Do we need a law against moving monuments?

Now, here’s the sort of thing that’s perfect for stirring up debate in the historical blogosphere:

A new bill proposed in the Georgia legislature would prohibit local governments from hiding or removing statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or other Confederate army heroes indefinitely.…

Rep. Tommy Benton, R-Jefferson, introduced the proposal at the request of the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The bill, if passed, would require that monuments be kept in a prominent place. It would also make it illegal to “deface, defile, or abuse contemptuously” any memorial dedicated to the Confederate army.

“We’re not saying they can’t move them,” Benton said. “We’re just saying they can’t just put them in a field somewhere.”

You can read the proposed bill yourself by clicking here. It’s pretty short, so go ahead and give it a look.

Of course, I’m in favor of throwing the book at anybody who mutilates or damages historic monuments and markers, but I would assume Georgia already has vandalism laws to cover that sort of thing. As for the bill’s more novel provisions to stop such monuments from being “relocated, removed, concealed, obscured, or altered,” I’m not sure what to think.

My inclination in disputes over older monuments is usually to let them be and keep them in good condition, since they have intrinsic historic value. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have a state law prohibiting local government agencies from moving monuments except in cases of construction projects, since the bill (if I understand it correctly) makes no distinction among monuments “dedicated to a historical entity” based on their age or significance.

What do you guys think?

Confederate descendants carry on the work of their forefathers

…by seceding from their SCV camp.

It seems some members of Florida’s General Jubal A. Early Camp No. 556 (of ginormous Confederate flag fame) wanted to devote more of their efforts to historic preservation and education.  Their compatriots preferred to focus on charitable work and PR, so twelve of the historically minded gents accordingly took their leave and formed a new camp, named for Judah P. Benjamin.

When members of a Civil War heritage group can’t persuade fellow members to engage in Civil War heritage activities, I think you’ve got a case for secession that even the most radical of nineteenth-century Republicans would support.

Show and tell

Head over to Civil War Memory to watch Glenn Beck pick up Nathan Bedford Forrest’s sword, explain that the weapon likely “skinned people alive,” and proclaim it “a sword of tremendous American evil.”  Sort of like the One Ring, I suppose; we should put it in a fire to see if it’s got an inscription.

As you might imagine, the SCV was less than thrilled with Beck’s attempt to paint Forrest as a nineteenth-century Hannibal Lecter.

Beck also had a number of artifacts on hand during a rally in Texas this past weekend.  If this broadcasting thing doesn’t pan out, maybe he can get a gig as a museum docent.  Hopefully he’ll do some additional reading between now and then.

A Lexington counterfactual

Those of you who follow the Civil War blogs are probably aware of the SCV’s recent legal defeat.  Those of you who don’t can get up to speed by clicking here.

I’m afraid I can’t give you my opinion on the city’s ordinance or the judge’s ruling because I don’t really have an opinion about either one.  As I’ve said before, the sight of a Confederate battle flag doesn’t offend me; I have about the same reaction to it as I would to the flag of Argentina.  On the other hand, a law against the flying of any flags on municipal poles except those of official government entities doesn’t offend me, either.  It sort of seems like common sense, actually.  So whether the SCV won or lost this one, I’d be cool with whatever.

Let’s indulge in a counterfactual exercise with this very recent bit of Civil War history.  Suppose the law had been overturned.  What then?

What would the SCV have gained from the effort?  They would’ve gained the right to fly the Confederate battle flag from municipal poles in Lexington, VA.  Would it have been worth it?

Sure, Lexington has symbolic value to devotees of Confederate heritage, since it’s the final resting place of both Lee and Jackson.  But anybody who wants to go to Lexington and wave a Confederate flag, plaster a Confederate flag sticker on their car, or march around in a Confederate flag t-shirt can still do so.  Your right to display a Confederate flag in Lexington is as secure as it was before the ordinance, if I understand the situation correctly.

I know the SCV’s raison d’être is to maintain the legacy of the Confederacy, and that perpetuating the display of the Confederate flag falls well within those limits.  And, again, I’ve got no problem with the display of the flag, so long as it’s not done with blatant insensitivity toward the feelings of people who might legitimately be hurt by it.

But when I think of all the causes that the SCV might take up—battlefield preservation, monument restoration, scholarships, etc.—I can’t help but wonder whether this was time well spent.

Then again, it wasn’t my time.

If a Confederate monument falls in Reidsville, does it make a sound?

Yes, it does.  In fact, it raises quite a ruckus.

