Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies 9781478004349

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Public Planet Books

A series edited by Dilip Gaonkar, Jane Kramer, Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner

Public Planet Books is a series designed by writers in and outside the academy—writers working on what could be called narratives of public culture—to explore questions that urgently concern us all. It is an attempt to open the scholarly discourse on contemporary public culture, both local and international, and to illuminate that discourse with the kinds of narrative that will challenge sophisticated readers, make them think, and especially make them question. It is, most importantly, an experiment in strategies of discourse, combining reportage and critical reflection on unfolding issues and events—one, we hope, that will provide a running narrative of our societies at this particular fin de siècle. Public Planet Books is part of the Public Works publication project of the Center for Transcultural Studies, which also includes the journal Public Culture and the Public Worlds book series.

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Written in Stone

p u b l i c

p l a n e t

b o o k s

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with New Preface and Afterword

Written in Stone Public Monuments in Changing Societies

Sanford Levinson

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS  Durham and London

© 1998 Duke University Press, Afterword © 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Cover designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Kepler by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Levinson, Sanford, [date] author. Title: Written in stone : public monuments in changing societies / Sanford Levinson. Description: Twentieth anniversary edition with new preface and afterword. | Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Public planet books | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018024676 (print) | lccn 2018028746 (ebook) isbn 9781478004349 (ebook) | isbn 9781478001720 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9781478002802 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LC aspects—United States. | Multiculturalism—United  States. | Political culture—United States—History—2th century. | Political culture— United States—History—21st century. Classification: lcc E159 (ebook) | lcc e159 .l485 2018 (print) | ddc 305.800973—dc23 lc record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2018024676 Cover art: A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee is removed Friday, May 19, 2017, from Lee Circle in New Orleans. AP Photo/Scott Threlkeld.

To my friends, Akhil Reed Amar Jack M. Balkin Philip Bobbitt Betty Sue Flowers Randall Kennedy Robert Post Richard Rabinowitz Fred Schauer

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Contents

Preface to the 2018 Edition  xi Written in Stone

An Introduction  1

Afterword 125 Acknowledgments 203

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Preface to the 2018 Edition

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his book was originally going to be a single essay in a collection of my writings eventually published by the Duke University Press under the title Wrestling with Diversity (2003). But as I was revising it, in 1998, it became longer and longer,

precisely because more facets of the general topic, that is, what I was to call in the subtitle of the book Public Monuments in Changing Societies, revealed themselves. I was delighted in 1998 that Miriam Angress, my editor at the Press, agreed to liberate the essay from the wider collection and to publish it separately. I am delighted to note that Duke has kept the book in print and that it apparently continues to be used in a number of courses dealing with “public history” and the role that monuments play in shaping versions of such history. So I was equally delighted almost twenty years later when Miriam proved receptive to my suggestion, sometime in the early spring of 2017, that the Press bring out a twentieth anniversary edition with a new afterword discussing some of the developments over the two decades. We agreed that I would hand in around five thousand or so words sometime in August, with publication anticipated in the spring

of 2018. Instead, I submitted the approximately seventeen thousand words that now comprise the new afterword in November (and added to it at the copyediting stage in May 2018) because of the remarkable events throughout 2017 and thereafter! There is no reason to believe that the interest in public monuments and other public symbols will abate, whether one refers only to our own country or many other countries abroad. As indicated in the afterword, Cecil Rhodes, a primary figure in the spread of the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century—as well as the eponym of the world-­renowned Rhodes xii

