Cities and their Confederate Monuments

When the US President asked where the monument removal would end and if George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be next, he certainly spoke for many Americans who ask the same question, possibly the majority of Americans. For them the Confederate monuments in many cities are just decoration which one passes daily like so many flowerpots. And the matter is by no means limited to southern states. There are over 700 Confederate monuments in the US with many placed in border states or states far removed from the Civil War. With the monuments so frequent, it is easy to get used to them.

White Americans are still the majority in most States and they are quite comfortable without poking around in what seems a distant history. But this view lacks the deeper understanding of history needed to explain why so many of these statues are still around. More importantly, ignorance also lacks empathy, i.e. the ability to put oneself in somebody else shoes. It lacks the basic insight that for African Americans these same Confederate monuments are a thumb in the eye every time they see them as well as for everyone else who is glad that the Civil War ended with a Union victory. An op-ed of the LA Times written on occasion of the New Orleans monuments expresses this point:

They are ideological symbols meant to assert power over our public spaces, a fact that became palpable during a contentious City Council debate on the removal plan. When a gray-haired preservationist in a bow tie stood up and gave the finger to removal advocates, I understood that those statues, just part of our landscape, high up on plinths and columns, have been giving the finger to the majority of New Orleanians for generations. Giving the finger to the people who create our vibrant culture and drive our economy, to our celebratory and joyful customs, to the true heart of a diverse, if sometimes fractious port city. To our past and our future.

For those fellow Americans the monuments are not just decoration but they have a meaning and purpose which all artistic beauty cannot conceal. For them the heroes of the Confederacy are an ongoing justification of the injustices they had to endure as a minority, solely based on their skin color and ethnic background. Everybody knows, that discrimination based on skin color is unfortunately not a distant past and is still relevant in 2017. Or they are a reminder how confederate secession attempts were treason on the original idea of the American Revolution.

The double horse Jackson-Lee statue is loaded on a flatbed truck Tuesday
night. 

In 1967, 22 years after the end of WWII, many, if not most, Germans lived pretty comfortably in their post-war Wirtschaftswunder and saw little reason to poke around in questions of German guilt. It was the year when Alexander Mitscherlich wrote the book "The Inability to Mourn", a book in which the psychoanalyst took psychoanalysis from the level of an individual and transferred it to a nation which he diagnosed to be in some kind of paralysis when it came to digesting the enormity of their past.

Creating systems of denial and forgetting, the Germans chose not to deal with the past. As a result the German psyche never freed itself from Hitler because it did not go through the rituals that true withdrawal demanded. (A review of the Inability to Mourn)

As having become a young adult in that period in Germany I remember how this book along with the revolt of my generation staged in the streets of Paris, Rome and Berlin broke open this inability of Germans to actively confront their past. Not that the victorious Allies, chiefly the US, hadn't tried to re-educate Germans right away. For one thing they had thoroughly blown up all monuments in any way related to the Nazi era or German militaristic past. But as an unintended consequence, they may have delayed the grief work that individuals and the nation had to do. High school students had seen the film footage taken in the concentration camps when the Allies liberated Germany in 1945 but the war generation was usually mum, scarred and scared, but full of excuses when confronted by the

German monuments toppled 1945

young. It was not rare that unreformed teachers and public servants spouted fascist thought. In every phase of being confronted with the fact that this German past was unequivocally bad and that there was no equivalency whatsoever, people muttered that now they understood and it was no longer necessary to bring up the past.  The mourning, the soul searching and the learning happened in waves, decade after decade, and from how I see it, the process has not yet ended. Still perpetrators are found who had slipped through the justice system, still court cases unearth the unspeakable.

Glorification of a truly sinful past: Confederate celebrations at Baltimore's
Jackson-Lee monument (Photo V-Dare)

To evoke the German history isn't only expedient for me who grew up coming to terms with what can only be described as the worst past in recorded history. It is also necessary, because the American ultra-right unfortunately affiliates with these perpetrators. But more importantly,  the state of the American psyche is not unlike the Germany inability to mourn which Mitscherlich had diagnosed when it comes to slavery and the Civil War.

