CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS, STATUTES, AND INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: SLAVERY, JIM CROW, AND ADOLF HITLER

A debate that sometimes flares into violence now rages in the United States over Confederate monuments and statues. The deaths of African American men and women in police custody like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have provided new urgency to an already invigorated movement for removing such monuments and statutes from city streets, government buildings, and college campuses. We stand squarely with those who would destroy or relegate such structures to museums or other places that can put them into proper historical context.

We acknowledge an arguable distinction between monuments honoring Confederate officials and military officers and symbols of the Confederacy on one hand and those recognizing founding fathers of the nation who enslaved people, but did not rebel against the United States.  Monuments honoring Thomas Jefferson and George Washington require a different conversation and we defer that to another day. We concern ourselves now with people who took up arms against the country.

We fear supporters of keeping Confederate monuments prefer forgetting inconvenient truths about what those monuments represent. Today we remind them.

It was About Slavery

The War Between the States, as supporters of the Lost Cause like calling it, was fought about one thing: The South’s desire to preserve slavery and expand it into the western territories. In the early 1800s, as Americans marched westward and new states sought admission into the Union, the South realized it had a problem. If those territories entered as free states, soon the South would find itself out gunned in Congress. The number of representatives and most importantly, senators, from free states would outnumber those from slave-holding states. The South would lose its hold on power in the national government. The South couldn’t have that, since it risked the end of slavery.

Too many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) two things about slavery -- how brutal it was and how important it was economically. When we wrote recently about the movement that would make Juneteenth a national holiday, we identified museums that tell the story of slavery’s horrors. We’ve noted before how

Professor Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism provides a thorough understanding of both slavery’s brutality and its economic dimensions. The book describes in chilling detail murders, rapes, and physical abuse that went along with slavery and explains the relationship between the peculiar institution and development of the United States as a world commercial power. It will disabuse any reader of the notion the Civil War (its proper name) was about anything else.

The Monuments and Jim Crow

Advocates of keeping Confederate monuments glossed over when most were

erected. It wasn’t immediately after the Civil War when supporters of the Lost Cause might have focused on memorializing their heroes. Only a few went up in those years. In fact, many monuments went up after reconstruction as part of an organized campaign against recently freed enslaved persons that promoted Jim Crow segregation and, later, resistance to the civil rights movement.

       

 

Richmond, Virginia, for example, installed a statue of  Confederate President Jefferson Davis on its famous Monument Avenue in

1907. The statue of Robert E. Lee removed in 2017 from a street in New Orleans went up in 1884. The Lee statute in Charlottesville, Virginia that sparked violence in 2017 was installed in 1924. South Carolina began flying the Confederate battle flag above its state capitol in 1962, as a protest against school desegregation. USA Today reported thirty-five Confederate monuments erected in North Carolina after 2000.

These historical facts suggest erecting monuments to Confederate leaders had more to do with intimidating blacks and the civil

rights community than with preserving “heritage” as monument supporters so piously claim. Students of history know context means everything. Context in this instance speaks volumes about the message the monuments were established to send.

Hitler?

Yes, Adolf Hitler. Frankly, we’ve been surprised many people appear hesitant about comparing

the  memorializing of confederates who fought against the United States with German and Japanese leaders during the Second World War. Well, we’re not. We’re not because we don’t see a distinction. No American city or university would erect a statue of Hitler. The United States military wouldn’t name a base after Erwin Rommel, the general who

commanded German forces resisting the D-Day invasion at Normandy. How about a monument honoring Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Yet, statues in cities and on college campuses and the names of military bases honor defeated, treasonous Confederate officers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Braxton Bragg, and other Confederate battle commanders fought as hard against the United States as Rommel and Yamamoto. Davis sought destruction of the United States just as Hitler and Japanese Emperor Hirohito did. A distinction is artificial and intellectually dishonest.

If we have made harsh pronouncements on

this issue, so be it. Some principles require expression with moral clarity and certainty, unadulterated by diplomatic or cultural nicety. For us, this is such an issue.

We stand by our assessment. None the less, we remain interested in contrary views. We’ve stated ours, so let us hear from you about yours. 

The Russians are Here!

When we think of the 1960s in which we grew up, aside from the details of our own lives, we think most often of the civil rights movement and the struggle for racial justice that so defined that decade -- not unexpected for three black men from the American South. Others, coming from a different place, might focus on anti-war protests, the counter culture, or the beginnings of the feminist movement. We are confident, however, that every American who lived through that era recalls the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. "The Russians are coming" had a real, fearful meaning.