Scholarships—is the center of contemporary disputes about memorialization in both the United Kingdom and South Africa. And only recently the city of Osaka, Japan threatened to cancel its status as a “sister city” of San Francisco because of the decision of that city’s leaders to erect a monument to the Korean “comfort women” who served basically as sexual slaves to the Japanese armed forces during World War II. Even if one agrees that one can engage in genuine debate about constructing new monuments, like those to the comfort women, one often hears (or perhaps asserts) that whatever is currently standing should remain so. To tear it down (or even simply to remove it from a place of public honor to, say, a museum for more detached and perhaps critical study) is to engage in the illegitimate “rewriting of history.” When asked to offer a sound-­bite summary of the theme of Written in Stone, I suggested that it both asks and attempts to answer the question: “Is it Stalinist to tear down statues of Stalin?” After all, the power of the term “Stalinist” comes from the accurate perception that Josef Stalin was a truly evil man who does not deserve public

honor but nonetheless received much of it in the old Soviet Union—and there are some today who wish to restore his place of honor in Russian history. Is it emulating or justifiably criticizing Stalin to destroy his statues? Much of what follows addresses such arguments, but it may be useful, especially for some younger readers of this book who have no active memory of the initial events of the Iraqi War of 2003, to note that almost literally the first thing that U.S. forces did upon conquering Baghdad in April 2003 was to participate in the obliteration of the statue of Saddam Hussein that had been a dominant part of the public landscape in that city for some years. The “actual” Hussein was not captured until December 13, 2003, and he was not executed until three years later. It is clear, however, that taking down the statue was a deeply significant act for both the conquerors and the conquered. Perhaps what is most relevant to one of the central themes of the book is that no one in the United States publicly objected to this undoubtedly destructive act. No one argued that it constituted an illegitimate effacement of an important, albeit relatively short, part of Iraqi history. Perhaps it would have been better had the American soldiers waited several days until it was unequivocally clear that the statue’s removal was an act of Iraqis themselves and not interpretable simply as American triumphalism. But even if one opposed the Iraq War itself (as I did), one could still rejoice in the statue’s removal insofar as opposition was based on pragmatic considerations (which, alas, turned out to be vindicated) and not at all on the view that Saddam Hussein was merely a “benevolent despot” who merited remaining in office. There

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was basically universal agreement that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant who deserved neither office nor public honor; as much to the point is that no one (at least within the United States) suggested that the statue should simply be moved to a museum where it could be studied by scholars and seen by museum-­ goers. Does that represent simply the extent to which we were blinded to our own self-­righteous destruction or, instead, an altogether correct response to the presence of an oppressive symbol of an abominable tyrant? Given that this edition of the book was being revised almost xiv

literally as it was going to press for final publication (including the addition of new photographs), I am confident that it does not constitute the last word on the actual controversies that have become part of our contemporary political scene. Indeed, only in the last several months we have become far more self-­ conscious about the degree to which otherwise respected public figures engaged in unacceptable sexual harassment or outright assault. How many university buildings, concert halls, or other such venues will face pressure to change their names and cease honoring persons who engaged in such outrageous conduct? Although this book, and the new afterword, focuses on issues raised especially by honoring Confederate “heroes,” the implications obviously go well beyond such specific examples. I began the original edition by quoting Robert Lowell’s famous poem “For the Union Dead” and his comment that particular monuments and other efforts at memorialization, whatever their original purpose or popularity, can become the equivalent of “fishbones in the throat” of the communities they inhabit. One can have no doubt that this has become ever more

true, and that we will continue to have to figure out how to respond to the presence of such fishbones and the discomfort they engender. I continue to hope that this book, including the new afterword, can play a constructive role at the very least in suggesting the questions that need to be asked and how we might go about answering them in a way that preserves civil peace instead of simply exacerbating our already overheated politics.

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Introduction

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat. Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”

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obert Lowell wrote these lines about the monument located at the northeast corner of the Boston Common directly across the street from the Massachusetts State House. It memorializes the Massachusetts Fifty-­fourth

Regiment, the first black regiment organized in a free state. It is usually called the “Shaw monument,” after its central figure, Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the regiment, who was killed along with many of his comrades in the assault they led against Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. (Their story was the basis of the movie Glory.) Anyone familiar with the tangled history of race relations in Boston can well appreciate the power of Lowell’s simile. Lowell could, however, just as easily be writing about many monuments in many cities and countries. Indeed, I will discuss public monuments in locales ranging from Moscow to Mana-

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The monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, Boston Common.

