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Trump’s stance on monuments a giant leap across illogical chasm
Vindicator Politics Writer David Skolnick’s column will return next week.
By Tom Mackall
Bethesda, Md.
The events in Charlottesville have invigorated debate about Confederate monuments. Museums and textbooks, not public statues, are the proper means to remember this history.
Many, including our president, posit a slippery slope: if we remove monuments to Confederate luminaries, what is to keep us from removing monuments to Washington and Jefferson, and destroying our history altogether? The premise of this concern is that removing the Confederate monuments would allow some moral imperfection to override the greatness of the person. Therefore, because Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, this aspect of their lives so taints who they are and their role in founding this country that they should no longer be celebrated or memorialized. I believe this is more of a giant leap across an illogical chasm than a slippery slope into destroying “our” history.
Visionaries
Washington and Jefferson are properly celebrated for truly monumental actions in founding this nation. Their military, intellectual, diplomatic, and visionary greatness gave birth to our Constitution and to a democracy and economy the likes of which the world had not seen before and ideals to which many in the world aspire. There is a reason why so many people from all parts of the world have come here and still seek to come here. We are not perfect, and we certainly have much to answer for as a nation, but I would rather live in this country than anyplace else on earth, and I suspect most people reading this feel the same way.
On the other hand, Lee and Jackson (and other confederate notables) are celebrated for their leadership in seeking to destroy the great nation Washington and Jefferson and others founded in order to preserve at the expense of our nation an economic system premised upon slavery and a moral system premised on white supremacy. Folks can point to other accomplishments of Lee, but the fact is that the monuments celebrate him and his colleagues as military leaders of the Confederacy.
Look at the statues. The men sit upon their warhorses dressed in military regalia and are often identified by their military rank. Consider their context. The vast majority of confederate monuments were erected between 1900 and 1930, as white supremacy regained political power and Jim Crow undid many of the reforms of reconstruction. They were erected by white supremacists and segregationists who had political power and sought to reclaim racial superiority from the reforms of reconstruction and disclaim the full humanity of black people. Erecting monuments celebrating the warriors of the confederacy in the midst of public squares, along with burning crosses and appearing in hoods wielding torches, were key symbols of that effort.
Whose history?
So, when people say that removing these statues is obliterating “our” history, I am left to wonder whose history that is. It is not mine. I lived in Charlottesville for three years. I went to law school, worked in a law firm, owned a home, had many friends, and worshiped there. I nearly chose to settle there. I passed the statue of Lee (the epicenter of the recent events) often. But I never saw as a celebration of my history. Though Mackall relatives fought for the Confederacy (and for the Union), the public testaments to Lee and Jackson were to me dissonant but harmless anachronisms of a progressive and delightful city’s segregationist past. To me, then, they were harmless. But I now understand the persistent adverse impact on a person of color of a glorious statue in a prominent public space celebrating somebody for becoming a traitor to the United States in order to preserve a culture and system of slavery and racism. To me, today, such statues and symbols are not harmless.
Many say that we must indeed remember our past, the good and beautiful and the bad and ugly, and that removing these statues obliterates our past. Yes, we must remember our past in full. We can progress only if we remember our past. We must learn from our low points in order to avoid repeating them. Removing celebrations of Confederate warriors from public squares does not mean we must remove the experience of the Civil War from our consciousness. Quite the contrary, instead of fetishizing Gen. Lee atop Traveller in a green copper statue, we can contextualize, humanize and memorialize him and other Confederate leaders and soldiers respectfully and fully in museums and textbooks. There we can present our history in a way that is accessible and meaningful to people of all races and backgrounds.
Take a lesson from Germany on this. I have been to Dachau outside Munich and, around the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall, to the Terrain of Terror exhibit in the former Gestapo HQ in Berlin. Germany does not shy away from these memorials and exhibits. They provide clear, unvarnished information about such an ugly chapter in the country’s history. Anybody who pays attention walks away understanding the human cost, the horrible experience of the victims, and the cold military and technical competence of the Reich, but there is no glorification of the Reich, the leaders, the soldiers, or those complicit in the regime. They remember. They remember fully. Statues in the public square are not intended to remember fully and certainly fall short of enabling us to do so.
Experience shows that our museums can evolve to curate a fuller remembrance, yet another reason why the slippery slope argument makes no sense. Thirty-some years ago, in my first visit to Monticello that I remember, there was virtually no mention of slavery and only euphemistic references to “servants.” Same at Mount Vernon. Today, at both places, there is fuller effort to explore the slave economies that sustained the estates. Through this exploration, people are able to see the complexity of both Washington and Jefferson, their humanity and their greatness, the moral failures and their commitment to our nation. They are not disappearing from our consciousness. They are becoming understood through the lens of our current consciousness. In this way, true heroes can continue to live.
East Palestine rally
I recently read an article about a 1923 inter-county rally in my hometown of East Palestine where more than 2,000 men from this area were “naturalized” into the KKK. Thankfully, there are no monuments celebrating this event, and we are not beholden to the choices some of our ancestors may have made then. Nor should we as a nation be bound to the choices of local Jim Crow politicians to erect monuments to champions of the lost cause in our public squares.
Tom Mackall is a native of East Palestine and a graduate of East Palestine High School. His parents live there. He graduated from Denison University with a bachelor’s degree, received his master’s of divinity from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. He lives in Bethesda, Md., and works in international business.