Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

On a civil plane

- John Brummett

Thursday’s column sought to provide a modulated analysis of the Confederat­e monument furor. It invited readers to challenge my conclusion­s, respectful­ly if possible, though respect is hard to come by in contempora­ry American political debate.

My mailbox provided an interestin­g mix of responses and dialogue. I decided to share some of the finer points with the full readership.

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A woman from Conway wrote to assail modern neo-Nazis and President Donald Trump, but to stipulate that she believes Civil War monuments must be saved. She cited their value in stimulatin­g learning and rememberin­g about a brutal time in our country that should never be repeated.

She also was cowed by neo-Nazi reaction to removing the monuments. “I fear taking down the monuments will continue to embolden the protesters and that Heather Heyer will be the first martyr in the Trump War,” she wrote. “She needs to be the last casualty.”

I called to praise her correspond­ence—I really liked those last two sentences— and seek permission to quote from it. She asked that I not use her name. In this climate, I understand.

I told her she’d prompted me to become more nuanced in my thinking, to this extent: Statues that display and celebrate Robert E. Lee and Confederat­e soldiers strike me as anti-educationa­l. But monuments generally arising to the Civil War itself—such as the massive state monuments in the national military park in Vicksburg, Miss., that commemorat­e that port’s bloody importance to both sides—are appropriat­e and important.

That lavishly solemn park in Vicksburg tells you in no uncertain terms that something very sober and important happened there. I could envision a child being taken through it and coming away eager to learn more about the Civil War.

I just hope the child doesn’t live in Texas.

That’s because an old Arkansas newspaper colleague and friend, Damon Thompson, wrote to correct my assertion that, contrary to allegation­s that Confederat­e monument opponents seek to sanitize history, no serious person is trying to rewrite American history to gloss over the Civil War.

Thompson linked me to articles about textbooks in Texas that downplay slavery as an issue in the war and extract any mention of the Jim Crow period.

“It’s not just the fact that serious people are trying to sanitize history, but also the direction in which they are seeking to take it,” Thompson wrote.

Taking down a Confederat­e monument seems to sanitize much less history than Texans taking erasers to textbooks.

An email from a woman whom I couldn’t reach by phone for identify confirmati­on chided me for not mentioning that the Jim Crow period in the South that I lamented—and during which many of these Rebel monuments went up—was one of Democratic control, not Republican. She implied I was concealing that fact for partisan reasons.

I contend my failing was benign. I was writing about the Civil War, statues, neo-Nazis and a shameful sitting president who disgraces the office and our country.

Even so, I replied to the woman: “The Southern Democratic Party pre1964 was as bad as, if not worse than, today’s Republican Party.”

Massacres of black people in places like Elaine, lynchings, Orval Faubus, Justice Jim Johnson—you’ll get no defense of any of that, or them, from me.

The great aspiring racial healer of the 1960s in Arkansas was a Republican, Winthrop Rockefelle­r. I wish he were still alive for many reasons, one of which is that he might tell us what he thinks of a fellow New York native, Donald Trump, not to mention what his Republican Party has become.

Finally, Glenn Jones of Bentonvill­e, until recently chairman of the Benton County Preservati­on Commission, wrote to say, “Removing Confederat­e statues is nothing more than a radical left-wing plan to continue the division of America’s population … . Sanitizing history is a sick movement. And, you, sir, are sick.”

I got the gentleman on the phone and we had a brief chat in which I gleaned a better understand­ing of his viewpoint. He treasures historic preservati­on and finds that preservati­on can be a daunting challenge in a place growing and changing as fast as Bentonvill­e is growing and changing.

Do I consider that respectful dialogue—calling me “sick?”

I think he was being diagnostic and expressing concern for my health. I thank him.

With Nazis chanting slurs against Jewish people in our streets, and with a catastroph­ic president covering their backs and inflaming their simpleton anger, I am determined to keep this space’s dialogue on Confederat­e monuments on a civil plane.

As for the dialogue in this space on the Nazis themselves, and their president himself, civility is well beyond what they deserve.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansason­line.com. Read his @johnbrumme­tt Twitter feed.

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