gua, Albania to Zimbabwe, not to mention a variety of American locales. In all of these places, one finds polities roiled in controversies attached to deciding who within a particular society should be counted as a hero worth honoring with the erection of a monument or the naming of a public space. Although as an American I am most interested in, and most of the pages below are devoted to, examples from the United States, I begin in Budapest, Hungary, with the fascinating tale of the Millennium Monument found there. Its vicissitudes wonderfully illustrate the central themes of this book; beginning in Budapest also underscores the ubiquity of the issues considered in this book. The 1881 proposal of the monument, ostensibly to celebrate the millennium of Hungary’s founding, was rooted, as is almost

always the case with such campaigns by self-­conscious politicians, in the political exigencies of the moment. As Hungarian historian András Gero aptly notes, it was also to function as a step in “an unprecedented drive towards modernization and the development of national consciousness, the main objectives of Budapest in its golden age.”1 To be sure, the monument that was actually erected in the first decade of the twentieth century included statues of Hungarian national heroes going back to the conquest that established Hungary and the reign of Christianity-­establishing King Stephen, who in 1001 accepted his crown from the Pope. Moreover, the archangel Gabriel had his own freestanding statue in the middle of the monument (and rising high above the other two sections) to signify the importance of Christianity to Hungarian national identity. Yet, if Hungarian identity was depicted as beginning in the mists of the millennial past, it also was inscribed in a specific narrative

The Millennium Monument, Budapest, Hungary (1997).

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with what its sponsors no doubt deemed a wonderfully happy ending: Hungarian membership in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire under the rule of the distinctly non-­Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. Had Bill Clinton been a nineteenth-­century denizen of Budapest, one easily imagines him supporting the monument as a “bridge to the twentieth century” symbolizing the marvelous promise of ever greater imperial accomplishments. Thus Budapest citizens could observe statues of various Habsburgs, including Franz Joseph himself, sharing space with angels and other national heroes all incorporated into a satisfying 4

story of national identity and historical ­progress. The Austro-­Hungarian Empire (and Franz Joseph) did not, of course, survive World War I. Indeed, when reading of the ambitious plans for the Millennium Monument, it is difficult to avoid thinking of Robert Musil’s merciless satire of 1913 Vienna, A Man Without Qualities, in which hapless characters devote themselves to planning a great celebration of Franz Joseph’s extended reign. (His reign had begun in 1848, the year of crushed rebellions and other hopes for transformative change, which perhaps reinforced the illusion that the tides of history could in fact be controlled.) The power of Musil’s great postwar novel in part derives from the reader’s knowledge of how the story will actually turn out, a knowledge denied the happily complacent haute bourgeoisie and governmental officials who inhabit the book. Apropos the specific theme of monuments, one might well note Musil’s own mordant observation that “the most important [quality of monuments] is somewhat contradictory: what strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn’t notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible

as monuments.”2 Musil well captures the combination of hubris and pathos in the attempt by the monumentalizing generation to speak to and, ultimately, control the consciousness of their successors. All monuments are efforts, in their own way, to stop time. As Nietzsche put it, in his observations “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” a “monumental” view of the past, a particular kind of consciousness instantiated in the physical stone of monuments, represents “a belief in the coherence and continuity of what is great in all ages, it is a protest against the change of generations and against transitoriness.”3 History, of course, moves relentlessly to mock any such beliefs. The humiliating defeat of Franz Joseph’s Dual Monarchy generated the emergence of an independent (albeit territorially reduced) Hungary. Nothing would ever be the same, including the Millennium Monument. In 1919 events took what Gero describes as “a radical turn . . . as the proletarian assumed power.” Among other things, this led to a revisioning of the Habsburgs, who “were now presented as agents of feudal-­capitalist oppression.” Far from the statues becoming, as Musil suggests, “invisible,” they were all too apparent, generating the same discomfort as a “fishbone in the throat.” Of course, the thing to do when so afflicted is to remove the offender. The monument was thus stripped of its statues of members of the Habsburg dynasty, and the particular “statue of Franz Joseph directly associated with the regime that had lost the war was smashed to pieces.” For better or worse, the radicals were rather quickly replaced by counterrevolutionaries who installed a monarchy whose legitimacy was based on the Dual Monarchy. Not surprisingly, “the Habsburgs resumed their place of honour” on the monu-

