Wayne O'Leary

The New Vandalism

It had to come to this, I suppose. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which galvanized the nation in the wake of the George Floyd killing and other incidents of police overreaching their authority, has itself overreached. Caught up in the euphoria of righteous indignation, it’s now pursuing absolutist ends that could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Demonstrators were on firm footing when their cause was overdue reform of policing practices and the militarized criminal-justice system in general, along with recognition for the victims of mass incarceration. Unfortunately, BLM and the multiplicity of ad hoc groups and interests following in its wake have gone off the tracks in an overzealous effort to maintain momentum toward racial justice as they see it and, it seems obvious, to find added justification for taking to the streets.

The latest outrage du jour in the attempt to cast a wider protest net has centered on memorial statues of white historical figures with less than pristine-pure records on slavery and/or the treatment of racial minorities. This is a renewed and expanded version of the project to cleanse American public spaces of Confederate symbols that followed the Charleston, S.C., church shooting of 2015. Since that incident (and especially since the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville, Va., in 2017), the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates, 138 Confederate statues have been removed or destroyed.

Statues of Confederate leaders are one thing. Honoring the likes of President Jefferson Davis, uncompromising slavery expansionist, and General Nathan Bedford Forrest, pitiless guerrilla commander and future Klansman, is something we can do without. But anonymous representations of ordinary Southern soldiers (several of which have also been demolished) are something else again, especially if designed as remembrance tributes rather than political statements.

The Southern rank and file were mostly small, independent yeoman farmers who owned no slaves; the majority had no clear idea why they were fighting except that it somehow involved defense of their immediate homeland. Similarly, most Northern soldiers were not fighting to “free the slaves,” but to preserve the Union.

Indeed, esteemed historian of slavery Kenneth M. Stampp (“The Peculiar Institution”) maintained that three-quarters of white antebellum Southerners had no direct connection with slavery at all. They were on the wrong side of history to be sure, but it was their leadership, the planter class, making up perhaps 12% of the population, that provided the generals and politicians who comprise the bulk of the offending hagiographic statuary of 2020.

Even the leaders, such as Robert E. Lee, were a complicated case, a combination of good and bad (see “Marble Men,” 10/15/17 TPP), who shouldn’t be evaluated in an undifferentiated manner. Their likenesses should be preserved in museums if possible, as works of period art and as educational tools. But that’s another story.

Today, the whole matter of statues has proceeded far beyond the Confederacy and the South. A movement is now under way to revise and reinterpret all of American history, largely by people with little historical training or understanding (but with an abundance of emotionally fraught political agendas), and to do so on the basis of one simple factor and only one — race. This compulsory revisionism will be applied to any and all figures from America’s past, and their legacies and public memorials will be judged accordingly; if the verdict is thumbs down, they will be “disappeared” from the cultural landscape and stricken from the national memory bank.

As regards any offending commemorative statues, these will either be removed by government edict or (preferably, it seems) defaced and toppled by cultural enforcers acting in extralegal fashion. This vanguard of America’s politically correct cultural revolution (our very own Red Guard) appears to delight in direct-action remedies amounting to outright vandalism. In that sense, it follows in the great purge tradition of historical purification exemplified most recently in the Middle East by the wanton destruction of archaeological sites carried out by the Taliban and the Islamic State.

In this country, monuments to non-Confederate historical figures either already razed or slated for removal in various places includes statuary depicting the following: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt; explorer Christopher Columbus; national anthem lyricist Francis Scott Key; Catholic missionary Junipero Serra; New Mexico colonial governor Juan de Onate; California mining pioneer John Sutter; and, with apologies to Chuck Norris, a generic Texas Ranger. (Even Abe Lincoln’s likeness in Washington’s Lincoln Park is under critical review, since it depicts a grateful freed slave kneeling in subservient proximity to the Great Emancipator.)

Either the images of these individuals are held to be racially insensitive, or the subjects themselves are charged with slaveholding (the ultimate retrospective crime) and/or mistreatment of Native Americans. Whichever it is, there are no gray areas. Blanket condemnation is mandatory and nuance is not allowed. Artistic merit and historical interest are irrelevant. If the subject or the rendering is wrong on race, nothing else matters.

Columbus, whose New World discoveries indirectly and unintentionally led to the eventual decimation or subjugation of indigenous peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere, has been unjustly given personal blame for it all. Eighteenth President Ulysses S. Grant briefly owned a slave inherited from his wife’s family, whom he subsequently freed; nevertheless, he more than balanced the scales as the victorious commanding general in the slavery-ending Civil War and as the president who enforced Reconstruction in the South.

Twenty-fifth President Theodore Roosevelt was an imperialist who cheerfully assumed “the white man’s burden” abroad; yet at home he was the first chief executive to formally entertain a black man (educator Booker T. Washington) at the White House, and he also defied Jim Crow objections to appoint blacks to federal positions in the South.

And so it goes. Most Americans are unaware of the positive contributions of these and other historical figures under attack — Jefferson during the Revolution, Jackson during the Nullification crisis — a sad by-product of our broken educational system, which teaches no history.

Among other things, this results in men of earlier times being judged by 21st-century standards and sensibilities, and evaluated in one-dimensional terms. In the end, the current anti-statue hysteria is a reflection of basic ignorance and extremist thinking on the part of a movement threatening to run amok.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020

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