When I was a third grader in Scarsdale NY, I had a teacher
who was a daughter of the Old South. Mrs. Langdon was born and raised in South
Carolina, never explaining how she happened so far across the Mason-Dixon line.
In general, things worked out fine with her instruction. I
had one mortification when I crashed out of a school-wide spelling bee, unable
to spell her word ‘iggle’ (which we Northerners would have pronounced ‘eagle’).
And she once mischaracterized the location of Cambridge MA, a sin that my
Bostonian mother could never quite forgive.
The oddest part of the school year was her treatment of the
Civil War in our proto-study of American History. She abandoned the textbooks
to instead teach us about the “Real Heroes” of the ‘Late Unpleasantness’ as she
preferred to call it. We learned about wise and warm Robert E Lee, crafty and
indomitable Stonewall Jackson, stalwart AP Hill, elegant PGT Beauregard and my
own favorite, dashing JEB Stuart. She could barely bring herself to name the
Northern Generals preferring to say that they won by shear numerical advantage
or by somehow cheating at the noble game of war.
It took me a while to unlearn what she taught me.
Fortunately, intellectual curiosity and a well-read brother taught me to look
for the unvarnished history.
There are many people decrying the disruption of statues as
erasing of history. What they are not accounting for is the bias of these
statues. It is rare in America to produce a non-heroic statue. City planners do
not want to fill public spaces with warts and all depictions of events that are
being commemorated. The trend has only changed with Holocaust memorials and
arguably with Maya Lin’s inimitable Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall.
When you see a statue of a great man on horseback or nobly
scanning the horizon, you assume that figure was a person of profound
influence. You don’t need to know the history of Belgian politics to recognize
the power embodied in the statue in Ghent of King Leopold II (at long last
removed from display). What you won’t recognize from the bronze itself is that
these statues were erected by those in his (or his family’s) political thrall.
What you will not learn is the monstrous cruelty of his African colonization or
the subsequent disgrace of his entire lineage.
Statues are not history, except wherein they fit into the
architectural history lore of a city. The Robert E Lee statue in Dallas, for
instance, only represents the history of an era of Black suppression or more
recently of the decision to remove it and the protests that occurred. It tells
(told) us nothing about the man or his actual time. In fact, its very presence
was a complete historical fallacy. Lee had nothing to do with the history of
Texas or Dallas. One of my colleagues even remembered it as depicting Lee
leading a group of black people to freedom. There were no black figures on the Lee
statue, not did the historical Lee ever lead black people anywhere constructive.
The opponents of statue removal are right in one thing.
History should not be forgotten or erased. But it is historical fact that
should be preserved, not some comfortable legend that plays into anyone’s
social agenda. The distinction is that whereas the past should be recalled, it
should not be revered. A man like George Washington was a great leader of our
country – fact. He was also a slave owner who relentlessly hounded his escaped hostages
– fact. Both should be remembered as they are both essential to understanding
the nature of a nation’s past. We don’t need our heroes to be untarnished.
That’s not what heroes are. Instead, they are humans, fault-ridden and
fallible, who happen to do immense things.
Sorry, Mrs. Langdon. There was so much more to your icons
than you were willing to share.