REIDSVILLE, N.C.—Mark Anthony Vincent says he was tired and distracted as he drove his van through this city early one morning last May to deliver auto parts, and dozed off. Mr. Vincent says he looked at his GPS just before 4:47 a.m., when the 1999 Chevrolet ran off the road and slammed into a 101-year-old Confederate veterans monument in Reidsville’s central roundabout.

The van struck the 32-foot-tall granite pillar, jostling a 6-foot marble statue of a Confederate soldier, which toppled onto the van and broke into at least 10 pieces. The soldier’s head slammed through the van’s hood, crushing the engine.

Example #28476193 of why cars and monuments don’t mix.  Watch where you’re going, people.

Many in Reidsville thought insurance would pay for a replacement and that would be that. Instead, two groups with different views of what the monument symbolized are squaring off in a debate over the statue’s future. The fight reflects the South’s continuing struggle over how to commemorate the Civil War.

No, it doesn’t.  It reflects the continuing struggle between heritage groups over how to commemorate the Civil War.  The other 100 million people in “the South” have other things to worry about.  Read on.

The statue’s owner—the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which collected $105,000 in insurance money for the piece—plans to repair the base of the monument, replace the statue and move the whole thing to a cemetery away from downtown. The statue’s broken pieces now lie in the city’s public-works yard.

City officials, who say they have no authority over the statue, applaud the UDC decision. “Once it’s down, I think it sends the wrong message to put it back up,” said James Festerman, the 69-year-old white mayor of a city that is 42% black. “I don’t want industries that might want to move here to think this is a little town still fighting the Civil War.”

Too late for that, dude.

The Historical Preservation Action Committee, a local organization that backs keeping the statute at its former site, has led numerous protests at the roundabout, with members and supporters often dressed in Confederate uniforms. It has gathered almost 3,000 signatures of support. A “Save the Reidsville Confederate Monument” Facebook page has more than 1,900 “likes.”

“How sad that the City is attempting to eradicate the history and memory of those that sacrificed so much,” one fan wrote on the Facebook page.

Look, if municipal authorities had ordered the monument torn down, then it would be a case of the city “attempting to eradicate the history and memory of those that sacrificed so much.”  The UDC claims ownership of the monument, they want to repair it and relocate it, and the city agrees with them.  Not exactly a case of eradicating history.

 The HPAC—which contends that either the city or the state owns the statue—joined with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a national heritage group, to hire a lawyer to press the state to intervene. The state refused. Now the HPAC has started raising money for a possible lawsuit against the city or the United Daughters. The threat of legal action has left the statue’s repair and replacement in limbo.

The SCV is pitching in to call for government involvement to thwart a decision by the UDC.  There are so many levels of irony here that I’m getting dizzy.

Wait, it gets even more bizarre.

Conspiracy theories abound that Mr. Vincent, who is black and lives in Greensboro, about 22 miles from Reidsville, wrecked the statue on purpose, even though it almost killed him and destroyed his van. Police found no basis for such theories, Mayor Festerman said. Mr. Vincent has an unresolved traffic citation for the crash.

Yes, they’re accusing a distracted driver of a kamikaze attack on a monument.  Heritage controversies—the cure for all those occasions when life makes too much sense.

Another flag flap

No sooner do we emerge from a Confederate Battle Flag squabble in Lexington, VA than another emerges in Georgia.

The Southern battle colors are flying again, this time as part of an effort to unfurl huge Confederate flags along Georgia’s interstates.

Among the three flags that have gone up so far is a car dealership-sized Southern Cross north of Tifton that measures 30-by-50 feet. Two others are in north Georgia.

“We want to remind people of who they are and where they came from,” said Jack Bridwell, the division commander of state chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which is paying for the flags. “Being Southern is nothing to be ashamed of.”

None of the flags fly in metro Atlanta, though Bridwell said the group is actively looking to buy a site along the highway or sign a long-term lease.

Even without the Southern Cross flapping at Downtown Connector commuters, what organizers see as a way to honor soldiers during the 150th anniversary of the Civil War has nonetheless revived the debate over the history of the war and slavery’s role in it.

These Confederate flag dust-ups are like Hollywood divorces.  Every time you turn around, there’s another one.

Here’s a sound bite to ponder: “Bridwell, a retired educator, said any opposition is misguided. To him, the Civil War, ‘or war of Northern aggression, if you will,’ he said, was about economics and an unprovoked attack on Fort Sumter.”

