported to have said “before the war, I was a Virginian, but after the war, I was an American.” In his own time, Lee was opposed to erecting monuments valorizing himself or other Confederate leaders. If he were alive today, he would most likely be appalled by the misappropriation of his good name and likeness as a symbol of white supremacy, and he would be pulling down those statues himself.

Let's be frank. Those monuments are not about honoring a valorous general, and they're certainly not about his honorable post-war deeds. Most (not all, but most) of those monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era as a way to send a message to southern blacks to know their place. At the same time, reverence for a Confederate battle flag was invented as a more genteel daytime cloak for those who wear sheets and robes at night. And the monuments are just a coded form of a burning cross with the plausible deniability of “heritage”. People have varying degrees of conscious complicity in this, but this form of “Southern pride” is at best a kind of collective willful amnesia about the ugly message being sent here. Look too closely through the veneer of nostalgia, and at its most charitable interpretation the message is “we liked it better before the war, and we wish we could go back to that”. Think it through, and it's hard to avoid the implication: “unchained blacks have no place here”.

Those who think it's really more innocent than that need to ask themselves a number of questions. If this is not about valorizing the Confederacy itself, why all the monuments to Jefferson Davis, the not particularly competent president of the Confederacy? Or Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Justice who gave us the ignoble Dred Scott decision? General Lee may be statue-worthy, but what's up with those guys? Why were so many of these monuments erected in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and even the 1950s? What do you suppose it really meant to erect such monuments in the 1950s? And why statues for every general and colonel in the Civil War? Is there a reason those men should be honored way more than southern generals in other wars? Why are there overwhelmingly more statues of Lee than there are of Admiral Nimitz or Black Jack Pershing, both southerners? And if it's about the singular importance of the Civil War in our history, why are there way more statues of Lee than there are of Grant in the north? And if it's about “southern pride”, then why aren't southerners anywhere near as proud of their great explorers (Lewis and Clark), authors (Faulkner, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams), inventors and scientists (George Washington Carver, McCormick Bros, Michael DeBakey), and other honor-worthy people (Helen Keller, Chuck Yeager)? There is clearly a peculiar fixation on Confederate leaders that is not just about “history” and “heritage”. We need to call this out for what it is.

When Hungary finally broke free of Communism, Budapest was adorned with monumental statues of Lenin, Marx, and other Communist heroes. They rightly wanted no longer to give those a place of honor in their city, so they built a place called Memento Park on the outskirts of town, where all of these old Communist monuments are on display in a kind of outdoor museum, where that part of their history can be preserved, but with the proper detachment and no inappropriate place of honor. That's what we need to do with all of this Jim Crow era “heritage”. Segregated water fountains are part of that same heritage too, and a few of those should be preserved as well, in museums, for history sake. Confederate flags and Confederate monuments should be viewed no differently than segregated water fountains.

Meanwhile, we need a reboot, “Southern Pride 2.0”. There is much worth honoring that has come from the South (see list above of statue-worthy Southerners, of which that is only a start). Let's honor that, and ditch this disingenuous nostalgia for a “peculiar institution”.