By David K. Shipler
Nobody believes in anything.
--Katya Polikanov, age 17
Moscow, 1978
The
trouble with statues is that they are carved in stone or cast in bronze,
unyielding to the fluid shifts in surrounding sentiment. They cannot easily be
revised. So they are erected in one time and toppled in another, and neither
their creation nor their demise carries the nuances and contradictions of the
real world. Statues that are celebratory and monumental represent myths, not true
history.
Some national myths are useful as
long as they set high standards that the nation aspires to achieve. These include
the founding myth of equality and liberty, the myth of racial acceptance, the
myth of the American Dream’s promise that hard work brings prosperity, the myth
of blind justice holding impartial scales. The distance between the myth and
the reality is a gap we should seek to overcome.
Therefore, as Americans rally to
tear down and deface the offensive symbols of a shameful past, it is worth
considering what vacuums will be opened and how they will be filled. A country
without heroes, which is what the United States is becoming, can be a land
adrift, susceptible to demagoguery and absolutism. The challenge is to make the
empty pedestals into foundations of conscience and self-correction. If
destruction is the only result, trouble looms.
Most
historical figures are complicated, not one-dimensional. Statues, on the other
hand, are rarely complicated. They honor and revere, nothing more. And they can
perpetuate perverse notions of virtue. The Confederacy was not a noble
enterprise, unbecoming as an expression of pride in Southern identity and culture.
Surely there is more to the traditions of the South than treason, slavery, and
a lost and bloody cause that left scars on America. Heroic sculptures of
anti-heroes, and military bases named after them, have no place in an honest
society.
But they are part of history, it is
argued. Yes indeed, and history should not be erased. Dictatorships do that
with abandon to suit momentary political doctrine. But neither should history
be sanitized and distorted. Let the Confederacy be taught by scholars who parse
the competing impulses of its leaders. Let museums educate in context. If
Confederate figures are retained in public squares, let them be accompanied by
their opposites: abolitionists, slaves who joined the Union Army, memorials to
all the useless deaths of that war. If Jefferson Davis must have a statue,
stand Abraham Lincoln beside him.
The risk comes not from cleansing
the countryside of abhorrent characters but by the spreading outrage of
iconoclasts who want to obliterate too widely. President Teddy Roosevelt is
coming down from before the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, despite his
legacy of national parks—one of the country’s finest treasures. The problem is
the demeaning portrayals of an African and a Native American by his
side. You can’t edit bronze. As Bret Stephens suggests,
a new statue would be appropriate for a president who “busted trusts,
championed conservation, and caused a scandal by inviting Booker T. Washington
to dine with his family in the White House.”
Francis Scott Key and Ulysses S.
Grant were deposed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Key owned slaves and
defended slavery. Grant, however, had a foot on
each side of the divide. He came from an abolitionist father and married a
Southern woman whose slave-owning father gave him a man named William Jones.
Grant, then a struggling farmer in Missouri, also employed freed blacks, and he
freed Jones before the Civil War, then led the Union army in its defeat of the
South. As President, he supported blacks’ rights during Reconstruction, ordered
his newly formed Justice Department to go after the Ku Klux Klan, and endorsed
the 15th Amendment giving the vote to African Americans. But his policies
on Native Americans were mixed. He wanted citizenship for them, and he tried
to negotiate peace, but met fierce resistance from Congress and the Board of
Indian Commissioners. Ultimately he sent the army into a series of bloody
battles with tribes, enough to cost his monuments their justification.
Since real human beings are never
perfect, it might be legitimate to regard certain statues as monuments to ideas
rather than to people. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a womanizer, unfaithful to
his wife but instrumental in raising the conscience of the nation. Should his
name be scrubbed from streets and schools, his statues removed because of his
philandering? Of course not. As of 2020, at least, King’s statues are safe, as
they should be.
George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson were walking contradictions, both slaveholders but central to the democratic
values that ultimately made the country freer and more inclusive than they could
have imagined. Protesters took down Washington’s statue in Portland, Oregon,
then spray-painted it with “1619,” the year the first enslaved Africans landed
on the continent. But what if Washington were cancelled out of our history?