If the attack on Ft. Sumter was unprovoked, then why was it “a war of Northern aggression”?  Go figure.

And the Park Service historian just sighs. . .

AOL News decided to start the year off with a glance at how America is getting geared up for the Civil War Sesquicentennial, so they called up the usual suspects for sound bites and came away with the predictable rhetoric, guaranteed to be 100% free of any meaningful historic sensibility.

NAACP official Lonnie Randolph compares the South Carolina fire-eaters to Timothy McVeigh, since both parties “disagreed with America.”  A nice grasp of political nuance, that.

Meanwhile, Mark Simpson of the SCV argues that focusing exclusively on slavery as a casus belli “would be like taking a book that has 10 or 15 chapters and tearing all the chapters out except one. While slavery was an issue, it was by no means what brought about the war.”  One wonders what the other nine or fourteen chapters might have been.

Meanwhile, the article reports, “Robert Sutton, the Park Service historian, just sighs.”  I know how he feels.

The Irritation Proclamation

Plenty of historical bloggers have weighed in on VA Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation of Confederate History Month and his subsequent apology for omitting slavery from it: Kevin Levin, Brooks Simpson, Robert Moore, and Richard Williams, for instance.  

The last meeting of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two eminent Virginia Confederates, on May 2, 1863. From Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park's website.

 

These historical dust-ups normally don’t spill over into more general-purpose news sites, but this one has done just that.  The Washington Post‘s Virginia Politics blog has devoted several posts to the subject.  

Even more interesting is this post from the same paper’s political analysis blog, on whether McDonnell’s gaffe will cost him a position on a national ticket.  The blogger plays it down, but the fact that people are raising the question at all tells us something about the way we’re remembering the Civil War nowadays.  Confederate history, it seems, is quite the political liability.   

This item on the Post blog states that the Sons of Confederate Veterans requested that McDonnell issue the proclamation, and notes that an SCV spokesman ”said the governor’s stamp of approval would help the group publicize the month and aide [sic] tourism efforts in the state.”  I didn’t know the SCV was in the tourism promotion business, and I don’t see why a proclamation of ”Virginia Civil War History Month” wouldn’t have accomplished the same thing.  In any case I don’t see how a gubernatorial proclamation of any sort would increase visitation to museums and historic sites.  This sort of thing strikes me as a case of giving lip service to promoting historical awareness and heritage tourism with nothing to back it up.   

Having perused a list of the governor’s official proclamations on his website, I’m not convinced that being the subject of one is anything to write home about.  For instance, in addition to naming April Confederate History Month, McDonnell has also proclaimed the same month to be Financial Literacy Month.   

March is pretty busy, with Mediation Month, Kidney Day (note the stirring section following the first “WHEREAS” on that one), Governmental Purchasing Month, and Tornado Preparedness Day.  Rest assured that if by some remarkable coincidence a tornado had struck Virginia on March 16, 2010, her citizens would have been thoroughly ready for it.   

And Virginians of all ages were no doubt wetting their pants in anticipation of Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week back in February.  

If the SCV is so concerned about promoting Virginia history, then let them lobby their state officials to beef up funding for historic sites, the state historical society, and so on.  That would take good deal more effort than convincing the governor to issue a simple proclamation, but it would do far more good.  

Similarly, if the governor wants people to visit his state’s many wonderful historic destinations, he’s in an excellent position to do something about it—but I think a proclamation will do very little toward that end.  Let him take active steps to strengthen historical interpretation and preservation  in the state which he runs.  Let him present a budget to the legislature with robust allowances for the state agencies which serve as caretakers of Virginia’s history.  Let him pledge not to lay off the people who work for these agencies, as so many state executives have done.  Let him implement sincere measures to make Virginia’s historic destinations the centerpiece of the state’s tourism initiatives.  

I don’t think the proclamation of Confederate History Month did either harm or good to the cause of promoting Virginia’s Civil War past.  In fact, I don’t think it has done much of anything, except make a lot of people very upset.

Spend those heritage dollars wisely

Not long ago, the Civil War museum where I used to work sent one of their battle flags to a conservation lab.  The red fabric in the canton was frayed and had needed attention for some time, but the museum had to secure the funds first.  A lot of history museums have backlogs of artifacts in need of more than in-house treatment, which they send out in dribs and drabs as donations, grants, and appropriations trickle in.  The conservation and repair of one artifact can run well into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.  Multiply that by thousands of artifacts, and you understand why financial assistance is important. 

