Seeking our monuments

Architect Christopher Wren was born four centuries ago. He made London beautiful after the Great Fire. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, his masterpiece, and his epitaph concludes, “If you seek his monument, look around you,” by which was meant all that he’d created.

Today, if you seek our monuments, you’ll find many toppled.

Don’t misunderstand. I’ve never shared our national tolerance — even fondness — for the Confederate battle flag, the emblem of an army that warred against the United States. I’ve also never fathomed how Andrew Jackson flouted the Supreme Court’s ruling against his Indian policy, defiance that culminated in the Trail of Tears atrocity.

Across the ledger, President Jackson defended the nation against the British in the War of 1812, and against South Carolina’s threatened secession over tariffs. He also championed the “common man” and supported extending voting rights to all adult white males.

Today, we’d hardly consider denying the vote to women and Black men a giant leap for democracy. But in a world where only kings voted, allowing property-owning men to vote had been a stride in the right direction. Removing that property requirement was truly progress in its day.

We need to evaluate history’s moments and characters by looking backward and forward. It’s proper to compare the past to where we are today, but it’s also needful to mark how far they came from their past.

None of this excuses slavery, nor is American guilt limited to the South. Northern textile manufacturers profited from plantation cotton, Northern shipowners profited from the slave trade, and, after the war, Northern states compelled Southern states to allow freed slaves to vote even while some Northern states denied the vote to their own Black residents.

Our Civil War was about slavery. Yes, Lincoln entered the war to preserve the Union, but when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he declared, “My whole soul is in it.”

Yes, states’ rights was a factor. The founders carefully balanced the power allotted to states and the federal government, and in the nation’s early years states’ rights was cited by both North and South in debates over issues from tariffs to free speech. It’s unfortunate that a legitimate Constitutional principle was hijacked to justify slavery in the 19th century and segregation in the 20th.

The Confederacy’s real “Lost Cause” was slavery.

Still, it’s easy to understand generosity toward defeated Confederates. They were Americans, too. Generosity is consistent with Grant’s surrender terms and his Appomattox declaration that “the rebels are our countrymen again.”

Mercy lay behind Mr. Lincoln’s call to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” his plea for “malice toward none,” “charity for all,” and a “just and lasting peace among ourselves.”

That peace and mercy, however, was conditioned on his resolve to “finish the work we are in” – restoring the Union and abolishing slavery. Monuments, whether statues or military bases, that glorify men whose prime contribution to the nation was armed insurrection in defense of slavery, and its descendant Jim Crow, are unseemly and insupportable.

I distinguish between those men and patriots like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, whose participation in slavery was a grievous fault, but whose life’s work created the nation that abolished slavery, and that today continues the struggle to fulfill its founding commitment to equality.

I’d add a general caution against excess zeal, however understandable it may be. Some critics, for example, propose replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem. They condemn its slave-owning author, Francis Scott Key, and the song’s forgotten, unsung third verse, which denounces runaway slaves who’d helped defeat American forces at a critical battle.

The tune, which Key didn’t compose, was originally the anthem of an English gentlemen’s club, written in praise of love and wine, which is why Prohibition activists opposed making it our national song.

As for Key’s culpability as a slaveholder, composer Richard Wagner wrote remarkable music, including a wedding march. He was also an avowed antiSemite. Must we stop walking down the aisle to “Here Comes the Bride”? Must we stop driving Fords because Henry Ford shared Wagner’s virulent prejudice against Jews?

Germany dealt with its Nazi past by destroying and preserving. German law bans the swastika and anything that “approves of, glorifies, or justifies” National Socialism.

A Holocaust museum rose where Gestapo headquarters once stood. Cobblestone “stumbling blocks” mark German streets, commemorating men, women, and children deported to death camps. In Poland, the gate to Auschwitz still remains as a silent reminder of iniquity.

Let Confederate leaders’ images survive in museums as points of information, not of honor. Let Confederate soldiers’ monuments memorialize the appalling slaughter of Americans lost defending a great evil. Let Emmett Till’s plaque and the Sixteenth Street Church stand as tributes to generations victimized by bigotry. Let our national anthem inspire us to become the land of the truly free.

Righteousness is an incremental struggle. Deuteronomy enjoins us “not [to] forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart…Teach them to your children and to their children after them.”

“Monument” comes from the Latin word for “remind.” Our monuments should help us celebrate our triumphs. They should compel our grief at our sins and failures.

But even more, we should seek monuments that remind us of the great gulf remaining between what we say we want to be and who we, so far, really are.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor at editor@ middletownpress.com.