Stop The War Against Historical Statues

This week Americans were presented the spectacle of dramatic video released by the Washington Post of the melting of the famous Charlottesville, Virginia, statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler. While presented as yet another coming to grips of our country with its past of racism and an action of peace, it was not received as such by a great many Americans. Instead, it was seen as an attempt to divide Americans yet again. Carol Swaim, the black conservative scholar, posted on X: “I am a native Virginian who finds this act repulsive. The momentary euphoria associated with the destruction of a historical monument will only serve to ignite racial hatred and animosity among people who have been neutral.” She is correct in this. I would go further. Americans need to press pause on the great wave of statue removals, topplings, and destructions that have been standard fare in America since 2020, for they have been motivated and designed not only for the stoking of racial animosity but hatred of our country and its history as a whole. And they are a distraction from the real threats we face.

This might seem wrongheaded. I suspect more Americans ten or fifteen years ago than today would have applauded or at least approved of the removal of most statues to Confederate generals and politicians that dotted the landscape of the American South. That many were erected much later than the Confederacy as a means of reasserting white supremacy—the real kind, not “colorblind” approaches or “cultural appropriation” nonsense—seemed a more plausible reason for removing them from all public squares. But times have changed.

The year 2020 yielded a tidal wave not merely of cities deciding to move statues of Confederate generals and other figures out of the public squares of towns in the South, but of mob destruction or defacement of lots of other figures, too. An August 2020 article in The Daily Signal catalogued 113 official removals, destructions, or acts of vandalism on various monuments. While many of them did have to do with Confederate figures, the list also included actions with regard to statues of George Washington, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, Union Soldiers (including a black regiment), Teddy Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, even Frederick Douglass. It was clear during that annus horribilis that the problem the left has is not just with slavery or Jim Crow, but with America itself.

The melting of the Lee statue and turning it into something more “inclusive” (yet to be announced) is called the Swords into Plowshares Project. But the video’s vision of the face of the statue on the ground in flames and being prodded about with pokers is anything but peaceful. Indeed, while it is being depicted as the death of a “myth,” there is something distinctly creepy about seeing what looks like a human being’s death mask in flames. NPR’s article on the topic rhapsodized: “They use a torch to score the head of the statue, in the pattern of a death mask. Lee’s face falls to floor with a loud clank.” Any such article on a figure beloved of the left would have pointed out the very real threat of violence that seemed to be present in showing us the image of a burning face.

Again, some might object. So what? Lee represents the Confederacy. The Confederacy was about slavery, thus it must be evil. The problem is that you don’t have to defend slavery or racism to think that there is something wrong with the need to stamp out all memory of this figure. Christopher Caldwell, in a 2021 article on the fortunes of Lee’s reputation, notes that until very recently, there was a nearly universal respect for this man who “had a hatred for slavery, both in the abstract and in practice,” even if he himself had participated in it. He who had been offered both the lead of the Union Army and the Confederate ultimately took the side of his own state, Virginia. Such a conception of state patriotism might seem remote to many these days, but surely one can see that it was his full surrender to Grant that brought the Civil War to a close even though in the days after, “Confederate President Jefferson Davis would call for a ‘new phase of the struggle’ that would involve reconstituting the Army of Northern Virginia—and thus inciting soldiers to renege on the pledge of honor that Lee had made in their name.” Caldwell says that it was Lee’s “moral authority” that kept the peace.

“Might there be something about Lee that preserves an aspect of Southern heritage worth celebrating?” asks historian Michael Schwarz? He concludes that such questions are not allowed to be asked because they offend those on the left who see themselves as pure and all those in the past as impure. “After all, nuance threatens the moral certitude that radicals crave. It makes them feel better, morally superior, if they simply destroy.”

And the lost nuance is not merely about Lee’s character but about Grant’s and all of ours. As Caldwell writes, in the new view of history, “Appomattox, far from being the moment when Americans began to reunite with malice toward none, with charity for all, becomes the moment when whites—North and South—unite against blacks, an episode in the history of a tyranny, a tyranny we inhabit to this day, which stands in need of a root-and-branch reconstruction.”

For the left, America, as Barack Obama put it, stood and stands in need of “fundamental transformation,” a transformation to be carried out by the left who will set all things right, for they (so they believe) have no sin. Yet the very fact that this is obviously not true is all the more reason for them to focus on the destruction of the memories of the people of the past. They need scapegoats who will serve as a distraction from what their fundamental transformation has yielded so far.

Indeed, it is supremely ironic that the reason given for the need to melt down General Lee is the 2017 rally in which protesters chanted about Jews, “You will not replace us!” There is no doubt racism and antisemitism lurking in the dark corners of the right, but those are not the only or most important precincts. Americans have been reeling the last few weeks from the discovery that, under the left’s tutelage, a great many young Americans now find it acceptable for Hamas to have murdered Israeli women and children. Indeed, all too many seem very happy to destroy Israel itself, for what else does it mean to chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free”?

The frantic nature of the attempts to cry “white supremacy” today is because too many Americans suspect these are not the only acts of violence that are on the horizon. Siding with Hamas and the need to erase the memory of General Lee are all part of one vision. The contemporary left divides the world into colonized and colonizers, oppressed and oppressors. Those in the former groups can do no wrong, while those in the latter can do no right. General Lee, the Jews, and indeed all of American society are grouped as oppressors by today’s left.

What some on the left would like to do to our country and to our fellow Americans finds justification in this Manichaean worldview that puts not merely the South and General Lee, but also the North and Lincoln and Grant and even George Washington and Frederick Douglass on the side of darkness. That is why we must press pause on the removal of statues. Until we get clarity on whether the goal is to remove all statues and purge all of our history as irredeemable, we ought not to topple any of them. There is no clear endpoint to this call for removal and ultimately destruction, and the stakes are high. Once a statue is destroyed, it is lost to every future generation and a piece of our shared and complicated history is gone.