At Charlottesville, large numbers of men paraded with Nazi symbols and slogans. My guess is that the people involved have no real political agenda, including protecting Confederate monuments, but want to shock and present themselves as bad dudes. Embracing Nazism is the most evil thing they can think of. That does not mean that individual members of these groups are not going to commit acts of violence. We need to be keeping an eye on these people; maybe in a better world, membership would disqualify you as a gun owner. Racism in various, often sublimated, forms may be the most powerful force in American politics today, and much of the Republican agenda is driven by perceived threats to white status. Perhaps seeing racism in overt and extreme forms might slap some people up side the head with a "and that's where this goes." Am I living in irrational hope?
28
A true historical accounting would name Robert E. Lee as a failed traitor same as Benedict Arnold. Lee, even though accomplished, was in fact treasonous to the United States by any reasonable measure. There's no reason to sugar coat it. Confederate enthusiasts are honoring a traitor. You don't see any statues of Benedict Arnold because there aren't any. The only one I can name is the Boot Monument in Saratoga, NY which commemorates Arnold's heroic actions before his treason and explicitly fails to mention Arnold by name. That's where Lee ranks in American history.
That said, I'm wary of abandoning historical relativism whole sale. History, like culture, is not a world of absolutes. Where would we be if we could not discuss the cultural propriety or impropriety of genital mutilation? Circumcision is a practice originated upon supporting male health and fertility. Were as female "circumcision" is an object of male predominance and the subjection of women. You can't really have a discussion about genital mutilation without discussing both side of the narrative. Context is essential. Like it or not, white supremacy is a part of the Confederate monuments' context.
3
"...cease using Confederate symbols for their abhorrent and reprehensible purposes”? Those abhorrent and reprehensible purposes are the reason they exist.
3
Isn’t all of this about keeping the rich and powerful white Southerners at the top of heap?
The rich whites following the Civil War wanted to keep their status, but they needed the backing of poor whites to do so. So, they made a deal. Rich whites kept their status and in return guaranteed poor whites through things like Jim Crow that blacks would never be allowed to supersede the status of poor whites. And, the deal worked until about the 1960s, when the federal government stepped in to undo Jim Crow, establish voting and civil rights, and the deal is now broken, and now middle and lower income working class Southern Whites no longer have status that exceeds blacks.
And, this is why we have a Charlottesville and a President Trump. It’s “Mississippi Burning”, nothing has changed.
12
Thank you for this. It is entirely correct. The entire disgusting lie that is the Greatness of the Old South was of course built on the backs and blood of people who are now supposed to disappear from history and the future. Glorifying slave holders regardless of their military positions is a good place to start - make it clear who they were and how they benefited. The idea anything was glorious about this horrible war is a joke - but the fact it defined America and liberty for the following decades is what needs to be focused on. Not "Gone With The Wind".
8
The article has some interesting points for then seems to get lost. Not sure what the author is really advocating other than perhaps her book.
5
Given that Europeans tend to have more Neanderthal DNA vs many other groups, I wonder if a trait passed from them is an intrinsic paranoia of extinction which leads to a more violent and oppressive stance to perceived out-groups, which adds to the seemingly non-sensical persistent existence of white supremacist thought.
2
While the neo Confederates were and are disturbing, I've assumed that they would eventually die out and take their bigotries and distortions of history with them. The neo Nazis in Charlottesville, however, are fighting a present and changing tide, their chants against Jews notwithstanding. That is very disturbing, as they resurrect the most hateful and harmful ideology in the modern era.
4
Ms. Cox,
I agree with everything in your article, except the misandry:
"They arrived angry about being displaced... by anyone who... challenged white male patriarchy."
In this age of the universally awful Donald Trump, misandry is especially attractive, but please don't. It just makes these men (and many others) angry and defensive, and it makes me worry for what I'm going to tell my 13YO boy so that he doesn't feel subservient to the women.
Instead, celebrate sexual dimorphism, and run for political office.
I dream of a day when I can vote for a woman candidate for president, like I did for Hillary Clinton, because she's the best candidate, and not worry that she will lose because so many women have put so many men down just for their sex.
6
Many Americans also don't realize that the anti-abortion movement is aligned with the white supremacists, who fear being "replaced" with non-whites, so want to make it impossible for women -- of course, they should be white women -- to be able to have abortions. That's why the conservative white men introduce measure after measure to restrict abortion. Doesn't make sense, from their sick perspective, because these prohibitions impact women of all races and ethnic groups.
4
Slavery in the Pulpit of the Evangelical Alliance: An Address Delivered in London, England, on September 14, 1846
London Inquirer, September 19, 1846 and London Patriot, September 17, 1846.
Mr. Frederick Douglass rose to address the audience. He said that he had determined not to speak, as he could add nothing to what had been so eloquently told them; but since they showed a readiness to hear him, he would just say a few words, and add his testimony to that already given as to the character of American slavery, and the religion of the land in which it was upheld and sustained. The slave system in America finds no stronger ally in any quarter than in the American church.
https://glc.yale.edu/slavery-pulpit-evangelical-alliance
8
"Our democracy is at stake."
Indeed and those posing the existential threat to our democracy have a knee jerk response to this claim I have repeatedly encountered as a I have been saying the GOP is a threat to the rule of law and our democracy for two years..."We aren't a democracy, we are a republic."
1
Whenever I feel the print of late has been too focused on all those Confederate monuments to The Lost cause, I stroll over to Grand Army Plaza, and look at that glorious arch, and remember the good guys won! But, in 2019, with the traitor Trump in office, we still have much work to do, to create that more perfect union!
4
This article, an opinion derived from complex fact, is presented in a rational, calm, direct context. History is not black and white - literally and figuratively. The rape of enslaved African-descent women, enslavement of African-descent people sometimes by others of racially-mixed descent, the oppression of poor, uneducated Anglo immigrants (usually Scottish) as indentured servants by wealthy Anglos, the bravery of enslaved African-descent people to rebel against their oppression for liberty, slave ownership by non-Christian non-Anglo whites, the freeing of all human "property" by a number of Anglo-descent slaveowners (often Quaker) as the "right" moral decision despite the financial cost, the intermarriage of formerly enslaved and/or free people of color within "safe" communities of native people and indentured poor Anglo-descent people, the concurrent oppression of native people - all are elements of US southern history. The Confederacy is only one part of US southern history; this distinction must be continually clarified. It is dangerous to suppress the history of slavery or diminish the racist consequences of it. African-American history is part of southern history, southern history is part of US history. It is ALL of our history. And we must learn it well and recognize its complexities with truth in order to move forward.
6
The bedrock reasoning upon which the CSA was founded was circular. Blacks, they insisted, were inherently inferior and so were justly locked into social order that guaranteed and enforced their permanent inferiority. Reasoning like that is alive and well in the American Right, which insists that what they want should be fact, and if they want it badly, then it's fact because it should be so. Now, as then, evidence that contradicts this fallacious thinking is nullified, distorted, hidden, and suppressed.
No wonder Trump is so successful with the small minority of voters who fear facts, fear evidence, view people who use them as tyrants and oppressors, and demand that what they want becomes fact because they want it. And no wonder this whole Administration is already doomed by that lie, just as the CSA doomed itself with self-delusion the day it broke away.
Dr. Cox does us a service here. Sloughing off weak habits of mind is painful, but it's necessary. This is a bracing prescription.
3
Why isn’t that Confederate rag banned, the way the swastika is banned in France and Germany?
10
We need stop pretending that "southern heritage" is about anything other than a system of white male patriarchy and the brutal oppression of blacks both during and after slavery. Despite what southerners try to claim, there is not this separate heritage that wasn't intertwined with slavery and racism. This is about more than a few statues, but rather about an entire culture.
12
Those brave, Confederate generals, including Lee, were good enough to prolong the war, but not good enough to win it. The South would have been far better off if they had been incompetent or cowardly. They encouraged the continuation of the war long after it was clear that the Union had built a war machine would not be stopped. Their birthdays should be days of mourning in the South.
9
Last year we had our local version of the controversy over Confederate statuary. Initially I was in favor of leaving the statues where they were, because it was a part of history. But I changed my mind. The statues were erected during a period of revived white supremacy. Maybe at that time (1880-1930) it was a matter of nostalgia for the Old South, but that nostalgia evidently had a racist base. Last year, what I noticed in the streets made me convinced that the proponents of the statuary were not motivated by a reverence for history or fact. The removal of Robert E. Lee was resisted with the same fervor that pagans would resist the removal of their golden idol from their temple. The statutes were being defended with "righteous indignation."
Most U.S. military bases in the South are named after Confederate generals. Occasionally there is a push to rename them, such as the push to rename Lee Circle which is now minus the statue atop the tall column. Fort Polk in Louisiana is named after Gen. Leonidas Polk, who also happened to be the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana at the time of war. He was a West Point graduate, who resigned his military commission to enter the ministry. When war broke out, he resigned as bishop in favor of a commission as a general in the Confederate Army. He died on the field of battle. I don't know of any local statues of Polk, but there is a Leonidas Street in an extremely poor part of town.
6
I recall as a very young high school freshman being taught by a nice lady in a Texas school that the civil war was really about states rights and that slavery was just a side issue. I also recall a colored girl of indeterminate heritage who rode the bus to and from school. I never spoke to her on the bus but none of the boys ever spoke to any of the girls. She always sat alone and each day I didn't see her again till she appeared on he bus going home.
This is one of the greatest regrets from my childhood and hers is one of the few faces I remember. One other was a classmate who in boxing class knocked me out with one punch.
4
White supremacists like David Duke are terrified of having to compete with black, brown, jews and muslims on an equal playing field. They have this terror in the back of their heads, that they are in fact NOT superior to non-white people. Confederate monuments were created soothe their well founded insecurities. They should remember that the Confederates were traitors, but also losers in war. So why should we have monuments to them in the first place?
15
problem here is that NO mention is made of white supremacists that sought to annihilate Native Americans. Too many "liberals" give a free pass to "Indian fighters" who sought either extermination or total subjugation of people of color. Monuments to men who committed genocide still stand.
9
Protesting the city’s decision is most definitely NOT what the Friday night march was about. First, the city made no decision, but it’s Council did, against the advice of an appointed commission looking into the matter. That it went against the recommendations of that commission brought out thorough-going nut jobs from around the country to make a scene. Second, the Saturday Unite The Right assembly never really happened as the site they were permitted to use was denied them, and they were surrounded by counter protesters (keep in mind UNR was protesting that Council had ignored the commissions recommendations) which made everyone unsafe. An unfit police under direction of unfit Council direction allowed interactions between the two groups they could easily have prevented. And an unsafe State Patrol helicopter crashed while observing the scene and traffic, killing two officers. And finally, one of the thorough-going nut jobs, infuriated by it all, drove down a young counter protesting woman among others.
There are more people at a single WNBA game, on nights they play, than TOTAL number of KKK members and White Nationals in this country, and it is the least popular professional sport in America. This small group, if provoked, gets ugly. If left alone, progress comes one funeral at a time. To spout, as the Times insists, it is GROWING, is silly. That the Virginia hills are still home to a few shouldn’t worry us much. Let them stay there to extinction.
3
Donald Trump and his supporters put the lie to "white supremacy."
5
The white supremacist movement identifies directly with the Nazis and KKK. In our 21st century world they really have a lot in common with ISIS and the Taliban. Everything except skin color of course.
9
It’s always amusing when folks claim the psychic ability to impose their motives others.
I happen to be a Civil War history enthusiast, and have paintings of Union and Confederate generals on my office wall. I’m not racist or misogynist - I simply realize that It’s the height of arrogance and ignorance to judge those who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago by today’s morality - and find them wanting.
Nobody who lived in the distant past could possibly possess all values compatible with mores which develop hundreds of years after they died.
Jesus, Mohammed, Aristotle, Caesar, Alexander the Great, Confucius, and all great folks in the past accepted - in whole or part - attitudes and cultures which have fallen into disfavor and now viewed as evil.
6
@Lance Wilson
It isn't the height of arrogance to conclude that the statues were about hiding the fact that the Southern secession was about the defense of slavery and, in hiding that, legitimizing Jim Crow. Those "monuments" were about that and their removal is about renouncing the lies that underlay them.
7
When you beat and murder people to make them work, you’re evil. And I say this as a descendant of Lee’s brother.
9
Wow, powerful commentary, and I applaud the illustration at the top.
Dr. Cox is brave, braver than me, and she's in Charlotte, North Carolina. Wow, again.
I've given up speaking truth to power: It's both dangerous and futile.
Look, we're dealing with barely evolved apes, longing to act once again like beasts. Once their emotions heat up, rationality and decorum are the first casualties.
Yes, such issues should be resolved on the basis of reason, argument, and evidence. But those pillars of American democracy were felled January 20, 2017. Did you not notice, Dr. Cox? Trying to talk sense to Trump's people is a fool's errand. I realize that she was talking to us here, but we don't have the power; that now belongs to Corporate America, where everything seems to going according to plan: The Democrats and democracy are blocked out, using the tools available. A pyrrhic victory, but effective strategy. Game, set, match, Republicans.
6
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” William Faulkner
7
"...cannot ..romanticize founding fathers and Confederate leaders...[but] ....also ... acknowledge the nation’s racist underbelly. "
The problem is no one will let us do both, so logical people who believe in facts are stymied. Many of the founding fathers were extraordinary people, some in any age and others in their time. Their typical faults were the faults of their age. Brazil, for example, imported more African slaves than the US, and ended their slavery later. The slave markets of Istanbul were still doing a brisk business in 1908(!). North Africans were still taking Europeans as slaves late in the 19th century.
We must also acknowledge that, had the situation been reversed, the results would have been the same. If, in a parallel universe, the great continent of Africa had received by happy and random chance the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in rapid succession, and her children had come to Europe and found its residents in the miserable and savage conditions in which they lived before the Roman Empire, those civilized Africans would beyond any reasonable doubt concluded that they were the Europeans' superiors; that they could with impunity capture and take them back to Africa as slaves; the road to equality would have been neither shorter nor less perilous than in the Americas.
So by all means let's acknowledge fully the grave sins of too many of our antecedents, but never let it diminish their virtues nor think them congenitally worse than their peers.
4
For me, Confederate Memorials are yet another reason why I would never ever live in the South. It was be nauseating to spend every day near those symbols of racism. Even worse would be knowing that the overwhelming majority of your native born neighbors support these statues because like statues, they are racist too.
Every day, I wonder why Lincoln bothered. This country would be so better off without the millstone of the racist South hanging around our necks.
7
Clever graphic but that’s not the Lee statue in Charlottesville if it’s Lee at all.
3
My brother in Nashville told me that the State of TN has a 'historical commission' and the city of Memphis really ticked them off last year. There is a state law that prohibits any removal or destruction of state property including the white guy monuments. The city sold the land in which a few monuments were erected on and the new owners destroyed them forth with. The white haired historical commission went ballistic and had the state law changed so it could not happen again. They even set aside a couple of hundred thousand of state money to buy land with monuments thought to be for sale.
At the same time the commission put a sign on the corner that was the center of slave buying and selling in the day. It read like someone ran a daycare center on the spot.
Be prepared to deal with folks who are determined to keep power, that is white power.
2
"honoring Lee or any other Confederate figure is to honor the brutal system of slavery they sought to defend"
Wrong again.
Two of my great-grandfathers were private soldiers in the Confederate Army. I can honor them both without honoring slavery.
6
@JND And how do you do that? Serious question.
3
@JND Yes, you can. But... what they fought for is reprehensible.
3
So, your great grandfathers were traitors to their country, the United States. How does one honor that tradition?
4
The political comedian Bill Maher, on a recent program, castigated those critics of Joe Biden for things Biden voted for, people he worked with, positions on busing, all of which occurred 40 years ago but were part of the reality of those times. The moral of this story is that you can’t look back and judge by today’s morality what people did as part of the “then normal”. By the same token, slavery was a significant practice in the American South up until the Civil War. The Confederate generals fought for what they believed in, consistent with the morality of the South at that time. Lee was not an evil man. Lincoln offered Lee - a slave owner- command of the Union Army at the time of the split of the country but Lee felt more loyalty to Virginia and the Southern way of life. The South lost. The evils of slavery and Jim Crow are gone while segregation and discrimination are still in flux. But this attack on Confederate monuments is a childish display by the politically correct with egg-shell sensitivities and egos.
10
@styleman There is no morality to slavery. It was not a "practice." Enslaving your fellow human beings is not a "practice." It's enslavement. You can't soften it up. What they fought for "consistent with the morality of the South at that time" was wrong. Nothing in your attempt at a defense can undermine the truth.
5
Slavery aside, the South took up arms against their own country, the United States, an act treason. I support Confederate monuments about as much as I would support putting up a monument to Japanese Emperor Hirohito in Pearl Harbor.
3
The South needs to glorify, perhaps with statues, those black Southerners who fought bravely in the Union army and those white Southerners who, trained at West Point and Annapolis, upheld their military oaths by fighting for the Union.
The South should also glorify the many non-slaveowning Southern whites who had the sense to recognize that defending slavery was not their war or in their interest, and dodged the Confederate drafts. Descendants of these men should glorify their heritage with statues and celebrations, and recognize that their ancestors, and not Lee or Davis or Forrest, were the South's true Christians (along with the blacks).
