No More Teflon For this Icon

The committed sadomasochists among you might  be interested to know that a more comprehensive version of this piece may be found in the current  issue  of Humanities.  The truly desperate may mash here to listen to the Ol' Bloviator's discussion of this article on NPR's "On Point."

After President Dwight D. Eisenhower revealed  that one of the four "great Americans" whose pictures hung in his office was none other than Robert E. Lee, a thoroughly perplexed New York dentist reminded him that Lee had devoted "his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government" and confessed that since he could not see "how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated . . . why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me." Eisenhower replied personally and without hesitation, explaining that Lee was, "in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. . . . selfless almost to a fault . . . noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. . . . Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities . . . we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained."

(Ike admired Lee so much that he took a shot at painting his own portrait of him.  Whatever you think of his presidency, this definitely suggests that he was wise to stick to his day job.)

        Eisenhower was not the first president of the United States to show such reverence for Lee. With characteristic restraint, Theodore Roosevelt pronounced him "the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth" and declared that Lee's dignified acceptance of defeat helped "build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share."  

        As TR's reference suggested, when it had finally become inescapably apparent that nothing was to be gained from fighting further, Lee had respectfully rejected Jefferson Davis's reckless call for continued resistance through guerilla tactics that would reduce his men to "mere bands of marauders" and serve only to inflict further suffering on the civilian population. He had then advised his fellow southerners to "unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of the war" and endeavor to "promote harmony and good feeling." Fearing that a high public profile might make him the source of controversy or conflict, Lee spurned an undignified and sectionally divisive campaign for personal vindication such as the one waged by his former commander-in-chief. When asked to participate in establishing battlefield monuments at Gettysburg in 1869, Lee had  politely declined, allowing that he thought it better "to obliterate the marks of civil strife" and "commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered." He also rejected  lucrative opportunities to serve as the front man for railroad or mining or other commercial enterprises seeking investors, choosing instead to quietly sequester himself at little Washington College, later Washington and Lee, where he served as president from the fall of 1865 untill his death five years later, at which point propagandists enjoyed full license to cultivate the legend of his infallibility as "a public officer without vices [and] a private citizen without wrong."

This, northern investors and their political hirelings proved more than willing to do, much to dismay of African Americans who found themselves the proverbial lambs on the sacrificial altar of North-South reconciliation. Amid the greed and scandal of the Grant era, Bobby Lee didn't look half bad in the North either, and the New York Herald had  declared upon his death that "here in the North we . . . have claimed him as one of ourselves" and "extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us." Understanding the broader and exceedingly dark racial ramifications of this national embrace of Lee, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained bitterly that he could scarcely find a northern newspaper "that is not filled with nauseating flatteries of the late Robert E. Lee," whose military leadership of a "bad cause" seemed somehow to entitle him "to the highest place in heaven." 

Douglass and several generations of his successors would remain voices in the wilderness even as the Civil War Centennial observance kicked off in 1961. Walker Percy, who had been thoroughly catechized in the Reconciliationist gospel as a youth, found it alive and pervasive as the nation began its official observance of the Civil War centennial. Contemporary writing about the war, Percy noted, "commemorates mainly the fighting. . . . Yet it is all very good-natured. . . . In the popular media the war is so friendly that the fighting is made to appear as a kind of sacrament of fire by which one side expresses its affection for the other." Compared with politics, certainly, there was "an innocence about combat," and the centennial's narrow focus on the military aspects of the war virtually assured that Robert E. Lee would garner even more attention than Abraham Lincoln, especially given "Lee's very great personal qualities," not to mention "the American preference for good guys and underdogs, and especially underdog good guys."

            The almost ostentatious magnanimity shown the Confederates during the centennial was especially striking because a century after emancipation, as Percy noted, "the embarrassing fact that the Negro is not treated as a man in the North or the South" was effectively "a ghost at the [centennial] feast." Sit-ins and freedom rides had already marked a more confrontational turn in the civil rights movement, and centennial officials hoped to avoid having their activities drawn into this conflict, either by segregationist demagogues invoking the idealized states' rights rhetoric of the Confederates or by black leaders likening their crusade to the struggle for emancipation. On the latter point, as one of them explained, "We're not emphasizing Emancipation. You see, there's a bigger theme--the beginning of a new America."

            As the nation entered what would become the most acutely dangerous years of the Cold War, national unity and morale clearly took precedence over the divisive issue of racial equality. All the more reason to use this occasion, as a Georgia centennial pamphlet put it, to "discern from our history what has made us the most powerful and united [nation] on the face of the earth." Naturally, if facing up to Cold War realities required a renewal of faith in American virtue, a Virginia centennial spokesman could think of no finer example than Robert E. Lee, "a man largely without hate, without fear and without pride, greed or selfish ambition." Regarded by North and South as easily the war's greatest general and rivaled only by Lincoln as its greatest man, Lee, as historian Thomas L. Connelly saw it, "emerged from the Centennial more than ever adored by the nation."

Still, that nation had changed a great deal between 1961 and 1965. By the time the Centennial observance closed with a somber recreation of events at Appomattox, the Civil Rights Act was on the books and the Voting Rights Act was on the way. Newly empowered African-American activists were soon working to secure the removal of public monuments or the renaming of public streets, parks, buildings, and schools commemorating Confederate leaders or prominent slaveholders. In New Orleans, for example, the majority black school board voted to change Robert E. Lee Elementary School to Ronald E. McNair Elementary in honor of the first black astronaut, who died in the Challenger disaster.

        Lee's defenders are quick to point out his dislike of slavery but not always so swift to note that he actually described it as "a greater evil to the white man than to the black race" or that he believed the punishments they suffered were "necessary for their instruction as a race." His view may have differed but little from the majority of northern whites at the time, but it was Lee, after all, who commanded the massive military effort that, if successful, would surely have extended the life span of slavery. Nor is there any gainsaying that Lee's installation in first the southern and then the national pantheon owes much to the efforts of those who were also bent on restoring and preserving white supremacy in the postbellum South or that his name was appropriated by many a klavern of Kluxers, or that, of all his champions today, none sing his praises more lustily than the belligerent representatives of neo-Confederate secessionist groups. Given his direct connections to the cause of slavery and his posthumous appropriation by those who succeeded in replacing it with Jim Crow, it's understandable that  many African Americans would prefer that Lee's name not be associated with one of their community institutions. Yet, we can only hope that at some point combatants on both sides of these skirmishes over symbols will realize that there is surely polarization enough already over the far more substantive and urgent concerns of a needful present without the additional stress of incessant quarreling over how the past is represented. For example, when an Annapolis councilman called for the former slave port to issue an official apology for the "perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness" that slavery had inflicted on black people, a constituent allowed that she would prefer "a resolution to atone for the lack of a decent middle school curriculum in Anne Arundel County."

 Unfortunately, although it might make for good political melodrama and perhaps even gladden the departed soul of Frederick Douglass, stripping Robert E. Lee's name from a school is unlikely to reduce overcrowding in its classrooms, upgrade its computer or science labs, or end drug trafficking in its corridors. If it would, ironically enough, Lee--at least the one Dwight Eisenhower believed he saw in the portrait on his wall--would likely be the first to join Douglass in endorsing the move.