Monuments men

Baltimore’s better options

WHENEVER somebody starts talking about removing statues of Confederate generals, or renaming parks, or renaming schools, our first reaction is to think back to the late but unlamented Soviets, and how they erased their history from time to frequent time. A fellow traveler of bad standing needs to be removed from a film clip? Edit it. Somebody who is no longer much of a comrade needs to disappear from a photograph? Crop it.

For goodness sakes, somebody had the brilliant idea of changing the name of a street in downtown Little Rock simply because it was called Confederate Boulevard. Even though the street was only given that name because a hospital for Confederate veterans happened to have an address there years ago. As if the word “Confederate” was forbidden in polite society, and professional offendees were too delicate and pure to read the name on a map or street sign.

Now Baltimore is in the news as far as all this goes. (Baltimore, to remind the forgetful, is a Southern city. You could look it up.)

The mayor there, one Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, is in the last few months of her administration. But what a last few months. Somebody without a sense or humor or a knack for brevity created something called (deep breath) the Special Commission to Review Baltimore’s Public Confederate Monuments. We’ll do Gentle Reader a favor and call it the SCTRBPCM.

The SCTRBPCM looked at four monuments in the city and decided that two of them—one to Confederate grunts and another to Confederate women—could stay. But two others— one to both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the other to Roger Brooke Taney—had to go.

The problem is the city can’t find any takers. First, who in his right mind would want Taney’s monument? He’s the Supreme Court justice who wrote the dreaded and dreadful Dred Scott decision, which will haunt this country as long as history is taught and read. And the park service that should be able to take the Lee/Jackson statues, well, it doesn’t have a policy for that. Somebody tell us this isn’t a government job.

The mayor “wants to find an appropriate place for those monuments, if she decides to go ahead and move them,” one of the mayor’s spokespersons told the papers. “It hasn’t been as easy, to be honest, as we thought.”

Oh, changing history never is. Poor Winston Smith had a time of it. We were never at war with Eastasia, we were always at war with Eurasia.

But Her Honor Stephanie Rawlings- of Baltimore might have better options. And like any good leader, she’s proposed one herself. An exceptional one. That is, it’s an exception to the rule that all mention of that part of American history should be dropped down the memory hole:

The mayor says, for now, she wants the SCTRBPCM to develop new signs for all four monuments that better explain the historical background of the people represented.

What can this be? Reason? On this subject? Glory be!

While the Sons of Confederate Veterans throws tomatoes at the SCTRBPCM and the SCTREUJ#&%-whatever sheds tears over statues more than a hundred years old and both sides generally lower the level of public discourse, Mayor Rawlings-Blake wants to present the public with a much-needed history lesson. Maybe the new signage will be detailed enough to explain that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were fighting for their country, and they both considered that country Virginia. And that life was difficult among the Confederate soldiers, but they fought on till the end, then their leaders—R.E. Lee chief amongst them—let the war end, rather than fight on as guerrillas. And that Roger Brooke Taney should go down not only as a chief justice, but a chief villain in American history.

And it could all prove once again that Americans—in the North, in the South, from coast to coast—aren’t so fragile that they cannot look at the whole of American history without having a fainting spell and having to recover on the chaise lounge.

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Back in the 1950s, Walker Percy wrote this, on whether modern Southerners can understand the foolishness of their ancestors, and still cherish their heritage:

“I don’t understand how a Southerner can do anything else. Mr. [Stephen P.] Ryan [of the magazine America] sneers at Southern tradition, at ‘that breed of men, indigenous to the South, who are capable of approving integration and then, in practically the same breath, falling into a state of almost religious ecstasy as they hysterically extol the glories of the Old South of slavery, of mocking birds, hominy grits and bourbon whiskey . . . .’ This really seems to me to be gratuitously offensive. If Mr. Ryan wonders why the Southern integrationist is discouraged, he needn’t look any further. If the rite of initiation into liberalism requires one to swear a blood oath against his native land, then the proposed initiate is going to take another look at the club.”