No one ever said being woke meant being smart.
Museum officials in Dunn, N.C., believe vandals torched a statue of local hero and World War II veteran Gen. William C. Lee thinking it was a memorial to that other Gen. Lee, as in Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Mark Johnson, the curator of the Gen. William C. Lee Airborne Museum, told the local CBS News affiliate this week that he believes the act of vandalism is tied to the controversy surrounding Confederate memorials and the various efforts to have them removed.
“Never even thought it would affect us in any way at all,” he said, adding in reference to the WWII memorial, “This is a hometown grown boy here that turned out to be an international hero of World War II, so to come and try to destroy his statue is just an insult to everybody.”
Vandals doused the statue in “some kind of a flammable liquid” and lit it on fire, badly scorching the memorial from its base up to about Lee’s midsection, law enforcement officials said.
The World War II Lee is known best for his role in establishing the U.S. Army’s airborne infantry. He served as the first commanding general for the 101st Airborne Division (the “Screaming Eagles”), according to the Washington Post. William Lee was also involved in planning the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
“I think it was a big mistake,” said Johnson. “Why would you do something like this? It really just irritates people.”
“I was surprised that anybody would do that to this museum statue,” he added. “This is not a Civil War museum and this is not Robert E. Lee. This is General William C. Lee from United States Army Airborne from World War II, so I was hurt and surprised that somebody would actually do this.”
For the record, the WWII Lee is not even related to the Civil War Lee.
Though respected in military circles, William Lee is still a relatively obscure figure, which is why museum officials feel pretty certain the statue was targeted by anti-Confederate enthusiasts. For museum officials, a case of mistaken identity is the only thing that makes sense, aside from wanton mischief.
“So just an alert to people who may be thinking about such things,” Johnson told the Daily Record, adding “this is the wrong general. … Complete different generation, complete different war, complete different everything.”
As to the suspicion that the William Lee statue is the victim of the push to have Confederate monuments removed, the Post has additional supporting details.
“Dunn, a city of under 10,000 people, is located in the greater Raleigh-Durham area, where some of the most heated debates over removing Confederate memorials have taken place in recent years. In August 2017, protesters in Durham, N.C., took matters into their own hands by toppling a bronze statue depicting a Confederate soldier that sat in front of the city’s old courthouse,” the paper reported.
It added: “A year later, activists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used ropes to pull down the monument known as Silent Sam, which was originally erected in honor of UNC graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War.”
Dunn has no good options here. It either has a problem of jerks or of historically illiterate jerks.
