There are more than 1500 monuments to the Confederacy in the United States, over 700 of which are statues.
Five of those statues -- including those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens -- are in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol building. In the Hall, each of the fifty states is allowed to designate two of its citizens for sculptured immortality. Mississippi long ago designated Davis as one of its honorees, and the Stephens statue was given by Georgia in 1927. For years, one of Virginia's heroes, Robert E. Lee, had a statue in the Hall. It is now in the Capitol crypt, still part of the government's collection and on display, but at a remove from the glory of the rotunda's Hall.
Over the course of the last twenty years, there have been regular efforts to remove Confederate statues and monuments from public places and to re-name highways, streets, parks, buildings and colleges named for Confederate leaders. Those efforts wax and wane and in any case are both monumental (pun intended) and disjointed given the sheer number of memorials and the fact that they exist in pretty much every corner of the country.
As of the summer of 2017, more than a hundred roads in eleven states were named for Jefferson Davis. Since then, countless memorials or designations of one sort or another have come down or been changed thoughout the old south, many of the Davis highways foremost among them. The same has also occurred in New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Montana, Washington and California -- decidedly non-Confederate precincts that nevertheless were moved to remember for one reason or another the south's putative heroes.
Removal, however, has not been universally approved.
In a 2017 Reuters poll, 54% said the monuments should remain, 24% said they should be removed, and 19% were undecided. Though the recent killing of George Floyd sparked renewed removal efforts, public opinion remains more or less unchanged. In this month's HuffPost/YouGov poll, 51% oppose flying the Confederate flag but 49% also oppose removing the monuments. This indecision is also reflected in legislative efforts. Virginia, with more Confederate monuments than any other state, just repealed a law protecting them, and Congressional Democrats want to introduce legislation to have the Capitol remove them. The Virginia law, however, gives localities the final say on the issue, and the Congressional effort is a long-shot and not remotely bi-partisan.
So most of the statues still stand.
And the question arises . . .
What gives?
Why are monuments to slavery and treason fit symbols for public art?
In our naming and sculpting, what are we trying to remember?
Or forget?
To begin, the monument craze wasn't a natural or inevitable outcome of the Civil War. Robert E. Lee himself opposed the whole notion, rejecting any memorials other than cemetary headstones and explaining to any who asked that monuments would keep divisions alive and retard development in the south. He refused to fly the Confederate flag at the college over which he presided. He was not buried in his military uniform, and the southern Civil War veterans who walked him to his final rest were similarly non-uniformed. His alternative, a form of suppressed acceptance, may not have been any better inasmuch as it counseled the sort of stiff-upper-lip denial that often mistakes a vacuum of ignorance for tolerance and progress.
But it was certainly a far cry from the "lost cause" mythology that came in its place.
And come it did.
In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist, published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates and laid the first of the myth's two foundations. The south's erstwhile "system of servitude", Pollard announced, was "the mildest in the world", did not "rest on acts of debasement", "elevated the African", and was therefore one in which "that odious term 'slavery'" could not be "properly applied". Two years later, Pollard followed up with The Lost Cause Regained and laid the second foundation -- state sovereignty. Thereafter, the warriors in this just fight were said to have lost only because of the north's "overwhelming numbers and resources" (according to Lee) and uncivilized "ferocity" (according Jefferson Davis).
New ideology announced, the defeated south eventually re-made itself into the segregated, white supremacist, Jim Crow post-bellum south.
And valorized Confederate veterans.
If there is any group that spearheaded monument making, it was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Formed in 1894, the UDC's object was to commemorate Confederate soldiers and erect monuments to them. To the UDC, the rebellion had been "a glorious fight" and those who undertook it "hallowed" veterans. Out of the universe of statues and monuments, only a small number were erected shortly after the war or in the three decades that followed it. The vast majority went up with UDC support (and often on account of the group's prodigious fundraising) in the first decades of the 20th century. Their dedications, moreover, were major community events, Confederate flag-festooned pageants that attracted long speeches and large crowds. In 1907, somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand showed up at a dedication in Newton, North Carolina.
The UDC aggressively promoted the myth of the lost cause and enthusuastically supported the south's post-bellum regime. In its world, slavery had been benign (because it civilized blacks) , segregation was legitimate (because Reconstruction had made former slaves savage and immoral), and noble Confederate soldiers had simply been overrun (by the uncivilized hordes that were the enemy's army). In 1896, according to one historian, the group established an auxiliary Children of the Confederacy (COC) in order "to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future." To do so, according to another, it made sure public schools "perpetuate[d] Confederate mythology" by vetting text books and setting curricula.
It also venerated the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact, in 1926, in North Carolina, the UDC even put up a memorial to the KKK.
None of this was done absent northern complicity.
To the contrary, having left the south to its own devices after federal troops departed in 1877, white northerners for the most part accepted Jim Crow and segregation, the latter of which the Supreme Court legalized in 1896 and northerners themselves practiced for much of the next century with only slightly more subtlety. As for lost cause mythology, they treated it like a palliative. Without curing the underlying disease, it allowed peace to replace rebellion, promoting reconciliation by suppressing memory.
And the statues and monuments to that lost cause, dotting the American landscape in increasing numbers?
They stood as . . .
Silent sentinels to that suppression.
It's unclear what would have happended had the myth not taken hold in the south or been ignored in the north. We might have become honest sooner, and in any case the racism that infected all corners of the nation could have been confronted earlier. Alternative history is always speculative, but the south of Reconstruction (from 1865 to the early 1870s) was one where former slaves voted and held office, the Ku Klux Klan was eliminated (it re-emerged much later), and vigilante justice was for the most part avoided. Had it survived and matured, there might have been no Jim Crow and, with space and time, a peaceful and multi-racial polity.
But it didn't.
And there wasn't.
The UDC never erected a statue of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass or the dozens of black law-makers who initially served in the newly re-admitted Confederate states along with the freedmen who put them there. Their stories were central to the Civil War but had no place in the myth of the lost cause.
And the statues and monuments remind us of that too.
In Charlottesville in 2017, neo-Nazis marched in opposition to plans in that city to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation (formerly Lee) Park. The proposed removal had been spurred by the shootings of Trayvon Martin in Orlando and Michael Brown in Missouri, and since then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 114 Confederate monuments have come down. Today, in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, there are renewed efforts to remove even more.
The deaths of Floyd and Taylor and Arbery are tragedies.
But the real tragedy is that . . .
The same thing keeps happening.
You can drive almost anywhere in the United States these days -- big and small cities, mid-sized suburbs, rural backroads, red states and blue -- and see signs that say "Black Lives Matter".
They do.
They always have.
But the statues and monuments say . . .
They don't.
It's time . . . beyond time . . . for them to go.
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