The fevered frenzy against public monuments has caused varied reactions. Among scholars, the main symptom is seemingly contagious dispassion. When a New York Times columnist spoke with art historian Erin Thompson, for example, their interview closed with Thompson recommending the use of chains for those interested in inverting large objects. She appears to have an affinity for neither art nor history. Thompson may have caught the bug from archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who recently — and apparently satirically — briefed mobs struggling to dislodge obelisks. “It is sometimes complained,” drawls historian William Cavert, “that such acts erase history.” According to him, that is a popular grievance against the destruction of statues that historians and scholars almost universally dismiss.
To inoculate the rest of us, let’s try to inhale and expose ourselves to the astonishing notion that these scholars seem to endorse: that statues are useless and that we derive historical knowledge only from archives, documents, and “objects preserved in libraries or museums.” Only if this is true — if statues can bear no intellectual or artistic value — would our indifference be justified. But if there is any value inherent in objects that a community once used publicly and symbolically, we should reconsider.
First, the physical evidence of Confederate monuments is what has generated much of the indignation towards them. This evidence directly contributes to historical knowledge.
Second, even if all Americans today deem artifacts from a certain era to be worthless, we shouldn’t decide on behalf of future generations.
Third, landmarks are inseparable from citizens’ intergenerational identities.
Finally, it is improbable that historians agree on the worthlessness of statues (academic consensus sounds like an oxymoron), despite what Cavert claims. Dissenters shouldn’t allow a few of their colleagues to speak on their behalf, because this indifference could be transmitted to the broader public and could become endemic.
Confederate monuments’ location, imagery, inscriptions, dates, and materials of construction, cost, and commission show what the communities who built them valued and what reasons they had for doing so. In the past decade, Timothy Sedore, Thomas J. Brown, and Douglas J. Butler have catalogued and produced works reliant on this evidence. Protesters (and observers) today glean Jim Crow–era historical insight while destroying its sources, and they are the last ones who will ever be able to do so directly. The primary evidence they offer — complementary to archival and secondary sources — of which there can never be enough, is gone. Art historians would never argue that Myron’s Discobolus is useless, even though plenty of documents illustrate it and the cultural tradition it represents. Why are Confederate statues uniquely worthless?
It would be myopic of a historian to decide that there is enough evidence to reimagine any bygone time, because that will not always be the case. We do not own historical artifacts; we owe them to our successors so that they, too, can subject them to etiological and aesthetic scrutiny as we can. We endlessly refine academic study by using new evidence or revisiting the old with new methods. To destroy these monuments is to rob future generations of that opportunity. The community does not, at any and every moment, share the moral or political sentiments of those who built its public monuments. But destroying them erodes our knowledge of those reasons and sentiments, of our predecessors who espoused them, and of how far we have come.
A political community is material as much as social. After 1974, when Turkish occupying forces in northern Cyprus renamed streets and towns, their motivation was replacing what came before. When most calculated, such acts attempt to expunge a community with which the actors aren’t planning to cohabit. When least calculated, they channel vicarious retribution against an inexcusable past. Now, the destruction of landmarks alienates community members who have natural, apolitical, personal, or familial associations with the material backdrop of their lives. Such acts make sense for culturally dissimilar invaders, but not for co-citizens who eventually intend to resume a shared life.
Historians, before all, should be well aware of all this. One hesitates to assume collective indifference among scholars. I have a suspicion: most historians have chosen to abstain from this controversy. They shouldn’t.
This is about erasing enough history so the rest can be re-written. Just look at the attempt 1619 Project is trying to make in destroying fact and replacing it with racist-revised “history”. I guess in the modern digital age, burning books is no longer effective.
@Deplorable Me:
This is actually about erasing the history of the Democratic Party, the Party of secession, the KKK, Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and the disgrace that was the 1964 Democrat National convention where the Mississippi delegates, legally elected as delegates, were disenfranchised by LBJ.
And look at the major cities where black Americans fare the worst, all held by Democrats for generations.
I asked someone who I have known for a long time that supports the removal of monuments if he agreed with me that because…………………slavery, we should ban all signs that say Democratic Party. He said “Of course not. That is old history.” Duh!
Hypocrites all of them being led by the nose by a bunch of spoiled white brats who have bought into Marxism.
Note to the Liar in Chief: There are no faces of men who fought to preserve human slavery on Mt. Rushmore. There were no statues of the Founding Fathers of our nation taken down.
@Greg:
He didn’t say there were, you blithering idiot.
@Greg: Note to our resident village idiot both Washington and Jefferson were torn down in Portland.
@retire05:
Are you not smart enough to realize how what he was saying was meant to be understood? You claim I’m an idiot, but I had no problem at all picking up on the implicit core message.
Did you see the Secretary of Homeland Security on FOX News immediately after Trump’s—whatever the hell that political event misappropriating a national holiday should be called—explaining how their new monument protection strike force is poised to spring into action to protect Mt. Rushmore from leftist desecration at a moment’s notice?
It’s pathetic how easily Trump manipulates his followers, and how totally unaware they seem to be of the obvious manipulation. Nor does he apparently give a doodly damn that his event was precisely the sort of setting that provides the best opportunity for COVID-19 to spread.
@retire05:
I’ve seen the same thing. The indisputable racist history of the Democrat party, something they simply try to ignore and hide their past instead of owning up and begging forgiveness. They’ve been successful at simply blaming all the past sins on others. Note the portraits and statues they take down in the Capital are not “Democrats”; they are “Confederates”.
Their racist history is “old” (actually, not so much) but tearing down Confederate statues has to be done because the pain is fresh. Good luck making sense of that. Bullshit is the only answer.
@Greg: No, no Democrats on Mt. Rushmore. Also, statues of Washington and Jefferson are threatened. Your stupid lemmings also tore down Grant and numerous abolitionists. They want to tear down Lincoln’s emancipation statue. There is no rhyme or reason to the wanton destruction your leftists promote.
@kitt:
He’s referring to the statues of Lenin and Obama.
“Righteous vandalism,” is what the Taliban did all over Afghanistan.
It’s what ISIS (Obama fondly calls them ISIL) did whenever they came across any cultural structure older than themselves.
And it is what those organizations’ wicked American stepbrothers are doing when they pull over statues here.
These same Americans were raised on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History…..
Thus they, 29 out of 32 responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only 3 out of the 32 correctly identified him as president.
Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.
And, they are convinced that slavery was only an American problem that ended with the Civil War, and are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.
No awareness that most Greeks were slaves, and NOT black at the height of the Greek Empire.
No awareness that over 90% of Rome population were slaves at the height of the Roman Empire. (Also mostly not black.)
No awareness of the vast slave empire of Egypt under the Pharaohs.
No awareness of the slavery endemic all thru the Islamic expansion up to the Gates of Vienna in 1683.
No awareness of modern slavery in Saudi Arabia, China, Cambodia, Pakistan, ect.