Let scalawags, carpetbaggers, and whatever name the Southern draft dodgers had for themselves, be transformed into the terms of honor that they really are.
1
I grew up in Boston in the 1950s and I can tell you that racism was as familiar to me as any son of the south. In Roxbury, where I lived, racially motivated attacks on black and white kids occurred almost daily. It's amazing that none of that racism was recognized inside and outside of Boston until the busing riots of the 1970s. Things are more peaceful these days but the racial animosity is still embraced by people I grew up with. Think of Bensonhurst and other displays of ethnic hate before you feel good about your own hometown, or Ferguson or any number of racial crisises.
We won't address it until we own it. It's past time.
7
You said they are opposed ,"by anyone by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy." What you should have said was anyone who, in effect, challenged white male Christian patriarchy.
2
Call for the removal of white supremacists like Duke, keeping in mind that two decades ago or less, a self-proclaimed white supremacist would have been shunned and scorned.
The restoration of 'Law and Order' promised under our president is not taking place, and he appears to be living on an alien planet, where angels fear to tread.
1
C'mon Times, playing with racism is a dangerous, dangerous game. It's clear the left is trying to tie all of the right up as a racist horde with Trump as the bow because face it, nothing else is working.
Just stop it. You're tearing the country apart. After all the lies and innuendo - Russia, obstruction, taxes, Epstein - and that's just the past few weeks - racism is the lowest of the low. Hispanic and A-A employment is at the highest levels ever and some of those people are going to vote for Trump 2020. They, as all of us, are smart enough to know a Left, bereft of sensible political ideas ideas tar & feathering Trump and party as racist is not only not vote-worthy but will be punished at the ballot box.
I've seen some pretty low sinking these past few years but this is the nadir. Stop promoting racism.
Thank you.
4
@Lazlo K. Hud
How about you stop posting here and run back to Fox where you belong. As for promoting racism - - it isn't the left. It's you, your kind and you OWN IT. And as far as where you say you are from which sounds like a real paradise:
You're advised to stay away from the inner city areas of Kingston and New Kingston and avoid wandering around alone at night in Ochos Rios, Montego Bay and Negril. Walking around after dark is not recommended and if you really need to, you should do so only in the safety of numbers.
4
Right-wing Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, using Trump’s and the Republicans’ rhetoric as justification, slaughtering people en masse in their churches, temples and anywhere else they peaceably assemble isn’t a problem, but people speaking out against it is racist? That’s your point?
10
@Lazlo K. Hud How is reporting facts "tearing the country apart"? They quote Trump word for bigoted word. He owns it: the juvenile name-calling, the thousands of lies, the inability to comprehend policy, strategy, and the basic rights inherent in the Constitution. He is an immature, childish, proudly ignorant racist. And you support him.
6
Let's just cut to the irrefutable truth. Confederate flags, statues and memorabilia are all symbols of a vanquished enemy of the United States.
They have no right to esteem by any American.
16
Some of the Trump-supporting Charlottesville mob also marched, armed with AR-15s, on a Charlottesville synagogue Saturday morning. It was immediately evacuated and even its scrolls had to be removed. Several people from the community helped stand guard, even while the knuckedragging right-wingers across the street brandished their weapons and chanted anti-Semitic slogans.
So the rest of us are supposed to search for validity in the views of Trump supporters who march, armed, on a house of worship (on their sabbath); wave swastika flags; run people over; not to mention open fire on anyone they think doesn’t belong here? Why?
15
Civil War monuments (North and South alike) were erected out of grief for America's greatest tragedy. The Civil War claimed 600,000 lives ( the equivalent of over 6,000,000 based on today's population), and resulted in immense loss of property. These monuments are a profoundly sad reminder of our past (especially the institution of slavery), which is precisely why they should stand.
8
Sad but not surprising that such is the viewpoint of a fellow Virginian - the state with the greatest number of Civil War monuments. Lest those outside Virginia be unaware of the divergent views on the issue, the State is broken into counties and independent cities where most reside. Few residing inside independent cities (or within the counties of Northern Virginia surrounding D.C.) hold opinions contrary those stated in the op-ed. It is generally those residing in sparsely populated, rural counties, primarily in western portions of the State, who cling to the heritage argument for retaining confederate monuments. This holds true even for smaller cities located in the western part of the State, such as Roanoke and Lynchburg.
8
@Chip Dodson I was born and raised in Newport News. Good to hear from you, neighbor!
@Henry Dickerson
Most of those monuments did not go up towards the end of the Civil War. The vast majority were erected during the Jim Crow era. They did not mourn dead soldiers, but rather the generals of the confederacy. The people who erected them wanted segregation and the persistence of slavery: https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments ("How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments," Aug 2018). The Daughters of the Confederacy were among the most influential groups helping to erect those monuments.
The statues are profound reminders of slavery...but that is not good. Many people do not understand the reasons behind their construction. It was not for a good cause.
6
We took a DNA test. Most of the results were not surprising––northern and western Europe. But it was interesting to learn that the genetic analysis determined we are partly Jewish. I always somewhat suspected this, having received a Bar Mitzvah card for confirmation! Getting the confirmation opened me up again to the puzzle of identity and made me curious about what it means to be Jewish. For that matter, what does it means to have an identity based on a nationality or group, especially absent a familial, religious or cultural context in which to place it? And it makes me think about how we relate to our heredity. When I went to college, almost all my friends were Jewish. Though I only went to a seder as a baby, my friends used to talk about their fasting on Yom Kippur. (I was born on Yom Kippur in 1985 and found myself writing a short story in college about this coincidence and its relation to my new Jewish friends.) It all seems obvious to me now but back then it must have been eye-opening to meet so many different people, explore so many different perspectives and experience a genuine opening, of which there are precious few during life. I came to cherish a certain intellectual style among Jewish thinkers. Spinoza, Einstein and Kafka. Modern public intellectuals like Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky appeal to me immensely. I studied Judaism with the Reform church a couple years ago. My journey toward understanding my identity, and the meaning of my past, is just beginning.
2
The fact that white Southerners expect black Southerners to pay for upkeep of monuments to the people who fought for the right to enslave black people is reason enough to take all those monuments down.
It’s high time this country stop appeasing White Southerners and their racism.
15
Yes, memorials to all the great heroes of the confederacy are wonderful, in the same way all the hundreds of European memorials to Hitler and the Nazis...oh, wait...
10
Give it time. I think monuments are understood in the context of accepted history, and the generally accepted history of the Civil War, i.e. the Lost Cause, is being challenged by modern historians. The result is that the people of Virginia may decide they want to take Lee's statue down regardless of any white supremacy overtones. Lee should be regarded as a general who literally dissipated his army, just count the casualties, and so played his important role in the general failure of the Confederacy. When Virginians realize that General Lee caused more Virginia fathers, husbands, and sons to die than any other northern or southern general, all in vain, they should be happy to remove his statue. The key thing here is continuing to debunk the "lost cause" and that takes time and effort.
2
The two statues in Charlottesville that caused all the controversy were part of a group of four statues sponsored by local son and philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire in the 1920's. He made numerous large gifts to the city and the University of Virginia, such as school buildings, libraries, flag poles, educational programs and materials etc, and was a believer in what some people call the City beautiful movement.
4
Offering quotes from individuals who lived over a century ago to support one's thesis is never very helpful. But it's always pleasurable to vent one's spleen, ain't it?
3
We must not stop with the confederate monuments. Statues of Washington and Jefferson should also be torn down, and cities and other places named after them must be renamed. In order to create a brave new world, the old must be systematically purged from memory. But some people will say we must be cautious about this program... I say they are complicit, and must reflect on their privilege and atone for it.
4
If you decide to follow the money trail...they unfortunately lead to the North. Apparently the Southern foundries had all been converted to the war effort and subsequently destroyed.
If the Yankees who made the monument castings and sold them to the mournful DAR members honoring their dead relations really wants them back then they should just simply pay to buy them. Money talks!
1
Like many Americans I have visited these sites and contemplated these statues, dismally ignorant of their factual history. I am not, however, dismally ignorant of this plague of white supremacist terrorism, which has adopted these monuments, and Mr. Trump's sly role vis-à-vis white terrorism.
Something must be done. These monuments cannot stand as they are, unmodified and unremarked, immoral and counterfactual. America is not these monuments as is. They do not represent our aspirations and values--however often we have failed to fulfill them.
As described here, a strong body of documentary evidence now tells us that the majority of these monuments were erected in order to advance a retrograde white supremacist agenda which included white dominance and terrorizing those who were not considered white.
I have standing to bring this moral suit. I am part of a mixed race marriage. Moreover, ancestors of our family fought on both sides in the Civil War, and on one side in the Revolutionary War. I was inadvertently in Charlottesville for a conference on the day of the anniversary of the first khakis and tiki-torch neo-Nazi shebang, when they did it again.
3
@Robert you are have iconoclastic mania that leads to Confederaphobia. It can be treated with therapy and medication. People destroy when they lack the ability to create. The North invaded for cotton and tariffs not to do Blacks any favors.
1
Dear professor
Awesome essay!
1
@Smithtown nygu awesome propaganda with only a superficial understanding of history, Economic Consequences of Dis-Union concerned the North and their #1 cash revenue source, textiles were far more important to Yankees than Blacks. Northern Black Codes became Jim Crow and was imposed on the South by the Invaders.
1
Strange, that the fact that the Confederate soldiers and officers thought they were fighting to protect their communities, doesn't bother Ms. Cox's certainty that they fought for slavery. If, as they believed, they fought for their communities, then their descendants would want to honor that sacrifice; and their monuments would remind us of our own responsibility to sacrifice for community. I like the graciousness of a nation that allows honor to the values of lost causes. And, we may still need to revisit our lost causes, if ever the course of our winners' history brings us to dead ends.
3
@Joshua Laskin Their communities included slaves so by fighting for their communities they were fighting for slavery. So what are we honoring when we erect their monuments? Lost cause=stab in the back=revanchism=back to the future of war.
3
@Joshua Laskin "I like people who weren't captured." Erm...
2
If this adoration for all things Confederate were merely about history, the disappearance of the gentle lifestyle or, God save us, states' rights, then the isolation, persecution and segregation of American Southern blacks would have ended at the Appomattox courthouse.
The South chose to embrace the dehumanizing of former slaves and their descendants for another 100 years (officially) and then another 50 years after nationwide civil rights legislation. (The North was little better, but it didn't have the nostalgia or history to justify it.)
There were the magnolias and the manners. And then there were the ugly faces pictured at hangings and at school integration attempts, at lunch counter sit-ins and on a Selma bridge, the murdered Civil Rights martyrs, the dogs and the fire hoses. Those are the Southern images I grew up with.
166
@Steve Bishop James Dukes of the Liberation Christian Center in Chicago is calling for the removal of Washington's & Andrew Jackson’s statues and & stripping of their names from parks. Dukes says these monuments are “a slap in the face & it’s a disgrace” for African Americans given their history as slave-owning presidents. Un CNN Angela Rye said statues and monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also need to be removed in addition to the Confederate monuments. "I don’t care if it’s a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue. They all need to come down,” she said. The people leading the movement to remove Confederate statutes by that I mean the far left want to remove ALL statutes. That includes Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson...because they owned slaves. That's their end game. We need to stop deluding ourselves. This is what we are fighting. The people leading this movement are irrational fanatics. We can't allow this to happen. What this academic fails to mention is the memorial movement led in part by the UDC had Washington's full sanction. It was considered part of the healing process that would mend the nations' wounds. I'm a conservationist. Going forward it would be helpful to put context markers near some of the statues and monuments. This will offer a fuller and more honest accounting of the south’s history and its legacy of slavery. We should ignore the leftist Stalinists who simply want to erase the past.
5
@Steve I couldn't agree more. I have often wondered what the reaction might be if beside every confederate statue a new statue were raised that commemorated the pains and perseverance of the slaves who helped build the south. That monument should be larger.
21
@Steve Jim Crow was imposed by the Unionists to facilitate their#1 revenue source,textiles.
2
Let's not let it get too complicated: It's called "Treason". Period.
Even before the 1st shot on Ft. Sumpter was fired neighbors in Kansas fought and killed each other over whether Kansas was going to become a free state or a slave-holding one.
Too many foolish poor whites were so riled up through press propaganda saying they were going to loose their rights to freed slaves that they were willing to take up arms and kill their countrymen from the North with whom their fathers and grandfathers had fought together against Great Britain. The poor whites in these states should have realized that the evil lay with the plantation owner class who looked down on everyone -- even them regardless of their being of the same race. Instead, they "carried water" for this elite group of brutal autocrats with their "genteel manners" when not buying, selling, whipping, hanging, subjugating another race usually carried out by some less than genteel white straw bosses.
The monuments are obscene...plain and simple.
Stuff them in a museum so that people can go look at them and realize what a warped, brutal, misguided culture can do to a person's soul...and take to heart that it will never occur again in the name of glory, pride, tradition or whatever spin an oppressor element of society wants to conjure up to justify their inhumanity.
Read McPhearson's "The Battle Cry of Freedom" for a wonderfully explicit recounting of the politics that led to the first cannon shot in Charlestown harbor.
7
@Jon Free States meant Free of Blacks not free for Blacks. Lincoln sent a war fleet to threaten Charleston, in response to Confederates sending peace Commission. See US Joint Congressional Sub-committee report of July 16 1862. North held 1/2 million slaves directly and a million as collateral. If the Northern Banks has offered to forgive loans to facilitate emancipation they would have the moral high ground but they didn't and they don't. Slaves taken in foreclosure were rented to RRs where they were worked to death not freed.
1
Blah, blah, blah. The author may be absolutely spot on, or not, but this piece sounds just like the thousands of others we've read in the last few years. Racism and racists are bad, we must do this, we must do that, whites must face this, white males are to blame for everything, etc., etc. Ugh. Enough.
How about recognizing we ALL play a part in the problem? How about we move on from pontificating and do some real work to try to bridge gaps between all of the "sides" in this country - blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, the "blamers" and the "blamed."
Instead of yelling and screaming, blaming, labeling and accusing - I'm right, you're wrong" - how about we start talking to each other, staying silent for a bit and learning something? What has happened to the art of TRYING to understand one another?
9
@Rich - Thank you.
1
Tripe, pure tripe. I'm naturally inclined to support progressive causes, but then, I am also a white southerner. I have the mental capacity and familiarity with American history to distinguish between the men who fought to defend their homes (No, they didn't charge the guns at Gettysburg just to defend the white Massa's slaves) against the depredations of Union generals such as Sherman and Sheridan, who didn't bother to ask one's political leanings before burning their homes. Ms. Cox's argument appeals to ignorance, and is quite simply the reverse side of the coin from Mr. Trump. A plague on both their houses.
11
Along with the predictable nonsense about Democrats in 2019 being the same as Democrats in 1860, another of my favorite ahistoricisms is the claim that for us to condemn the Confederates who sought to destroy the country for an evil cause is to “impose the standards of the 21st century on these Americans of the 19th century.”
I don't need to refer to 21st-century standards to have a sound ethical reckoning of what the Confederacy stood for when the 19th century provides all the standard I need: that of those who fought and died to preserve the Union and to end the institution in whose name the Confederates wished to wreck it.
4
Excellent article and comments. I grew up in the South, though I have no idea whether any of my ancestors were slave-owners. I suggest, with due respect to all commenters, that attempting to characterize Confederate supporters as 'evil' or not is (excuse the expression) a lost cause. Some, including vocal leaders of the Confederacy, were vocal in support of slavery; others opposed it but resented Northern invasion (a word much used lately in a different context); still others were simply gulled, or even if not owning slaves, could not abide the prospect of being regarded as legally equal to a group they felt inherently superior to (also some modern resonances). In the 2016 election campaign none of the candidates even mentioned climate change in the debates; how long until the discourse describes their oversight as evil?
Humans are social creatures, and thus inclined to accept cultural pressures, and instinctively to look for scapegoats and conspiracies to explain the course of events rather than to reflect and question the values that surround them. We cannot expect or presume our ancestors to be saints, but it is past time to lionize them for defending crimes against humanity. America was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, and that deserves some reflection.
3
The best way to address this ongoing problem is to increase economic livelihood for everyone by making the country once again one of rising affluence and a strong middle class across the board, from all walks of life. When this was more the case more strides were made in civil rights. Problem is, both sides of the aisle have now completely given up on trying to do this.
2
I think the Confederate monuments should all come down. The Confederacy and the Civil War were terrible, tragic, and -- yes -- based on slavery. Certainly few Southerners in the immediate aftermath of that war saw anything to celebrate about it.
But Ms. Cox goes too far in her indictment, particularly two passages:
-- "We cannot simply romanticize founding fathers and Confederate leaders, or quote from great speeches about our democracy, if we are not also willing to acknowledge the nation’s racist underbelly."
"founding fathers"? Any full evaluation of historical figures must consider both the full facts and the historical context. But I resent the admonition that we must "acknowledge the nation's racist underbelly" before any discussion of Washington or Jefferson.
-- "Confederate monuments can no longer be debated solely as objects of history, when they have become rallying points for a violent movement."
