So recently at my alma mater (Texas A&M) there’s been a Change.org petition to remove a statue of one of the seminal university presidents (Lawrence Sullivan Ross) out of a desire to be more inclusive, because Ross was a Confederate general nearly twenty years prior to becoming the Governor of Texas, and after that, president of the University .
And some years back, the Houston Independent School District renamed a bunch of schools for a similar reason. Most were reasonable- it’s hard to defend not renaming Robert E. Lee high school. But one in particular seemed extremely questionable to me- Sidney Lanier middle school. Sidney Lanier achieved his renown for being a poet and composer in the post-Civil War era, but had been a Confederate enlisted man when he was a teenager/young man. Not a general, not anyone with any kind of decision-making power, just a regular person in the Confederate military.
Where do we draw that line? I think it’s a bit absurd to rename anything associated with anyone who was ever a Confederate, especially if their fame was achieved outside of that. I mean, we don’t see Germans trying to hide Helmut Kohl’s Hitler Youth membership, for example. But at the same time, I don’t think we should be celebrating famous Confederates either.
Maybe a good compromise would be to keep stuff named after people whose renown wasn’t gained through being part of the Confederacy- i.e. Lanier and Ross, but remove the stuff that was named specifically because the person was a Confederate- i.e. Robert E. Lee, etc…
I think you’ve got it about right. Any monuments to specific Confederate leaders (Davis, Lee) should be removed post haste, and placed in a museum or destroyed.
I think generalized monuments to memorialize Confederate soldiers are okay. Many of them were draftees who were forced to fight. A lot of people feel the American involvement in the Vietnam war was a bad cause, but there doesnt seem to be an issue with the Vietnam Wall in Washington.
The line will eventually be drawn wherever the voting majority want it, which is quite fine. Monuments are not public necessities; it matters very little who that school is named after. Personally I agree the case of Sidney Lanier seems a little much because his being a soldier has nothing to do with his fame, but it hardly matters. If instead they name the school after someone who did something for Houston long after the Civil War, so what?
It depends on what is being honored/praised/glorified and what the individual has come to represent.
If you are honoring someone for treasonous rebellion and murdering Americans in the name of enslaving people, then GTFO. If you are glorifying someone who directly represents that cause, then there’s the door.
So, if you name an art academy after a poet whose poetry has nothing to do with an evil cause, but who so happened to have done bad things but didn’t make that central to their identity and it hasn’t become central to their perception in modern times, then fine, whatever. I’m not particularly miffed about it.
But a building name/statue/monument can also be tainted by the intent of those putting up said monument. If you support hateful causes, it’s pretty obvious the things you put up are to advance that hatred, and that’s a poisoned well from which no good can originate. So all the civil-rights era monuments and renamings to confederates are on the axe list so far as I’m concerned.
So where’s the line? Easy: why was the statue/renaming/ect done, what does it glorify specifically and who put it up?
I’ve made it pretty clear how I feel about Confederate monuments.
However, I will admit that I feel ambivalent about removing the monument to Commander Matthew Maury. He was an accomplished scientist who also served in the Confederate navy.
I’m OK with people taking a case-by-case review of Confederate figures. Like, I grew up on a street named for Confederate General Ashby. Sometime in the 90s, that street was named after civil rights activist Rev. Ralph David Abernathy. I think this change is totally defensible, given the fact that almost everyone who lives on that street owe a lot to Abernathy but owe nothing to Ashby. Personally, I believe that someone like Commander Maury did make contributions that people today benefit from. So we can honor his existence without feeling too weird about it. I mean, I remember passing by the Seth Boyden statue in Newark, NJ everyday on my way to school. Seth Boyden might have held some unenlightened views for all we know, but he discovered patent leather, for pete’s sake! So why not honor him with a statue?
That’s exactly the sort of situation I’m talking about- nobody knows Maury for his Confederate Navy service really, but his oceanographic and meteorological accomplishments are pretty well known.
Not to Godwinize the thread, but I have a sort of suspicion that the post-war South was similar to post-war Germany, in that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a half-dozen ex-Confederates or ex-Wehrmacht personnel.
That’s the situation, I suspect for Lawrence Sullivan Ross. He was a Texas Ranger prior to the war, was a Confederate officer during the war (he was 26 when it ended and one of the youngest generals), and then did other stuff for about 20 years, including being sheriff of McClennan County (Waco), and being in the State Legislature prior to being elected governor. Then, after his governorship, he was asked to be President of Texas A&M in 1891, at which point he basically saved the school from closure, which is why he’s so revered. Being a Confederate general was likely icing on the cake for the Texans of 1890, but that’s not why Ross was appointed, nor why he’s commemorated with a statue on campus.
I’m not sure I agree on the reasoning for Ross in particular. I don’t think he comes out looking particularly statue-worthy based on how he handled the Jaybird-Woodpecker War, which was decades after the civil war and during the time he was governor. I think in general I’m okay with giving passes to those who served and later had important, unrelated, accomplishments. Statues of those who led, on the other hand, should start from the “tear that shit down” angle and work backwards, kicking and screaming the whole way.
no hijack intended. I don’t know if there is any monument to him, but what would you do with someone like Gen Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler? A general in the CSA and then in the US Army during the Spanish-American war.
You can look up the speeches they gave when it was installed. They were so proud of themselves they always published them. I think you may discover that no matter how minor this fellow’s role may have been, his statue, it’s clear from the words said over it, was to reinforce that the white man’s dominion over the black man is sanctioned by God himself. It was pretty much front and centre for all of these statue dedications.
So maybe go read those words, and decide is they offend your sensibilities. Then decide if it’s worth defending.
Possibly a monument to Dr. Matthew Maury (or Mr., it’s not clear whether he had a doctorate). But certainly not to Commander Matthew Maury, as he does not hold any military rank worthy of honoring: He relinquished his Union rank, and his Confederate rank is a mark of shame, not honor.
I suppose this sort of thing is best settled by local people. If they err one way or the other the damage is small, local, and temporary. The people of a town ought to decide how to decorate their own parks.
Did you see that Kentucky is removing the statue of J B Castleman? He was a pretty good guy for a Confederate and all. But, it is none of my business I suppose.
Yank them all down. Any hint of the confederacy should be denigrated for the anti-American ideals they represent. There’s no “good” nazi sympathizers,there should be no “good” confederate sympathizers. Even if they make amends later in life.
It’s not like these dead bastards care. It’s only for the alive bastards.
I propose replacing all confederate statues with Michael Jordan statues. He represents Americana, and no race didn’t wanna be like Mike
I suppose a monument for a repentant confederate would be ok. Not that I’ve ever heard of a repentant confederate though. And I don’t just mean regretting that he picked the losing side.
I don’t think being hailed as “poet of the Confederacy” and only *being *well-known because the UDCworked hard to make it so during the 20s is a strong case for his renown being separate from the Lost Cause…
Mind you, the only Longstreet statue is one at the Gettysburg battlefield. The Lost Cause types who threw up all those statues decades after the war definitely didn’t consider him one of their own.
That’s a different argument, but an interesting one. As far as I can tell, Lanier himself was at best, a reluctant Confederate, and seems to have come to regret it later in life.
But what if *other *racists decide he’s worth naming a school after, for reasons independent of what he did?
Apparently, a statue of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout Movement (aka the Boy Scouts) is under threat because of accusations “of racism, homophobia and support for Adolf Hitler.”