# What should we do with confederate monuments and statues? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 15, 2017, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694 "2017-08-15T01:11:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 13
**Author:** ![begbert2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/begbert2/32/3357_2.png) [@begbert2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/begbert2)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2017, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/241 "2017-08-16T22:51:00Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Sounds ridiculous to be honest. > > I don’t want a shrill mob targeting historical art or other artifacts because they need symbol to blame. In this day and age if people aren’t happy with their circumstances they need to start with what’s looking back at them from a mirror not a random chunk of stone or metal that someone told them to be outraged about. If you considered actually reading the thing you quoted, it was explicitly speaking very calmly about an ordered and principled removal of status objectively determined to have little or no worth. The only shrill mobs under discussion are YOUR side. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2017, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/242 "2017-08-16T23:02:17Z")
> [@octopus](#): > > Sounds ridiculous to be honest. > > In this day and age if people aren’t happy with their circumstances they need to start with what’s looking back at them from a mirror not a random chunk of stone or metal that someone told them to be outraged about. Sounds like you should be directing this at those “very fine people” who were protesting on Friday and Saturday in Charlottesville. ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2017, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/243 "2017-08-16T23:18:40Z")
Statues and monuments are not for learning, they are for glorifying. You learn history from history books. Tear them down, grind them down to sand, get rid of all of it. Not glorifying traitors does not change history, treating them like heroes does. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2017, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/244 "2017-08-16T23:34:34Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > How about you–do you similarly advocate for reinstalling the flagship statuary of the third Reich, with its glorification of the Aryan ideals, just putting a plaque on them? There are, though, in Germany, monuments to German soldiers who died in WWII, even though they were fighting for the cause of Nazism. If we could, for a second, take a look at one of the examples I had given in my post, VMI’s “Virginia Mourning Her Dead”. A little bit of background… VMI, the Virginia Military Institute, is a state military college in Virginia, established in 1839. It’s been nicknamed “The West Point of the South”, and even today, it trains officers…all the cadets are ROTC members, and, upon graduation, get commissions in the US Army. Stonewall Jackson had taught there before the war, and, hen the Civil War broke out, a bunch of Confederate generals were VMI graduates, as well as some Union generals. In May of 1864, the Valley Campaigns began. The US Army penetrated into the Shenendoah Valley, which was Virginia’s breadbasket and industrial center… In May, Union General Siegel marched 10,000 troops towards Lynchburg, hoping to destroy the railroad depot there. John Breckenridge, the Confederate General, scraped together an army of about 4100, including a battalion made up of VMI cadets, and commanded by the Commandant of Cadets, Scott Ship. The two armies (the Union force having been reduced by that point to about 6600), met outside the town of New Market. When the battle began, Breckenridge had held the VMI cadets in reserve, but when the Confederate line began to break, he ordered them in to close the gap. Within about 15 minutes, about 50 cadets were wounded, and 10 were dead, but they had repulsed the attack, and then counterattacked, advancing across a muddy field (nicknamed The Field of Lost Shoes, because a bunch of them lost their shoes in the mud), and managed to capture a large segment of the Union artillery, which led to a Union retreat. At the turn of the century, VMI decided to build a statue to honor those cadets killed. Moses Ezekiel, an American sculptor living and working in Rome and Berlin, himself a cadet who was wounded in the battle, and whose roommate had been mortally wounded (and died in his arms the next day), had had the idea about ten years before, to create a statue in honor of the dead cadets, and he submitted his model. VMI agreed, and the statue was built in 1903, and six of the ten bodies were re-interred at the base of the statue. The monument is of a woman, Virginia, sitting, her foot on a broken cannon overgrown with ivy, while around her, broken weapons are scattered. On the base, there are plaques with the names of the dead. This is clearly a Confederate War memorial, and it’s on public land, because VMI is a state college, but it would seem, to me, inappropriate to take it down. First, Moses was an accomplished and well known sculptor in his own right, and it is a piece of art, but beyond that its in the place, VMI, where the dead cadets came from, and also these were young men, most of them between 18 and 25, who actually died in battle. They supported secession, and most of them probably supported slavery, but none of them were in any position to do anything about it. These aren’t Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, or anybody with any real authority or in any ability to make decisions. They were just young men, motivated by patriotism, who died for it, and who the school and sculptor,who himself had been one of those young men, escaping death only by chance, decided to honor. ---
**Author:** ![control-z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/245 "2017-08-17T01:56:24Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > This is clearly a Confederate War memorial, and it’s on public land, because VMI is a state college, but it would seem, to me, inappropriate to take it down. First, Moses was an accomplished and well known sculptor in his own right, and it is a piece of art, but beyond that its in the place, VMI, where the dead cadets came from, and also these were young men, most of them between 18 and 25, who actually died in battle. They supported secession, and most of them probably supported slavery, but none of them were in any position to do anything about it. These aren’t Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, or anybody with any real authority or in any ability to make decisions. They were just young men, motivated by patriotism, who died for it, and who the school and sculptor,who himself had been one of those young men, escaping death only by chance, decided to honor. Good post. I think this summarizes how a lot of people in the South feel about the monuments. They aren’t about politics or slavery, they are about how their ancestors fought and died to protect their homelands. If soldiers are coming to burn your crops and take over your towns and homes, you would likely fight them too. The tragic thing is today old man leaders still declare war on each other and send young naive men out to fight and die in wars. ---
**Author:** ![Okrahoma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90db22/32.png) [@Okrahoma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Okrahoma)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/246 "2017-08-17T02:08:51Z")
Washington and Jackson are [next](http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/08/16/jackson-washington-park-protest-presidents-slave-owners/). ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 2:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/247 "2017-08-17T02:23:10Z")