What movement? Every white nationalist rally that makes the news consists of about 100 people, and is usually attended by an equal or greater number of reporters. The idea of white nationalism seems to be a greater rallying point for reporters than it is for its would-be supporters. And "violent movement"? As detestable as those rallies are, does one nut at one rally a "violent movement" make?
I agree with most of Ms. Cox's column, but am troubled by her excesses.
4
Ms. Cox,
Excluded from your article is the fact that the images that obtained the most coverage of the event on TV news programs was of marching men with torches chanting "Jews will not replace us". What that message had to do with the Confederacy and removals of its symbols is beyond me.
14
The US seems terminally tied to its original sin of slavery, not that it has done much to atone for the evil that it caused. But many of us do want to move past that dreadful heritage and on toward being a modern and rational country. But white supremacists are constantly there to remind us of our sordid past and the millions of Americans who long to return to it.
7
Nearly every county and civilization in the world has had slavery at some point. Read world history. It is a universal sin. All have ancestors who were victims and perpetrators at some point in time. What can anyone today do about it? What does atonement look like exactly? My grandfather immigrated here from Poland, so now slI should "atone" for slavery in the US? Ridiculous.
3
There is a significant omission in this otherwise well-argued piece, and that's the omission of white Christianity and anti-Semitism as a lively and historic part of white supremacy. Unite The Right protesters shouted "Jews will not replace us", held posters that read "the Jewish media is going down" and "Jews are Satan's children." They also targeted Charlottesville mayor Mike Signer with a sustained campaign of anti-Semitic slurs and imagery on social media. You would not know that from reading this op-ed, although it was much covered in the media and obvious to those who attended.
Promoting a white supremacist vision of Christianity--with white men at its center, and women, Jews, and people of color subordinated-- has always been a primary focus of white supremacy, both then and now.
12
@Rachel Beard Spot-on comment. Thank you!
3
Owning people enriched and empowered the USA, and it appears that ongoing racism, the exploitation and degradation of "the other" is going to destroy your nation.
2
Actually it held the south back considerably, while the north industrialized and became rich through vibrant capitalism.
2
Nothing in this good piece surprises me.
Worse yet, it makes me think that it would be appropriate -- as a measure of true understanding of the ills that we do, and all that have been done even worse in the days since our 'enlightened' founders held humans in bondage while extolling the "equality" of all men (if not women) -- if every one of us were to 'take a knee' every time "The Star Spangled Banner" is heard.
4
I too am a descendent of slave owners.
Children are not born bigoted, they learn it.
Confederate statues and the confederate battle flag are useful symbols in teaching a false narrative of a lost cause and the white supremacy that fosters it.
Any argument that claims these symbols need to be preserved basically proliferates the teaching of Jim Crow bigotry and hatred.
Changing this is a generational challenge and we’ve a long way to go.
10
“Confederate monuments can no longer be debated solely as objects of history, when they have become rallying points for a violent movement.”
A part of the history of confederate monuments that continues to not be mentioned is that many of these “historic markers” were not erected for historical reasons were erected during times of racial strife as a backlash to equality gains of minorities by the racist group DCS to rewrite history and portray the South’s part in the Civil War history in a positive light. In many Southern states Civil War history still uses the phrase The War of Northern Aggression to describe the civil war and teaches that war was all about protecting states rights and Southern Culture/heritage; which no one seems capable of defining what that means. Southern Heritage and Southern Culture has always been dog whistle code for white supremacy as has the use of the confederate battle flag which appears with the KKK immediately after the war and to this day with white Supremacist groups.
The confederate memorials like the confederate symbols are there to perpetuate a historic myth and racism. The exposure of these myths and removal of these monuments and symbols from the public squares is only a beginning to the actual healing of a nation by ending the commemoration of a heritage of racism. We as a nation need a serious discussion of slavery, apartheid, segregation, discrimination and the ongoing outright racism. Removal of the symbols will not solve or heal.
7
Monuments erected with the idea of studying history is a bad joke. Statues and monuments are there to show respect and reverence. There are historical creatures like John Wilkes Booth and Hitler. But we don't need monuments to study them.
5
", a young man, inspired by this gathering and the white supremacist ideology, drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterdemonstrators, injuring several dozen and killing a young woman, Heather Heyer."
This is the kind of false reporting that makes my cynical about the so-called freedom of the press and their so-called noble mission to preserve democracy.
Anyone who watched the news of the happenings in Charlottesville knows that the counterdemostrators were not peaceful. I saw videos of people walking back to their cars, away from the activity of the demonstrations, that were attacked by a stone throwing mob of "peaceful counterdemonstrators". A middle aged woman was struck in the head and knocked to the concrete by a stone thrown at her. There was plenty of documented violence perpetrated by the counterdemonstators.
If the police chief of the city had done his job, he was removed from office, Heather Heyer would still be alive.
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@Aristotle Gluteus Maximus There is zero evidence of Heather Heyer or the people she was standing with of having been violent.
That's like saying there were "good people on all sides." Nonsense. Some were speaking up to protect the American values our Constitution states as the bedrock of our democracy. Some were there to deny that the Civil War was a treasonous uprising by racists who used the flimsy cover of States' Rights to attack our United States.
Make asinine claims and you will be called an "ass" for making them, regardless of your online moniker.
3
Confederate monuments symbolize the evil of slavery, the evil of Jim Crow laws, and the ongoing attempts to denigrate people of color.
3
The professor omitted, presumably inadvertently, the "Jews will not replace us" chant by the neo-Nazis, KKK, etc. during their hate-filled march through Charlottesville. It is historically important as Jews are frequently scapegoated as globalists aiding and abetting immigrants.
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The truth is that white supremacy embraced by President Trump and his people will be the death of American democracy.
5
Keep up the good work, Professor Cox. The nearby Charlottesville tragedy was indeed about America's future. A beautiful young lady died for the cause of the peaceful right to protest. She died at the hands of those who were here to celebrate the rejuvenation of the violent "right" to protest. Which one is our future is the challenge presented by Professor Cox.
3
This writer is way off the mark when she says.. "But there is a large group of white Americans who are hesitant to acknowledge the link between white supremacist ideology and Confederate monuments. They are the same Americans who hesitate to criticize an inhumane immigration policy, and the hateful rhetoric President Trump has directed at members of Congress and entire American cities." I deplore Trump and every thing he has done and I also think tearing down Confederate statues is wrong. And I make no connection between Robert E. Lee's statue and white supremacy. Let people in the South have their history rather than erase it to appease a minority with a egg-shell thin sensitivity. The same mindset that wants to paint over colonial murals in a San Francisco high school because they depict slaves and a dead Indian. The Founding Fathers from the South all had slaves - Washington, Jefferson for example. White supremacy is in the hearts of those who worship it. It will be there with or without statues.
6
@styleman If the South had separated into another country, that would be fine. But it isn't the case, and what they are spouting falls either very nearly or completely into anti-American hate speech that is blatantly inciting violent action.
@CA Girl The "spouters" are white supremecists filled with fear and hate and that, I agree, is un-American. But that has nothing to do with statues of Confederate generals. Slavery was part of Southern culture. A bloody war was fought between the Agricultural South and proponents of Sates Rights and the Industrial North who wanted to preserve the federation that was the United States. The South lost, slavery was abolished (although bigotry lives on). But the Confederate generals were not heinous individuals like the scum at Charlottesvlle. Leave their history alone. Enough with the suffocating political correctness.
1
The monuments, for whatever reasons originally erected, are a window into, shed light upon and should cause us to reflect on the evilness, cruelty and immorality attendant to 300 years of American history. Knocking them down won’t change anything.
1
Nazis, The Taliban and other Islamic terror regimes tear down historical monuments that didn't fit their "current" view of what should be allowed.
The intolerant and Un-hinged Left are in good company.
Our history is complex, but it is ours. To forget it ,is to repeat it. Banishing statues is the first step to forgetting.
The statues were also erected as a conciliatory gesture to the defeated south to help a divided nation heal. They were not given to promote a defeated philosophy of slavery.
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@Norville T Johnson
Please check to see when many of these were erected. Also please reread the comments of the ladies who were the United Daughters of the Confederacy. If not mistaken Robert E. Lee was against building of monuments to himself and some of his decedents have come out in favor of removal, perhaps a museum where all sides can be shown and studied would be the best option.
1
@K D
Relocating them might be an option but I would also suggest that we halt the practice of erecting any future statues. Someone will invariably be triggered either now or in the the future
1
There are no “monuments” to the Nazis in Germany.
She (Mildred Rutherford) ... claimed that “slavery was no disgrace to the owner or the owned.”
And yet I can only imagine what her response would have been if someone had approached her and said that she ought to try being a slave for a while... if it truly was "no disgrace" then she should have no grounds to object.
Can we add the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the list of hate groups already?
5
Dr. Cox: This is an excellent article, however I would make one important addition. In the fourth paragraph as you build your thesis you state “They arrived angry about being displaced, or perhaps replaced, by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy” while this is true, you failed to quote what these haters actually said as they marched and chanted “Jews will not replace us” which is important because it connects their hatred to the international rise of Neo Nazism as well as the American brand of white supremacy. Antisemitism is making huge and dangerous advances here and around the world and because of their very words, should have been included in your article.
7
It is not an accidental ommission. Antisemitism is also very prevalent on the Left.
3
Why didn't the author mention that the Confederate Statues were of Democrats? Do you think Americans have forgotten the Democrat's sordid history?
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@Keller- So what? The Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the 19th century have switched roles over the past century and a half. The "Party of Lincoln" would be unrecognizable to Lincoln now. Congratulations on your keen observation and insight into the past.
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@Keller . While it can be challenging to learn and remember the history and lessons of other countries, one ought to know the history of one's own country. The parties essentially flipped after the Civil War.
Have you forgotten the sordid history of Republicans? Are you blind to the anti-American, bigoted, dishonest, divisive, and racist stands taken by today's Republican party??
1
Read Colton Whitehead’s Underground Railroad , and then tell me what you think should be done with these monuments.
1
I've spent the past 30 years in Charlottesville, and the sight of that statue always reminded me of my own Irish immigrant ancestor, a father of two small children, drafted into the Union army in '64, dead as a prisoner of war in Richmond by '65, buried as an 'unknown' a few miles away. I did consider the statue a rather benign and pathetic relic of bad times past, but no longer.
3
Ironically, hundred of thousands of small towns in the South have been replaced with African-American mayors and city councils yet their Greek-columned court houses, old majestic oaks and magnolias, and shuttered downtowns still stand with monuments to the confederate war dead. Seems that they attract historians and tourists who would otherwise not stop for a lunch, a photo, a rest, or a diversion at all.
To destroy them would just hollow out what is already been hollowed out. Maybe these governments recognize the tangible losses that this writer can’t even see.
9
I am a descendant of immigrants who arrived in this country well after the end of the civil war, in the last couple decades of the 19th century. I am white, nonetheless, and thus inheritor of a legacy of white supremacy. My family did not own slaves; they scarcely owned anything until my grandparents' generation, being from outcast / minority religious groups in their respective home countries and being largely unwelcome upon their arrival in the United States.
So as a result I have a strange attitude about white supremacy. On a surface level, my family has been considered white for several generations, so I passively benefit from that and realize I have that privilege. But as to the whole idea of racialized guilt and inherited responsibility for white supremacy, I don't feel any of it. It's nothing to do with my family, who never owned slaves nor had much chance to participate in Jim Crow, being outcasts for the first couple generations in this country. I am a descendent of farmers and peasants, who only in the last couple generations in the wake of the unprecedented prosperity of the post-war 20th century managed to climb out of poverty.
So I will denounce white nationalism, I'll use my vote to deny it purchase in government and society, but it is not my legacy, nor will I shoulder any guilt or shame for it as such. It was not my choice to be born white, I don't believe I have any kind of original sin for that. What is my choice, though, is to oppose an oppressive system.
10
@Joel Nobody is telling you to be guilty for the actions of your ancestors, even if you did have ancestors who were here as slaveowners. Nobody is saying that we are accountable for the actions of people who died 150 years ago, or bear guilt because of who your ancestors were.
All people are is saying that we must ACKNOWLEDGE the benefits we, as white people, have received from that state of affairs. I'm not to blame for my white privilege. I didn't ask for it, and I don't support policies that perpetuate it. But it still exists, and I have to acknowledge it as such. And sometimes, I even have to take responsibility for it. Because sometimes things that are not our fault are still our responsibility; that is just part of being an adult.
My dad's family (the Jewish side) fled Russia and came to New York in 1905ish. My mother's family has been in various parts of the US since the 1600s, and while I do not know for sure if any of them owned slaves, it is entirely possible. I am not responsible for their actions and beliefs, but I AM responsible for recognizing the fact that I have benefited from those actions and beliefs whether I wanted it or not.
You and I have benefited from this country's history of white supremacy, and it is impossible to argue against that. It is not either of our faults, but it is our responsibility to work for change, so that subsequent generations can experience a little more equality and fairness than what was experienced by those in the past.
14
.
Wrong.
Republicans welcome people of all colors and creeds into their party insofar as their values are consistent with conservatives. Think Ben Carson, Candace Owens, Daniel Cameron ... and so many more. Trumpism and neo-conservativism are value-driven movements; NOT racist at all.
What I hear from the author is a kind of threat: give us (leftists) what we want or we will stir up the emotions of the populace with accusations and condemnations that invoke historic injustices. This is a leftists power-grab by way of guilting the perceived opponent. This tactic is untenable as the populace wakes up to the shallow negativity of the leftist interpretation of history and society.
11
@Avoice4us "I'm not racist, look at my three black friends!"
That's literally the argument you just made. Good try though, I'd give you a 4/10.
Trumpism is absolutely a value-driven movement. And the "values" that drive it are White Supremacy, Dishonesty, and Entitlement.
5
@Avoice4us
You say “This is a leftists power-grab by way of guilting the perceived opponent.“
From my point of view, the right power-grabs by way of using fear and demonizing “the other”.
Sorry we liberals make you feel so guilty about losing the Civil War, but we believe that there are some on the far right that are arming themselves for a new civil war. And “Trumpism”, as you call the current climate, is encouraging this.
3
I think statures of Confederate generals and politicians should continue to be displayed, but only in an appropriate context... inside a replica of a slave shack, for example.
6
'Of course, the fact that white supremacists have so easily attached themselves to the monument debate gives the lie to the assertion that it was ever simply about “Southern heritage”.'
That is a non-sequitur. Anyone can hijack or misuse an argument, but that does not make the argument invalid.
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@wnhoke The the one weak point in the author's argument.
1
@wnhoke Right, except for the fact that there are literally dozens if not hundreds of Confederate writings espousing the superiority of the white man over everyone else, and outright declaring that the cause they are fighting for was slavery above all others.
If you just ignore all the historical facts though, then yeah you can absolutely write this off as people "hijacking or misusing" an argument.
35
@wnhoke
On the other hand, this particular argument has only one actual underlying intent: to reinforce the notion that the Confederacy was simply "political." It is a callous approach in "erasing" the facts about what it meant to fully participate in a society that subjugated people of color - because of their skin color. This isn't difficult to comprehend, Hokey- pokey.
12
I went to a high school named Robert E. Lee in the 1970’s. When I first learned the definition of “treason” and “traitor,” I knew Robert E. Lee committed the crime of treasons and was a traitor - he bore arms against his country.
The South cannot light up the traitors with halos. Lee and others were in the same league as Judas. Betrayal is betrayal.
5
From the politically correct vaulted perch of 2019, this column is a cheap shot. The author is exaggerating the UDC's malevolence & influence. The racist views of the early UDC are indefensible. But face it, most 19th century American citizens would be seen as bigots today. Groups like the UDC were created at a time when women didn't have the right to vote, had little opportunity to attend college or have a career. During the late 1800's America saw a proliferation of historical oriented women's groups. In addition to United Daughters of the Confederacy, you had such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Pilgrims, Daughters of the War of 1812, Patriots of America, and the Colonial Dames of America. Many women belonged to multiple organizations & they served a benign social function. Yes the UDC did a lot of lobbying for state archives & museums, national historic sites, & highways, but all women's groups did this. They also compiled genealogies; interviewed former soldiers...a valuable function. The UDC was active in national causes during wartime. During World War I, it funded hospital beds and contributed over $82,000 for war orphans. They raised $24 million for war bonds. Their influence dramatically diminished once women got the right to vote in 1920. These women weren't saints, but neither were they the horrible demons this author would like you to believe. The current UDC has nothing in common with the vile racist bigots of today.
12
Of course, the fact that white supremacists have so easily attached themselves to the monument debate gives the lie to the assertion that it was ever simply about “Southern heritage.”
WRONG!
Since the late 80s, honorable Southern heritage groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy have sought actively to put an end to the misuse of Confederate symbols by white supremacists.
It has been so-called "politically correct" establishment liberals that have held back efforts to stop such misuse, and in some cases even actively helped groups like the KKK to co-opt Confederate symbols.
4
@Carl Roden "sought actively to put an end to the misuse of Confederate symbols by white supremacists."
How does that work, exactly, considering the fact that the entire Confederacy was populated and operated by white supremacists?
2
@Carl Roden:On the other hand, there's our President, Donald J. Trump, who rather than call out and denounce the violence from those White Supremecists, he claims there were "good people on both sides."
