A healthy process on statue removal
My secondary education, which ended in Connecticut public schools a few decades ago, left me with the belief that while Robert E. Lee might have been on the wrong end of things in the Civil War, he was basically a stand- up guy worthy of admiration. Ulysses S. Grant, by contrast, was a disaster, one of only a handful of presidents in a children’s book I once owned deemed a failure in that position.
I learned enough to know Connecticut was on the right side of the Civil War, so it’s hard to explain the reputations of its two main protagonists in the 1990s. It’s what happens when history is written by people who think the world depicted in “Gone with the Wind” is something to emulate. I was also taught the argument that the war wasn’t about slavery at all, but something more amorphous known as “states’ rights.” Again, this was not Alabama 1955 that I was learning these lessons.
Times have changed a bit, with the popular view of Grant and Lee moving in opposite directions. More people have come to understand that whatever else you might say about Lee, he led a cause that was, in Grant’s words, “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” That understanding helps explain why statues of Lee and other Confederates have been coming down around the country — there’s no justification for the cause of owning other people, no matter what bad history books say.
Some statue questions, then, are straightforward. If you take up arms against your own country, you don’t get a monument in your honor, and if you have one, it should be taken down. Simple enough. Anything beyond that presents all kinds of gray areas. That’s why we publicly debate these questions.
But there’s nothing wrong with having that debate. A statue can be put up or taken down and it doesn’t change history. A school can be renamed without erasing the life of the person it was named for. It’s normal for society to have changing beliefs on whom we want to honor. A statue taken down could always be put back up.
The current reckoning hasn’t stopped at Confederates, with monuments to Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt, among others, targeted for removal. This, too, is a normal process and one that should be encouraged. Societal values can change, and who we want to honor isn’t going to be the same from one era to the next. Certainly no one is going to argue Columbus doesn’t have a complicated legacy.
Objecting to a statue of Grant or Columbus taken down by a frenzied crowd is one thing, but we shouldn’t confuse that with what is happening in places like New Haven and Bridgeport, where people have asked to reconsider the monuments in light of changing times — and officials have listened to their pleas. This is not a rash process, even if many people disagree with the outcome.
On Columbus, too, basic education has failed a lot of people. Among the mistaken ideas people have taken from their younger years is the notion that, while Columbus certainly met some people when he landed, he arrived in a New World of mostly wilderness with some scattered settlements. In fact, scholars today say in 1491 there may have been more people living in the Americas than in Europe, up to 90 percent of whom died from diseases introduced by Europeans.
Our understanding of the crossocean meeting of cultures changes all the time. The American Museum of Natural History in New York last year updated a 1939 mural depicting a scene where Dutch settlers interact with a group of Indigenous people in what is now New York City. The mural today is full of corrections and context, showing all the ways our understanding has changed over the years. Outside the museum, a statue of Roosevelt that is said to glorify colonialism is on the way to removal.
This reckoning should be encouraged. We should have the debate on whether Columbus or anyone else is worthy of the honors previous generations have bestowed upon them, and if society decides otherwise, that’s the result of a legitimate process. Disagreement is normal and just as legitimate.
Let’s just agree on some better history books, and no more statues for traitors.