That flag is one of those artifacts that always left an impact on visitors.  It belonged to a Confederate cavalry unit from Tennessee—and one of the members of that unit may have been the person who left his blood on it.  The stains are still quite visible.  

I thought about that bloodstained flag when I read this post over at Civil War Memory.  A local SCV group has secured private land and raised nearly $100,000 for a brand-new statue of Gen. Joe Johnston at Bentonville. 

Readers of CWM may recall that the controversial statue of Jefferson Davis and Jim Limber, which the SCV commissioned and then had to trot around in search of someone willing to accept it, had the same price tag.  Remember, these aren’t historic works of art that have come onto the market and need a home, but entirely new sculptures produced for specific purposes.  

Personally, I’m not at all uneasy about monuments to Confederates.  I can understand why public displays of this sort bother some people, but the sight of a Confederate flag doesn’t make me any more uneasy than the national flag of Argentina.  In fact, when I hear discussions about removing or relocating old Confederate monuments, I lose both interest and patience pretty quickly.  

Monuments that are ninety or a hundred years old have historic value in and of themselves.  They’re artifacts in their own right that have become a characteristic aspect of certain American landscapes, and they’re evidence of who we were and what we used to believe about ourselves.  One shouldn’t go around trying to blot out every piece of culture simply because it’s distasteful.  Furthermore, in some cases Civil War veterans themselves placed these monuments, so they provide information about how participants in the war interpreted their own experiences.  Occasionally, they tell us where units were positioned during engagements, or at least where its members thought they were positioned. 

This statue of Joe Johnston in Dalton, GA is an artifact in its own right. The UDC erected it in 1912 at a cost of $6,000. Image from Wikimedia Commons, info from roadsidegeorgia.com.

 Here, though, we’re not talking about statues that have been around for decades and have accrued some intrinsic historical or cultural worth.  We’re talking about brand-new sculptures which cost a great deal of money, and that money has come from the efforts of heritage groups.  

I’m extremely grateful that there are dedicated, generous people out there who are willing to support history with their money and to spend their time persuading other people to do so.  I wish, however, that more of this money could be used to meet existing needs, rather than to create new monuments.  Honoring brave men is a fine thing to do, but commemorative sculpture doesn’t play the prominent role in public memory and civic education that it once did.  What matters now is that we have the raw material of history at hand, and we’re losing it.  The sort of money spent on these statues could go a long way toward helping us preserve it. 

If the SCV is looking for ways to perpetuate the legacy of Confederate soldiers, there is no shortage of opportunities.  The CWPT is trying to raise $150,000 for the site of a remarkable Confederate breakthrough at Franklin, in the face of overwhelming fire and despite devastating losses.  That spot of ground is a far more eloquent testimony to the bravery and prowess of the Confederate soldier than any plaque on a monument could provide. 

The same organization is also trying to raise $75,000 for part of the field at Gettysburg associated with Longstreet’s assault of July 2.  The cost of one of those statues would have secured ground over which southern troops marched during what Longstreet called the “best three hours of fighting” he had ever seen, with funds left over for even more.   

Finally, there’s a need for $12,000,000 for a critical portion of the Fredericksburg battlefield, site of one of Lee’s most decisive victories.  These are just a few handy examples; there are plenty of other endangered sites, along with historic Confederate monuments on battlefields and in graveyards that need the sort of serious maintenance that this sort of money could provide.  

A hundred thousand dollars would renovate a museum gallery.  It would cover the salary of a full-time historic site interpreter for three or four years.  (There is currently no interpretation at Brandywine, due to a loss of state funds.)  It would send a cabinet full of deteriorating uniforms, weapons, flags, portraits, or documents to the conservator.  

Of course, the SCV and other heritage groups do, in fact, support such efforts with their money and time.  I’m sincerely thankful for that.  But I also think that in a tight economy, with governments and institutions slashing budgets for historical causes left and right, it’s important for those who care about history to be especially prudent with their resources. 

That applies not just to Confederate heritage groups, but to those who want to preserve the legacies of Union soldiers, Revolutionary soldiers, abolitionists, Native Americans, or any historic group or individual.  Is the best way to honor their memory a work of art, or ensuring that what’s left of their world is still around for your children and grandchildren to learn from and appreciate? 

One more thing about that flag I mentioned at the beginning of this little tirade.  It used to hang in a display case near the uniform of a young Confederate soldier from Virginia, who died in battle at age eighteen.  The uniform isn’t on exhibit anymore.  It’s in fragile condition, but it might go back on display after some treatment.  Just as soon as there’s enough money to do it.