They can have a tombstone because they are human beings who deserve that level of dignity. They do NOT deserve to be honored as “war dead” any more than Osama Bin Laden’s henchmen who died when the US stormed his compound do.
I can understand your point here. I am sorta wishy-washy on the idea of memorials other than simple headstones and the like, certainly a few of them cross the line into glorifying.
So Headstones- OK.
Glorifying traitorous leaders & generals- bad
Simple memorials to the dead- maybe.
When the take-downs started, you would read something like this towards the end of most articles documenting a monument take-down:
That’s what I meant by hiding away. Maybe that was wrong of me in that these confederate history parks and museums, where the statues were moved, are easily located. If you show me some links about these growing confederate history parks, I’ll quality or withdraw my comment.
You sentence said “all art.” I commented on that.
Virgil! Quick, come see! There goes Robert E. Lee!
That’s probably true. I wasn’t referring to any specific monument, just the concept.
In fact, many Confederate monuments are quite openly celebrations of white supremacy even MORE than they are monuments.
You’re right – their actions are no more worthy of memorial than those of any other traitor.
But I’m comfortable with memorials to war dead (from all sides) because we should be reminded, every day, of the awful cost of war.
For that reason, I don’t think Confederate war dead should be forgotten.
Memorializing war dead would not, to my mind, include or justify erecting (or even allowing to remain standing)statues of Confederate leaders or glorifying the service of Confederate soldiers.
Yes, I have been thinking of Mr Kane too.
I think it’s a major difference. People generally get a tombstone when they die. I have no problem with that.
But most people don’t get a monument. When somebody decides to put up a monument it’s because they want to advance an ideological cause.
A lot of the Confederate monuments were placed in response to the City Beautiful movement in the late 19th early 20th century. The movement was concentrated in a few northern cities, but it trickled down to a lot of other municipalities who were suddenly interested in creating parks, lovely spaces with fountains, nice buildings, and erecting memories. I had a discussion about this with a colleague of mine when I worked at a museum many years ago. This was pre-BLM and George Floyd, and in the public history world Confederate monuments was a topic of interest. My colleague wasn’t happy about people wanting to be rid of the monuments and argued that they existed because of the beautification movement and I agreed. However, why did he suppose they picked so many Confederate “heroes” to honor?
It seems clear to me that these statues were there to send a message. These were the good old days, this is how things should be, and this is how things will be.
I remember seeing a lot of monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield, mostly in remembrance of specific Union military units/regiments. They were placed there to express pride in one’s unit and to honor fallen comrades (there didn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the grandiosity of the monument and the unit’s contributions to winning the battle; for instance I don’t recall anything fancy in commemoration of the 20th Maine).
It’s true that the City Beautiful movement, which got its impetus from the white, classical architecture at the 1893 World’s Fair, overlapped with the peak period for erecting monuments to the Confederacy, which was from 1900 to 1920.
I think it’s grossly misleading to therefore say that the former caused the latter. Rather, the movement gave plausible cover to the rank intentions of putting up monuments to the Confederacy. They were a small part of a large-scale campaign of harassment and terror.
This commentary by Daniel Bluestone, about the monuments in Charlotteville, VA, summarizes those intentions.
Paul Goodloe McIntire had commissioned the major civic monuments in Charlottesville. McIntire, the son of a local pharmacist, grew rich working at Chicago’s Board of Trade and New York’s Stock Exchange. Returning to Charlottesville, he became a one-man City Beautiful Movement; he built prominent statues of Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Shoshone guide Sacagawea, and Confederate officers Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. McIntire also gave the city two major public parks, one for whites and one for African Americans. He funded and built the public library and endowed art, business, and history departments at the University of Virginia.
McIntire’s Civil War monuments had an immediate and obvious context. In 1912, building on established Jim Crow laws, the city council of Charlottesville unanimously passed a segregation ordinance, making it illegal for whites to move onto blocks that were majority black or for African Americans to move onto majority white blocks. At the time, the entire row of residences facing the west side of Court House Square had become occupied by African Americans. City officials felt this constituted a blight on their civic landscape. They planned a public school there, which would permit them to condemn and demolish the black residences. School officials balked at a school adjacent to the court and jail. Then McIntire simply purchased and demolished every house on the block. He commissioned sculptor Charles Keck to design the distinguished Jackson equestrian statue for the site. The intent was plain. The project reasserted Court House Square as white civic space. It monumentalized the Civil War’s effort to maintain chattel slavery in a town that by the 1920s was made up of 28 percent African Americans. Born in 1860, McIntire hardly experienced the Civil War; however, his father owned eight slaves and McIntire endorsed segregation. He sympathized with one side in the Civil War, and he put the white Southern narrative into the saddle with his money and his monuments. For McIntire, heritage and the current politics of white supremacy went hand in hand.
I didn’t say the beautification movement caused anyone to put up Confederate monuments. Only that the impetus to put up monuments at all, at least to the degree that they started popping up, stemmed from the movement. It was a deliberate choice on the part of various southern organizations to honor Civil War “heroes.”
I disagree that the beautification movement gave anyone a plausible cover for what their intentions were with those monuments. Simply put, they had very little need to cover their true intentions back then. Those monuments are a deliberate message that white supremacy is is good and people should know their place.
Monuments are reflections of what we choose to remember. Different people will look at the same monument and see different things. I’ve often wondered if it would be productive to graffiti, Banksy-style, actual despicable quotes from the individual still honored. The act of painting over it would be the literal whitewashing of history. The continued defacement of the given statue would be attacking power with truth. Even in front of loads of people in broad daylight, ‘Rosa Parks’ that shit
The usual penalties for graffiti may include: Property Damage exceeding $400: 1-3 years and /or fine of up to $10,000 or more depending on the severity of the damage. Property Damage less than $400: punishable by a misdemeanor with penalties of up to 1 year In county jail and/or maximum of $1,000 fine
Doesn’t seem that bad, it will get on the news and this monument and the quote will be discussed.
One of the first monuments removed had nothing to do with the Civil War at all (although others removed around the same time were to honor Confederate figures, so I think they were lumped together in the public’ mind). It was the Battle of Liberty Place monument, and it was unabashedly a monument erected in honor of an illegal overthrow of government and in the name of white supremacy. it even said so on the monument
(bolding mine)
You may remember Bree Newsome who was arrested for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds back in 2015. Placing graffiti may constitute property damage exceeding $400 which your cite says carries with it a fine of up to $10,000 or more and/or 1-3 years of jail. I certainly admire the conviction of anyone willing to risk jail time and fines for a good cause though.
I am just barely OK with what the OP describes. I don’t like that the traitors get to be on the same rock as the Americans, but I wouldn’t bother blowing it up over that.
In general, simple memorials to fallen Rebels, listing their names, ranks, etc, and not explicitly or implicitly stating that the cause they died for wasn’t evil, located either in their hometowns or near the place where they died, are OK with me. That’s as far as I will go.
I concur. Nothing big or flashy, nothing apologistic.
Umm, who is putting up these simple memorials to fallen Rebels?
Well, I’m certainly not going to chip in for them! But the monument the OP described seems similar to that. There is a Confederate cemetery near Chicago; I haven’t been there but I believe there are just gravestones there.
I don’t live in the South so I really have no idea how common such monuments actually are, but to the extent they exist I don’t object to them.
Now that I think about it, though, I would seriously question the motives of anyone proposing to erect even such understated monuments NOW, except to replace offensive memorials which have been dismantled.