Instead of blaming those "politically correct liberals" for allowing those White Supremacists to co-opt the symbols of the Confederacy, you should also call. out Trump, for not only not condoning what happened, but for essentially validating the racism that was already there; beginning with his campaign rallies.
2
America had Slavery, Segregation and now "white supremacy". The message is the same: Whites are superior to people of color based purely on their color of skin, which is just a pigmentation or a lack thereof. Justifying this message with symbols of the past is deplorable. It only divides the country, except that now there are no fixed physical borders. That we have a whole political party which exploits this divide to gain votes is unfathomable. If we don't make a correction, we are doomed as a nation.
1
A cogent piece. Hatred is bad. Nazis are bad. This Trump stuff is insane.
And, most soldiers fight and die because they are compelled, they are not fighting for huge ideals. I have ancestors that fought on both sides, and they were both doing what their cultures expected.
And, of course the monuments were not built just after the war, the South was shattered and militarily occupied.
Hate generates Hate, War generates War - we are still reaping the tragic consequences of all our wars- from the 300 years of Indian genocide to the Civil War to the utter insanity of the fraudulent Iraq invasion. Peace.
8
Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revalution many years ago, because of their refusal to allow Marion Anderson, the only Black star of the Metropolitan Opera, to sing the star spangled banner at their headquarters on July 4th.
12
It’s crazy, I’m a white Conservative who is very outspoken. You would think that I would run into “white supremacists” occasionally. Weird, I’ve never actually met one. But if you read this publication for a week you would think they were everywhere. Huh, more manufactured hysteria? I think so.
9
@Thomas Aquinas Wow - wish I could claim the same!!
1
@Thomas Aquinas
No TV huh? Didn't see any of the footage from Charlottesville?
1
@Thomas Aquinas Try this zerohedge.com. Read the comments. Mainly antisemites, but search Michelle Obama and I think you'll find plenty of racists.
1
By this reasoning , anything white supremacists rally around should be banned or removed. They rally around snow cones? Ban them. They rally around John Currin’s art? Remove it. Doesn’t this approach mean they win?
4
@Saint Leslie Ann Of Geddes
White supremacists rally around tiki-torches too.
But I’d hate if tiki-torches got banned. I need them for my exotica-themed pool parties.
3
" these monuments are no longer relics of a horrendous past — they have been resurrected as symbols of white nationalism. "
To be precise, the Confederacy is a model of what the white supremacists want. They want to overthrow the democratic government and replace it with a slave state. They can't do it in today's Germany, where the democratic government is vigilant and one can be arrested for praising the Nazis, but they think they can do it in the US with its naïve notion that "Nazis have free speech".
As for "Southern heritage", there's no such thing. I know because I'm actually descended from slaveowners. I found a will one of them wrote; he was so illiterate he couldn't even sign his name and wrote an "X" on the document. After Jefferson's generation the white South was a desert that never produced any cultural document worth mentioning. It was too dangerous to think.
6
I don't get it. Weren't the Confederates traitors? Wasn't what they did insurrection and treason? Yes, I know, the history is complex, but revolting against the established legitimate state is anti-patriotic, isn't it?
6
@Denis Pelletier Yes, that is correct.
Too many of today's Rs no longer object to treason as long as it's committed by people on their "side" as they're no longer committed to our country's clearly written values embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Had Obama done ANY of what 45 has done, he'd have been endlessly vilified and promptly impeached.
Couldn't Dr. Cox at least have spelled Mrs. Crutcher's name correctly? Sadly, the rest of her work is of similar quality.
4
For some reason many people who write about Charlottesville seem to not remember that the marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us”. As an assimilated Jew, I will never forget hearing that chant. It is not just about “white males” but white christian males.
12
Budapest has a park with soviet union era statues for history, and education and context, Memento Park.
Some of these confederate loser statues belong in a similar museum/park setting for truth, consolation, and education.
The rest destroyed.
The confederacy lost for all the right reasons.
Please speak truth to power and educate the oppressed.
3
Those that took up arms against the United States were traitors. Those who continue to push the confederacy are traitors. The fact that they must twist, mangle and reinvent the past to fit their agenda shows how utterly dishonest they are.
10
The endless preservation and augmentation of unearned and undeserved white male entitlements, prerogatives and dominance. That was what Trump campaigned on. That was why his voters voted for him. That is why his base continues to support him. And that is what McConnell and the Congressional Republicans have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned their Constitutional duties in the service of.
"When white nationalists [Trump and his supporters] look at these monuments ... They feel emboldened by the racist vision that unites America’s white-supremacist past and the future they are fighting for — one in which people of color and women are again subjugated under the rule of white men."
1
No matter how many Confederate monuments they build, they still lost and they were always completely wrong, just as the white nationalists are wrong today. They are really just monuments to a people unable to accept defeat. it's pathetic, really. It's like giving a trophy to the worst team in the league. Well, let's give them another century for their failed treasonous acts to sink it. We can be magnanimous in victory.
5
This is not just white male patriarchy, or is Christian white male patriarchy. They did chant “Jews will not replace us” and they are anti-Muslim and any other non-Christian religion. That makes them non-Christian in my understanding.
6
What changed for me in Charlottesville, as the son of Jewish immigrants and a member of a Holocaust family, is that I no longer felt safe in America. When the neo-Nazi white supremacists chanted, "Jews will not replace us!" I felt that a symbolic Jewish star, a racist target, had been placed on my back. And then when Donald Trump failed not only to firmly renounce them, but abdicated any semblance of moral authority by forcefully saying there were "some good people" among them, I knew America was headed to some dark place. That fear has grown more palpable after Pittsburgh, after Poway, and now after El Paso. Trump has unleashed the equivalent of his "brown shirts" in a reign of domestic terror where dozens have been cruelly massacred. And still American Jews like Stephen Ross invite him into their homes and raise $12 million for his re-election naively believing as my German Jewish in-laws did that they were safe. I may be Casandra, but I will "bear witness" and I will continue to call out "Never Again." Wake up America for darkness is descending.
9
Germany has a simple and clear approach to the genocidal acts of its past -- nazis were villains and are not remembered as heroes.
The perpetrators of the civil war and the genocidal southern US system of slavery and bondage would do well to emulate Germany's example of how it deals with the sins of its history.
Also, the past isn't even the past.
7
“They arrived angry about being displaced, or perhaps replaced, by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy”
I wonder why did the esteemed historian omit that they were chanting “Jews will not replace us”?
3
There is no honor in racism, be it in celebrating a Confederacy whose treason was for retaining the enslavement, torture, rape and murder of people of a different color or presently, to supposedly make America "Great Again" to ultimately do the same thing.
3
These are monuments to those who fought against and killed soldiers of the United States of America. Traitors. That is their heritage.
2
These racists might be angry at getting displaced or replaced but they mostly just want to be angry at something. It is far easier to be angry and hateful while wallowing in self pity than to be a productive member of an integrated society that demands skills and work ethic to succeed.
3
No doubt Ms. Crutchers would utter something like this: "but my family treated our slaves well." I have heard this statement in the modern South. Repugnant, tear down the statues.
1
Not only do White Supremacists/Neo Nazis use the Confederate monuments as rallying points to draw people to join them in the creation perhaps of a White Nation State within the land now seen as the lower 48.
They are extremely active in Sweden, joining the Russians, to support any and all efforts to portray Sweden as a country invaded by people who will destroy Sweden. The, have paid the children iof formerasylum-seekers living in Rinkeby to burn cars so that the president of the United States can gleefully state "Did you see what happened in Sweden last night.
See this article and Reader Recommended comment number 10 by Laura for a report from my city Linköping. She came here 10 years after me and presents a sane view that I could expand on. So far the American Neo Nazis have not taken root in this city.
The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism
https://nyti.ms/2ZOLsXO
Yes indeed, for white supremacists, Confederate monuments aren't about the past - they symbolize a racist vision of the future that they want not only in my America but also in my Sweden and every other country that has taken in asylum seekers.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
1
I am a white retired Air Force colonel, born and raised in upstate NY. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was stationed in the segregated Deep South. I was appalled by the treatment of Blacks as subhumans. I not only want the confederate statues removed, but want the southern military bases to be renamed, since most are named for confederate traitors. There are no monuments in Germany honoring Hitler, an avowed racist.
8
@JSK
If you are concerned about honoring racists, then you should have the consistency to cast your net wider.
Washington and Jefferson were racist slaveowners. Lincoln was a racial bigot who, at least initially, was content with allowing Southern black slavery to continue if the South did not secede, and he had no intention of ever allowing freed black slaves to be the equal of American whites.
Also, Congress has formally recognized Confederate war veterans as U.S. military veterans deserving the same basic recognition as others.
So if we are going to tear down and rename all things Confederate, we should proceed to take a wrecking ball to the Washington Monument, and Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials. And how many locations do you think have Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln in their names?
And then there is Andrew Jackson. Does his being a pre-Civil War unionist exonerate him from his iniquitous track record?
4
Charlottesville also confirmed what we long suspected, that Trump is part of a cadre of 'white nationalists' convinced it is a survival situation (hogwash, of course).
1
The Confederate statues and monuments should be treated like all those descendants of the British erected to honor Benedict Arnold.
1
Yes, “They arrived angry about being displaced, or perhaps replaced, by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy” but they chanted “Jews will not replace us”. Let’s not bury increased Anti-Semitism in flavor of more “preferred” victims of white male patriarchy.
4
Those white nationalist are also anti Semite. In Charlottesville, they were shouting "Jews will not replace us". Also the Europeans White Supremacist perfectly know the meaning of the Confederate flag. If they are forbidden by law to use the Nazi flag or any other white supremacist or racist symbols at their rallies, they will replace it with the Confederate flag.
1
The chant that I recall from Charlottsville was "Jews will not replace us." I also recall seeing many confederate flags bastardized to resemble swastikas as Neo-Nazi symbols. I don't mean to minimize the author's assertion that the white supremacy movement is a backlash against immigrants and people of color, but clearly this was not the only ball in play here. There should have been at least some mention of the Neo-Nazi movement and it's embrace of confederate symbolism in this article. Clearly, this was also present at Charlottsville.
2
Those seeking to aggrandize those who fought against the U.S. in the Civil War hope to disprove "history is written by the victors."
People will ask: Where are the statues to Hitler, Mussolini, or Emperor Hirohito in making the point that we don't raise monuments to enemies of the United States. "No fair!", they cry. "They weren't Americans and not as a bad." Of course not as bad carries a difference in technology, even so the Civil War was brutal and carried high causalities. But there is little doubt Hitler and southerners believed in the superiority of the white race and went to extremes to make the point. No Hitler statues still.
OK, too tenuous? Then where are the monuments to Robert Henry Best, Mildred Gillars, or Martin James Monti? They were Americans. You can read about them in history books and online to learn of their treason during WWII, but we didn't erect statues to them. Why not? Why do we for others committing treason? Good intentions aren't not a defense.
Something closer then? You can also read about Thomas Hutchinson, William Franklin, James Chalmers, and John Malcolm and learn about them without statues to their honor fight against their brothers and fathers. They were born in here, they sided with England during the revolution. Loyalists. Tories. You won't find statues to them here in New England. Not even to Franklin's (illegitimate) son. Or to Chalmers's "Plain Truth". Funny, the language of the Tories has remained much the same. Hasn't it?
1
@Marie - "They weren't Americans and not as a bad." was supposed to be "They weren't Americans and Lee was not as a bad."
1
Charlottesville was not a protest. It was a dress rehearsal. These “fine people” intend to incite a race war on the behalf of Trump and his Russian masters as political theater. They are armed and dangerous and we should treat them as the seditious traitors they are. Zero tolerance is the only response. Every law enforcement resource we have needs to focus on rooting them out and bringing them to justice.
2
Confederates were traitors and committed treason against the United States of America.
Today, the white supremacists who support the Confederacy are traitors as well.
This includes the president and the Republicans in congress.
3
The very idea of a " confederate monument " or monument to a " confederate hero" is an insult to every American. There were no " confederate heroes". They were all traitors to the United States of America and engaged in the bloodiest and most deadly of American Wars because they wanted to keep people of color as property and refused to acknowledge what was written in the constitution and Bill of Rights and finally attempting to be enacted. This whole falsehood about a " War about States Rights" is more lies to cover up inherent and ugly racism. It is time to stop pretending otherwise and time to call out the people who worship at the shrine of these treasonous " heroes", and pretend it is about honor and courage. When you are a racist like the President and his followers you are devoid of honor or courage.
2
It’s not about confederate monuments. It’s about erasing American history.
First, the leftists will get rid of confederate monuments. That’s low hanging fruit.
But now it’s George Washington murals and Thomas Jefferson statues.
See the problem, author?
7
@Cjmesq0
Well, then that would make Robert E. Lee a "leftist", dear.
Robert E. Lee wanted NO MONUMENTS to commemorate the Civil War. He felt great shame.
Too bad you don't.
2
@Cjmesq0 When did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson commit Treason against the United States of America?
Also, we have these crazy things called books, which are made out of ground and pressed wood, and they have words written or printed inside them with ink. They allow you to read and internalize vast amounts of information, and I would suggest learning to read as soon as you can and picking a few up. That way you won't be laboring under the delusion that removing a statue of someone who committed Treason against their country is somehow making it so that the history never even happened.
5
The Charlottesville protesters began with "Jews will not replace us," etc. White supremacists harbor an intense hatred and fear of Jews, who they view as evil non-whites pulling the strings of international finance, power, and political influence. If Jews and people of color could work together in progressive and liberal circles, we would all have a better chance of quelling white nationalism.
2
Virtually nobody outside of the 19th-century US was defending slavery in principal, certainly not to the degree of going to war to preserve it.
It's not imposing 20th- and 21st-century standards on the 19th century. It's imposing international 19th-century standards on the provincial US southern 19th-century, which was residing proudly, anachronistically, suicidally, in the 17th century and earlier.
5
@Prof- Slavery was still widely practiced in North Africa in the 19th century! In fact many accuse some nations (Mauritania) of still allowing the ownership of enslaved peoples!
3
@Donna Gray "Look, I found the lowest possibly standard that the US can judge itself by! Look how awesome we are, compared to all the worst countries in the world!"
Are you people serious? Do you not even hear yourselves when you talk? That's literally the argument you just made.
1
@Donna Gray
And it was mass industrialized slavery?! and they fought wars over preserving it?! and there was a significant effort among the Mauritanian et al. intelligensia to defend it in principle?!
The idea of monuments and statues existing as purely historical markers doesn't pass muster. We erect them to celebrate and honor past heroes. The statue of Roberto Clemente outside of PNC Park exists to celebrate and honor the man and the baseball player. The Vietnam Memorial exists to solemnly honor and remember the soldiers and family members who died in a terrible war. Both serve a historical purpose, but they go way beyond that.
Those who say that removing statues of Confederate generals is the same as erasing history are full of it. Removing them only erases the physical manifestations of men who not only lost a war, yet who are honored for fighting for the wrong cause.
3
"The people who showed up in Charlottesville...arrived angry about being displaced, or perhaps replaced, by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy."
The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville obviously exploited the Confederate monument debate to amplify their racist agenda. However, the author curiously omits the group that this mob very explicitly targeted with their screaming rage: "Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!"
The bottom line is that all monuments glorifying any Confederate leader should be removed from their pedestals of honor and placed in museums with proper historical context to explain who these men truly were - traitors, who committed treason to the United States to protect one of the most violent, large-scale systems of subjugation and dehumanization in recorded history, and who perpetrated a rebellion that resulted in the slaughter of 620,000 American soldiers.
4
Is making America "Great Again" supporting a president who brags about sexually assaulting women, making fun of a female Republican presidential candidate's face, treasonously calling on Russia to release emails they stole from his opponent, gyrating and spasmatically making fun of a critic who suffers from a neurological disorder, sowing racial and ethnic division on a daily basis, taking the word of Putin over our own intelligence agencies, etc. etc.....? May God save America from this madman and those who blindly support him. I miss President Obama and for that matter, Senator John McCain - true American patriot's.
5
@logic
John McCain was a right-wing conservative republican ideologue who cared not one iota for the suffering of those less fortunate than he.
3
@wandererI dunno about that. I think he cared a little bit. Just not enough to be willing to actually DO anything about it, when doing something was politically inconvenient for him.
1
There certainly wasn't much southern about the white nationalists who came to Charlottesville. Their chants came directly from Nazi Germany. And much of their hate was directed not only at blacks but also at Jews. The local government's decision to take down the statue was simply an excuse for a Nazi march. They probably could care less about the fate of the statue. They were there to spread hate and build their neo-Nazi movement. Certainly anyone who detests racism would not conclude that some of the marchers were good people as Donald Trump said. After WWII who would ever think an American president would be praising neo-Nazis some whom have the goal of a literally all white country which sounds like all others would be victims of ethnic cleaning. Charlottesville was wake-up call. With the election of Trump the white nationalists are coming after Jews and all non-whites. The question is can they be stopped.
5
Interesting that the author does not mention Jews as a group of people that the white supremacists detest. For example in Charlottesville, they were shouting “Jews will not replace us.” Maybe doesn’t fit her too simplistic analysis of who these people resent.