There is revisionist history that would like to paint Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson who rode side by side in a rare double horse statue in Baltimore's Wyman Park as noble gentlemen and heroes that had nothing but freedom and courage in mind when they fought for the Confederacy. New Orleans Mayor Landrieu addressed this issue well in his famous explanation why he ordered the removal of statues in his town:

But that doesn’t mean we must valorize the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal — literally — in our most prominent public places.
The record is clear: New Orleans’s Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were erected with the goal of rewriting history to glorify the Confederacy and perpetuate the idea of white supremacy. These monuments stand not as mournful markers of our legacy of slavery and segregation, but in reverence of it. They are an inaccurate recitation of our past, an affront to our present and a poor prescription for our future.
The right course, then, is to excise these symbols of injustice. (Mitch Landrieu)

The Confederate women's sculpture on the way out in Baltimore
this morning  (Photo: Baltimore Sun)

Those who still believe that the Civil War was not about slavery need to only visit the African American History Museum down the street on the Washington Mall and see the historic documents that prove otherwise. I would challenge any white American to spend three or four hours working through the exhibits in this museum all the way from the bottom up and not come out deeply touched and depressed by how humans treated other humans, even though they had already been forced to do nothing but serve this country with everything they had. Those of us who believe that Americans really already have the empathy that allows them to see the angle from which African Americans must see the past, only need to listen to the President and his followers to see that false equivalence is still the popular mode of thinking when it comes to Black Lives Matter, Affirmative Action or similar race based considerations trying to create a level playing field.  

Solidarity with Charlottesville rally in Baltimore last Sunday
(Photo: City Paper)

It is true that removing monuments doesn't change history and it won't level the playing field. But keeping them not only glorifies a past that can't be glorified but acts like a barrier for people to do the deeper soul searching that is needed for true withdrawal from white supremacy thinking needed for actual reconciliation.

That is why the balanced and thoughtful monument commissions consisting of blacks, whites and art historians recommended removal of monuments in New Orleans and in Baltimore as early as spring 2016.

New Orleans's action and now the gruesome events Charleston have brought the matter back to the fore, nationwide and also in Baltimore, since the previous Mayor had not acted on the commisions removal recommendation. "The dark side of America's past", Baltimore councilman Brandon Scott has called this part of American history in a resolution for "immediate destruction" of all confederate monuments and the sculpture of Justice Roger Taney. (Taney is the supreme court justice who presided over the Dred Scott case in 1857 which ruled that former slaves could not be US citizens). The resolution passed the city council unanimously this week.

The pedestal with Mother Light statue (Photo: Philipsen)

“Monuments with ties to the dark side of America’s past have come under increased scrutiny in recent years with cities across the country debating on whether they should be removed. Following the acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white supremacist terrorist groups in Charlottesville Virginia this past weekend cities must act decisively and immediately by removing these monuments. Baltimore has had more than enough time to think on the issue it’s time to act.” (Councilman Brandon Scott)

Last night Baltimore Mayor Pugh, who had deliberated with other mayors facing the same problem, took decisive action and removed all four statues in question. The bold and swift action came unexpected. It prevented neo-nazis and Confederates to rally and was completed without any confrontation.

Justice Taney sculpture, Baltimore 2016
(Photo: Philipsen)

The way the removal was executed—swiftly, peacefully, authoritatively, and with all the necessary permits—served as a desperately needed demonstration that the civic compact was not hopelessly broken.(David Dudley, editor CityLab)

Nothing would be more constructive than a concerted effort by all cities with such monuments to remove all of them one night and agree on new placement in appropriate locations. This would spread protesters really thin and prevent them form gaining momentum for their horrible movement of white supremacy.

If there is one thing one must learn from Germany's Nazi past, it is that one has to fight evil from the beginning. Marching down dark city streets with torches and horrifying chants has little to do with free speech and much with notions and sentiments that America cannot allow; lest we want a full fracture of the country in which the consensus of what we are and for what we stand is lost once again.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Related article on my blog: Learning from New Orleans?
Baltimore Brew article about the Baltimore Monuments
CityLab "How Baltimore removed its Confederate monuments overnight"