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ment. Moreover, the site of the Millennium Monument also was designated as the proper place to put up a “heroes memorial.” The specific heroes who were being commemorated were those thousands of Hungarians who had lost their lives fighting in World War I, altogether unsuccessfully, to “maintain the borders which had been in existence for 1,000 years. . . . Ironically, the memorial was thus dedicated to the soldiers of a war in which they had lost everything they had been fighting for.” Like many other societies, the Hungarians proved themselves thoroughly capable of organizing their public psyche around a 6

“lost cause.” The site of the monument and memorial became “an inseparable part of the capital and a national landmark,” renamed Heroes Square in 1932. Once more fate intervened in Hungary’s destiny, as Hungary made yet another disastrously wrong choice in political and military allies. The aftermath of World War II swept away the conservative regime that had cast its lot with Nazi Germany; Hungary came within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, and a Communist regime came to power. Once again the monument reflected new political realities, as the Habsburg statues and reliefs were taken down and assigned, almost literally, to what Trotsky unforgettably dismissed as “the dustbin of history.” In their place were statues of Istvan Bocskay, a seventeenth-­ century insurrectionist against the Habsburgs, together with reliefs of “his soldiers fighting imperial mercenaries.” Substituting for the statue of Franz Joseph was one of Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the 1848–49 revolt against the Habsburgs. Although Gero suggests that the Communists “would gladly have wiped the monument, with its archangel and kings, from

the face of the earth,” they did not do so. After all, they too could use it for their own ideological purposes of forging a new Hungarian consciousness, not to mention that they were unwilling to pay the potential political costs of destroying what had become a central public symbol of the Hungarian nation. Still, a “monument [that] was intended to condense the whole of Hungarian history into a single, complex symbol” with a unified narrative building toward Franz Joseph and his Dual Monarchy has instead, in “the different forms” it has taken, “faithfully mirrored all the historical and political changes which have taken place in the course of its lifetime.” One might well have mixed reactions to this tale of a faraway monument in a society about which most of us know little and with which few of us have any emotional identification. Is it a somber tragedy or a Central-­European high comedy emphasizing the ironies (and roundelays) of history? No doubt it is both, though readers will undoubtedly differ on which aspects of its history merit tears or laughter. The fate of the Millennium Monument and its heroes memorial is a perfect illustration of the central topic of this book, which is how those with political power within a given society organize public space to convey (and thus to teach the public) desired political lessons. Changes in political regime sometimes awesome, as from Habsburg monarchy to Communist dictatorship and then from Communism to (some version of) liberal democracy often bring with them changes in the organization of public space. States always promote privileged narratives of the national experience and thus attempt to form a particular kind of national consciousness, yet it is obvious that there is

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rarely a placid consensus from which the state may draw. In particular, organizers of the new regime must decide which, if any, of the heroes of the old regime deserve to continue occupying public space. And the new regime will always be concerned if these heroes might serve as potential symbols of resistance for adherents among the population who must, at least from the perspective of the newcomers, ultimately acquiesce to the new order. As one might well expect, many of the best examples of these issues are presented in the aftermath of Communism in Europe. 8