6
Get rid of Lee. Keep the horse
4
The author is correct by identifying the crazy young white men who terrorized Charlottesville (the area shopping center, 23 miles from me) as not from the region, yet she curiously avoids mentioning the prime focus of their hate. They chanted "Jews will not replace us!", not immigrants, women or blacks! While they were obviously racist, they expressed the most hostility toward Jews!
3
Celebration of "Southern Culture" is not focused on our own hot, back-breaking work clearing fields, planting, harvesting and surviving harsh winters on small, family farms. It is about celebrating the neo-royal "plantation society" of the few percent of well-connected white men who bought, sold and mortgaged the free labor of African-American people -- and their children -- so that they and their elite families could live luxurious lives of balls and leisure. Like the fictional Jim Crow narratives that created them, "Lost Cause" statues are as representative of the antebellum South as Mar-a-Lago is today.
3
@CWM
Great comment I haven’t heard before. Those slave owners in Virginia all liked to think of themselves as “Cavaliers” rather than merchants and rich farmers.
2
We know an awful lot about Adolf Hitler, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a statue of him. So much for the argument that statues are required to sustain historical knowledge.
If anyone would like to erase the moonlight-and-magnolias version of Southern history common in some circles, I would suggest they read the writings of CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, in particular the “Cornerstone speech,” which lays out in painful detail the primacy of slavery in the Confederacy. It was not about “states’ rights,” period.
I was born in Georgia and have discovered many slaveholders among my ancestors, but I am certainly not proud of it. I have a great-great grandfather who died at the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee and is buried there; I have two great-great aunts who served time in the federal women’s prison on Louisville, presumably for spying, though as far as I can find no charges were ever filed. I have yet another great-great aunt from Waleska, Georgia, Matilda Archer, whose house was burned down around her in 1864 by her friends and neighbors, including the pastor of her church, because they thought she was spying for the North. (I have a transcription of Matilda’s memoir; I have not found any documents to show that her family owned slaves, and while her brother, husband, and father fought for the South, from what she wrote they did it without any enthusiasm.)
Robert E. Lee was a psychologically complicated man who suffered from severe shame and depression on many fronts. He came from a dysfunctional family with an abusive and absent father. He was not proud of his role in the Civil War. His issues with shame and low self esteem were secretly disabling. The statue in his likeness on his horse “Traveller” that currently stands in Charlottesville would cause him untold despair. He would not want it there. It was erected by Jim Crow followers and has nothing whatsoever to do with R.E.Lee the man or the general. It needs to be removed. Period.
1
There were two hundred people at Charlottesville. Tens of millions of people voted for Trump. The effort to tie Trump and his voters to this is baloney.
3
There were far more than “200” Trump-supporting neo-Nazis and Klansmen at Charlottesville, more like thousands, which the extensive footage makes obvious, and they managed to not only cause a devastating riot in which they attacked dozens and murdered a young woman.
In two years I’ve yet to read or see any Trump supporter apologize for or disavow what they stand for, and marched for, for obvious reasons: Trump supporters agree with them, and Trump needs their votes. The Charlottesville white power mob is a perfect distillation of Trump supporters, only slightly more motivated.
4
White supremacy in its many insidious forms is more difficult for this white grandfather to ignore when two of his mixed race (their dad is African American) grandkids sit beside him watching the movie Holiday Inn, one of my former Christmas favorites, and ask what's going on with all the white leads suddenly donning blackface to celebrate, of all things, Lincoln's birthday.
The movies made for us white folk, from the silent era to the 1960's anyway, are white supremacist in tone and texture. No blacks appear except as maids and buffoons; no black professionals; no blacks in seats at night clubs, in the army, in theaters. No black lives depicted at all.
Identity politics arose as a white phenomenon. We white just don't notice it.
Until our little granddaughter sits beside us wide eyed at goings on in white supremacist cinema.
Dr. Cox, you forgot the "male" in "white male supremacy." The Southern Poverty Law Center defines "male supremacist" hate groups as blaming "feminism" for society's ills. Even in an op-ed that admits that these ideologies are both white supremacist and male supremacist, the author still refers to the ideology as "white supremacist." Why? Why is racial hate given a name but not misogynist hate? And, yes, women can be and are white male supremacist. White male supremacy is an ideology, not a demographic.
3
"Sorry, that's not enough to justify the destruction of historical markers that millions of people in this country value (but not for the ugly reasons this author so sanctimoniously posits), which at their best call upon us to pause and reflect honestly about our past."
The historical markers you praise literally idolize traitors to the United States. War criminals. The people who marched in hate at Charlottesville - and their supporters - do not "pause and reflect honestly about our past." They glorify an idea that was barbaric, not noble; and based on a criminal level of entitlement as well as white supremacy and misogyny.
1
Re: preservation of Southern heritage against the monuments’ historical ties to slavery and Jim Crow.
Historical ties to slavery? True, but what they are in fact are monuments to traitors of the U.S. Enemies that killed U.S. citizens in a quest to defeat the U.S. We have no obligation to raise monuments to those who would kill us. And should hold those that would has having questionable aligience to the United States. Traitor monuments honoring traitors.
1
Calling out of the racist and violent repression represented by these woeful Confederate monuments requires opposing them with monumental figures that name the lie and the shame that accompanies the legacy of slavery in the United States. There must be a representational dialogue that shows the sorry, cruel, and ultimately evil intent of white supremacy. Don’t tear down these monuments erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy. Rather let them wither into oblivion under the confrontation served by counter-monuments that reduces each their message to pitiful diatribe.
It's important to remember that many Confederates never accepted that the Civil War had been lost, merely that the phase of it involving the use of formal armies had ended badly. Attempts to recreate slavery in some other form have never entirely ended, and still are implicit in many right wing activities, unfortunately not just limited to those of avowed white nationalists.
6
So many of the people who support these monuments claim to be patriots. The monuments depict people who took up arms against their country because they disagreed politically. This makes them traitors, not noble warriors. How would they feel if instead of taking these monuments down we created "Traitors Park"? We could add statues of Benedict Arnold and others who betrayed their country for personal gain or political reasons.
6
The supporters of the Confederacy were traitors, who sought to destroy the United States of America in order to be able to continue to own other human beings. And we are still fighting that war -- in this case, the fight about how to interpret the past is absolutely about the fight to control the future.
4
I don't think that the debate over Confederate monuments was mostly about history even before Charlottesville -- at least not for all the black people who had to walk past those monuments every day on their way to work or school or daily errands. They were a daily symbol of honor and respect towards those who had enslaved them. Faulkner was right that the past is never past. What we choose to remember and memorialize tells us what we value. Memorials to the Confederate dead -- which appear throughout the South, sometimes next to the state Capitol -- almost invariably carry inscriptions to the "noble cause" for which the dead made their sacrifice. It is long past time to stop these lies about our history. The Confederacy existed, and started the Civil War, for one reason: to preserve slavery in the states and spread it to the territories. It is truly sinful that every American is not taught that simple truth.
Beyond that truth about slavery is the further simple truth that all these men were traitors. They took up arms against their country and swore to destroy it. What other nation is littered with monuments to its traitors? No one has ever suggested erecting a statue of Benedict Arnold in Central Park. And why do we have Army bases named after traitors? Those should all be renamed. The pro-Confederate rewriting of history is the greatest propaganda coup ever foisted on the American public. It puts Russia to shame.
6
I completely agree with this opinion piece. However, I've become acutely aware of something recently and want to point it out since I find this 'mistake' occurs often. There are at least two sentences that I think should be corrected. The first one is in the fourth paragraph, 7th and 8th line of the paragraph:
"...or perhaps replaced--by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy." The word 'white' should be placed right before 'women,' so that it reads, "...by WHITE women..." Women are naturally included in the other groups (i.e., immigrants, African-Americans). The other spot I saw is in the second-to-last paragraph. The other option is to note 'women,' but then say, 'immigrant men,' and 'African-American men.' I think the way it currently appears in the article implies women of color, not sure why I read it this way, as if this isn't a white women issue, too.
I think this somehow makes it a lot clearer that white women suffer at the hands of white supremacy, even if to a lesser extent than women/men of color, especially in light of the recent information that mass killers, including those who are racist like the El Paso shooter, seem to have a common theme of misogyny.
2
Has Trump repealed Appomattox or something? How many times does Robert E Lee have to lose?
Moreover, any notion that the United Daughters of the Confederacy are THAT Kanye West-bent on slavery having somehow been a CHOICE -- per faked assumption that "slavery was no disgrace to the owner or to the owned" -- and that we "can't impose the standards of the 21st century on these Americans of the 19th century" must hold true in reverse too. That the Confederacy clearly didn't WIN in the 19th century, for example, cannot be arbitrarily ignored to elevate any false notion in the 21st century of the South having somehow WON.
Otherwise, by their own argument, what's WRONG with the Michael Vick-like 'United Dog-Slaughterers of the Confederacy' today if "Southern heritage" is somehow immune to 21stC standards whence embracing owner supremacy over the owned is still acceptable?
You can't have your MAGA fake and cheat it too!
1
I wouldn't be overstepping the mark by stating most, if not all Black Americans knew very well what Charlottesville was about. Because nothing has changed.
And that's the problem.
That's why it wasn't so much about the removal of these Confederate monuments as the fact that they were still there, and venerated one of the darkest and most barbaric chapters in this country's history.
There's no way to ignore the racist and white supremacist vision of America that they represent, and it's certainly nothing to be proud of.
And that the debate over removing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee should set off such pandemonium that would ultimately result in several clashes and the death of a protester should have been expected, especially since a resurgent right-wing white nationalist movement has made more of an appearance on the political stage of late -- no doubt emboldened by some of the rhetoric coming out of this President's mouth, which is also why they've claimed him as one of their own.
Whatever the case may be, it was chilling to see hundreds of angry red-faced white men screaming hate as they marched in line with their tiki-torches.
It could have easily been a lynching mob.
Or the prelude to Kristallnacht.
I shudder to think of both.
And I ask myself is THIS what has changed in America?
4
I watched a panel on CBS, this morning, and it seems that not much as changed in Charlottesville. There, racism was just hiding under the surface, but it's out in the open now. I think I prefer it out in the open--easier to identify and fight.
1
Last years horrible event in Charlottesville made me think of a simple solution to this problem of these monuments. We all know the statues were strategiacally placed in a kind of 'propaganda-fashion' here and there around the South ( mostly ) Some citizens don't want to see them melted down to make play-ground equipment for inner-city youth, so why not take them all from public view finally & put them all in a big museum on the Mason-Dixon Line. Charge a nominal admission to visit them with the proceeds going to the ACLU or the NAACP or some kind of group that does good for all people.
1
A logical case can be made that Trump has invaded America. First, we know the media underestimates and normalizes Trump, his actions; missing his acceleration and his leveling up. Instead, viewing each act as separate/unconnected, they get the story but not the narrative.
The narrative is different. Begin with his descent, his insults on stage, his belittling/demeaning/physical assaults on women; his consistent lack of veracity, his complete absence of details, his eagerness at every turn for fights, his wrong-headed policies and decisions.
In total, these incidents/stories add up to oppositional defiance. A disorder marked by a willful phantasmagoria of defiance and bitter/angry resistance to authority. This understanding requires inductive logic. But media stories are not inductive; ethics and profits say no.
For an oppositional-defiant personality, the presidency is a dream! You can make threats, punch with money, call out countries, reward bad boys, offer back door quid pro quos, lock children in cages without hygiene and proper nutrition, raise fees, and shut down government. 4/8
You can initiate lethal non-violence, scatter statistics and use federal agents belonging to a racist Facebook group to invade America's communities. You can smile, thumbs-up, with an orphaned infant, parents killed by a shooter quoting your racist phrases as his motive.
Inductive conclusions demand wide evidentiary support. If the inductive model is right, Trump is leveling up.
2
In this context, not "Southern heritage"--the phrase appears twice in the op-ed--but "Confederate heritage." Lots of us in the South cherish sweet tea, barbecue, soft manners, children saying "Yes ma'am," and long, mild autumns--while being revulsed at "Confederate heritage." (By the way, I can't presume to speak for black southerners, but I'll bet I just did.)
2
@Steven T. Corneliussen, so well put! And how about some really great music: from Gospel, to Ragtime, to Jazz, to Dixieland, to Country-- that's a history to celebrate! How about some great universities: Georgia Tech, Morehouse, U of Virginia, William and Mary, Vanderbilt, U of NC- just to name a few. American lit would be incomplete without Twain, Faulkner, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, and so many more contributors. And who among us has not whiled away a summer afternoon racing through a John Grisham novel, or Gone with the Wind? So gosh yes, the south can proudly embrace Southern heritage! The treason of the civil war? The codification of the Jim Crow era? The resistance to the federal government in the implementation of 60s civil rights protections? Nope-- as you say, that confederate heritage needs to be put into a well-curated museum, forever. Imagine the cleansing, healing, and uniting effects it would have on ALL Americans.
3
The male leaders of the mostly male protesters in Charlottesville gave speeches in the afternoon before the march. In those speeches, the male leaders spewed vitriol at "feminism" and "feminists." The Southern Poverty Law Center defines male supremacist hate groups as those groups blaming "feminism" and "feminists" for society's ills. Other media outlets have finally realized that this extremism is not just about race. There's a reason these mass shooters are nearly all male. There's a reason the alt-right recruits from the manopshere. The Anti-Defamation League published a report last year on the connection between white supremacy and misogynist ideologies. The point is not tangential. It is foundational. This incessant reporting on race is missing the elephant in the room. We all can see it. The groups that monitor extremism can see it. It's tragic to read op-eds by female writers who completely disregard it. It would be like an African-American writer being oblivious to a global racial hate movement.
3
Thank you for this column, Ms. Cox. I have lived in South Carolina my entire life, a descendant of humble German farmers who settled the South Carolina backcountry in the mid-eighteen century. Many of my ancestors fought and died in the Civil War as private soldiers. Those who survived it returned to their homes impoverished, struggling simply to survive on their ruined farms. For them, the Civil War was something to be forgotten, not commemorated. For them, the monuments to Confederate generals erected at local court houses and government buildings during the Jim Crowe years quickly faded into the background. My father, a veteran of WWII, flew the American flag, not the Stars and Bars. I have never given much thought to those Confederate monuments until reading your column, but it does appear to me that their purpose was more in tune with the defiance and provocation of Jim Crowe, than with a nostalgic form of historical commemoration, using memory as a way to perpetuate and animate a sense of unresolved historical grievance and antagonism. The irony is that the current provocateur-in-chief is not a Southerner, but a New Yorker.
"The past has a future we never expect." Javier Marias
8
Absolutely right. The Lost Cause that inspired the founding of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other such organizations, didn’t rise out of some misplaced nostalgia for the Confederacy, The movement, begun by a former Confederate general Jubal Early, deliberately created and promoted a false, heroic version of the Confederacy in the hope, and with an assortment of subversive efforts, that they could eventually revive it as a governing system. Not only did the Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy erect statues all over the country, they were very sucessful in lobbying to get school textbooks rewritten with their paternalistic view of slavery and claims of victimization at the hands of the federal government that are still dominating political discourse today. The statues represent a false history and are powerfully subversive. What we need is something more akin to truth and reconciliation. If the Daughters of the Confederacy were sincere in wanting to change their legacy, they would lead the way on something like that.
6
@Maggie
I live next to Jubal Early Drive and it makes me sick when I think of it. I’m just glad it’s not my address - that would be worse than a statue.
This makes me sad. I'm a liberal Democrat that has traced my ancestry to the antebellum South. I felt a pang of pride when I saw my last name on a plaque commemorating a Confederate battery at Gettysburg. I've rarely been more affected then I was when I walked down the lane at Appommatox Court House and imagined the Army of the Potomac saluting the Army of Northern Virginia as they stacked their arms in surrender. I'll argue until I'm blue in the face that Lee's impression of slavery was wrong by today's morality, but no worse than that held by Generals Sherman or McClellan. I'll also concede that whatever their personal politics, Sherman's war was to end slavery, and Lee's to preserve it (McClellan is his own story). And for all that, I take issue with contemporary Northerners who glibly say "we should have let the South go." It's insulting to think that the northern fight to preserve the union and end slavery shouldn't have been fought.
Perhaps I'm the last person that's conflicted on this. The historiography of the Confederacy is unquestionably gross. The history itself is messy at best. But there was a certain type of pride in Lee's surrender, an honor to the poor whites that took up arms for a cause that many of them didn't grasp. I'm unwilling to say that my ancestors were evil for the role they played in the Confederacy. And I'm appalled that their legacy has coopted and corrupted in such a vile fashion.
105
Agree completely. Well said.
This country reconciled, North and South, long before any of us were born. They fought and the South lost, and the West expanded.
The notion that Southerners should no longer honor their dead is unheard of.
We, none of us now living, have been bought or sold as chattel.
The past needs remembering, soberly, with humility and gratitude- not redefinition to suit current political moods. Faddish.
41
@Jack You are spot on in your analysis. I'd only add that while both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E Lee are personal heroes of mine, they were both racists. They had their moral failings just like the rest of us. If you actually take the time to read the letters written by Union and Confederate soldiers, many of whom were drafted or joined the army out of a sense of patriotism, adventure or peer pressure, you find some interesting motivations. The Union soldiers write about preserving the Union and protecting their country. Many also write about ending slavery.
