New Orleans Monuments

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Like I said, some monuments do not deserve to be preserved. And as an addendum, some events and some people should not be celebrated with prominent statues. It is possible to teach the uglier aspects of history without celebrating the people who did ugly things. But then again, I just finished reading The Regular Army on the Eve of the Civil War, and I am spitting mad and unhappy with the Confederates.

There is also no precedent for renaming states, so I suspect your fears are just hyperbole.

Michael Denisovich

I don't see any point in being spitting mad about rebels since they're all dead, but apart from that I agree with your sentiments... ;)

[NMVolunteer]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

I don't see any point in being spitting mad about rebels since they're all dead, but apart from that I agree with your sentiments... ;)

True, but on the other hand I have some NPS and mainstream events coming up this month and June, so I might as well get myself in the proper mood. After all, my regiments lost a few officers as turncoats. And I heard rumors of the secesh trying to bribe fellow Regular enlisted men in Texas.

Michael Denisovich

[maillemaker]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

I wonder if a new thrust of preservation for Civil War Round Table groups who donate to the Civil War Land Trust and other similar organizations should now divert their funds to preserving Civil War monuments. Perhaps a museum could be founded and these monuments could be purchased from the governments who no longer want them and they could be housed there instead.

I totally am in favor of removing Confederate monuments from places of pride on the grounds of state legislatures or courts of law. Putting them there gives an implicit endorsement of Confederate ideology by those institutions. But I think they should be preserved and displayed for educational reasons and for those who still have strong family connections to Confederate veterans to be able to honor them.

Steve

[Tarheel]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Can a Brit enter this debate? I am utterly confused by the myopic, indeed, one-sided view of your history expressed by those who advocate the removal (destruction?) of Confederate monuments. There is no question but that the words "Confederacy" and "Slavery" are emotive and many of your countrymen and women find them offensive. But what purpose does it serve to remove the statues? Is it a question that if they're not there then people are not reminded and will ultimately
forget and that critical period of your country's history will vanish? I don't think so. If this thesis were to be extended, when do some of your legislators start ordering the burning of the books? To return to my confusion. In your history, which has been a source of fascination to me for most of my life, who was it who was a slaveholder who became a soldier who became a rebel who became a president who, with others, founded a country? My candidate is not Jeff Davis but George Washington. To carry my point further, the country that he and others founded accepted the institution of slavery (not just in the south) and, for many decades of its existence, also permitted the slave trade. Therefore, by extension and with this heritage, do you rename your country's capital and remove all monuments to Washington and his colleagues who signed the Declaration of Independence? This notion is of course ridiculous but, in the strict context of what's happening in New Orleans and other places, does it not have a logic? However and sadly, perhaps logic and a knowledge of your history does not have a place in the passion of the current debate.
Patrick Reardon

[NMVolunteer]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

To some people, statues exist to celebrate and commemorate. While most of us would see those statues as being akin to statues of Napoleon in Paris (and those with little familiarity with history would see them as statues of Louis XIV in Paris), the African-American community in New Orleans would see them more as statues of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Especially since they were put up in central locations by Confederate veterans and the post-war Jim Crow government to spite the Federal government shortly after the war. They were not placed on battlefields to commemorate and honor the sacrifices of soldiers, they were put up to fly the flag of the Unreconstructed. They should be placed in museums or battlefield parks; I am sure the state museums have sufficient space in collections storage to accommodate the statues.

Michael Denisovich

[LibertyHallVols]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Mr. Reardon,

Yes, a Brit can weigh in, and I think you provide a little bit of detached perspective, which we could all use at this point.

Statements like the following mystify me...

Putting them there gives an implicit endorsement of Confederate ideology by those institutions.

To apply a one-dimensional interpretation of a monument, the people who erected it, and the people whom it commemorates, based on a current-era interpretation, lumps an entire generation from (at the time) half of the country in to a single demographic. It assumes all in the group thought and acted alike, believed the same things. In my opinion, it separates them from their humanity.