Russia v. U.S. We thought of the Soviet Union as "Russia." Fifteen countries made up the Soviet Union before it broke up in 1991, but we ignored Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Georgia, and 11 others. Only Russia, the biggest one, mattered. The United States maintained a massive conventional military force, deployed thousands of nuclear missiles, built fall-out shelters, and set up a huge intelligence operation mainly aimed at protecting the country against aggressive acts by "Russia." America devoted a huge portion of its GDP to defending its interests against "Russian" adventurism. In October 1962, a young President even took the world to the brink of nuclear destruction because of the threat posed by "Russian" missiles in Cuba.

This history makes all the more interesting the relatively mild reaction in the United States to reports that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election by hacking into computers of Democrats, then releasing their embarrassing e-mails with the purpose of helping elect Republican Donald Trump. Whatever the differences between the old Soviet Union and current day Russia, until now, a fundamental tenant of American policy, and of our cultural understanding of the world, has been that the United States and Russia have different interests. Right now, the U.S. and Russia differ mightily over the Syrian conflict. Despite business deals and cooperation on the international space station, the two countries have non-aligned world agendas and the societies vary greatly. By and large, Americans haven’t cared much for Russia during most of our lives.

While some members of Congress call for investigations in to this matter, we don’t hear an outcry. One poll showed only about a third of Americans believe the hacking influenced the election. This story hasn’t consumed the mainstream media, talk radio, or social media. Many other controversies went more viral than this one. We dare say the 1992 "nannygate" scandal resulting from Bill Clinton’s intention to nominate corporate lawyer Zoe Baird as Attorney General generated a hotter firestorm than has the possibility Russia interfered in a basic aspect of American democracy. We don’t suggest nobody cares. Speeches have been made and statements released. But, the measured response raises questions we think deserve thought.

Admittedly, the public doesn’t have the full story. The government hasn’t released details of the intelligence showing Russia tried to tip the electoral scales. Much of what we know comes from anonymous sources. We also recognize no one can show that Russian interference determined the outcome. But, as we’ve written, we subscribe to the theory that many little things caused the 2016 result, and this could have been one of them. We emphasize, however, whether the interference changed the outcome isn’t the point. The fact remains that the U.S. intelligence community has determined that a foreign power, one traditionally hostile to American interests, interfered in our electoral process and the country isn’t up in arms about it.

The President’s reserved reaction fits with his "No Drama Obama" persona. He’s said he didn’t talk more about this before the election so as not to look like he was putting his thumb on the scale. He says now that in deciding how much to reveal about what we know and how we know it, he must weigh the effectiveness of a U.S. response against the right of the American people to know the details of something that affects their security and way of life. These considerations, at least facially legitimate, seem to have prevented venom from spewing out of the Obama White House.

Not so Noble We think, however, the muted American reaction stems from other, less noble motives. Dispirited Democrats, mindful of being cast as sore losers and seekers of scape goats, have decided to leave this to their Senators and Representatives to investigate "in due course" while they focus on other things, like picking a new Democratic National Committee Chair and figuring out a winning strategy for future elections. Republicans, giddy with the prospect of controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, want to do nothing that delegitimizes Trump’s victory. Republicans have warmed to Trump, but only because he won, giving them the opportunity for the legislative and executive mischief they’ve so craved the last eight years. No matter how much they hate the Russians, and many of them do, they’re taking Trump’s lead on this.

Trump’s coziness with Russia and its leader, former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, has been well documented and we need not repeat it here. What further evidence do we need than the selection of a Secretary of State who received the Russian Order of Friendship award? Trump’s followers – his true believers – probably agree with him on the merits about the Russians – they’re not our number one enemy and we ought to forge closer ties with them. Traditional Republicans, like Mitt Romney, who don’t buy that at all, kept relatively quiet on this. They don’t want to endanger Trump’s presidency, and their own access to power, by riling up the country about Russian hacking and interference into our election. Self-interest Trumps everything else.

John F. Kennedy, in his 1961 inaugural address, warned that the danger of riding the back of a tiger lies in the possibility of ending up inside. The United States for years applied that axiom to Russian bears. Maybe we still should.

Outrage, anyone?