Bunker Boy read a maudlin speech at Mount Rushmore yesterday whose text obviously bored him to death except during the sentences inciting his elderly white core constituency against the scary black demonstrators. It's always mildly entertaining to hear him recite names of people he mostly couldn't identify if asked during a press conference or ordinary conversation.
NBC News has a YouTube of its live coverage, Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event, with his speech beginning just after 1:15:00. Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore event:
Although the removing-statues moment is almost exclusively about monuments to the Confederacy, Trump praised statues of Washington and Jefferson in a bored tone. He didn't even allude to the, uh, special character of Confederate monuments.
SQJ managed to make a decent point about monument symbolism. Although he wouldn't be himself if he didn't manage to garble the message a bit. Still, he does make the point that Confederate symbolism stands for white racism and treason and people generally understand that's what it stands for, despite the Sons of Confederate Veterans types babbling about Heritage and their sacred honuh of their great-great-great-grandpappies.
Without explicitly offering advice to protesters, he actually managed to sound like he was giving a sympathetic suggestion to protesters to keep their focus on Confederate monuments and not blur the message by making issues of those whose symbolism is not so clearly identified by the general public. When pressed on the unauthorized removal of Confederate statues, Biden understandably expressed a preference for normal procedures, citing the Mississippi Legislature's recent decision to dump the Confederate-themed official state flag:
But I can understand, I can understand the anger and anguish that people feel by having for years and years, then under the statue of Robert E. Lee, who, if you're an African-American. So, it's a difference. It's always better to do it peacefully. But there's a distinction between, in, those monuments, and - I shift responsibility and I'm not, I think, the elected officials where those statues are have a responsibility to move. Put them in museums. Get them down.
But don't expect, if you have sittin' in front of you all these years, and we finally, finally, are going through another phase of maybe responding to the systemic racism in America, and what's we seen happen is, don't be surprised if someone pulls down the statue of Jefferson Davis. It's better that they do not. But it's fundamentally different than pulling down the statue, or going into the Lincoln Memorial and tryin' to pull, you know, a - not Lincoln Memorial, that's a bad example - the Jefferson Memorial, and grabbing Jefferson off his chair. [my emphasis]
That is not nearly so clear for most other public monument themes. I'd be happy to help someone pull down a Grover Cleveland statue. But good luck trying to explain the symbolism of that in a 15-second TV report. Hint: Cleveland's explicitly expressed philosophy of government was, "though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."
Public symbols like statues and state flags embody symbolism that changes over time based on the public narrative that develops over time. It also has to do with power, as we see in cases of authoritarian regimes that create huge monuments to the leader of the moment. In the end, all of them wind up like Percy Shelley's famous Ozymandias:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or, as John Maynard Keynes also famously put it, in the long run, we are all dead.
But if we crank our time range down from millennia to a century or two or a couple of decades, we get to the span in which public icons have some contemporary emotional and ideological meaning.
But, obviously, not every historical figure or event has equal meaning. In the United States, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War loom large in the national collective memory. Wars and revolutions generally play prominent roles in national symbolism in because they represent significant collective turning points that help us to break up history into understandable chunks. In our world of sovereign national states, national symbolism matters to people.
Civil War symbolism in the US has been more contentious than most, largely because of the continuing, toxic role that white racism against black people has always played in the US. The symbolism of the American Revolution didn't have the same enduring divisive role, because there was never huge constituency aiming to reverse the substance of the US becoming its own independent country, the Hartford Convention (1814-15) being the last gasp of such sentiments as any kind of political force.
Confederate symbolism has been a live topic of political contention since essentially the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The infamous public Confederate monuments, as we've recently been reminded, were used in the post-Civil War era to be symbols and advertisements for Southern continuing white resistance to equal rights for blacks citizens, although that clinical phrasing doesn't come close to capturing the brutality, cruelty, and just plain meanness of Southern US apartheid.
Arguing over the meaning of the Civil War isn't restricted to public monuments or the names of military bases. It's also been an intensive subject of contention in professional history, and has attracted an huge amount of interest in amateur history and popular culture. Including movies, of course. What to Know When Watching Gone With the WindTurner Classic Movies 06/26/2020:
The Confederate symbolism is pervasive enough and has been around long enough that everyone in America basically knows that the symbolism is about white racism and white supremacy, both of which are poison for democracy and the rule of law. Of course, it's part of white supremacist narratives to deny that it is about race. But essentially no one of voting age actually takes that seriously.
