Because it’s still part of the region’s history. Sure, history is written by the winners, but pretending it never happened because fuck those guys isn’t helpful either.
Sure, as long as it’s clear that it’s history. See, George Washington is history, but he’s also our present. He is a revered figure, and so we honor him literally everywhere. He’s on the $1 bill! The legacy of Washington positively permeates our national life.
Robert E. Lee, by contrast, whatever we might think of him as a man, is on the ash heap of history. He should be remembered, but he should not be part of our national fabric the way Washington is. That means he shouldn’t be on money, or have stuff named after him, or have statues in prominent, present-day publicly used places.
This is a tough issue pretty much everywhere in the world. I can only imagine the debates the Russians must be having and I know this is a constant thorn in Japan’s politics. Germany seems to have more of a consensus that Nazis should never be honored, but I bet they are a little more conflicted about Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm.
I suspect the Germans figure that if there’s any statues of Bismarck or Kaiser Wilhelm about, they should be left where they are since they’re not hurting anyone.
I agree Confederate personages shouldn’t be on US currency, but I see no problem with there being historic statues of them on public land.
I’d be a little more concerned about someone wanting to cast a new statue of Lee and put it in front of the town hall, though.
Generally agreed, but of course one should bear in mind the pendulum can swing both ways. Stalin is getting a resurgence of popularity in Russia now and new statues to him are being built. It’s not inconceivable that someday people like Saddam Hussayn and Qadhafi might get a resurgence of popularity as well. One of the guys who physically organized the demolition of a Saddam statue in 2003 now says he regrets it, because he thinks post-2003 Iraq has been worse than Saddam’s regime ever was.
I am dubious and certainly hope that Lee, Jackson etc. won’t ever get such a rehabilitation, since in my view they don’t deserve it.
Wilhelm did carry out a genocide too (and to the tune of 40% of the population):
Rereading the article makes me realize it was even worse than I remembered.
No one is entitled to a statue.
Wouldn’t this be against the Constitution? Doesn’t it say something about the Limitation of Statues?
Yes as the man said to the BBC.
And U. S. Grant defended a political system that denied the vote to women and relegated black citizens to second-class status. To say nothing of the horrible record the North had on LGBTQ issues.
Is there any room to consider that perhaps Grant was a product of being born in 1822, and it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect he was aware of the damage his insistence on cis-normative identity was?
Part of this is just sheer nonsense. Grant was the last of the Reconstruction Republicans; far from defending a political system that relegated black citizens to second-class status, President Grant actually had a strong record of defending the civil rights of the new American citizens. Unfortunately he couldn’t bring the rest of the country along with him.
As for the rest of your post, you rather bizarrely seem to have confused me with Al Sharpton. Once again: We memorialize fallible human beings (as individuals or as groups) in spite of their failings, not because of them. We don’t put Grant on the $50 bill to celebrate his defense of cis-gender heteronormativity; we put Grant on the $50 bill because, although his record as President of the United States was quite mixed, it was far from wholly dishonorable; and as commander of the Union Army, he played a crucial role in saving the Republic from destruction.
Look, how about we just go back to the rule in Torah, and have no graven images at all? Then we can be consistent!
Grant was a slaveholder for a while. He see his one slave free in 1859. Julia Grant owned slaves throughout Grants command of US forces in the ACW, she would visit his HQ with them.
In an ideal world, only statues which were erected for the wrong reasons would be targeted. Of course, in an ideal world, they would never have been commissioned in the first place, so that's out the door.
I studied both history, and the past. The differences between the two, and the way we as a people and as individuals decide to CHANGE our histories from time to time in order to try to reshape the present and future, are normal to the course of human events. So, unfortunately, is that most "corrections" that are made, are sloppy rather than precise and factual. Not even the "bad guys" have pure motivations.
And certainly, the number of purely admirable people in the history of any society are so rare, that if we ONLY had statues to those who proved to be historic Mary Poppins’ (perfect in every way), we would have to include “what a statue is” to every child’s basic education.
What we are clearly going through now, is a culture war. As with any kind of warfare, innocents and only marginal targets will suffer along with the most valuable targets.
So no. You wont likely be able to limit the “damage” to JUST the Confederates. Because it isn’t JUST the Confederate military people who were enshrined for the wrong reasons.
If we take this stance, what would be your response to applying it for the good he did, too? That is to say, if we handwave away these unpleasant things because Grant was a product of his time, don’t we also have to handwave away some of the good things he did because they, too, are a result of him being molded by the time and place he lived in?
That seems to amount to saying we should remove Lee but not Washington because a lot more people want to remove Lee than Washington. But that’s how the decision will be made, basically (though the details matter).
I’m a Damn Yankee and have never favored venerating Confederates. And it wasn’t that the principals (for the most part) owned slaves, though of course that’s not a positive. But if you emphasize slave ownership heavily enough, indeed there’s a strong argument to excise Washington as well. The key difference IMO is that the Confederates fought against the United States, and in what basically amounted to (not to dig into the weeds of very principal’s personal motivation) fighting for slavery.
However there’s also the question of whether this is appropriately a national debate. I see Trump tweeted on it today, besides vamping on it Tuesday. So that tends to confirm it as one but I don’t think it should be. When the majority of voting Southerners wanted Jim Crow, and maintained it in part by effectively denying the vote to blacks, I think that was a national issue. If a majority in particular Southern locales, with everyone getting reasonable access to the ballot box, wants Confederate statues not to be torn down, elects city council members etc who don’t, that seems to me a local not national issue. Likewise if Baltimore removes them.
The national issue to me would be just US national monuments. And I think Confederate statues/memorials/symbols at Civil War battlefields run by the NPS are appropriate. There the context is clearly history, military history specifically, and the monuments or symbols aren’t as open to being hijacked as latter day political symbols, which IMO is the biggest problem with Confederate symbols, when they are not just forgotten people or ideas but re-applied to more recent debates in a pernicious way. I’m thinking for example of SC’s decision to start flying the Confederate battle flag from their capitol in 1962, not 1862. That doesn’t really apply to the statue of Lee at Gettysburg.
The erection of these monuments was and is part of an effort to erase part of history, wasn’t it? The history that the war was fought to defend slavery, the history of the suffering of the slaves, the history that the entire country benefited from slavery, and so forth. Another reason for the monuments was to erect a false history instead, that the war was actually fought for states’ rights, that it was caused by northern aggression, that the defense of it was glorious and fought by morally pure gentlemen in the noble defense of their homelands, and so forth.
Leaving aside the other purposes, of trying to enforce a repugnant code of conduct, why wouldn’t you agree with an effort to erase a false history and bring a true one further into awareness?
But as a military officer, he didn’t swear allegiance to his state. As best as I can tell, the oath he took as a general officer went like this:
In your opinion, did Lee honor that oath?
Nope. At the time, the Confederacy believed they were right (Narrator: They weren’t) and rather a lot of people living in the CSA died fighting for that. I suspect most of the Confederate troops really didn’t give much of a fuck about the whole “slavery” thing and were fighting to defend what they thought of as “their country”.
Acknowledging there was a Civil War and lots of people died and BTW this guy was one of the key figures on the losing side in said war is not “a false history”.
And as a military historian, I’m extremely wary of deciding some things in the past are “false history” and some are “true history”. History gets “revised” all the time and not always in the interests of accuracy.
Obviously not if that was the oath.
I was commenting also on treason to the state of Virginia.