> [@control-z](#): > > Good post. I think this summarizes how a lot of people in the South feel about the monuments. They aren’t about politics or slavery, they are about how their ancestors fought and died to protect their homelands. If soldiers are coming to burn your crops and take over your towns and homes, you would likely fight them too. > > The tragic thing is today old man leaders still declare war on each other and send young naive men out to fight and die in wars. New Orleans took the statue of Lee down, and other monuments that indeed demonstrated what the South fought for. As U.S. Grant said of Lee: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, **though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse**.” > **[New Orleans Takes Down Statue Of Gen. Robert E. Lee](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/19/529130606/new-orleans-prepares-to-take-down-statue-of-gen-robert-e-lee)** > > The statue in Lee Circle was the last of four Confederate-era monuments that the city had pledged to remove amid a swirl of controversy. > [@](#): > > Mayor Mitch Landrieu began pushing for the monuments’ removal in 2015 after Dylann Roof massacred nine black Charleston churchgoers. The New Orleans City Council approved the move later that year. > > On April 24, a monument to a deadly 1874 white supremacist uprising was the first to come down. A couple of weeks later, a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis was taken away. And on Wednesday, a statue of Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was removed. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/248 "2017-08-17T02:29:54Z")
> [@Okrahoma](#): > > Washington and Jackson are [next](http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/08/16/jackson-washington-park-protest-presidents-slave-owners/). Sounds like more silliness that will not pass even a city vote. A lot of that argument came from Trump and others, so: > **[Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/16/historians-no-mr-president-washington-and-jefferson-are-not-the-same-as-confederate-generals/)** > > "The most kind explanation of that can only be ignorance,” a historian says. > [@](#): > > Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as Confederate generals. > [@](#): > > To make an equivalency between two of the Founding Fathers and Confederacy leaders is not only “absurd,” but also “unacceptable for the president of the United States,” said Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. > > “They accomplished something very important. Washington and Jefferson were central to the creation of a nation … Lee and Stonewall were not being honored for those types of accomplishment,” Grossman said. “They were being honored for creating and defending the Confederacy, which existed for one reason, and that was to protect the right of people to own other people.” > > Trump has said that he’s a fan of history yet he does not seem to trust historians. > > Douglas Blackmon, an author and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he’s sympathetic to white nationalist views. > > “It’s the difference between a monument to the founder of our nation, and a monument to a key figure in an effort to break apart the nation,” Blackmon said. “The most kind explanation of that can only be ignorance, and I don’t say that to insult the president.” ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/249 "2017-08-17T11:10:11Z")
[Franklin, Ohio removes its Robert E. Lee statue.](http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/346908-ohio-city-to-remove-robert-e-lee-monument) I’m confused why they had a statue in the first place. Anyone know? ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/250 "2017-08-17T11:26:02Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > [Franklin, Ohio removes its Robert E. Lee statue.](http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/346908-ohio-city-to-remove-robert-e-lee-monument) > > I’m confused why they had a statue in the first place. Anyone know? It was the only monument to Lee north of the Ohio River. [From here:](http://www.columbusnavigator.com/ohio-confederate-monuments/) > [@](#): > > The plaque is attached to a boulder and reads: “Erected and Dedicated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Friends In Loving Memory of Robert E. Lee and to Mark the Route of the Dixie Highway. ‘The shaft memorial and highway straight attest his worth — he cometh to his own.’ — Littlefield/Erected 1927.” ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/251 "2017-08-17T11:28:26Z")
> [@Okrahoma](#): > > Washington and Jackson are [next](http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/08/16/jackson-washington-park-protest-presidents-slave-owners/). If you’re going to make silly arguments, why don’t you just say, “Next all churches are going to be burned down!!11!” I am certain there is one person out there somewhere that can be quoted saying that for a news story. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/252 "2017-08-17T12:19:21Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > I’ve spent most of my life in the south. Mostly in the Deep South. And I’ve never come across a “southern pride” monument. What is memoralized in such a monument? A big platter of fried chicken? Well, that would be OK. If there’s a big statue honoring the abomination known as “sweet tea”, that sucker has to go. :mad: ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/253 "2017-08-17T13:02:26Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > It was the only monument to Lee north of the Ohio River. > > [From here:](http://www.columbusnavigator.com/ohio-confederate-monuments/) [A 1957 United Daughters of the Confederacy brass plaque about Jefferson Davis was taken down yesterday from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s exterior wall in Montreal.](https://twitter.com/sarahleavittcbc/status/897939800501637121)[The reporter covering its removal has received threats.](https://twitter.com/sarahleavittcbc/status/897857605049208833) ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/254 "2017-08-17T13:18:57Z")
