The dear old “Lost Cause”
Stop stop don’t you dare remove that Confederate monument.
Hours after workers began removing a towering Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting the effort to dismantle one of the country’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land.
Because why shouldn’t we have a monument to race-based enslavement? It’s such an inspiring part of our history.
The memorial has been criticized for its sanitized depiction of slavery, and the plan to remove it from the country’s most famous cemetery is part of a militarywide effort to take down Confederate symbols from bases, ships and other facilities. Dozens of Republican lawmakers have opposed removing the memorial.
This is where that obsession with identity politics gets Republicans – they want to be special so they stand up for slavery. Seems like backing a losing horse, to me.
On Monday, as the work to remove the monument was getting underway, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that had been requested by a group called Defend Arlington.
Defend Arlington by not removing a monument to the slaveholding South. You really want to go with that?
The monument was funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that took a prominent role in mythologizing the Civil War as a “Lost Cause,” depicting the Confederacy’s rebellion as a noble defense of Southern values and painting slavery as benign. Like other monuments that the group funded, the Arlington memorial promotes the false narrative of the “loyal slave,” which has been used to justify and perpetuate white supremacy.
Retrofitting. “We do this thing, so we have to come up with a way to make it look acceptable.”
More than 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter last week demanding that Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, stop the removal of the monument. They argued that the memorial did not commemorate the Confederate States of America but rather the “reconciliation and national unity” between North and South.
Oh honestly. What a thing to take a stand on.
The memorial features a woman who represents the American South standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, according to the cemetery. Near the base are dozens of life-size Confederate soldiers alongside mythical gods and two enslaved African Americans.
One is a “mammy” holding the child of a Confederate officer, and the other is a man “following his owner to war,” according to the cemetery’s description.
…
The United Daughters of the Confederacy began planning for the memorial in 1906, said James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association. The group, composed of descendants of men who had served in the armed forces or government of the Confederacy, raised money for scores of monuments and memorials that presented a romanticized view of the Confederacy and a sanitized take on slavery.
“The statue was a way of reminding Americans who was in charge in the South and what the true traditions of the South were,” Dr. Grossman said. “It’s one of hundreds of statues that were created across the South in the first two decades of the 20th century whose purpose was to make sure that everybody knows that this is a white country, and that slavery was legitimate and benign.”
Plans for the monument drew fierce opposition from civil rights activists and groups, notably the N.A.A.C.P. The depiction of the “mammy,” in particular, diminished the harm inflicted upon women whose families were destroyed under slavery, they said.
The monument at Arlington was among the most prominent memorials that the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded, and the symbolism of the location was potent. The cemetery was established on a former plantation that was seized from Gen. Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Nearly 200 enslaved people lived and worked on the plantation when Lee lived there, according to the cemetery.
You’d think by now we could all just agree that slavery was and is indefensible.
Arlington Cemetery has had a prominent monument to the confederacy since it was created in 1864 – it was built in Robert E Lee’s front yard. Lee’s house sits on a hill overlooking thousands of Civil War dead.
Sure, erect statues to people who committed treason. That’s what we usually do, right? This needs to be spelled out – it was treason. And treason in defense of holding other people enslaved. To even TRY to justify that demonstrates a warped personality.
Why now? Why, after more than 100 years, is this memorial now being removed in a display of Bamiyan-style moral fervour?
Is it because people are going around defending slavery? (No, no-one is.)
Is it because the monument’s imagery is particularly egregious? (No, while nothing from 100 years ago by Confederate supporters would meet modern standards, the imagery is actually fairly tame.)
Rather, it is a distraction. It’s a performance intended to distract attention from what actually matters to the lives of today’s 16-yr-old black youths. It’s a performance intended to convey that this sort of thing — statues like these — constitutes the semi-mythical “systemic racism” that supposedly blights the lives of those youths today.
It’s a performance akin to moving a very large rock from a university campus (just because once, a hundred years ago, a newspaper referred to the rock using a bad word).
This does diddly squat to improve the wellbeing and achievements of students, but serves as a distraction that avoids having the difficult conversations about what does actually matter today.
