Preserving Monuments Sustains Absurd “Both Sides” Argument

After spending most of the summer abroad, it has been slightly surreal (read: horrifying) to return home to bitter arguments about monuments to people who fought to protect states’ rights to uphold laws defining certain human beings as property. Polls on the subject indicate that a majority of Americans support the monuments, and the most prominent argument they make is that tearing them down is a repudiation of our history, something that dooms us to forget it. Putting aside for a moment the insanity of arguing that the prodigious amount of film, television, literature (both scholarly and popular), and tourism dedicated to the Civil War could be eliminated, leaving graven images as our sole reminder of what happened in the 1860s in America, what exactly are the monuments as they stand reminding us of?

Let’s take as an example the Confederate marker closest to where I live: the Confederate Memorial Fountain in Helena, MT (see accompanying image), which was removed amidst bitter protest on August 18, 2017. Some people claim to have found it beautiful, but at least one person I know dubbed it “the ugly penis statue” while walking past it frequently growing up, so it is not an indisputably magnificent piece of art. However, its purpose was not to remind us of the artistic tastes of the period in which it was erected. Instead, its inscription read, on one side, “A Loving Tribute to Our Confederate Soldiers,” and, on another side, “By the Daughters of the Confederacy in Montana, A.D. 1916.”

Based solely on this information, it would seem that the Confederacy was a benign part of our history – perhaps, even, a cause that should have prevailed. This is, of course, exactly what the Daughters of the Confederacy intended as its message. While many argue that this could be countered by adding a plaque offering context (something the Helena city commission approved in 2015), it is naïve to believe that a few lines of text could neutralize a memorial to prejudice. If a monument was built to commemorate a value repugnant to the preponderance of the populace, surely contextualization can happen more appropriately in a museum or private space rather than on public land, where the continued physical presence of the object lends credence to the cretinous “both sides” explanation of intolerance and overshadows (likely literally as well as figuratively) a plaque and any historical nuance it might try to impart.

Another popular argument against monument removal rests on a claim that it is a “slippery slope” to expunging all historical statues. For instance, people have tried to point to the slave-owning reality of most of the Founding Fathers as evidence that anyone offended by a statue of Robert E. Lee should be equally offended by one of George Washington. However, Washington helped create the country we know as the United States, and although that creation involved abhorrent compromises, without him, we would have an entirely different history. Robert E. Lee, by contrast, fought to divide the United States and preserve a way of life based on slavery, as the notorious “cornerstone” speech by the Confederacy’s vice president highlighted.

The reason we have monuments to George Washington is because he helped build our nation, and we seek to remember and honor that. What is it, exactly, that we are supposed to be remembering when we gaze upon Robert E. Lee’s sculpted image or that of any Confederate soldier? That we honor men whose defining accomplishment was fighting to uphold slavery? Surely the lesson we should be remembering from the Civil War is that prejudice can easily rip us asunder, and it is hard to see how monuments to the soldiers do that. If Confederate monuments were really about reminding us of the bits of history we shouldn’t repeat, they would prominently feature slaves.

One internet meme making the rounds shows the famous McRae engraving of New Yorkers pulling down the statue of King George III in 1776; superimposed over the engraving is the phrase: “And this is why nobody remembers who won the Revolutionary War.”  A corollary to this, it could be noted, is that, since statues of the Founding Fathers of the United States are not dotted around the English countryside, people in the UK must have completely forgotten that colonies might revolt against perceived tyranny. Obviously this is not true, so there are ways to remember history without preserving statues of tyrants and traitors.

Overall, monuments are a wonderful way to honor history and a terrible way to teach it. Anyone walking by a Confederate memorial should be saddened, not only by the loss of life by the (mostly) white soldiers but by the callousness of so many humans toward their fellow humans. Unfortunately, that aspect of the Civil War is largely overlooked in the plethora of statues to soldiers and generals. As long as those memorials remain standing, even with accompanying plaques, they represent a tacit reverence for the fight those men fought. Since by the Confederate government’s own admission, that fight was to preserve slavery, it is impossible to unravel reverence for the men from reverence for their cause. Unlike the Founding Fathers, who fought to build a country, the men honored by Confederate memorials fought to unravel one – ours. They don’t deserve our veneration.