Removing statues not the answer; need to accept bad with good
Several years ago, when it was proposed that the World War I soldier statue at Five-Corners in Uniontown be replaced with one of George C. Marshall, the idea encountered strong opposition, principally from the World War II veterans who belonged to and ran VFW Post 47, across the street from Five-Corners and Marshall Plaza.
Their point was simple: you don’t mess with a long-serving fellow-veteran, even if the veteran is cast in granite.
Now, I’m happy to say the Marshall-on-horseback statue proposed and paid for by the late Robert Eberly turned out just fine. Today, it stands along Pittsburgh Street near the Main Street-Morgantown Street intersection. I’d hate to lose it. It’s a handsome rendering.
I’d also hate to lose the statue of Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin on Main at Beeson. The two men are shown checking the placement of the National Road, Route 40, conceived during the Jefferson administration and enthusiastically supported by Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin.
All of this is a lead-up to the controversy over the presence in communities across the country of statues commemorating the leaders and soldiers of the Confederacy, the ill-begotten, illegal, immoral and unpatriotic attempt to tear the Union asunder and to perpetuate (for goodness knows how long) human slavery.
The statues and other Confederate memorials must go; this should be done, however, in such a way that public understanding of the men and women of the Confederacy period is depended and broadened.
“Let ’em up easy,” President Lincoln said of the South at the close of the Civil War. Lincoln, whose steadfast refusal to acknowledge the right of the likes of Jefferson Davis and his friend Alexander Stephens to blow up the Constitution resulted in the bloodiest four years in American history, wanted the former Confederate states back in the Union as seamless as possible.
Born in Kentucky, Lincoln recognized that the United States was not the United States without the South. Lincoln both hated slavery and loved his country. Lincoln befriended Frederick Douglas; he also asked to hear “Dixie” just as the guns fell silent. The song once again belongs to all of us, he commented.
According to Sidney Blumenthal, the author of a great book about Lincoln called “A Self-Made Man,” Abraham Lincoln lived with a certain amount of ambiguity when it came to picking and choosing between good and evil in politics and in life in general.
Lincoln, Blumenthal explains, “found the politics of moral absolutism irrational and counterproductive, achieving unintended tragic consequences.”
He quotes from a letter Lincoln wrote in 1844, following the election of James K. Polk, who subsequently carried out a campaign pledge to expand the Union, as a consequence strengthening the political power of Southern slave-holders. Polk’s opponent had been Henry Clay of Kentucky, Lincoln’s political hero.
More than a few Northern voters — Lincoln’s correspondent was one — refused to vote for Clay, a slaveholder who nonetheless pledged to hold the line on slavery.
“If by your votes you could have prevented the extension of slavery, would it not have been good … to have used your votes, even though it involved the casting of them for a slaveholder?” Lincoln asked.
A tree may be evil, yet it still might bear good fruit, Lincoln argued. “If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?”
Two weeks ago in Charlottesville, we witnessed the convergence of two evils, one original to the 19th century, the other a product of the 20th century — the tribal hatreds of the domestic KKK and the brute nihilism of European fascism.
It was ugly. The bigots’ torchlight march through downtown Charlottesville the night before their fatal Saturday rally resembled nothing so much as the frightening nighttime spectacles staged in Germany in the 1930s by Hitler and the Nazi hordes goose stepping their way into slaughter’s history book.
Others were reminded of the KKK which, under the cover of darkness, burned crosses in both the North and South during long stretches of the last century.
The rationale for this mayhem was a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in a public park; the city of Charlottesville had made noises about dismantling the statue, in line with a growing national sentiment that Confederate hero-symbols have no place in our 21st-century multi-cultural, multi-racial society.
“Each of us deserves a voice in determining how to address the questions raised by the statues of Robert E. Lee and others, and confront the darker moments in our nation’s history,” Vincent E. Price, the president of Duke, said after a Lee statue was defaced on his school’s campus.
He might have added that we are not the countries of eastern Europe, which seem to scrub their histories as well as their public memorials every generation or so, owing to changes in governing ideologies.
We should embrace our history, the bad as well as the good.
That’s why I like an idea advanced by a historian from Czechoslovakia. Zdenek Lukes told The New York Times that instead of removing a statue of the Communist minister of culture in one Czech town, for instance, the city “placed a plaque there explaining who he was and what he did.”
“I believe a plaque explaining who he was and what he did would suit General Lee very well,” Lukes said.
Two great-great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson recently said they favored removing statues of their famous (some might infamous) ancestor.
“Confederate monuments … were never intended as benign symbols” they declared. “Rather, they were the clearly articulated artwork of white supremacy.”
The two Jackson relatives said they admired Stonewall’s sister, a “staunch abolitionist” who, though close to her brother, never spoke to him again after he took up arms against the United States.
Some plaque, that Stonewall Jackson and Laura Jackson Arnold and a family torn apart. Isn’t that what the Civil War, in part, was about?
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.