The Confederate soldiers write about protecting their country, defending their homes and families, and some also write about preserving slavery and their "way of life" which obviously included slavery but also included an agricultural economy point of view.
As a reminder, most of the Civil War was fought on Southern soil and both slave-owner and non-slave owner families suffered tremendously-- homes and farms destroyed, food and personal property looted, women and children turned into homeless refugees.
For both Union and Confederate soldiers, when they mention black people, their viewpoints are all over the board-- indifference, racist hostility, amusement, sometimes compassion.
Monuments and statues help us remember our history and hopefully learn not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
31
@Jack and @American
Certian type of pride in Lee's surrender
Humility and gratitude.
Really?
Than why are all the statues to Lee and other leaders of the effort to break away and kill U.S. citizens always shown in proud defiant poses and not in surrender or humility?
Yes. Put the names of the fallen on plaques but raising monuments to those who fought against our country (traitors) to glorify them and our cause is keeping the war going after it is well over and the reconciliation you claim to want was promoted by Lee himself. Where is the monument to that?
86
Thank you Ms Cox for the article and its insight into the white supremacist and Southern persona. I was born and raised in Los Angeles beginning over 74 years ago. My paternal family is rooted in the tobacco fields of Elkins, Surry County, North Carolina. My paternal great grandfather, served in the 1st Regiment North Carolina Cavalry during the Civil War, or The War Between the States as my Father would admonish me. I vividly recall the first of many times my Father would remind me of my Southern heritage and that our family had Slaves. There was one caveat my Father would always add when describing this part of our family history. “Your great grandfather had slaves, but he took good care of them”. Regretfully, this might mind set is still alive and well in America.
99
As my Midwest roots are anchored in the region from which the Union Army's Iron Brigade was mustered, and because an indelible memory from my childhood includes the courthouse display memorializing the history of that Wisconsin unit within the northern side of the first floor of that building in Lancaster, it has never made sense to me that the people who led the slaveholder side of the national tragedy we call the Civil War (and adamantly not the "War Between the States") should be able to erect monuments to the "glory" and "heroism" of what they called "The Lost Cause."
And yet the Johnny Reb statues, sometimes supplanted by statues of Confederate generals, abound.
To me, personally, it's a thumb in the eye of the men who came from my hometown, too many of whom died fighting - from their perspective - against slavery.
Why has it been necessary to "make nice" with the sensibilities of the offspring of people who participated in an armed rebellion against the United States?
The sooner those statues come down, the better.
523
@rds--I'd like to see ALL of them hauled to a central site, preferably in the deep South, where they can be put into perspective, and visited on purpose, not casually invading local parks, all over the country. Listen to the black people who are offended and frightened by these monuments. Their opinions should come first, since they have suffered the most, and are still suffering.
48
As a granddaughter of the Confederacy and of slaveholders I can say unequivocally that the monuments are frightening symbols of a horrific past and should be removed from town squares. I am not proud of my ancestors. They committed crimes against humanity; enslavement of human beings was and is immoral.
The stories of slavery need to be told, lest we forget. We have distorted and denied the horrific realities of slavery.
Memorials to the enslaved are slowly becoming part of Southern landscape. Preserving the REAL history of slavery is important. Historical preservationists have begun to realize the importance of restoring and preserving relics of slavery as a way to ensure the truth is not forgotten. I am involved in preserving a cemetery in Shannon, Georgia where remains of people enslaved by my ancestors are buried. Slaves were buried separately from whites, their burial grounds often relegated to wooded areas away from the plantations. Most slave cemeteries throughout the South have been destroyed and built over literally burying the history, memories, ancestry of Southern slaves and their lives.
Through preservation efforts Southerners can preserve the truths of slavery, of antebellum Southern life, and tell the stories of enslavement. And we can put the old Confederate generals in their place, perhaps in Confederate cemeteries, symbolizing the blessed END of that horrific chapter of US history.
369
@Ellen S.
No gainsaying any of that. Thanks for writing it.
11
It's interesting that even my northern primary/secondary school education in the late fifties-sixties tended to inculcate in us more than just a grudging respect for the Confederate cause; the South had the better generals; more gallant and courageous soldiers with a true commitment to their cause as opposed to the Union conscripts; a motivation to defend their homeland against savage attack. They were the scrappy underdogs, fighting for principle, nobly soldiering on against the overwhelming material superiority of the industrial North.
Given this, one can easily imagine the message promulgated in the (segregated) schools of the south during that time.
96
@Len Safhay
Much of what you were taught was true but that does outweigh the moral need to defeat them. Fighting to preserve and expand the institution of slavery outweighs whatever the merits of capable military leaders and commitment of the troops. The same could be said about the Germans and Japanese in world war 2
16
@Len Safhay
I went to school in the sixties/seventies in the north and that was most certainly NOT what I heard about the confederate "cause" from my teachers or from my parents.
Perhaps I heard a more factual rendition since my mother was born and raised in the north and my father was born (dirt poor) and raised in the south. My mother's first visit to Mississippi (where they would end up getting married a few months later) was horiffiying to her. My Dad had to constantly explain "no, not that water fountain", "not that seat on the bus", "not that seat at the counter". And regardless of what some of my Dad's side of the family may have thought, he made it very clear to us that that part of our southern heritage was absolutely nothing to be proud of. He scoffed at people who couldn't give up the past with their guns and confederate flags. His favorite remark was along the lines of "I guess they still don't realize they were the losers".
30
@Len Safhay
In the northern schools when I was growing up in the 1940s and '50s, we were repeatedly told that "the Civil War wasn't really about slavery," but about an "economic system."
Even in the north, little children were being subjected to the lies and myths about the "nobility" of the Confederacy.
28
It's possible that for those of us who are left of center this struggle over monuments is the wrong battle to have at this point. While the Myth of the Lost Cause needs to be rejected completely in our public schools, some of this debate verges on university campus politics of triviality (our Ivy League campuses are roiled over the possibility, just the possibility, of a sombrero being worn on Halloween) spilling over into our larger public debate. Could we not make more headway on the issues of extreme inequality, climate change and cleaning up the environment, clean energy, affordable education, medical care for everyone, equal rights for all, protecting women's reproductive rights, etc., if we addressed people directly on these issues rather than urging the smashing the "white male patriarchy"? So many of our friends on college campuses simply provide ammunition for the rightwing noise machine.
I'd personally like to see the monuments moved, but the entire nation is not going to be "woke". We don't need to heedlessly further polarization at this point. We're losing valuable time because of our ethnic divisions. Look at hay made by the tight over the ludicrous footage of the debate at the Democratic Socialists of America Convention held in Atlanta recently. We need to think more strategically.
54
@Mark Johnson
"(our Ivy League campuses are roiled over the possibility, just the possibility, of a sombrero being worn on Halloween)"
A recent editorial summed up the political situation as follows: the liberals have banned sombreros on Halloween, and the conservatives have taken over the judiciary branch.
19
@Mark Johnson-if you’re looking for polarization you have no reason to look at college campuses, if that bothers you. You need only look at the latest mass shootings and police brutality cases. Then tell us who is doing the polarizing.
7
@Mark
They're certainly not ethically equivalent nor equivalent in importance, but neither are they mutually exclusive. Mr. Johnson's essential point is not to be stupid when it comes to electoral politics and this unabashed lefty agrees with him.
7
People and situations are complex. How are we in 2019 able to judge decisions made by others in a very different historical context? Why should the accomplishments of someone like Lee be totally ignored just because he fought for the Confederate cause?
5
@JEG -- The accomplishments of Robert E. Lee: He committed treason against his country, and then lost the war, dude, quite the accomplishments. Oh, and his home and estate in Arlington was confiscated and became the Arlington National Cemetery. So at least his former property had an accomplishment.
3
@JEG Merriam-webster definition of treason: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance. Lee was a traitor and he committed treason. There should be no statues to any Confederate soldier. How many statues of Benedict Arnold have you seen?
3
Please list Lee's "accomplishments."
3
There’s a big difference between recognising, studying, mourning certain pieces of the past of one’s country and turning that past into a symbol of one’s biases. The making of modern America is bloodier and more shocking than many know or care to know. I can only read about historical slavery and the attempted extermination of our native Americans several times removed. I usually avoid books that make me marvel that the writer could keep sane finding out who we really are, we apple-pie, aw-shucks American people, who waving several flags, some literal and some symbolic, and attempted two great slaughters. One, the American tribes and two, and this one continues today, people whose skins are not what we call white.
The joke is on we white people, though, as in the not so distant future we will just be an oddity that once roamed the earth for a short while as our warming planet will be a less welcoming place to the melatonin-challenged.
It things weren’t so dire, I might laugh.
3
I do not know if this really occurred; I read, online, that in Belgium a statue of King Leopold II had a hand or an arm cut off – in protest of his actions in the past, and it was left that way. Perhaps somehow adjust these monuments rather than trying to erase memories.
2
@Mark Adding googly eyes works for me. Nothing deflates a Tough Guy like ridicule, it should become America's new growth industry.
2
We are stuck in the aftermaths of the Atlantic Slave Trade. I do not see how the United Daughters of the Confederacy are not part of that extended history. That organization has little other reason for its existence.
It is difficult to get rid of the imagery yet remember the past for what it was, in all its ugly forms. What counts more is recognizing that past: a brutal war to protect slavery. Even if the monuments are purged, that is not enough. How and why do we preserve a memory that is so odious that is does not obstruct the way forward--as it continues to do?
2
@JSK Well, you had to go and do it. You built up to a thundering moral crescendo.... and then let us down. It's not "enough" to melt down all the statues? What WOULD be enough? Ban the UDC from public life? Standardize history texts? Specifically, what would you have us do?
1
@George
We should be modifying our entire grade and high school educational system to understand the damages done by the Atlantic Slave trade and its after-effects in the USA. Destroying statues without teaching what developed and why is not enough. Destroying statues will not pick up where the Civil Rights movement left off.
The education of our children would take far more than I could offer. I am certain that revisionist history texts are not the way to do it (such as offered by the Texas Board of Education: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/witness-a-texas-showdown-over-teaching-standards/ ).
@JSK But how? Education is one of those (big) perogatives that flow to the states because not reserved for the Federal government. It's a Constitution thing, instituting a standardized curriculum for the whole country (and enforcing it) would require putting some real police-state mechanisms in place. Not a place I want to be.
Should we examine the rhetoric of the increasingly extremist US left, including that of the "squad" and several current Democratic candidates for President, for the near verbatim content it borrows from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Mao? The last four, parroting the dangerous nonsense of the first, were - objectively - responsible for the deliberate murder of more than one hundred million citizens in the countries they "governed" with their oppressive, state driven terrorism, pitched under the rubric of furthering "equality."
Ever wonder why people still flee those countries (when they can) to relocate to the US where they won't be jailed (or worse) for disagreeing with their political saviors?
Why emulate such obviously failed politics?
2
Most of this pieces grounded in historical reality, although the monument issue tends to displace a larger, more fundamental problem. There has not been the will -- since the end of Radical Reconstruction -- for national leaders to say forthrightly that the Confederacy was all about defending slavery; and that it was evil and treasonous.
What is weird -- although totally in keeping with progressive fashion -- is the gratuitous statement that follows the sentence, "But there is a large group of white Americans who are hesitant to acknowledge the link between white supremacist ideology and Confederate monuments." The author continues -- without any support whatsoever -- by asserting, "They are the same Americans who hesitate to criticize an inhumane immigration policy..." The attempt to paint anyone who believes in any restriction of immigration whatsoever as racist or xenophobic (or, at best, unwilling to acknowledge that any expression of concern about unlimited illegal immigration can only come from malignant views) is factually incorrect, ignores the historical record (including consistent support for immigration restriction from labor unions and other progressive forces until the very recent past), and provides confirmation to many voters that progressives have indeed gotten drunk on open-borders Kool-Aid.
3
Walk around any park in the U.S.A. and the E.U. and all you see is images of dead white men and women. They represent their contributions to medicine, music, literature, civics, liberty, government, education, and war. One can destroy them all but their sacrifices will not be undone regardless of one’s opinion of their merits or lack of merits. They lived in a different times, different places, and different situations of which no amount of political correctness that anyone assigns to them can ever be erased or dissolved or absolved...they are dead forever and their glory was theirs when they lived.
4
@Charlie It's no political correctness. Confederate soldiers were traitors and there should be no statues of them anywhere in the United States. They lost. Sorry.
4
There are no monuments to Hitler or his allies.
4
… we should not “impose the standards of the 21st century on these Americans of the 19th century.” Isn't that backwards? History will always be revisionist as long as those who write it, read it and interpret it exist. This is simply the calculus of human nature, at its best and its worst, regardless of when or where it takes place. 'Cultures' and 'societies' will always be honored or vilified or both.
Lost in your plea for a deeper understanding of the racism that has always been the four-square support and, dare I say it, the raison d'être of the commercial, political, spiritual and scientific hegemony of white supremacy.
These Confederate monuments are a spike in the eye of the "great American experiment." These frozen-in-place stony memories of racism go wide around the unassailable fact that the Confederacy was a movement in place to assault the mother country and to replace it with their vision of the still-building nation.
"America: love it or leave it!" was the right's response to the rioting that broke out afresh in the late 1960's. That was a time that the Republican Party expropriated the mantle of self-righteousness explicitly to divide the country along the Rubicons of another culture war. Whither patriotism now and the white nationalists' thirst for a return to government-sanctioned white supremacy?
The angry white men who fear "displacement" ignore the fact that the stone gargoyles of the "particular institution" and their "heroic" defenders were traitors to their nation. What would be their response if Vladimir Putin's or Xi's soldiers attacked and defeated America to establish a foreign government here? Would there be outrage and defiance? One thinks not.
Throughout our history, we have always been two Americas. Barack Obama's presidency scaled the heights of what this nation can do with tolerance. The Confederate monuments, under Trump, promise what?
2
As bad as the monuments are, the confederate flags are worse. And they fly so often with flags naming America's president.
This is our history, this is our present -- but it cannot be our future.
6
@Kathryn
The monuments and the Confederate flags are one and the same.
2
In addition to these valid points in the article, I never understood monuments to traitorous secessionists who were defeated in battle, and at great cost. Replace them with statues of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and other true American patriots!
2
Racism is not the underbelly of the beast.It is the heart and soul.It is a dominant part of our nature. Only culture can restrain it, and culture is a frail veneer, easily ripped of to reveal the base structure.
When we live in an era in which learning, science, history and the norms of decency are mocked and derided, there is little chance the humane elements can control the beast .
3
For those of us with no southern heritage and whose ancestors came much more recently (my mother's parents were born in Europe) this tell us much that we frankly did not know, "Lizzie George Henderson, an early president general of the organization, praised her father, Senator James Z. George, for writing the Mississippi Plan of 1890, which systematically excluded black men from politics. According to Henderson, the plan, adopted by other states of the former Confederacy, placed “white supremacy on an enduring and constitutional basis.”
Now we do. This tells me that the monuments do not deserve to be preserved. Mediocre as art, they are malign in spirit.
2
What if it’s really true that no one can be innocent or neutral with regard to Confederate monuments any more... and those people who used to content themselves with an innocent neutrality break for white nationalism?
2
The descendants of Robert E. Lee should come forward and defend the honor of their ancestor by coming out against white nationalism and for the removal of the statue until such time as this present fever has passed. Lee himself would probably approve, were he available for comment.
1
@RjW Several have.
2
Not everyone agreed with our involvement in the war in Vietnam, yet we honor those who fought and died for the interest of our country. We have a memorial for them in Washington DC. I am hoping people will not propose to tear it down.
Demonstrating against removing statues raised in heroes
honor is legitimate. The demonstrators did have a permit to do so. It was unfortunate that some fascist group joined in later. Having said that Trump was right to say that there were some decent people were amongst them, the ones who wanted to keep the statue in the park
4
I don't think that there's any outcry for the removal of contemporaneous or near contemporaneous memorials to ordinary soldiers. It's the memorials to "hero" generals and statues erected in the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras--statues that are mere icons of the "Lost Cause--that many of us are asking to have removed from places of honor.
7
@Marika, actually the Vietnam Memorial is not intended to honor a war that was "in the interest of our country." It was designed to honor the ordinary soldiers who fought and died in a tragic wasteful war. It was intended to allow the living to share their grief: that is, the surviving family members who lost these people, the troops who came home with survivors's guilt, addictions, PTSD or "just" a haunted past. It was designed for all of us, for all time, to recognize the folly of war for the sake of war. It is certainly NOT a monument to the folks who led, and misled, and persisted in this war-- Dulles, LBJ, Nixon, countless generals, etc. If our Vietnam Memorial had been constructed to honor those who led this folly-- as most of the Confederate monuments assuredly are--I daresay there would be a dramatic movement to destroy it-- perhaps led by the ordinary guys who fought in the war. In part BECAUSE of its simple beauty and message, this honored memorial will certainly not be torn down. Nobody is proposing this. Your argument is thus specious.
3
@Marika Please come back up from the rabbit hole you just fell down. Is it not clear that the soldiers in Vietnam were acting under the (arguably misguided) direction of the US government, ostensibly on behalf of the nation. The Confederate rebels were traitors.