Building different narratives around other issues is more difficult, because the shared understanding of the symbols is rarely so clear as with the celebration of the Confederacy. Also, the Confederate States of America was also explicitly treason to the United States. The enemy soldiers Confederate generals and their armies were killing soldiers of the United States Army. The contradiction between celebrating the violence and treason of the Confederacy and the idolatry of the US military that is practiced primarily by present-day conservatives is so painfully obvious.
Most other historical periods in the US just don't have symbolism as intense and widely understood in common ways. And that's the context for discussions over what other historical symbols should be newly contested.
Woodrow Wilson has come in for condign attention, for instance:
I don't ever recall having been a particular fan of Woodrow Wilson. So I don't particularly care how many buildings or streets may be name after him.
But I also doubt that the renaming has much resonance for most other people, either. When it comes to university buildings, very few of them are named after respected historical figures or innovative scientists are star professors from decades past. They're name after rich people who made large donations to the universitiy. So talking Wilson's name off a college building is a fundraising opportunity. The Planet Princeton article above notes, "The university had already planned to close Wilson College and retire its name after opening two new residential colleges currently under construction."
Wilson is known for being the President during the First World War. And he is also known as a tragic figure who tried unsuccessfully to get an isolationist-minded Senate to join the League of Nations. He also had a progressive-leaning economic policy by the standards of the time. I tend to take a generally dim view of Wilson's Presidency. The Versailles Treaty that produced the League of Nations was on the whole a bad treaty, that did a great deal to lay the ground for a second world war. The "Spanish flu" pandemic may have a direct effect on Wilson's performance in the negotiations, as Steve Coll discusses in Woodrow Wilson's Case of the Flu, and How Pademics Change HistoryNew Yorker 04/17/2020
Sigmund Freud and American diplomat William Bullitt did a joint biography of Wilson that was first published in 1967, Thomas Woodrow Wilson A Psychological Study, that expressed their shared dim view of the late President. (Ben Yagoda, What Drove Sigmund Freud to Write a Scandalous Biography of Woodrow Wilson?Smithsonian Magazine Sept 2018) Their book focuses on Wilson's tendency to dogmatic moralism, which arguably inclined to poor decisions in regard to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, an issue in which Bullitt in his diplomatic role had been intensely involved at the time.
Wilson's racism, as described by Dick Lehr in the article linked above, was also real.
Yet Wilson stood in American politics and diplomacy for the importance of international law, however poorly his attempt to integrate his concepts into his negotiations with the victorious diplomats of the British and French Empires may have been. But his general commitment to international law particularly influenced Franklin Roosevelt and the diplomatic worldviews of the architects of the post-Second World War order. Wilson's anti-imperialist ideas also had a significant influence on the ideas and aspirations of independence leaders in countries held as colonies. (Joshua Keating, The Accidental Anti-ImperialistSlate 06/30/2020)
So, despite being an unreconstructed Southern racist and and despite his failure to effectively push through his position in the Versailles negotiations, Wilson's actual subsequent influence developed in ways that he might not have expected or entirely approved. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Wilson Quarterly are good sources for establishment-minded but center-left analysis of foreign policy issues.
In other words, in contrast to the defined and long-standing nature of Confederate symbolism, the symbolism of Woodrow Wilson doesn't have the contemporary ideological intensity that Confederate symbolism has in American politics. I doubt there are many people who much care whether Princeton clears up a couple of Wilson-designated items so that donors can buy the building names for themselves.
Speaker Pro Tem Jason White, a Republican, spoke on the House floor in favor of the bill. “Many opponents of changing the state flag say we should stand up to what is right, that we shouldn’t cave to outside pressure … even if it’s bad for business," White said. "I agree with those people... I’m here today because it is simply the right thing to do.”
Sen. Barbara Blackmon, a Black Democrat from Canton, said she had witnessed several major historical moments, but she never expected the state flag to come down in her lifetime. "The time has come to take this flag down, because it is right," she told her colleagues.
Sen. Chris McDaniel, a Republican, argued that in the future, people who view the American flag as oppressive may want to take it down as well, and that voters should decide whether to change the state flag. “I don’t see how that makes me a racist," he said. "I don’t see how that makes me a terrible human being.”
