How far is going too far in removing monuments?
WASHINGTON — In the nation’s capital, Democrats want to sweep away the statues on Capitol Hill honoring Confederate soldiers and politicians. At the National Cathedral in Washington, officials plan to remove stained-glass windows portraying Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Last month, about 100 people gathered at Columbus City Hall to demand that the city remove its three monuments to Christopher Columbus. In Durham, New Hampshire, there are complaints about a mural at a post office that portrays a Native American in a menacing pose.
An iconic film theater in Memphis, Tennessee, opted to end its annual screening of the 1939 film “Gone With the Wind,” which portrays a benevolent interpretation of slavery that collides with historical reality. The move sparked such a backlash that guards were placed outside the home of the theater’s president.
The increasingly divisive debate on symbols from another era ignited last month after police charged a white supremacist from Ohio with murder in the death of a young woman who was run over by a car while protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia, against white nationalists and neo-Nazis who were protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
To opponents of these symbols, they commemorate an ugly past when millions of African-Americans were enslaved in the South and hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were killed by European explorers. The other side argues that the opposition is part of a wave of political correctness that has veered out of control.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Jefferson Township, supports
the removal of the statues, saying, “I equate it to the day when my great-great-grandmother tore up her papers for being a slave in the South. That allowed me to carry a driver’s license and a college degree. Those are the papers I carry.
“I hope my grandchildren live in a better world, where they’re looking back at the Confederate flag, a statue, as I look on slave papers. I remember a time when all of these things that are symbolic caused real harm in the America that we live in.”
By contrast, Alfred Brophy, a professor of law at the University of Alabama, said he’s “against taking all this stuff down. We need a reminder of the bad old days.
“I understand the impetus behind it because it is a daily reminder of slavery,” Brophy said. “It may be we will get to the point where the public’s sphere is completely sanitized in that you don’t have anything that offends anyone.”
The debate has long raged about Confederate symbols. There is a Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, named after the president of the Confederacy; Washington & Lee University in Virginia is named after George Washington and the Confederate general.
Along Monument Avenue in Virginia’s capital, Richmond, are statues of such Confederate icons as Davis, Lee and Jackson, prompting the late comedian Robin Williams to quip, “Those are a lot of second-place trophies.”
Don Doyle, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, said that when he moved to the South in 1974, he “couldn’t quite understand why the South was so interested in honoring and commemorating this war they had lost and seemed to me such a terrible mistake.”
“Many of the monuments were put up in the heyday of Jim Crow in the 1890s and on through the 1920s, and they were understood to be a rebuke to Northern interference in Southern race relations, as well as symbols of the lost cause of the Confederacy,” Doyle added.
In the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, Virginia erected a bronze statue of Lee in 1903. In 1931, Mississippi opted for a statue of Davis.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., introduced a bill to remove nine Confederate statues from the Capitol; Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Beatty have promised to support the bill. Beatty said the move
would “send a message that we will not tolerate discrimination and bigotry.”
Critics say that Democrats are walking into a political trap, accusing them of a search-and-destroy mission to eradicate history. Republican political strategists say that Democrats are running against the tide of American public opinion when they should focus on issues that matter to voters, such as job growth and education.
“If we apply a filter of today’s beliefs on historical figures, there are very few who will pass that test,” said Jessica Towhey, who was an aide to former House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester.
Towhey argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “who led the country through World War II, also created internment camps for Japanese citizens. We look at that today and shudder at how wrong it is. Statues, movies, books and cultural references help ground us in remembering our history while also seeing how far we’ve come.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, who opposes the Booker bill, said much the same thing about monuments to the explorer Columbus, asking, “Where does it end?”
The American Historical Association responded last week by saying that removing monuments to Confederate officials “does not necessarily create a slippery slope” to eliminating memorials to the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
“George Washington owned enslaved people, but the Washington Monument exists because of his contributions to the building of a nation,” the association said.
Despite the uproar, many analysts believe that most monuments will remain in place, relics from another age that enrage some people and delight others.
“My guess is this stuff will blow over and the Columbus statue will stay there,” Brophy said. “I don’t know if it makes sense to charge Christopher Columbus with all the genocide of the Native Americans that followed during the next four centuries.”