In the coming months, we are going to see the "secessionist" / "treasonous" portion of this argument fall away in order for further moves to be made against notable memorials to our (unfortunately) slave-holding forefathers. Andrew Jackson is next, and when he goes, the road is open to the founding fathers.

[LibertyHallVols]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

This notion is of course ridiculous but, in the strict context of what's happening in New Orleans and other places, does it not have a logic? However and sadly, perhaps logic and a knowledge of your history does not have a place in the passion of the current debate.

Ridiculous? I wish.

"...perhaps logic and a knowledge of your history does not have a place in the passion of the current debate."
It DOES have a place, but is currently being left for dead on the side of the road.

[Tarheel]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Thank you for your response. I'm mystified that, as yet, no one who advocates the removal of such symbols, has answered my question regarding the "removal" of the Washington memorials. I've posed the question, both on this forum and on FB but silence is the only response. Andrew Jackson apart, what or who is next, Memorial Avenue in Richmond? To bring the question closer to home, if this movement continues to gather traction, when will we be banned in certain states from portraying soldiers of the Confederacy and, in re-enacting scenarios, forbidden to fly the battle flag? Again, this sounds utterly absurd but could it happen? My final thought on this subject after which I shall hold my peace (unless I get a response as above!!!) is that I completely understand that the New Orleans statues are found to be offensive by the African American community who wish to see them removed. However, is their removal not offensive to others in the community who wish to see them retained? Which "offense" is superior to the other? I for one would fight for their retention and I'm not a knuckle dragging, neanderthal, unreconstructed, neo-confederate racist and I'm sure neither are the majority of those who hold my view. I'm simply an amateur (very) historian and foreigner who has a passion for your history in general and the Civil War in particular.

Patrick Reardon

[Cpt Boone]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Can a Brit enter this debate? I am utterly confused by the myopic, indeed, one-sided view of your history expressed by those who advocate the removal (destruction?) of Confederate monuments. There is no question but that the words "Confederacy" and "Slavery" are emotive and many of your countrymen and women find them offensive. But what purpose does it serve to remove the statues? Is it a question that if they're not there then people are not reminded and will ultimately
forget and that critical period of your country's history will vanish? I don't think so. If this thesis were to be extended, when do some of your legislators start ordering the burning of the books? To return to my confusion. In your history, which has been a source of fascination to me for most of my life, who was it who was a slaveholder who became a soldier who became a rebel who became a president who, with others, founded a country? My candidate is not Jeff Davis but George Washington. To carry my point further, the country that he and others founded accepted the institution of slavery (not just in the south) and, for many decades of its existence, also permitted the slave trade. Therefore, by extension and with this heritage, do you rename your country's capital and remove all monuments to Washington and his colleagues who signed the Declaration of Independence? This notion is of course ridiculous but, in the strict context of what's happening in New Orleans and other places, does it not have a logic? However and sadly, perhaps logic and a knowledge of your history does not have a place in the passion of the current debate.
Patrick Reardon

Patrick,

From what I have seen, this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In New Orleans they are already targeting Andrew Jackson. And they do want to go after Washington and Jefferson. If you think it is just about Confederate monuments you're wrong. This is just the beginning. Even the Joan of Arc statue in the French Quarter was tagged with the "Take it Down" graffiti just a couple weeks ago. Take it down New Orleans even wants to remove Confederate Memorial Hall. Someone already tried to burn it down a few months ago and their flower bed was torn up Saturday morning. This will not stop until all statues, monuments, names are removed from the public memory. If someone believes taking down the Confederate Monuments is good, then they agree that Washington, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and their like should be removed from public memory as well. Instead you should remember all were flawed as men and women today are. And if you think about their philosophy, state and national parks are government property. They will go after those monuments as well.

I hope this helps.

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

The last paragraph seems especially relevant for this group...