[Republican] Gov. [Tate] Reeves tweeted that he will sign a bill that comes to his desk.
His whiny-white-guy comment above isn't novel. You can see his filmed Facebook presentation on it here (06/28/2020). Where you can here his tone of authoritarian condescension, similar to what we hear from Mike Pence. It's kind of a rural high-school principal tone.
He claims what he wanted was a referendum on the flag, which has a specific history. There was one in 2001. He was hoping for a rerun of it.
Ole Chris havin' him a serious talk with his Facebook followers over that thar flag vote
He had this to say about fighting for the lost cause of the Mississippi Confederate state flag:
Ah'm not doin' this to try to hold anybody that voted for the change accountable. Accountability, uh (thoughtful pause), it has to rest with the people that were pushin' the issue. [You know, those people.] ... If you think that the American left is going to be satisfied with this change, you ah mistaken. These are the same people who are tearin' down monuments to George Washington, to Francis Scott Key, to Abraham Lincoln, to Theodore Roosevelt, etceteruh, etceteruh. They will never be satisfied until we make them be satisfied. And the only way to make them be satisfied is to finally tell them No. ...
Look, at some point, you draw a line in the sand and yuh explain to the American left that we are going to either learn to live together or we or not. But part of learnin' to live together is to occasionally be offended by one another. And right now, we don't have that in this country. One side of the equation is shouting and screamin' and usin' violence to git their ways [sic], that is not appropriate and we cannot allow it. The fact that we condone it even through our silence is problematic, It's, uh, (thoughtful pause) it's encouragin' their behavior. We can't do that.
Today we allowed it to occur in this state. An' I'm sure that some of the people who voted for it wur well-intentioned, I do not dispute that. The question, for purposes of thiis discussion is, will it stop? No, it's not goin' to stop, and it's not goin' to solve these problems, and it's not going to bring us closer together under these circumstances.
Gee, I haven't been keeping up enough with Mississippi politics. I had no idea that there was a strong anarchist faction in the Mississippi Legislature that rammed this flag bill through by "shouting and screamin' and usin' violence to git their ways"! Wow!
At the end, he wishes himself happy birthday and bitches about "Obamacare" and whines about how mean God is to him on his birthday. (I'm not kidding!)
His reference to the statues of Washington et al is in line with his indirect quote in Pantaleo's report, "that in the future, people who view the American flag as oppressive may want to take it down as well." He's simultaneously smearing critics of Confederacy idolatry as being un-America and vaguely hinting that the White Power crowd may start going after public symbols that are meaningful to African-Americans and Democrats. And I wouldn't be surprised to see the Republicans try something like that, because they unfortunately have reason to expect that the Democrats would be fairly feckless in their response.
Public symbolism is symbolism. But there's good reason to single out monuments to the Confederacy. Because it was a treasonous uprising against the United States government to defend and expand the institution of African-American chattel slavery. And the Lost Cause monuments were part of pointed political campaign in the postwar period to inspire the resistance to equal rights for black citizens. They are monuments to white supremacy and of hostility to democratic government. As much as politicians like Chris McDaniel might want to deny it, essentially everyone in the US is very aware that the celebration of the Confederacy is about white racism and white supremacy.
There are monuments that recognize a major Revolutionary War general whose name became synonymous with "traitor" in American English. But they show more discretions than the monuments to Robert E. Lee and his fellow Confederate commanders. (Dennis Yusko, Infamous Benedict Arnold finally gets some respectHouston Chronicle 06/17/2001)
This week provides an occasion for the U.S. government to get real about history, as April 9 is the 150th anniversary of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. The generous terms of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House foreshadowed a multitude of real and symbolic compromises that the winners of the war would make with secessionists, slavery supporters, and each other to piece the country back together. It’s as appropriate an occasion as the Selma anniversary to reflect on the country’s struggle to improve itself. And to mark the occasion, the federal government should make two modest changes: It should make April 9 a federal holiday; and it should commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support. [my emphasis]
He puts this in the context of reframing the popular historical narrative over slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and discrediting the persistent effects of the Lost Cause ideology.