Some of the most enduring memories of my only visit, in 1989, to Moscow involve the public statuary, posters, and flags that dominated the urban landscape. My family found our hotel, for example, by reference to a giant statue of Lenin that hovered over the square where it was located. Many of the people I spoke to about the great changes then sweeping what was still called the Soviet Union found it almost impossible to envision that these statues would ever disappear. Such a possibility would have signified changes even more portentous than those already coursing through Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. My last memory of the Soviet Union is the statue of Lenin in front of the Finland Station in what was then called Leningrad. Given that Lenin had made his fateful return to Russia in 1917 at that very station, that statue in that venue generated a special resonance and helped to constitute the psychic reality that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It should go without saying that it was truly unimaginable in 1989 that the flag displaying the hammer and sickle would have disappeared within three years. No doubt the reality is far different today, whether in Mos-

cow, Budapest, or many other cities of Eastern Europe. Those who overthrow regimes often take as one of their first tasks the physical destruction of symbols and the latent power possessed by these markers of those whom they have displaced. Kenneth Branagh, in his film version of Hamlet, brilliantly evokes this by opening and closing his film with shots of what the screenplay describes as an “immense statue of a military hero,” the murdered King Hamlet. At the film’s beginning, it is as if Hamlet were still reigning, as is true in regard to the consciousness of his son, the Prince of Denmark. At the end of the film, however, the son (along with the murderous usurper) is dead, and soldiers of the Norwegian conqueror Fortinbras “tear at the great statue, hitting it continually with hammers, until with a mighty crash it falls.” As the pieces of the statue fall (in slow motion), they “gradually obliterate the name hamlet. For ever.” Whatever the truth of the general proposition that “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” this is almost certainly true of monumental crowns, especially when faced with an aroused populace who view them as symbols only of their oppressors. Perhaps it was the memory of the transformations of the Millennium Monument that helped contribute to what may be the most permanent Hungarian contribution to political semiotics, the toppling of a statue of Stalin during the ill-­fated 1956 revolution. Nor is Budapest the only Central European capital that could tell a vivid story about the fate of its statue of Stalin. As the Rough Guide to Prague points out, “Prague’s most famous moment is one which no longer exists. The Stalin monument, the largest in the world, was once visible from almost every part of the city: a 30 metre high granite sculpture portraying a pro-

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cession of Czechs and Russians being led to Communism by the Pied Piper figure of Stalin.” The sculptor of this gigantic 14,200 ton megalith which took some 600 workers a year-­and-­a-­half to put up “committed suicide shortly before it was unveiled, leaving all his money to a school for blind children, since they, at least, would not have to see his creation.” Unveiled in 1955 on the Communist holiday of May 1st, the monument lasted only seven years until, under “pressure from Moscow” (then ruled by Nikita Khruschev, who had famously denounced Stalin and his excesses), it was “blown to smithereens by a series of explo10

sions spread over a fortnight in 1962.” “All that remains above ground is the statue’s vast concrete platform,” which apparently is “a favorite spot for skateboarders.” Sic transit gloria mundi. The New York Times thus rightly emphasized by placement on page one the moment in August 1991 when, in the aftermath of the aborted coup against the government of Mikhail Gorbachev, a crowd in Moscow toppled the statue of the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky. The statue had stood for many years in front of the Lubiyanka prison, itself the instantiation of the secret police and, therefore, of the worst excesses of Communist tyranny. Lawrence Weschler wrote in the New Yorker that “monuments all over the country of fierce icons of the longtime socialist-­realist hegemony were being toppled and carted off ” and, presumably, destroyed. Surely, anyone who viewed this as a great moment for the cause of human freedom rejoiced as the symbols of the ideological walls came tumbling down? Well, not exactly. Even some strong anti-­Communists confessed to a deep ambivalence at the destruction of these important cultural objects. Thus Weschler

quotes Vitaly Komar, described as “formerly among the ancien régime’s most notorious dissident artists”: This is a classic old Moscow technique: either worship or destroy. Bolsheviks topple czar monuments, Stalin erases old Bolsheviks, Khrushchev tears down Stalin, Brezhnev tears down Khrushchev, and now this. No difference. Each time it is history, the country’s true past, which is conveniently being obliterated. And usually by the same people! In most cases, there weren’t passionate crowds doing tearing down it was cool hands of officials, by bureaucratic fiat. Same guys who used to order our shows bulldozed now arranging these bulldozings. Perhaps it is thinkable that state officials should have used their power to prevent the destruction of these statues or, at the very least, not called in state-­owned bulldozers to collaborate with the inflamed populace. It surely seems bizarre, though, to subject Muscovite political authorities to criticism for failing to offer a more vigorous defense of the earlier regime’s tribute to Dzerzhinsky and to the secret police system that he was honored for creating. One wonders if Komar would subject Boris Yeltsin to similar censure for calling in June 1997 for a national referendum on removing Lenin’s embalmed body from Red Square, where, seen by millions of people, it served as a central shrine of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin apparently advocates giving Lenin, some seventy-­three years after his death, a decent “Christian burial.” Needless to say, the Communists who continue to dominate the Russian parliament are reported to be vehemently hostile to any such suggestions.