New Orleans took down its Confederate monuments. Will the rest of the South?
By Editorial Board May 21 at 7:35 PM

IN THE space of just a few weeks, New Orleans has taken a major step toward de-glorifying a past that deserves very little glory. Acting on the vote of its city council, and with cover from state and federal courts that rebuffed specious challenges, the city took down monuments erected with the explicit goal of lionizing the Confederacy and a past in which slavery was a central and defining feature.

Despite huffing and puffing by relatively small bands of whites — some armed, some unrepentantly racist — claiming their “heritage” was being dishonored, Mayor Mitch Landrieu acted decisively. He removed statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, as well as a triumphal monument exalting a bloody white racist attack in the Reconstruction era that killed members of an integrated police force.

The city is warehousing the monuments while it searches for a new home for them — perhaps a museum or garden outside the public space. In the meantime, the South is left to grapple with what to do with hundreds, or perhaps thousands, more such statues and memorials, in varying sizes and settings, many of them erected as odes to the Confederacy’s “lost cause” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There is no blanket rule that easily applies to the proper course to take with all such symbols, let alone countless schools, roads and other facilities named in honor of men who, in the name of maintaining an inhumane system, sought to destroy the United States. Some statues should be removed and relocated. Some might be given updated contexts, perhaps with historical plaques. Some, including those in private cemeteries, should probably be left alone.

In many cases, however, what is unacceptable is to do nothing. In New Orleans, the monuments that stood for decades (or, in the case of the Lee statue, 133 years) were offensive to broad swaths of the local citizenry — not just the 60 percent of the city’s population that is African American. One does not have to be black to grasp that whatever revisionism about the Civil War’s roots the South once clung to — “states’ rights” was a popular one — those who fought and extolled the Confederacy were champions of a system whose defeat meant liberty and the promise of justice for millions of once enslaved people.

Yes, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and other prominent early Americans were slave owners, but their lives and contributions to history were not defined by a struggle to the death to preserve slavery. And those who erected many of the statues of Confederate icons, in the decades after the Civil War, did so as an act of defiance — a promise that the South would “rise again” in the cause of white supremacy.

That impulse is deeply offensive to most Americans today, in a more enlightened age. In some ways, the Confederacy has passed into the realm of folklore — reenactments and toy soldiers — but its real history deserves serious attention and, in the case of physical monuments, a healthy dose of context. It’s no longer acceptable to pretend that no political meaning attaches to glorifying the “lost cause.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/new-orleans-took-down-its-confederate-monuments-will-the-rest-of-the-south/2017/05/21/b2ac662c-3cd9-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html?utm_term=.b0a709366a0a

[LibertyHallVols]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

That impulse is deeply offensive to most Americans today, in a more enlightened age. In some ways, the Confederacy has passed into the realm of folklore — reenactments and toy soldiers — but its real history deserves serious attention and, in the case of physical monuments, a healthy dose of context. It’s no longer acceptable to pretend that no political meaning attaches to glorifying the “lost cause.”

Schnapps,

I say this with no sarcasm, whatsoever:
I value your contributions here because you challenge my assumptions and my positions, and I think that dialogue is absolutely necessary. Aside from that, we've done several events together and I genuinely like you.

However, I think the perspective in that article is just that: One perspective. Yes, it is the one that is gaining traction right now, but it is an opinion piece. Others here might (probably will) give counter-posts.

For me, the text that I highlighted is meaningful. "...a more enlightened age..."
I think not. Recent events have shown that are anything but more enlightened than we were 30, 50, or 80 years ago. We do not live in an age that values facts, reason, empathy, truth, or logic.

[Pvt Schnapps]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

I like you, too, John. :)

But here's another expression of that perspective -- an explanation of why it's less about history than about contemporary culture and politics: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-...81831463657669

Briefly, when we associate the movement of postwar supremacist monuments with a perceived overall decline in civilization we're no longer talking about the civil war. We're talking about our own cultural anxiety and privileging it over the concerns of our fellow citizens who no longer want their public spaces dominated by the heroes of the slaveholders' rebellion and the Jim Crow society that raised them.

