Confederate Monuments: America’s Original Participation Awards
Napoleon Bonaparte’s name has been slapped on just about everything in the last two centuries. The little corporal has a cognac, a complex and a pastry. His name is affixed to towns as far afield as Bolivia, Ohio and Australia. Nonetheless, the colossus that bestrode the world is depicted in very few public monuments. The most prominent one, the Column of Vendome, only survives because the iconoclasts charged with pulling it down couldn’t budge the enormous column. For the most part, though, the world was spared a class of monuments depicting the Corsican as he would have liked to be remembered. The reason is simple: Waterloo. Napoleon was defeated and sent into exile, and his enemies ruled a greatly reduced French nation. By the simple metrics of military monuments, Napoleon was a loser, and losers don’t get statues.
This style of public art that Napoleon was denied is so familiar to us that we aren’t even aware of it as an artistic tradition. A general on horseback or a solider poised in combat can be found, rendered in bronze, in the smallest towns and villages in Europe and North America, and the common citizen could be forgiven for concluding that such statuary is a natural part of public life. Nonetheless, the legacy of such works is very specific to the arts of Ancient Rome, where the tradition of depicting great military leaders in public statues was born from the wedding of Roman martial values with Greek sculpture. Along with the familiar visual language, the Western World inherited a merciless but simple entrance requirement: you had to win. An array of monuments to Samnite generals dotting Southern Italy would have been laughable, and the Roman response would have been simple and merciless.
A curious exception to this rule exists in the United States, land of the participation award, where roughly 1,700 public monuments to the long-defeated Confederacy still exist, muddying our public debate and delaying our long-overdue reconciliation. There are a comparable 2,100 monuments to the leaders and soldiery of the Union. The United States is likely the only country in the world that honors its vanquished enemies and victorious leaders in roughly equal numbers, a fact which should shame anyone professing patriotism. It’s strange enough that the failed leaders of a stateless army are still lionized in such large numbers. It’s even stranger that these were individuals that attacked their own state and slaughtered their fellow citizens.
So how did this strange suspension of the rules begin, and why do we allow it to persist? First, it should be noted that confederate monuments were not constructed until the first half of the twentieth century. In the years of Reconstruction, the Union army was an occupying force in the Southern states, and Union soldiers were as embittered as the Northern citizenry against an enemy considered to be a treasonous rabble. A Robert E. Lee statue would have stood in occupied Atlanta about as long as a Tojo statue would have in MacArthur’s Japan. This situation remained unchanged until a pseudo-historical idea called the Lost Cause of the Confederacy swept the South. Partnered with Jim Crow institutions and spearheaded by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause narrative sought to revise the story of the Civil War, emphasizing states rights and heroism with a bit of melodrama. Along with revising history books, the movement built statues in ridiculous numbers while an industrializing north looked the other way. The effort was so successful that we’re still confused.
Much of the current controversy surrounding confederate statues involves our reevaluation of the myths spun by the Lost Cause Movement. Large numbers of Americans still subscribe to the sophistry that argues that any number of issues besides slavery was at the heart of the conflict, and nearly all Americans believe that a series of brave, chivalric battles fought in Virginia define a conflict that was really over once New Orleans fell to a modern naval attack. Confederate warmaking genius has also been propped up by the myth, which explains why the architect of Pickett’s charge has been immortalized in downtown Richmond in a timeless art form that, absent an Orwellian revision of the facts, would be reserved for the successful military strategist. No one in the political mainstream wants to preserve these laughable bits of bronze because they believe in the cause these men fought for, but there is an understandable fear of erasing or revising history. It should be noted that confederate statues were erected in a brazen attempt at historical revision, and their removal amounts to simply putting the winner’s version of the history book back on the shelf.
Few topics have ignited America’s passions as fiercely as the fate of confederate monuments, and the long pent-up anger against confederate statues has spilled out in unpredictable ways. Attacks on statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key cite both men’s conduct as justification for removing public monuments to them. However, if we use contemporary values to judge every public monument in the world there won’t be one left standing. Furthermore, an evaluation of confederate statues made in the context of America’s persisting racial and economic divisions risks reopening old wounds and writing a new and unpredictable chapter of America’s most tragic story. It’s possible that such a reckoning would have a happy ending, but we can avoid the risks because the problem has a much simpler solution. We just need to look at the history of these statues as art and evaluate their success against that tradition. Clearly, as celebrations of military success and genius, they fail miserably, legitimizing a poorly executed act of treason with what can only be described as 1,700 enormous participation trophies. And, as anyone who’s been involved in youth soccer knows, if everyone gets a statue at the end of the war, no one will even try.