(Coutesy Brent Moore/Flickr.)
The Ol' Bloviator has delivered so many truly mind-numbing disquisitions on controversies over Confederate iconography that something akin to this downright demonic representation of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has begun to haunt his dreams.(Not for nothing was this ugly-assed sucker selected as one of the world's ten most terrifying statues.) True to his nature and calling however, the O.B. refuses to let the fact that he doesn't have much to add on a particular topic prevent him from cutting loose on it yet again, particularly when he is asked to do so, as he was a few weeks ago by the folks at Zocalo Public Square. What follows is a dramatically revised and expanded version of that piece.
The recent uproar in New
Orleans over de-Confederatizing southern public spaces succeeded once again
in bringing out the worst in those who are emotionally overinvested in concrete
representations of the leaders and key figures who stood on the wrong side of
history more than 150 years ago. Unlikely as it seems, the search for a useful
parallel for understanding the historical and contemporary context of events in New Orleans may take us from the
banks of the Mississippi to the banks of the Tigris. (The O.B. knows he is asking his gentle readers to make a bit of a
stretch here, but he makes that request out of sheer desperation to appear to be
saying something new about this time- and tongue-worn issue, so cut him a
little slack, will ya?) When Saddam
Hussein's Baathist Party came to power in Iraq in 1968, he undertook straight
away to instill a sense of national pride and identity in his subjects by deliberately
glorifying (and grossly embellishing) his own regime's accomplishments while
linking them to the supposed glories of ancestral antiquity. Pursuant to this
end, he demanded that writers and visual artists present positive and compelling
representations of Iraq's past and present, stretching back all the way to
ancient Mesopotamia and classical Islam, to be supplemented later by a variety
of overpowering monuments such as the Arc of Triumph, formed by gigantic hands
holding swords and designed to pay tribute to a claimed victory in the
Iran-Iraq War. All of this was meant to instill nationalistic fervor as a means
of securing support or at least tolerance of Saddam's tyrannical and reckless
leadership.
Despite the differences in time and
distance, there is a certain similarity between Saddam's tactics and those of
postbellum southern leaders, who sought to instill a sense of
quasi-nationalistic pride and purpose among white southerners by rallying them
around a glorious if illusory past, embodied in the Lost Cause and its valorous
defense of the genteel and aristocratic Old South. Tirelessly invoking this
seductive imagery, politicians drew on it to rally whites behind their efforts
to strip blacks of their political, legal and civil rights. The move to
monumentalize the Lost Cause often went hand-in-hand with campaigns for
segregation and disfranchisement that, replete with incendiary rhetoric, more
than once fueled outbreaks of mass violence against blacks. An ex-Confederate
and former North Carolina congressman Alfred Moore Waddell, worked
tirelessly to secure monuments to the state's "fallen sons," while warning that
the only real means of preserving their heroic legacy was denying black men the
vote by any means necessary even if "we have to choke the Cape Fear [River]
with carcasses." These chilling words
foretold Waddell's role as the principal
instigator of the infamous Wilmington,
N.C., riot of 1898, which left at least two dozen blacks dead.
Likewise, guardians of a Jim Crow system that
prevailed well past the middle of the twentieth century played on Lost Cause
loyalties in making the defense of this sinister arrangement the litmus test of
loyalty to "our forefathers" and to "the
southern way of life," suggesting just how deeply the institutions of
white supremacy had been embedded in the notion of a distinct southern white
identity over the stretch of several generations. When the Civil Rights
era finally toppled the formal barriers to racial equality, it was not
surprising that white southerners who could not accept the finality of this
result and fought to reverse the irreversible continued to cloak themselves in
the Confederate flag and other trappings of the Lost Cause. Yet, even among the
majority of white southerners who made their peace with Jim Crow's demise,
there was a reluctance to go full cold turkey on their allegiances to the Lost
Cause ethos, lest they surrender all that remained of what defined their
cultural identity.
It took way
too long, of course, but their insistence that continued affinity for
Confederate symbols could be grounded in "heritage" rather than "hate" finally
became blatantly untenable. Rebel flags and Confederate monuments had dominated
the grounds of courthouses where such mockeries of justice such as the 1955
trial of the murderers of Emmett Till and the 1964 trial of the slayers of four
civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi played out. In the aftermath
of the grisly slaughter of nine black parishioners occurred in Charleston,
South Carolina, it became inescapably clear that Lost Cause iconography and
paraphernalia had been a central thread in a lengthy but tightly interwoven
tapestry of racial oppression and injustice. The Charleston massacre forced
many white Southerners at long last to weigh the abstractness of heritage
against the concreteness of hate, leaving them little choice but to withdraw, however grudgingly at first, from
the active defense of Confederate symbols, largely leaving the field to an
outnumbered, under-resourced minority for whom white supremacy was all that was
left of their identity to defend.
Perhaps
that is why, for all the death threats and precautionary measures that marked
recent events in New Orleans, the proceedings gave off more than a whiff of fait accompli. It was particularly
noteworthy that while the removal of the first three monuments was accomplished
in the dead of night, the fourth and most significant extraction, that of none
other than the iconic Robert Edward Lee, came in broad daylight and on a
pre-announced schedule. Make no mistake
about it, this was no mere takedown of a another memorial to a Confederate
general but rather a benchmark event, in that it was a high-profile removal
from a high-profile location of a monument to the highest-profile Confederate
of them all.