Now we can agree or disagree about that, but the fact is it's a contemporary argument. Taking the side of the statues -- saying they can't even be moved, that they have to remain towering over the central square in the face of everyone, even the majority of citizens in a town whose ancestors were enslaved by those very men -- that's not "preservation" in the usual sense. It's not standing against a developer who wants to pave over a battlefield. It's preservation of something more nuanced, if not insidious. And I think that whether I held a different opinion about the statues or not, I would resist conscription -- as a reenactor who considers himself intermittently, partially authentic -- in that contemporary fight here.

When we broaden the coverage of "preservation" from battlefields to any artifact that can be associated with the civil war -- no matter how it's been used or abused since -- we risk straying from whatever legitimate historical mission we claim and falling into the trap of serving just one side of the present national discussion.

I'm sure others have opposing opinions, just as we do on other topics. But on this topic we can't resolve the discussion by reference to research or original sources about the war. We can't resolve anything. We can only take part in a series of contemporary political fights probably best left to the localities involved. There are plenty of other places where we can do that without distracting from an orientation on historical research, education, and living history.

I will disagree with you about one thing. I don't consider this an age that doesn't value "facts, reason, empathy, truth, or logic." It does, or you and I wouldn't continue talking to each other. ;)

[Tarheel]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Dear Pvt. Schnapps,
I've now read most of the responses to The Washington post article and what a depressing read it was. It certainly seems that some of your countrymen and women are willing to advocate the destruction of the Washington Monument and, by extension, the re-naming of your capital because references to Washington "offend" them. There are several comments which caused me utter disbelief. One respondent stated that the Southern States did not vote for secession by overwhelming majorities because the votes cast did not take into account the slave population which, if considered, would have resulted in a clear vote to remain in the Union Yea Gods!!!. Can anyone tell me which state in the entire union at that time allowed black suffrage let alone universal suffrage to include women? Another good one was the statement that the New Orleans statues were paid for by "the Government". Federal??? I understood that payment was largely paid by public subscription although I'd welcome correction. My favourite assertion from the article stated that even though Washington, Jefferson and Monroe were slave holders..... "their lives and contributions to history were not defined by a struggle to the death to preserve slavery" Really??? My history tells me that they certainly fought to the death (against my country!!) to found a Republic in which the widespread institution of slavery was unequivocally accepted and the slave trade was a commercially acceptable business enterprise. What was it that Patrick Henry (a slave holder I believe) said about liberty (his) or death? I have to admit that the debate is deeply worrying as the most strident and radical of those advocating the removal of the memorials seem to have a tenuous grasp of your history at best and a fanatical willingness to have it re-written it to suit their own contemporary agenda.

Patrick Reardon

- - - Updated - - -

Dear John,
Many thanks for your PM. I fear that we and other like minded souls are fighting against overwhelming odds with little chance of success but fight on we must.

Patrick Reardon

[NMVolunteer]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

Never read the comments on newspaper or television news websites. That is truly the road to madness, as any member of news aggregator websites would tell you. Half of the posts are made in ignorance, and the other half are deliberate efforts at trolling.

Michael Denisovich

[maillemaker]

Re: New Orleans Monuments

To apply a one-dimensional interpretation of a monument, the people who erected it, and the people whom it commemorates, based on a current-era interpretation, lumps an entire generation from (at the time) half of the country in to a single demographic. It assumes all in the group thought and acted alike, believed the same things. In my opinion, it separates them from their humanity.

I think that it is probably true that the further away in time you get from an event the more one-dimensional it becomes for most people. Most people no longer care about the nuances of Egyptian religion anymore - they just see the Pyramids as tombs for pharaohs.

Most people today rightfully summarize the Confederate effort during the Civil War as a rebellion against the United States of America fought predominately to protect the financial interests of slaveholders.

Steve