6
Attaching the moniker white people to the institution of slavery ignores the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands of northern men and families who mourned their dead who died to end slavery. A more appropriate description which does not overlook the northern soldiers role in this epic struggle would be southern white people.
Thank you to Prof. Cox for adding more to my knowledge and understanding of the historical roots of white supremacy. I didn't think it possible, as a country, we'd find virulent and violent white supremacist thinking (and people) gaining power, especially in the 21st Century. These statues need to be housed somewhere in a teaching museum where the whole story of America's toxic past and current racism is exposed.
1
Why not keep all the monuments built in the Jim Crow era - but have made and placed next to them statues of black people. Black people whose descendants where slaves and who after the civil war rose to the heights of US society and leadership. There is a multitude of them. It would be impossible to see one without the other.
We could then have a proper discussion of the merits of both systems in front of representatives of these systems. After the talking had worn out there might be some reason brought to the issue.
3
@GRAHAM ASHTON Outside Atlanta is the Stone Mountain monument. There is lots of room still to add Dr. Martin Luther King. Just sayin'.
4
In 2008 we elected our first African-American President, a man of "hope" for all our citizens. I love that man. President Obama is a person of substance, grace, a man of thought and high intellect, a wonderful husband and father to their daughters.
Eight years later this country elected a racist. And I have to ask myself, is this my country anymore? I'm not sure now. What went so terribly wrong, color of one's skin means nothing, it's what's inside that counts. There is so much hatred out there, and there seems to be no end to it.
I guess we can just vote and hope the our future leaders will bring us out of this nightmare.
Thank you Dr. Cox for your insight.
3
I see the Confederate Stars and Bars occasionally flown in my home state of Connecticut. I know it isn't being displayed for sentimental purposes alone. When I see it on a vehicle, always a pickup truck, there is a Trump bumper sticker or two as well.
Is Trump Jefferson Davis's successor? Did the South prevail after all?
4
@Ralph Averill Nope. Trump is a Yankee opportunist, a reviled Carpetbagger. Davis was a weak and stupid Southern opportunist. Oh, wait... well, never mind, then.
2
A month after the Charlottesville protests and an evil attack, I contacted Buddy Dyer, the mayor of Orlando, asking him why there was still a statue of a Confederate soldier on top of a very tall pedestal on the side of Lake Eola in downtown Orlando. He replied that he had just had it removed the previous day. I thanked him for his actions.
If one is going to have statues of those that fought for slavery, then either remove them completely, or else there should be equivalent statues of those that fought to abolish it built right next to them, so that the full history can be properly appreciated.
2
Read the history of these monuments. They were chiefly erected as reminders of white power over black lives, and their back stories often say so explicitly. Indeed, many bear inscriptions that refer to states’ rights or otherwise invoke ideologies closely tied to “lost cause” revisionism that paints African Americans as unworthy of freedom and self rule.
Those who complain of “erasing history” ignore several key facts. One, most of these monuments were mass produced—literally mail-ordered, in many cases—and have no real “artistic” value. Two, not everything old is “historic.” No generation is bound to eternally revere whatever monuments prior folk chose to erect. And three, to the extent a *few* Confederate monuments are deemed to have historic or artistic value, they can be placed in museums or recontextualized by placing other markers nearby. There is no reason to ask black Americans to live, work and go to school in the shadow of monuments erected to “commemorate” those who committed treason in a “valiant” effort to enslave their fellow humans on account of the color of their skin.
Treason. Taking up arms against the United States is the definition of the term. And slavery was and is an abomination. Germans do not erect elaborate monuments praising the valor and courage of those who fought for Nazism—and this is not decried as a lack of respect for “history.” Enough from the apologists for treason and brutality.
4
@J Our Constitution is the only thing that keeps us from jailing and crushing with civil penalties anyone celebrating with the Stars and Bars.
1
"They feel emboldened by the racist vision that unites America’s white-supremacist past and the future they are fighting for — one in which people of color and women are again subjugated under the rule of white men."
The Times had a story yesterday about how many mass shooters attacking those they feel are "stealing" their place in this country also harbor deep-seated feelings of misogyny. I hadn't realized how much this anger towards women's independence and self-sufficiency were driving their feelings, even if simply triggered by female rejection over the years.
I hadn't really considered this argument about the future versus the past when it comes to the monuments, until reading this piece. Of course it makes perfect sense: White supremacy is about restoring the "rightful" role of white males who feel all those uppity folks of color, immigrants, and women have stolen their power.
Which is why they probably gravitate towards the authoritarian Trump, hoping he'll continue to grab power and make sure their "rightful due" is once more theirs.
3
White supremacists do not represent the most important racial issue in America. Hundreds marching in Charlottesville, or the few hundred protesting at other locations are but a small minority of the population. Similarly, while utterly deplorable and horrifying, the insane individuals motivated to kill minorities by racist propaganda again are a very small minority.
America's nightmare are the millions, perhaps more than half of the nation, that harbor racist attitudes deep in their minds and souls. That deeply seeded racism resulted in Trump's election. That racism continues to prevent any solution to racist policies leading to segregation, economic deprivation, incarceration of minorities, lack of education, the break up of families and the myriad of other social and economic problems plaguing Blacks. We must attack open racism, but we must also try to solve the barely hidden racism infecting a majority of Americans.
5
Neo-nazis in Europe, in countries where swastikas are banned, use the Confederate flag instead. While some may assert that the history of the South has been hijacked by fascists, many assume that the coded messages were simply recognized and are being amplified. I believe that the South holds principles of decency and virtue which are distinct from the traditions of slavery, and these should be celebrated as part of a southern identity. But the former requires the repudiation of the latter, and even disowning those symbols that have been co-opted by white supremacism.
2
"Ms. Crutchers, like other modern defenders of the Confederate past, suggests that such assertions are just a matter of interpretation and historical relativism, and that we should not 'impose the standards of the 21st century on these Americans of the 19th century.'"
This is such nonsense. The standards of their own contemporaries were diametrically opposed and were strong enough that many died to end slavery and stop the secession of the Confederate States.
2
Until we can acknowledge how horrific slavery was and how we still suffer it’s consequences, we cannot truly move forward as a nation. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I believe that we need to have an authentic conversation about reparations. Removing the monuments to southern generals is a good starting point but it shouldn’t end there. White supremacy is an evil that is harming our citizenry and it must end.
2
“He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.” -- George Orwell
Prof. Karen L Cox's has shown how the racists controlled the narrative in the South. She wants to defeat them by removing their monuments.
Cox is correct that the American government was racist from the git-go. Yet, the remedy she advocates is limited to Confederate monuments.
Full restitution for slavery, Jim Crow and all other forms of racism is necessary for addressing racial injustice. So is returning all land stolen from Native American tribes.
Removing monuments glorifying supporters of slavery, such as the signers of the U.S. Constitution and Confederacy officials should be viewed as part of the remedy.
Since past generations rejected racial justice -- that can never excuse us prolonging racial injustice. Some fear divisiveness, but that can never excuse cowardice.
Racial justice can't be limited to opposing racists in Charlottesville shouting, "Jews will not replace us." We should be simply and resolutely motivated by what is right!
Defeating the Charlottesville racists is a good small step, but we must keep sight of our ethical goal -- racial justice.
4
Slavery and a uniquely American version of racism is inextricably bound into the Confederate idea.
However, the Civil War devastated the South. A lot more was harmed than just slave owning. Wars do that.
Post War, there was a great deal of bitterness in the South about much more in addition to feelings about slavery and racism.
We tend to overlook those other interests now, in our present focus on racism and its roots in race-based slavery. That is because those issues are more nearly resolved, though not completely, while racism festers and does a lot of immediate harm.
The old movements were about racism and slavery, but they were also about much else. When we look back and see only fragments, we misunderstand and offend.
We also miss opportunities to win over and heal. Current talk about how Confederates were traitors and should have been more severely punished is a return to the worst of the post War world. It distracts from current needs to overcome the racial heritage of slavery.
2
@Mark Thomason You mention repeatedly that the devastation of the Old South was about "much else" than race and slavery, yet never tell us what all these "other interests" are.
While I'm no mind-reader, I anticipate the usual litany about crushing the economies, built on slavery, of the Confederate states, radically altering the cultures, created and enabled by slavery, of the Confederate states, and diminishing the rights -- necessitated by the institution of slavery -- of the Confederate states.
So please, do spell out what all these "other interests" -- beyond race and the enforced uncompensated labor of kidnapped people treated as livestock -- are, and help us understand why, 150 years later, so many Americans somehow feel justified in embracing the symbols of a racist, slavery-enabled Confederacy.
3
My great great grandparents both served in the northern army during the civil war. They were medical people rather than soldiers but were at huge battles like Chancellorsville and Peach Tree Creek. They both were captured and held in Confederate prisons until released as non-combatants. So the Civil War was always fascinating to me, especially since I knew their grandson very well while growing up. Lee was always a sympathetic character for his moxy as a general and the loyalty he inspired from his men. However, not only was he fighting to preserve slavery but he was fighting for the destruction of the Constitution. If the Confederacy had succeeded what kind of credibility would that document have achieved in later generations? Among other questions raised by the Civil War. The one good thing about Lee is that he, unlike Jefferson Davis, did not want the war to continue through guerrilla action and told his army to go home, fix their farms and be good citizens of the US. Personally though I don't think he should have a statue in the city square. He should be studied for those still interested in that period. Remember what Lincoln said, "with malice toward none and charity for all." It was such a bitter war best not to fight it over again. Plenty of other fights to take on in real time.
8
Professor Cox and others are opening up to many the sordid, cloaked in dog whistle language embedded in the Southern American Civil War version history. Before Trump, valid historical analysis never reached everyday discussions. Now, we see important, accurate stories of the dark side of racism, and the undeniable causes behind the Civil War.
Professor Cox, and others like Yale’s David Blight, have an accurate historical narrative, and thanks to Trump, a megaphone to put out the truth. It puts a lie to the champions of the South Civil War narrative. Dr. Cox, Dr. Blight, and others, keep it coming.
8
The removal of Confederate monuments has had no tangible positive effect on anyone's life as far as I can see. But, it has stirred up a hornets nest of anger that has led to violence and radicalization. Is this what success looks like? Why not focus on the future? The nation has present and real imperfections - no need to reach back to find wrongs to be righted. Let's fix the future - the past is gone.
12
@Dino
So, how many people have you asked? I know several people from Baltimore and New Orleans, for instance, who tell me what a great lift they feel in their heart now whenever they pass the sites of the removed monuments and recall how much the regular sight of those worshipful statues made them negative, irritable, and frustrated in the past. They would definitely say the removals made a tangible and deeply impactful improvement in their lives.
I am a New Yorker, where Confederate monuments are almost non-existent. But when ever I reflect on the removal of the the Lee and Jackson busts from the Hall of Fame here, I smile and fell good about my country.
9
@Dino Of course removing these statues will not change American culture in an instant, like flipping a light switch. When you are dealing with a society of hundreds of millions of people change comes slowly. But removing these horrible symbols that are a rallying point for these hateful movements is a start. You can't "fix the future" until you deal with the past that future is built upon.
I live in Charlottesville, and I want future generations of children here to grow up in a place where there are not monuments to past, and touchstones for future, white supremacy.
Ask yourself, should we allow new confederate monuments to be erected? Why not?
2
@Dino, you assert that the "removal of Confederate monuments has had no tangible positive effect on anyone's life as far as I can see". Perhaps you should ask that ancestors of slaves whether their removal has had an effect. They were the major victims of the Civil War and the reason the North fought the war against the Secessionists. How would you feel if you were black to see these monuments (which were not built during antebellum years but after the war had been over for decades) as you go to work or take your kids to school. Your comment demonstrates extreme lack of empathy to such citizens. As a white Southern Jew, if I went to Germany (where I have been repeatedly) and saw statues of Hitler and other Nazis I would be so appalled I would feel the need to leave the country immediately).
3
If one is not sure if Confederate flags and statues are a symbol of white supremacy, one only needs to look at a couple points in history. When the southern states left the Union, their state legislatures wrote Letters of Secession in which they made it abundantly clear this was not about abstract principles; it was about slavery.
Next, look at when Confederate flags became popular again. Obviously, southern state capitals could not fly that flag from their capital domes in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended. When did they make their reappearance? In the 1960s, to protest the Civil Rights Movement.
There's no question, really, about what the Confederacy represented then or now.
69
@Tim
Well said. The flags also came out at KKK rallies and parades.
Slavery, and the controversy it provoked in the antebellum period, fostered a greater southern loyalty to one's state than to the Union. Robert E. Lee, who had served loyally in the American army for decades, was offered command of federal troops in the crisis of 1861. This son of Virginia famously responded that he could not raise his sword against his home state, but he subsequently proved perfectly willing to use that weapon against the US after Virginia seceded. In contrast, his hero, George Washington, had told a cabinet member in 1795 that, if the nation split apart over slavery, he would side with the free states. Unlike Lee, Washington's primary loyalty was to the nation he had helped to create.
While thousands of white southerners in 1861 emulated Washington and fought in the Union army, most sided with their state. Even after the war that commitment to state over nation endured. The celebration of the "lost cause," symbolized by the erection of military monuments at the turn of the century and later, reflected a continued commitment to the Confederacy but also a strong identification with the "rights" of their states in opposition to federal "tyranny." The people of Vicksburg, moreover, refused to honor the Fourth of July until well into the 20th century.
This state loyalty, although much attenuated today, still finds expression in skepticism over the expansion of federal power. Southern heritage buttresses this state loyalty.
32
@James Lee
An excellent set of points. To illustrate further, if the monuments are cultural and about the Confederacy rather than about White Supremacy, why are there no monuments to General Longstreet? Lee’s #2, and regarded during the war and just after as part of a holy trifecta with Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson, he was erased from “Lost Cause” mythology and not honored.
The obvious answer is what happened after the war. Longstreet was grateful for his Federal pardon, and remained a loyal and reformed penitent to the U.S. and the Constitution thereafter. He recognized the common humanity of the former slaves and worked for their betterment. He even commanded a troop of National Guardsmen to defend the legally elected integrated government of Louisiana against a White Supremacist lynch mob seeking to impose Jim Crow rule. (He lost.)
And so there are no Confederate memorials to this giant of the Confederacy who behaved honorably in defeat and sought some measure of racial reconciliation. But there are plenty to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a second rather in the war, but a vehement, defiant White Supremacist who was the founder of the Klan.
But it’s really about the war, right? Sure.
12
Good point. Thank you for this piece of history regarding General Longstreet. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are 175 Confederate memorials in my home state of South Carolina. Only three of them commemorate General Longstreet, three streets named after him in Charleston, Columbia, and the town of Kingstree.
Forget the contemporary political posturing.
Remember the real pain of American Irish families.
The Irish Pattersons were honorably divided by the civil war.
Remembering the eight nephews.
http://www.theirishstory.com/2014/07/20/the-pattersons-an-irish-family-odyssey/#.XVFSZS2ZPUI
"In terms of actual service, three sons and a son-in-law of our General Robert Patterson served on the Union side during the Civil War, to include three being generals, two of whom were West Point graduates. And he had eight nephews who served with distinction in the Confederate Army – to include several receiving battle honours/wounds and one being killed in action. The nephews were the sons of Robert’s sister Frances and brother James M."
My mother's "Patterson" grandfather, an ordinary Indiana farmer, of Irish descent, not related, as far as I know, to the "distinguished" Pattersons, served as a Union soldier and came home with a vicious temper that damaged the family for generations.
6
@Meta1
We get it. War, especially between related individuals is bad and leaves lasting scars. How is the "Patterson pain" different from black families torn apart by slavery? How abut jut acknowledging that it was bad all around, and we still feel its effects. But we should not forget who began the fight and for what reason.
5
@Len Safhay. My Northern education of the 60’s taught that it was an issue of an agrarian south contending with the industrial north who viewed slavery as immoral and an act that would ultimately die out over time.
4
Our world is full of symbolism, if one chooses to define objects as such. The reality of it is that tearing down monuments does not tear down beliefs, prejudice, or hate. It only serves to amplify them and give them credence. The only real solution is to educate people through open dialogue. When you stop conflicting views from being vetted, no one wins. Truth hates the light of day.
17
@George
By his actions, Lee was a traitor. Raising monuments to him says that some people think that treason in defense of slavery is somehow acceptable, even admirable. Those monuments stand against the principals of the idea of America and every citizen should consider their removal.
3
@George
"Truth hates the light of day." Huh??
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. It’s 2030. All Confederate monuments have been destroyed. What will progressive iconoclasts do then? Express satisfaction that progress was made, disband, and take up a crusade against something else? Or will they continue to claim that structural racism is worse than ever, and even more insidious now that the monuments are gone. What will be targeted for destruction next? And after that? Though I wouldn’t commit to keeping any monument indefinitely, and think that elected legislators (not radical protestors) from time to time should decide how to redecorate a state, I’m concerned about the rage being expressed at inanimate objects. No monument is racist. Only a person can be racist. Monuments can be props for history education, objects of filiopietistic reverence, symbols of hatred, and many other things. I trust readers of books to somehow arrive in the general neighborhood of truth. I don’t destroy books for being “racist.” Why destroy symbols and statues for the same reason?