Oh shut up. What good reason is there not to remove it? It’s not in some little local cemetery that only the locals know about, it’s in Arlington cemetery, where the war heroes and political bigwigs go and the tourists visit. What on earth is wrong with removing a monument that valorizes slavery?
As for why now, I rather suspect that’s because it hasn’t been done yet.
And that crack about the Bamiyan Buddhas is truly disgusting.
It’s more like tearing down statues of Stalin, or the removal of Franco’s remains from the Valle de los Caídos.
Pliny,
The placement of the cemetery at Arlington was a big fuck you to Lee. Taking the property–with its views of and from the capital–ensured that he wouldn’t have a farm to return to. (And as an aside, the property actually belonged to his wife, who was the great-granddaughter of Martha Custis Washington.)
Maybe they could move it next to the Benedict Arnold statue.
I’d more liken it to removing a large and prominent rock marked with the Ten Commandments from in front of a courthouse, frankly.
And frankly, Coel, this wouldn’t be an ‘issue’ if there weren’t Republicans in Congress, and pro-‘Southern Heritage’ groups fighting so hard to keep these monuments to racist traitors on public lands. They serve no valid purpose there, so there’s no reason to keep them up–unless you really have a hard-on for the depiction of benign slavery and noble slavers.
“…following his owner to war”
My mind boggles at the dehumanising matter-of-fact way this text describes enslavement of a *human being* by another human being. (Not surprised to find, when I googled the phrase “following his owner to war”, most of the hits were accounts of devoted dogs.)
Seriously.
@Cole #3
I can’t see how teaching that Black people benefited from being enslaved is anything other than a defence of slavery – see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-florida-standards-teach-black-people-benefited-slavery-taught-usef-rcna95418
@Seanna Watson:
That Florida course does not teach that “Black people benefited from being enslaved”. Since this has been made a post on its own I’ll reply more fully there.
It’s rather difficult to justify retaining memorials and monuments honoring treason against the United States. It’s rather easy to justify removing them.
You’ve got “semi-mythical”, scarequotes and “supposedly” in the one sentence. Is there any more minimization you’d like to add to this or is the trifecta here enough? This casual passing over and brushing off of historical and ongoing racial discrimination makes an interesting contrast with your eager and vigorous defence of any perceived slight against your favourite billionaire. The legacies of Jim Crow and redlining are still within living memory, and presented a huge obstacle to Black families attempting to build wealth and move up in the world. So I can forgive people who are tetchy about the reluctance to remove monuments that venerate and glorify a society that fought for the “right” to own their ancestors as property and used them like machinery.
And what of the other part of the systemic racism that is outside the part you’ve deemed to be “mythical?” Or is there any?
Seriously. Hence my extreme snappishness in reply. I’m SO TIRED of Coel’s “yawn what’s the big deal” sneers from 3000 miles away.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
Since you’ve asked me some direct questions, and since then generally leads me to respond, I’m going to presume that you want a reply and that a reply will at least be tolerated by Ophelia,
It was not about *historical* discrimination! It was about today (the word “today” occurred multiple times in that comment). Yes, things were dire in the slavery era, and the post-slavery era and the Jim Crow era and beyond, and up until about the 1980s.
You’re right. It did. But most of the rest of non-black America also hasn’t benefitted from inter-generational wealth (or, at least, not until very recently). The bottom half of the white distribution doesn’t pass on substantial inter-generational wealth. (By the way, more whites were redlined than blacks, though a higher fraction of blacks were.) Ditto most Hispanic families; ditto most Asian-American families (many being relatively recent immigrants from poorer countries). That might be changing rapidly now, but we’re now 50 years beyond redlining.
When it comes to the issues that really matter — racial gaps in educational achievement and in crime rates, in youths and young adults — being the issues that are actually driving societal tensions and most of the DEI ideology, inter-generational wealth does little to explain it. That’s partly for the above reason, and anyhow it’s very easy to do studies that control for family SES and that does not explain the racial gaps.
I don’t think there’s much. There might be some, but not nearly enough to explain the just-mentioned racial gaps as they affect today’s under-30s. I am, however, entirely willing to rethink that in the light of evidence.
I do think that the near-automatic “racial gaps derive from systemic racism” refrain avoids a proper evidence-based discussion of the actual issues today, which is actually what is needed.