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All of this is simply to ask, though, what one ought to think of the toppling of these and other monuments. Writing in April 1996 from Albania, New York Times reporter Philip Shenton notes that since the 1985 death of Enver Hoxha, “the brutal, eccentric, isolationist dictator of Albania for more than four decades,” Albanians have done “their best to erase any memory of his crazed dictatorship. Statues of Mr. Hoxha were smashed and photographs burned. . . .” Ought the Albanians have been more respectful of the statues and photographs, at least as a way of acknowledging the past rather than trying to erase or 12

a Freudian might well say, with wonderful double entendre, to “repress” it? Anyone taking this view would presumably admire post-­Communist Berlin for maintaining at least some continuity with its past by leaving up on the Alexanderplatz not only statues of Marx and Engels, but also what a travel writer for the Dallas Morning News describes as “six stainless-­steel obelisks engraved with photos from communist revolutions around the world.” Interestingly enough, the paper captioned a photograph illustrating this story as follows: “Symbols of a failed system still have a place on the Alexanderplatz for now.” One does not know, of course, whether the “for now” reveals the newspaper’s own ambivalence or that of the Berliners themselves. Especially curious is the News’ description of a photograph of Erich Honecker, the former leader of what was then East Germany, as “all but scratched away by vandals.” One might wonder if “vandals” is quite the mot juste to describe those who might resist the celebration of Honecker on one of Berlin’s main public venues. Just as one person’s “terrorist” is often another’s “freedom fighter,” so might one person’s “vandal” be another’s “cultural liberator.” As should be obvious, regimes in transition not only tear

down monuments but build new ones. Thus a recent article about the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, described by the New York Times as a Russian Robert Moses in terms of his impact on the Moscow landscape, refers to the “grandiose, $20 million, 150-­foot nautical bronze statue of Peter the Great” that will, upon completion, tower over downtown Moscow, presumably serving at once to efface the former Communist reality and to establish a link with another period of Russian glory. (This overlooks that Peter founded St. Petersburg in part because he detested Moscow.) And May 1996 saw the installation, in the Moscow suburb of Taininskoye, of a monument of Czar Nicholas II, whose coronation had occurred a century earlier (and who was, along with his family, executed by the Communists in 1917). This monument, described by the Associated Press as “Moscow’s only monument to Nicholas II,” was destroyed on April 1, 1997, by a bomb. In condemning the bombing, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdrin was quoted as saying that “Russia has already lived through the time when churches were blown up in order to assert the Communist vision of the world. Whatever our country went through this is history. We, as Russian citizens, must treat it with respect.” One wonders what “respect” counsels in the case of Lenin’s tomb. We must therefore come to terms with the transformation (or lack of same) of the public landscape of such cities as Budapest, Moscow, Tirana, and . . . And what? I use the ellipsis points not only to suggest that examples are legion, but also to refer to an issue linked with the destruction of physical monuments: the naming of public spaces. Consider, for example, whether the absence signified by the ellipses should be filled in with “Leningrad” or “St. Petersburg.” And who, if anyone, is authorized to