Lee's
posthumous anointment as the symbolic embodiment of the Lost Cause was but a
prelude to his acceptance into the national pantheon as well. As white
America in general rushed to embrace the romantic vision of southern gallantry
and devotion, Lee's star shone ever brighter in the national firmament as well,
commanding the admiration of several U.S. presidents, including both Roosevelts
and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who hung Lee's portrait in the Oval Office, and
praised him for being "noble as a leader and as a man and unsullied as I read
the pages of our history." Even as Eisenhower rendered this high compliment,
however, "the pages of our history" were being re-written. Lee's aura of
nobility and strength had insulated him from his undeniable role as leader of
the fighting forces of a nation whose self-described "cornerstone" was slavery,
but with historians and those who took them seriously finally ready to confront
the reality that the Civil War was fought over the institution of human
bondage, his pristine personal aura no longer loomed large enough to obscure
his connections to a monstrous human evil. His name began to disappear from
public schools, parks, and thoroughfares some twenty years ago, but monuments
bearing his likeness have been slower to give way, as if he represented the
final sacrosanct pillar supporting the crumbling infrastructure of Lost Cause
mythology.
Though it drew more attention, the
removal of Lee's statue in New Orleans actually conveyed less of a sense of
finality than the decision to do the same in Charlottesville,
Virginia, scarcely 100 miles south of his birthplace, where torch-bearing
opponents of the move gathered recently to hear white nationalist Richard
Spencer, sparking a candlelight counter protest in which a "Black Lives Matter"
banner was laid at the statue's base. Legal action has guaranteed that the
statue will stay put for six months, but if the ultimate failure of such
efforts in New Orleans is any guide, General Lee and his storied mount,
Traveler, will soon be on the move in Charlottesville as well.
Beyond these moves to evict Lee's
likenesses, there are other reasons to suspect that, at long last, the days of Confederate
monuments occupying well-known public spaces might be numbered. Since the
Charleston massacre two years ago, at least sixty other Confederate symbols have
reportedly been removed from such spaces. Confederate Memorial Day is no longer
observed as such in Georgia, and the holiday is under fire in Arkansas and
other states as well. There will be rear-guard counteroffensives, to be sure,
as attention-seeking legislators seek to reinstitute Confederate holidays or
impose legal restrictions on the removal of Confederate monuments, but the broad
sense that symbolic tributes to the Confederacy will soon be much less central
to southern representative culture is hard to shake.
If reaching this point in what has
been a protracted and often agonizing process
has triggered a certain splintering of southern white identity then it
is a small price to pay, compared to the benefits of forging a more just and
inclusive society. Such a society had of course been the aim of those who
succeeded in overthrowing Saddam in Iraq, and they quickly launched a radical
and sweeping effort to de-Baathify the country by purging the government and
its bureaucracy of former party members and erasing the cultural and architectural
remnants of the historical memory that
Saddam had constructed in the interest of fostering national unity and pride.
This zealous campaign soon raised concerns, however, including the specter of
an unraveling social fabric across a population already marked by significant
and contentious ethnic and religious divisions. The situation only grew worse
when de-Baathification seemed set the stage for wanton looting and depredation
of some of Iraq's most precious antiquities, some of it driven by a variety of
lingering sectarian animosities. Iraqi art expert Nada Shabout
conceded that "Some of the [Baathist] monuments were in bad taste and were
ugly, and I would not be heartbroken if they were brought down. But... they were
nevertheless part of the history of the country... So do we throw away the baby
with the bath water?"
While the immediate consequences of de-Confederatizing
southern public spaces are unlikely to prove even remotely as severe in this
country, events in Iraq represent yet another addition to a list of particulars
stretching back many centuries of the complexities and frequently unintended
consequences of attempting to erase disturbing reminders of an imperfect past.
Monuments
to the defenders of slavery are nothing if not disturbing, all the more so because
they were also the instruments of the people who brought us the watered down
version of slavery that was Jim Crow. Yet, in this respect while, like Saddam's
memorials, they may no longer be acceptable as public historical symbols, they nonetheless
retain a distinct and indelible value as historical artifacts. Placed in
museums or other suitable venues where they can be appropriately contextualized,
they might succeed in persuading whites that they don't belong on public property
while persuading blacks that they should not be destroyed.
The
spirit of an ambitious campaign by historic preservationists at the Atlanta
History Center and elsewhere to properly contextualize Confederate monuments is
embodied in a tablet affixed last October to the base of a Confederate monument
on the campus at Ole
Miss. While respectful of the idea of honoring "the sacrifice of local
Confederate soldiers," the tablet also cautions that such monuments
"were often used to promote an ideology known as the 'the Lost Cause,'
which claimed that the Confederacy had been established to defend states'
rights and that slavery was not the principal cause of the Civil War." In
addition to a reminder that the Confederacy's defeat "meant freedom for
millions of people," the plaque also notes this particular monument's
divisive legacy as "a rallying point for opponents of integration" on
the evening of the deadly riot that marked James Meredith's arrival on campus
in September, 1962.
Here, in and between the lines on this tablet, lies a truly
compelling argument for preserving and fully articulating the origins and
implications of these notorious pieces of concrete. Modest as it might seem, this effort might be
a step toward the day when white and black Southerners not only find a way to
share their common but traditionally conflict-ridden past, but to make it the
foundation of a new and profoundly more representative regional identity. If
this should indeed come to pass, the Lost Cause will have given way to one
infinitely more inclusive and inspiring.