22
@Thomas Morgan The Code of Hammurabi can be seen in the British Museum by anyone interested in ancient history. It is not placed in a public space to promulgate the content. General Lee still sits on a horse looking down on passersby from a height of sixteen feet, with no qualifying plaque to explain that this was a post reconstruction attempt at reasserting the chattel status of the local black population. This doesn't need to be destroyed but it should join the other historical objects of interest in a museum.
42
@Thomas Morgan Whom a nation or a state reveres is a powerful thing, an expression of its deepest values. When someone has done something truly extraordinary, people say. "they're going to put up a statute of him." There are few higher honors that a society can bestow on an individual than memorializing them in granite.
In that context, is it really appropriate to have heroic statues of confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest? They sundered the nation and fought the bloodiest war in our history to retain the right to own human beings as chattel, like you and I would own a car or a chair. The basis of their nation was the explicit rejection of the bedrock American creed that all men are created equal. Blacks, confederate leaders said, were inferior to the white man and always would be. After losing the war, former confederates and their descendants spent the next 100 years denying former slaves their fundamental rights and keeping them in a state of semi-bondage.
I agree that it is wrong to erase history. Which is why these statutes should be put in a museum or in a dedicated park that explains the history behind them and how they were erected as part of the "Lost Cause" mythology that
falsely portrayed the Civil War as about "states rights" instead of slavery.
9
@Thomas Morgan
So public monuments are merely decorations? OK, let's redecorate Boston with some really swell monuments to George III; after all, we're good friends with the British now. Would those be good "objects of filiopietistic reverence"?
3
There was just a fire in my building and my neighbors and I were evacuated in the middle of the night. As we fled, no one looked to see the color of our skin. We helped each other get out quickly. We were all in the same boat trying to survive.
If only we in this country could see we are all human beings. No one is superior to another.
48
One cannot re-write history or tear everything down to hide from it. It needs to be seen in the light of day. The Confederacy is part of the history and culture of the South. Statues and other monuments will live their life cycle. Look at Rome, Egypt, Ancient Greece, the former Soviet Union, all scattered with destroyed or torndown monuments to former leaders. Keep some on battlefields and cemeteries to remember the dead and to educate future generations of this monumental mistake.
19
@Hello
These moments were erected in the 20’s not immediately after the civil war to remember the fallen.
Lee and the Confederacy were actually committing treason against their own government.
Removing statues in public places - not destroying them - is NOT denying history. It’s acknowledgng why they were erected in the first place, what they stand for
3
Good reason. That is why there are so many monuments to Hitler and Mussolini all over Europe. These monuments only came with the resurgence of the Klan in 1915. And always remember that the leaders of the South had sworn allegiance to the US and thus were treasonous traitors.
1
@Hello
Look at Berlin. One cannot walk a mile without passing some relic of Nazi Germany, but they do not put them on a pedestal, literally or figuratively. They are there to remind us of a shameful past. These southern monuments in town squares today are an attempt to honor that which had nothing honorable about it.
2
“The people who showed up in Charlottesville were not there because of their nostalgia for the Confederacy. Many had no Confederate ancestry, nor were they Southern. They arrived angry about being displaced, or perhaps replaced, by immigrants; by women; by African-Americans; by anyone who, in effect, challenged white male patriarchy. They saw the potential removal of the Lee monument, a statue with historical links to white supremacy, as a siren call for their movement.”
Could not agree more with this statement. Do we really think a bunch of white boys (yes, boys) have any sentimentality towards some statues?
The denial in this country that this movement doesn’t propose a threat is frightening . I ask how many mass murders in the last 5 years have been carried out by an immigrant? And how many from an American? But who do we blame all our woes?
Tucker Carlson went off after the horrific shooting last week about how white supremacy is not the REAL threat... then circled around, it’s the immigrants!
As a movement they hide behind their need to preserve history a.k.a. “These statues” , and no longer shave their heads & cover their bodies in Tattoos, or wear white cloaks.
The messaging is subtle but those that know it, hear it (siren call) As the boy that committed the mass murders did last week in El Paso.
This refusal to belief that our own citizens could pose such a threat is naïve. And we will most likely pay again with lifes for our shortsightedness.
110
@Kate S
Mass murders by these people are not considered "our woes". They are seen as the solution to our woes. For too many these murderers aren't causing pain and suffering they are solving the problem. Thus they see themselves as doing good not evil.
Replace is the wrong word. Today we have a larger population- the pie is bigger and their piece got smaller as a result. Their agenda is not the only one that matter, and others now get a say now too. Hopefully those others who tend not to vote in large numbers will realize that their vote places representatives in office that speak for them. Vote like your life spends on it. Vote in every election.
30
On the outskirts of Budapest is a tourist attraction, two acres at the most, crammed with Soviet era statuary that only a few decades ago stood tall on pedestals in squares and parks on both sides of the Danube. These gigantic artifacts were widely resented by all Hungarians including the workers whose contributions to the modern socialist state they supposedly honoured - imposed as they were by a foreign regime upon a proud people. Slavery in America was an unpardonable offence imposed on a proud people that must somehow be forgiven by the decedents of its victims if she is to remain whole and prosper in the twenty first century. In that spirit, like Budapest's Soviet era statuary, a few acres on the outskirts of town is where monuments to leading defenders and heroes of slavery properly belong, and nowhere else.
97
That an entire section of the country (same section that seceded) has been allowed to fashion it's own history of what slavery was and is is a fault of those people who would never come to terms with the institution of slavery for what it was, an evil practice. What's alarming is the number of people who willingly accept the views of slavery of people 200 years ago. I think the country will for a very long time into the future struggle with the racism issue and I think this is the price the country must pay for it's inability to prevent differing versions of the same evil disease.
58
I believe that John C. Calhoun was a great American. He represented South Carolina in the Senate and he dedicated his life to trying to reconcile Southerners and Northerners in order to avoid a cataclysmic Civil War. With Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, he crafted compromises that kept us from war for decades. He represented slaveowners but what he cared most about was the best interests of our nation. He has many badges of dishonor on his record, but far more of honor.
I taught the antebellum period to bright high school students in the Bible belt. And I taught them that historians were divided on their views of slavery. Some compared it to concentration camps. Some insisted it was benign and paternalistic. I taught my kids they'd have to decide for themselves.
I value most open minds that embrace a version of the truth that reflects careful thought. Who am I to tell a bunch of smart whites and blacks in the Deep South what they are supposed to think about their past? I did the same with Calhoun as I did with the institution of slavery, even though I had strong opinions in favor. And what do I care what a white nationalist thinks about Calhoun? I have an open mind and I embrace my version of the truth after I give it careful thought. White nationalists would all fail my class.
6
So.... what you THINK is true or SAY is true is more important than what IS true? So much of what is leading America down a precarious path is this tendency to conflate everyone’s right to freedom of speech with the idea that everyone’s statements carry equal weight and legitimacy. We should not give weight or ascribe value to baseless (fact free) assertions or opinions rooted in ignorance, even as we defend the right of the misguided speaker to persist in empty noise making. Full stop.
88
@michjas I’m an educator as well. While I see and appreciate your obvious respect for your students, i have to i object. They do not get to “decide for themselves” whether slavery might have been benign. To allow this is to fail in one of the fundamental responsibilities of an teacher; just because a point of view exists doesn’t not make it equally valid.
Would you also teach that because somebody people think the moon landing was faked that their perspective is equally valid? What about that the pyramids being built by aliens? Vaccines causing autism? I understand that you want to teach them the skill of interpretation, but don’t sacrifice truth on the altar of moral relativism. I hope that I and others have misinterpreted what you’ve said.
42
@michjas You taught American History, pre-Civil War to high school students in a southern state. You "taught them that historians were divided on their views of slavery" . You asked them to make up their own minds about slavery.
Was slavery a gulag for blacks or was slavery a benign, paternalistic institution that served the interests of both blacks and whites?
You must have taught them about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Did you ask them to make up their own minds about whether the "institution of slavery" was a condition that made the Civil War inevitable?
Or, did you skip that question as too advanced for high school students?
6
Revisionist history. There was a read debate about heritage and history prior to this often miscast day. There was actually an intelligent debate that went deep into these reminders of a time passed but not forgotten. It wasn’t all about race and that is one reason they still stand
Have we all learned more about their history since? You better believe it. But this article and view neglects much of the truth at the time.
4
Can you see any way that the removal of the southern statues could be legally challenged?
And if it could be legally challenged, and made it to the Supreme Court, what do you think would happen?
Oh, the statues need to stay up.
The placards need to be updated to reflect reality, like how Columbus' impact has been re assessed....
In this way, we can Never Forget.
11
@Casey"In this way, we can Never Forget."
I think that is a canard southern sympathizers use to hide their true feelings. There are any number of historical events in both world or contemporary history with no statues or memorabilia that people find easily accessible without having a statue for reference.
24
Millions of Germans who weren’t Nazis died in World War Two just drafted or fighting for what they thought was their country. We don’t honor their leaders with statues
In the words of William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
121
Objects, including monuments, have a history. What might be deemed appropriate at one time might become inappropriate at another.
The question is who decides.
Such decisions are usually political, i.e. the group that has the political power decides.
That may not be right, but that is usually reality.
Can such decisions be forced?
Perhaps, just as other matters of politics can.
There are, however, "natural" monuments which may be established as expressions of this or that popular sentiment. They, however, are usually as lasting as popular sentiment, here today and the subject matter of sociologists tomorrow.
Prof. Cox seems to be quite correct re monuments and Charlottesville. Their birth was a refection of politics and so should their be demise.
30
I recently visited the Museum of Natural History in New York, which has a pretty lousy exhibit on Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands tribes. I’ve heard they are going to considerable lengths to make a new, realistic depiction, hiring a Native American expert in museum displays to show how things really were once upon a time. It would be nice to see a collaboration among all parties to figure out to adequately depict the Civil War in an unromantisized way.
47
Ms. Cox has summarized eloquently and precisely what took place in Charlottesville two years ago. It is refreshing to read an opinion so well framed and presented in so few words. As a graduate of the university that bears Lee's name, I am well versed in the legend attached the famous general. Had he signed up with the other side, which arguably could have happened, maybe in another universe. He might well have become another POTUS who had owned slaves. Regardless, I don't belief there would be any doubt that he would condemn the August, 2017 "invasion" of Charlottesville.
55
"Until Charlottesville, the debate over Confederate monuments was mostly about history..."
This reader, a native of Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, agrees that the debate prior to Charlottesville was mostly about history. However, I have never been able to understand why military personnel that tried to destroy the Union should be honored by monuments encouraging reverence for them.
405
In Virginia, the debate over Confederate monuments has never been just a discussion about history. All sides have agonized over replacing church stained glass windows which create a near hagiography of CSA leaders. We have struggled with renaming schools, with alumni in their twilight years bitter about any change while ignoring the pain to decades of black students past and even more students now and to come when they enter every morning, reminded by the huge sign, J.E.B. Stuart High School. We continue to struggle over the name of Washington & Lee University, Washington College until General RE Lee opted to spend his post-war career as its president. And, of course, the military metallic monuments, usually on horseback, the figures often brandishing swords. In Richmond, not far from the state Capitol Building, Monument Drive is defined by miles of these monuments, one at every intersection. The mind-numbing sameness was recently relieved by the arrival of integration in the form of a statue of the late, great, Richmond native, Arthur Ashe.
We cannot change history, not the 1860’s that saw the Civil War, nor the 1920’s that saw adulation of the leaders of the Confederacy, men who would have died a traitor’s death (today I expect we’d execute them as domestic terrorists) but for Lincoln’s belief in mercy and reunification. But we can put the artifacts of history in museums. There, all can see them, ponder the past, and resolve to create a better, fairer future.
90
@Ellen Lyons:
My son attended Washington & Lee Law School.
My friend was an undergraduate there, attended Harvard Law and became a Rhodes scholar.
They take pride in the school's historical significance, but also recognize that times have changed.
My friend thinks, eventually, Washington & Lee will become "Ampersand University."
15
@Ellen Lyons How would you handle the University of Virginia? Its founding by a slaveholder is well documents but the Cavalier is the ultimately Lost Cause symbol and combined with the UVA crossed saber logo is pretty comparable to the Cossacks that drove the Jews out Russia.
We have a complicated history, and its on full display in Virginia.
4
I am from the North, I read history and value its importance for understanding the contemporary world, and for me, the statutes of Confederate soldiers are not at all what the author of this piece so definitively asserts. They are not symbols of white supremacy. They are not monuments to slavery or the Jim Crow era. They do not celebrate those grotesque injustices. I have visited places like Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chickamaugua, and such thoughts did not occur to me. Nor were such attitudes even remotely discernible among the many people I saw and spoke with at those locations. I am not angry about "being replaced," because it has never occurred to me that I am being replaced. And I am not interested in subjugating anyone. On the contrary, I'm interested in seeing this country pull together and provide opportunities and prosperity for everyone. So where is this author coming from? And what evidence does she rely on in making these outlandish claims about what those statutes represent? The fact that some racists marched at Charlottesville? Sorry, that's not enough to justify the destruction of historical markers that millions of people in this country value (but not for the ugly reasons this author so sanctimoniously posits), which at their best call upon us to pause and reflect honestly about our past. We don't need a Red Guards-style campaign of cultural purification. Maybe what we need is a little more humility.
36
@JMM
I believe the major origin story is that the statues were all largely put up some 50+ years after the Civil War ended and were established along with the rise of the KKK and Jim Crow laws and lynchings. So the statues represent a statement of those atrocities and a threat of more to come to establish and maintain a certain power differential.
I read plenty of history, as you say you do. The author didn't pull this idea out of a hat.
221
@JMM What statutes, laws, are you referring to? As for statues, there are other places for them, where they can be looked at for their artistic and historical significance. Those places are called museums, and the statues are put into perspective by the curator of the exhibit. Prof. Cox doesn't mention destroying statues, as I recall. She writes about "remov[ing] a monument". Do we get the same detached unemotional reaction JMM apparently would standing under the heavens looking at the statue of Lincoln at his memorial as we do looking at a bust of Lincoln next to twenty other busts on display as pieces of art? There's also a difference looking at a bust of Pontius Pilate in a museum than there would be if there were a public statue of him sitting on a throne about to carry out his duties on behalf of the Roman Empire, is there not? There are statues of Barabbas in museums, but suppose some organization had commissioned a heroic statue of him and placed it in a park a hundred years ago. That statue would still be there today? Should it be? I realize that these are symbols, but there are indeed people who take them seriously, and not just as historical artifacts, which can indeed be moved to museums for preservation as such. Those symbols send a message to them, if not to JMM, and they act on it, as they did in Charlottesville. Is that not what we are asking African Americans to accept in the here and now, when there are plenty of other subjects available for public art?
33
@JMM
Read the history of these monuments. They were chiefly erected as reminders of white power over black lives, and their back stories often say so explicitly. Indeed, many bear inscriptions that refer to states’ rights or otherwise invoke ideologies closely tied to “lost cause” revisionism that paints African Americans as unworthy of freedom and self rule.
Those who complain of “erasing history” ignore several key facts. One, most of these monuments were mass produced—literally mail-ordered, in many cases—and have no real “artistic” value. Two, not everything old is “historic.” No generation is bound to eternally revere whatever monuments prior folk chose to erect. And three, to the extent a *few* Confederate monuments are deemed to have historic or artistic value, they can be placed in museums or recontextualized by placing other markers nearby. There is no reason to ask black Americans to live, work and go to school in the shadow of monuments erected to “commemorate” those who committed treason in a “valiant” effort to enslave their fellow humans on account of the color of their skin.
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It's worth noting that many of these monuments were erected in the 1950s and 1960s as a direct and conscious response to the civil rights movement that was gaining support and victories at the time.
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After his surrender, Gen. Robert E. Lee himself was strongly opposed to the construction of monuments that glorified the Confederacy as he was keenly aware that these would prolong the ability of a Nation to heal itself after the Civil War. Those claiming the monuments should remain as "records of history" are conveniently forgetting why they were constructed in the first place (ie Jim Crow) and acting in direct opposition to the wishes of General Lee who they supposedly hold in high regard. Undoubtedly, he would be deeply disturbed by groups using his memory to promote white supremacy.
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The University of Virginia’s Bob Gibson commented last month that America has long memorialized its Confederate past with historical markers and monuments but not its abhorrent experience with vigilante justice between 1880 and 1930. Standing in prominent places across America are statues commemorating soldiers who died in defense of the Lost Cause. Absent from most of the U.S. is any acknowledgment of the lynchings by mobs who upended our justice system by colluding with corrupt law enforcement officials bent on upholding white supremacy in the decades leading up to and following the First World War. Replacing confederate memorials with lynching memorials would go a long way addressing America’s racist and violent past.
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@M.A. Heinzmann "America has long memorialized its Confederate past with historical markers and monuments." Memorialized is not the right word. Propagandized would be better, as most of the monuments were reactive responses to periodic upwellings of resistance against Jim Crow, not spontaneous expressions of nostalgia for the Lost Cause.
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@stewart "erasing history shows a lack of vision" These monuments are not history rather a distortion of reality. Removing context? of defenders of slavery speaks to an altered ahistorical myth and there are an excessive number of American myths- including exceptionalism.
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@M.A. Heinzmann, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Birmingham commemorates the victims of lynching. It's a very moving experience.
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