Get Thee to a Museum!

With all the controversy swirling around the nation about Civil War monuments and commemoratives, I felt the need to weigh in with my own two-cents-worth.  I grew up in the South with Northern parents, so I think I have a different perspective for viewing the various angles to the story.  There is a good bit of murkiness involved.

Let’s start with Abraham Lincoln.  He set the policy—continued by Andrew Johnson—of encouraging the healing of the nation’s wounds by welcoming back the wayward South without recrimination.  That sense of how to mend things made it possible for proud Southerners to begin the process of reintegration—political if not racial—with at least a shred of dignity intact.  So far, so good.

But it seems that many, if not most of the statues in question were erected a good bit later—decades after the War during late-nineteenth-century Reconstruction and into the Nineteen- teens.  The timing sends up clear red flags that surely announce Jim Crow business-as-usual.  Where do patriotism and pride leave off and bigotry and White privilege begin?  Murky, indeed.

I developed a litmus-test while considering Robert E. Lee.  I think it applies more broadly.  Here it is:  Lee was a West Point graduate, and one of the best and brightest of his generation.  He surely had a keen intellect, a well-developed sense of duty, and other laudable qualities as well.  He was also wonderfully handsome, and cut a fine figure on horseback.  I’m just saying.

But when Lee was faced with the political challenge of a career, he chose not only to back the breakaways, but to become their general.  Without even counting the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers—North and South—it is piercingly clear that Lee took up arms against the United States of America.  And that is treason.  Very simple.  And neither Papa Abe, nor congress, nor States’ Rights advocates, nor anyone else can change that.

I am offering my treason test as a suggestion to those who are troubled by the current controversies.  I say, get those traitors out of Monument Park (wherever it may be) and into museums, where they belong.  Write me a plaque that explains their qualities, good and bad.  I’m an adult.  I can take it.  But I think children deserve public spaces that celebrate heroes of our shared values of excellence, tolerance, equality, and service.  Let’s take the kids to the museums, too, so they can learn about the full range of human experience.  But let’s start at the top.

That said, I find the giant mountain-side monument in Stone Mountain, Georgia, to be particularly disturbing, celebrating as it does in Rushmore-esque grandiosity the Confederate triumvirate of Lee, President Jefferson Davis, and General “Stonewall” Jackson.  Blasting it away might serve to inflame more than instruct.  I say let’s call it a museum and get on with refining its message for the future.  Fortunately, It’s none of my business.  The people of Georgia will decide.  God grant them wisdom.