> [@XT](#): > > I’m not seeing it, to be honest. You seem to be saying we should take down all the monuments everywhere and then revote to see if they should be put back. That doesn’t seem reasonable. Just because they were mainly put up before folks today voted on it, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote now on them to decide their fate. Times and attitudes change, and as they change so does society and the stance on what should or shouldn’t be memorialized. But we, as a society, should collectively decide on this stuff…not some random people acting on their own. Put it to a vote and I’m all for taking the majority down, whether to be destroyed or put in a museum, maybe one that takes a clear eyed view of history with an eye towards education and teaching the real history, instead of the often whitewashed version or collective legend that we usually get. > > In the future, it’s possible that memorials we put up today might be taken down by later generations for this or that reason many of which would probably be alien or incomprehensible to society today. What do you mean by collectively? Who’s the collective ‘we’ here? New Orleans and other city governments, elected by the people they serve, voted to remove the statues. It might not have been a consensus, but it was a democratic process. As monstro pointed out to you, those statues were put up by a **violent** white majority at a time when it wasn’t safe for black people to even voice an objection to the statues. Well now a few generations later, the descendants of blacks who were terrorized in these cities and towns throughout the South have democratic control of these governments, or at least strong influence, and have decided they don’t want them there. White Southerners talk about honoring their forefathers, well guess what? It goes both ways. Black people and whites who abhor the ideas the South fought for are honoring their forefathers by taking those goddamned statues down for good. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/255 "2017-08-17T13:20:31Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **HoneyBadgerDC** : > > Something about those monuments that I haven’t seen mentioned that has nothing to do with racism is simply pride in being a southerner, pride in being tough and enduring. After the war the south was ripped to pieces, it took generations for those people to recover, for a lot of those people all they had was their pride. I don’t believe in what those statues represent either but I do believe in respecting people and I know enough not to assume that I know what that statue might mean to someone else. The war and Reconstruction didn’t tear the South to pieces. They did a woefully incomplete job of putting the South back together. The South tore itself to pieces, and it did so long before the war, and the people who suffered from it are _still_ suffering from it, 150 years later. If you want to put up a statue to commemorate Southerners being tough and enduring, it’s not going to be a statue of a white man. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/256 "2017-08-17T13:38:13Z")
> [@XT](#): > > We have a functional democracy though. Yes, and the city governments elected by people in New Orleans, Charlottesville, and elsewhere decided to remove the statues and monuments. They presumably have the support of people in doing so, and I’d imagine that after the events we saw last weekend, that support is only going to grow stroner. > [@XT](#): > > The wheels of progress grind slowly, but they do grind, and even in North Carolina if this is something the majority want then they will get their way. Think of how the south was 50 years ago and how it is today. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than it was 50 years ago? That’s right, and how did that progress happen – by people sitting down and shutting up and respecting white Confederate sympathizers, or by challenging them directly and telling them that they’re not going to tolerate a race-based class society? Progress doesn’t just happen. People in power, who get used to living in a society according to their own norms, don’t just change. > [@XT](#): > > And in 10 years it will almost certainly be better than today. 50 years ago it would be unthinkable to tear down the old Confederate monuments for the majority of people. Today, it seems we are at or have already crossed over to where a majority are considering it, and considering it in light of actually doing it. I’ve seen politicians on the news from southern states saying, on TV and on the record, that they want to put forward initiatives to do so. Again…that would have been unheard of even a decade ago. Not necessarily true. If you had been a black person in the late 1860s and early 1870s you might have been forgiven for assuming that things would be better in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1895, most states in the South had laws that severely restricted their rights even though they were in theory supposed to be treated as equals under the law. If you were black and lived during the era of Teddy Roosevelt you might have been encouraged by his attempts to bring more black people into the federal civil service. By the time Woodrow Wilson’s presidency ended in the early 1920s, most blacks had been expelled from those positions and the KKK enjoyed its largest ever membership. Yes, progress does eventually happen, but it doesn’t happen on its own and the lesson of history is, when you see the evil face of bigotry, confront it and tell its advocates that they’re not welcome in your neighborhood. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/257 "2017-08-17T13:50:20Z")
I’m amused at my own reaction to the removal of certain statues. The equestrian ones make me go “Oh, but it’s such a nice statue of a horse!” I appear not to have outgrown my childhood love of horsies. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/258 "2017-08-17T13:59:10Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > I’m amused at my own reaction to the removal of certain statues. The equestrian ones make me go “Oh, but it’s such a nice statue of a horse!” > > I appear not to have outgrown my childhood love of horsies. I think we should lop off the generals and keep the horses. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Parker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/35a633/32.png) [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/259 "2017-08-17T13:59:27Z")
The horses don’t deserve this. We should remove the riders and keep the horses in place. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694/260 "2017-08-17T14:19:26Z")
The horses with detached rider legs would be symbolic. Creepy, but symbolic! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694.md?page=12) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-should-we-do-with-confederate-monuments-and-statues/793694.md?page=14)