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offer a definitive answer to this question? Some of us are old enough to remember Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s insistence on using “Peiping” as the name of the Chinese capital, given that it was the then-­unrecognized People’s Republic of China that had changed the name to “Peking” (and, later, Beijing). Whatever one thinks of Rusk’s specific politics, he can be interpreted as saying that one need not necessarily accept the attempts of victors to reorganize the consciousness of the onlooking world. In any event, “Leningrad,” which survived a nine-­hundred-­day siege by the Nazis during World War II, did not survive the 14

downfall of the Soviet Union; it has disappeared on contemporary maps, imaginatively restored to its pre-­1917 rendering as St. Petersburg. (One wonders if Shostakovich’s great Leningrad Symphony will be similarly renamed, or will Russian youngsters be taught that, as with the morning and the evening star, the apparently different cities of Leningrad and St. Petersburg in fact share a common referent?) Perhaps we should view the change of name as a censurable act of state-­sponsored cultural silencing, the extirpation of seventy-­five years of Russian history, a submission to what is often pejoratively described as political correctness. Alternatively, we could instead describe it as the state’s recognition of a moment of cultural liberation, the reclaiming of a different cultural heritage that itself had been ruthlessly silenced by those who wished to impose a Communist hegemony over Russian culture. The Communists, after all, had displayed no hesitation in changing St. Petersburg’s name when they deemed it ideologically useful. (Indeed, St. Petersburg had, even before the revolution, been changed by the tsar to Petrograd in order to

give it a more Russian feel.) And the decision to name it Leningrad obviously takes on a wholly different valence from one to name it, say, Nevagrad, after the Neva River that flows through the city. It is hard to figure out why Communist mythmakers are entitled to a greater measure of respect, in regard to their politically motivated decisions concerning the naming of public places, than they showed to the mythmakers surrounding Peter the Great. Would anyone seriously protest, for example, the decision of a future non-­Communist regime in Vietnam to change the name of what is now Ho Chi Minh City back to Saigon? Names are important, and the ability to assign a definitive name is a significant power manifested, as significant power often is, in the most apparently banal of ways. As a sometime visitor to Budapest, I can testify to the frustrations that accompany using pre-­1989 maps that still have the street names assigned by the Communists; most such streets have reverted to their pre-­Communist names found now only on post-­1989 (or pre-­1945) maps. Street names are surely less dramatic than the names of the cities within which they are located, but no one ought to think that they are treated as matters of dispassionate routine. The kinds of passions linked to naming are well illustrated in contemporary Berlin, where local authorities have proposed renaming the Tempelhof Weg after Marlene Dietrich, described by the New York Times as “one of Berlin’s most fabled daughters.”4 There is, however, opposition to this suggestion, and not only from local businesses who don’t want the expense of having to buy new stationery. Other opposition comes from “older residents of the Schoneberg district [within which Tempelhof Weg is located]” who have “taken to grumbling that

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she was a ‘non-­German’ and a ‘traitor to the Fatherland’ for her repudiation of Nazi Germany.” She was no Elizabeth Schwartzkopf or Herbert Karajan, who remained, by all accounts, happily loyal to the Nazi regime; instead, during World War II, “she donned an American uniform as she sang to lift the spirits of Allied troops” preparing to take the war to her homeland. Interestingly enough, the street on which she was actually born is not available for renaming because it was earlier renamed for Julius Leber, a Social Democrat who in 1945 was executed because of his resistance to the Nazis. So Berlin cannot be accused of en16

tirely ignoring resisters (though Alan Cowell, who wrote the Times article, notes that no street is named after Willy Brandt, who left Germany for Sweden during World War II, returned afterward and became mayor of Berlin and then Chancellor of the German Federal Republic). Dietrich is different. “She wore a foreign uniform and she never came back,” according to a sixty-­ eight-­year-­old woman quoted by Cowell: “After 60 years abroad, she should be treated as someone who has betrayed the Fatherland.” Perhaps Marlene Dietrich Strasse will become part of the Berlin topography, but that decision will clearly not represent a unified determination that she deserves any such commemoration. The Times had earlier printed a story about Managua, Nicaragua, and the difficulty of finding places there because many new streets, built in the aftermath of the disastrous 1972 earthquake, have not yet been named. This seemingly routine municipal matter was stymied because of great political diffi­culties: At the moment, plans call for streets to be given numbers rather than names. In its 11 years in power, the San-