I have another citation from Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory blog, Victor David Hanson and the Republican Obsession With Confederate Monuments 03/14/2019. Whatever Hanson's academic credentials may be, he is a hack Republican ideologist. Dick Cheney during his time as Vice President referred to Hanson as his fa vorite historian. VDH was an enthusiastic fan of the disastrous foreign policy known as the Iraq War.
Kevin gives a good summary of a silly rightwing claim that's actually become a standard white nationalist argument in the Trumpified Republican Party, as described by the sad, weird propagandist Dinesh D’Souza:
Historians have tended to point to a gradual realignment of African Americans from the Republican to Democratic Party beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. In the late 1960s, early 70s the Republican Party refocused efforts on a “Southern Strategy” that sought the support of white southerners in the former states of the Confederacy. That shift helped to solidify the Democratic Party as the party of civil rights and widespread African American support. According to D’Souza this is a myth. I am not going to go into too much detail here, but what you need to know is that according to D’Souza the Democrats have always been the party of white supremacy going back to the antebellum period, through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century. In short, there was no party realignment. The Republican Party has always been the true political party of civil rights and racial equality.
Kevin's characterization of this political tall-tale is spot on: "Needless to say the historical rigor behind these claims is flimsy at best and easily debunked."
But this brings up the question of whether debunking actually matters. Of course, I think it does. (A recent journatlistic presentation of the debunking-doubting case is This Article Won’t Change Your Mind by Julie Beck The Atlantic 03/13/2017.)
One of the obvious problems of the D'Souza nonsense argument is that it has been mostly Democrats pushing for removal of Confederate-ideolatry monuments in recent, while Republicans have been more likely to support the pro-Confederate advocates. (Republican Nikki Haley provided an exception to Repüublican neo-Confederate sympathies in 2015: Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate FlagNew York Times 06/22/2015)
Kevin writes, "This obsession with protecting these monuments and memorials was reinforced for me after reading Victor David Hanson’s piece earlier today at National Review." He notes in the following that it's a "poorly argued piece," although that a bit redundant, since he had already noted that the author was Victor David Hanson.
Hanson is a noted Conservative historian and author of The Case For Trump. It’s a poorly argued piece beginning with his failure to distinguish between history and memory/commemoration and his decision to equate the vandalism and removal of Confederate monuments with the destruction of religious monuments by ISIS. Nowhere does Hanson mention that in most localities public conversation has been the order of the day nor does he mention state laws preventing removal in places where monuments/memorials have been vandalized.
But what is truly revealing is that Hanson fails to mention other instances of monument removals that I have no doubt he supports. Perhaps the best example is the destruction of the Saddaam Hussein monument in Baghdad by the United State military. More to the point, I would love to know what Hanson’s thoughts are regarding the often violent destruction of monuments celebrating communist leaders like Lenin and Stalin in former Soviet-bloc countries at the end of the Cold War. [my emphasis]
If there were a Nobel Prize for hackery, VDH woulkd have won it long ago.
Kevin's has written a number of times at Civil War Memory about the Confederate monument controversies.
It includes a reminder that Confederate "Heritage" Month is unfortunately still officially celebrated:
Multiple Southern states proudly devote public time, energy and resources to celebrate the Confederacy each year. North Carolina and South Carolina celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on May 10. Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee celebrate it on June 3. Texas celebrates on Jan. 19, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and – recently – Livingston, Tennessee, dedicate all of April to “Confederate History Month.” Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi also celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on various dates in April. [my emphasis]
The report recalls how a racist mass murder provided new intensity to the debate over Lost Cause public monuments, which actively continues four years later, "The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic 'Mother Emanuel' church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy."
The defenders of monuments promoting a Lost Cause version of history that celebrates treason in in defense of slavery include a number of very fine people dubious characters:
White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.
President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and tweeting that it is “[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”
The Lost Cause monuments provide a continuing example of the way that current political priorities and historical understandings and historical symbolism can be intricately connected:
There is no doubt among reputable historians that the Confederacy was established upon the premise of white supremacy and that the South fought the Civil War to preserve its slave labor. Its founding documents and its leaders were clear. “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” declared Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in his 1861 “Cornerstone speech.”
It’s also beyond question that the Confederate flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and that segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of Jim Crow. George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, unfurled the flag above the state Capitol in 1963 shortly after vowing “segregation forever.” In many other cases, schools, parks and streets were named for Confederate icons during the era of white resistance to equality. [my emphasis]
