Confederate Monuments Belong in Museums, Not Public Squares

On Monday, the city of New Orleans began the process of removing its four major Confederate monuments:

• a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1884).

• a white obelisk (1891) dedicated to the Crescent City White League, who in 1874 had attempted a violent overthrow of the Reconstructed (i.e. racially integrated) Louisiana government.

• a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis (1911).

• a statue of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard (1915).

This is a good thing.

The Federalist‘s John Daniel Davidson disagrees, writing Tuesday that despite assurances to the contrary, this is not about “unity or tolerance,” but about “power and politics.”

Is it true that the push to remove the statues represents a kind of progressivist Dixieclasm? Is it the case that, as Davidson puts it, “censoring historical symbols is … the cousin of censoring speech and inquiry”?

Davidson is right to notice that, for some, the application of both kinds of censorship—toward monuments and toward speeches—stems from the same illiberal impetus.

But just as Davidson noted that the original motivation for erecting the monuments need not be our motivation today for keeping them up, those of us who want to see the statues fall need not be automatically lumped together with speech-censoring and monument-toppling leftists.

Here’s why. I applaud New Orleans’ decision to remove—and eventually relocate—its Confederate monuments because I make a distinction between backward-looking and forward-looking monuments.

Backward-looking monuments are those specifically intended to teach the lessons of history. Forward-looking ones can also memorialize, and can reflect historical realities, but they have an additional feature that backward-looking ones do not: Forward-looking monuments promote our core values and herald American virtues.

Forward-looking monuments are those we use to proclaim what is best about us, to signal who we are and to project into the future who we will continue to be. These are the ones we canonize because embedded within them is the set of virtues we wish to continue to be associated with.

Viewing monuments this way allows for historical reflection as well as moral striving. As an approach to our national iconography, it strikes a balance between an extreme self-flagellation over our past sins (“we have always been terrible”) and an ahistorical jingoism unwilling to acknowledge any past transgression at all (“we have never been terrible”). There is value in looking back and value in looking ahead. And history, despite its association with the past, furnishes us with the symbols we need for both sorts of activity.

Museums should hold those artifacts whose original usage we find problematic today. A statue erected in a city space, on the other hand, is a paradigmatic example of a forward-looking monument—one that is supposed to herald something about us moving forward.

Another way of putting it is that some monuments are primarily pedagogical and others are primarily presentational.

Here is my thesis: For its self-presentation, America should utilize only images and symbols that promote our core values. Our iconography should embody American virtues, not challenge them. These should be the monuments we use to project into the future who and what we are striving to be.

Last fall, the City Council in Alexandria, Virginia, voted unanimously to rename Jefferson Davis Highway and to formally request that a statue of a Confederate soldier be relocated somewhere less prominent.

The Federalist‘s Ben Domenech offered a series of tweets in response:

Like Davidson, Domenech is right to be concerned by progressive iconoclasm. Both writers correctly diagnose that a terrifying blend of illiberalism and anti-intellectualism pervades our public discourse. When some of society’s institutions—popular culture, public monuments, etc.—come to be primarily used as a means to assuage our historical guilt or to signal the splendor of our progress, something’s gone wrong.

But the destruction of history is not the only reason we might have for toppling Confederate monuments.

The Confederacy is part our history, yes, but that does not mean its symbols and soldiers are candidates for monuments whose primary function, today, is to send a message about what is best about us. Confederate imagery should still be on display, just not in the public spaces reserved for monuments which herald our shared values. In short: These should be disqualified from functioning as heralding monuments.

I am not morally superior to the men who fought for the Confederate cause. That’s not what this is about. Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the left’s premier commentators on race, had this to say about the hubris of our harsh historical judgments.

Prohibiting Confederate artifacts from functioning as forward-looking monuments stems not from a feeling of superiority, but from a recognition that some of our monuments  should be chosen for their capacity to communicate what is best about us.

Yet slavery didn’t begin in the middle of the 19th century, so shouldn’t statues of Washington and Jefferson, for example, also come tumbling down?

No, because while our first and third presidents were slave-owners, this is not central to why they are memorialized. Moreover, they did not push for the permanent establishment of slavery. On the other hand, a Confederate monument has a pervasive connection to the aims of the Confederacy. In her book Confederate Reckoning, here is how historian Stephanie McCurry describes the central animating concern of the Confederate States of America:

Since it is impossible for the Confederate battle flag or a monument to a Confederate soldier to extricate its connection to slavery in any meaningful way, and since the attempt to permanently establish the institution of slavery was the rationale for the Confederacy’s war with the United States, there is nothing to be gained, and quite a bit to be lost, by allowing any pocket of our country to officially herald its identity through these monuments.

Domenech is right that the Appomattox soldier does not stand proudly. This isn’t Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass. But statues have a way of subverting the message of disappointment and defeat. The majesty of the statue just won’t allow the soldier to convey the South has lost.

When statues are used in the way Alexandria has used Appomattox, or how New Orleans has used the obelisk, a monument can’t help but function as a herald of what the town is now. It does not function primarily as a history lesson but rather as a self-presentation, as an identity statement. A tall piece of rock shaped as a Confederate soldier, Confederate imagery within a city or state flag, a monument to Reconstruction-era “redeemers” — when used this way, mere historical items become identity-announcing symbols.

My point isn’t to suggest we strip our cities of historical landmarks that are in any way tainted by the past’s imperfect understanding of right and wrong. This is not a call for us to remake our towns into ahistorical tomorrowlands.

I am not even saying that Confederate soldiers don’t deserve to be memorialized. But perhaps it’s not too much to relegate those who fought for the continued bondage of their fellow human beings to museums and not to the public spaces we reserve for sending a message about who we want to aspire to be like.

Berny Belvedere is a professor of philosophy and writer based in Miami. He is editor-in-chief of Arc Digital. Follow him @bernybelvedere.