Would the American Revolution have succeeded? Would the disparate states have
relinquished autonomy to form a union? Without Washington as the presumed
president, would a consensus for the Constitution have been possible?
These were flawed leaders who
transcended their limitations at a crucial juncture of history. Their ideas
have proved larger than themselves. If we see them clearly—Jefferson in
particular—we see ourselves vividly, in the ongoing clash between our faults
and our principles.
Jefferson was a patriarch of the
American idea. His declarations on individual liberty still serve as a moral
and political compass, yet
his belief in the racial inferiority of blacks also endures, embedded in
the stereotypes that afflict African Americans today. He abhorred slavery as a
“fatal stain” but never abolished it, not as governor, not as president, not as
plantation owner. He owned enslaved people inherited from his father and his
father-in-law, including Sally Hemings, with whom he had at least one child, DNA
tests have shown, and probably five others.
His draft of the Declaration of
Independence included an excoriation of slavery as a “cruel war against human
nature, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.” He called it “piratical
warfare, the opprobrium of infidel
powers” and accused England of engaging in “execrable commerce.” He was pained when
the Continental Congress deleted this denunciation.
Yet in his only book, Notes
on the State of Virginia, he describes white skin as “preferable to
that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of
black which covers the emotions.” He asserts that blacks “secrete less by the
kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and
disagreeable odor.”
He sees less ability than whites to
anticipate consequences. “They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome,”
he writes. “But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which
prevents their seeing a danger till it be present.”
He portrays blacks as primitive in
sexuality, emotional capacity, and creative powers. “They are more ardent after
their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a
tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are
transient. . . . Comparing them by their
faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory
they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could
scarcely be found capable of tracing and and comprehending the investigations
of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. . .
. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the
blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” And so on.
Do we cancel Jefferson because of
this? If we do, then we cancel ourselves, for alongside his prejudices, he
nurtured momentous concepts of liberty. They remain alive, essential to the
progress that the nation craves.
Countries without proud histories
suffer. When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, just
seven years after the teenager quoted above assessed her society as lacking in belief,
he tried to open
the door to historical condemnation—only partway. It was suddenly
permissible again to criticize Stalin, as Nikita Khrushchev had allowed in the
1950s. In the bold second chapter of de-Stalinization under Gorbachev, the press
was mostly freed to spread the dictator’s crimes before the public, which heard
from officials and ordinary citizens who had been witnesses, victims, or even
perpetrators. Capricious arrest and exile, mass execution, famine, and even
Stalin’s failures in World War II were under scrutiny. It was a heady time.
The delight was hardly unanimous.
Many conservative, antidemocratic citizens were uneasy and resentful that their
history was being trashed, especially when other Russians took the
denunciations farther than Gorbachev intended. They expanded back in time, condemning
all that had been revered from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on. An ecstasy of revisionist
truth-telling swept the country, bringing down statues of Lenin and his
henchmen, revising the names of streets and other public places. Leningrad reverted
to St. Petersburg, as under the czars, whose era of reign became a font of
nostalgia.
Lenin’s mausoleum remains in Red
Square, but the November 7 anniversary of his revolution is no longer observed.
With the exception of the victory against Germany in what Russians call the
Great Patriotic War, the reverence for modern Russian history has been
practically extinguished.
No sensible argument can be made to
preserve it, given the monstrous nature of the Communist Soviet Union. But the
psychological effects were instructive. In the vacuum, a kind of chaos
developed—economic and political primarily, but also spiritual. A
weightlessness was felt, with nothing much to grab for steadiness. Where in
this exhilarating change could you get a foothold to find solid ground again? I
asked Russians at the time. There were no good answers. Who are your heroes? I
asked them. There were no good answers. Instead, they have settled on a strong
hand at the top, abandoning—at least for a while—their search for pluralistic
democracy.
The United States is not at all
like the Soviet Union, obviously. But we have no heroes, either. We are not
divinely ordained to be a pluralistic democracy, either. And if we discard
those whose ideas we rightfully revere as pedestals of that democracy, because
they were not also saintly human beings, we lose more than the statues.