dinista National Liberation Front named many streets for heroes of the left including the one that runs in front of the United States Embassy here, which was called Salvador Allende Boulevard as a reminder to the “American imperialists” of their role in overthrowing Chile’s elected Marxist President in 1973. After the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990, most such streets, including Allende Boulevard, were stripped of their revolutionary designations. One main artery was given Pope John Paul II’s name after his visit here last February, but the authorities appear eager to avoid political problems by limiting themselves to numbers. “This is a society that is still much too polarized and divided to risk a controversy over something like this,” a European diplomat said, “In this country, one person’s hero is another person’s villain, so something as simple as naming a street can become an eminently political act.” It is important to recognize that history offers us few examples of a clear and unequivocal displacement of one hegemonic regime by another. Historical reality is a far less tidy, and almost infinitely more messy, enterprise than that suggested by many national myths. After all, it is rarely the case that partisans of the displaced regime actually exit from the historical stage. Ironically enough, one of the tidiest examples of transformation was the American Revolution, where the losing loyalists had the good grace to accept exile (or return “home,” as the case may be) in England or in Canada. Almost no active supporters of the discredited regime remained to speak of the

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merits of King George and his associates or to demand some public recognition of their contributions to the creation of what would become the United States. This certainly helps to explain why there is no full-­scale monument to Benedict Arnold in the United States, even though his skills of generalship, revealed at the Battle of Saratoga prior to his defection to the English cause, contributed mightily to there being a United States at all. (This must be understood in the context of the fact that there apparently is a monument at the site of the battle, but it consists only of the feet of an unnamed general. The cognoscenti know that 18

this is in fact a limited tribute to Arnold.) Perhaps the most important question is what happens to public space when the political and cultural cleavages within a given society are fully manifested and even, as in some versions of multiculturalism, endorsed. Consider another example involving street-­naming, from the United States. The February 15, 1997, New York Times included a story, “Another Proposal to Rename a Street Upsets San Franciscans,” detailing the debate over a proposal, by Dr. Amos Brown, “the lone black member of the [San Francisco] Board of Supervisors” to rename Fillmore Street after “a local civil rights hero, Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett.” Brown, noting that Fillmore Street commemorates President Millard Fillmore, one of whose most noteworthy deeds was signing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, said, “Here’s a person who worked to keep our forebears in the cruel system of slavery.” One can be confident, of course, that San Francisco’s desire to honor our oft-­ignored thirteenth president had far less to do with his views on slavery than with the fact that one of the other bills he signed, as part of the so-­called Compromise of 1850 that staved off civil war for a decade, included California’s admission to the

Union (as a free state). And, whatever the origins of Fillmore Street, one can be confident that most contemporaries identify it as the location of Bill Graham’s legendary rock venue, the Fillmore, one of the major sources of the counterculture of the 1960s. San Francisco’s usually voluble mayor, Willie Brown, said only, “You have to be very careful with the street-­naming process.” One doubts that many people care about the fate of memorials to Millard Fillmore. However, this is most certainly not the case with regard to George Washington, “the father of our country.” Much public debate ensued, therefore, following the October 27, 1997, decision by the (New) Orleans Parish School Board, which had adopted a policy prohibiting naming schools after “former slave owners or others who did not respect equal opportunity for all,” to change the name of the George Washington Elementary School, which will now be known as Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary School. Drew was an African American surgeon best known, according to the New York Times, “for developing methods to preserve blood plasma and for protesting the United States Army’s practice of segregating donated blood by race.”5 Editorials, op-­ed essays, and letters to the editor debated the propriety of the New Orleans policy in general and of its application to Washington in particular. I note that far less controversy was stirred, at least nationally, by the decision to remove from a junior high school the name of Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard and to replace it with the name of Thurgood Marshall. The point is that though one might well analyze San Francisco or New Orleans as ever-­changing societies, one would still hesitate to use the language of “regime change” that comes

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more naturally to analysis of Eastern Europe. Instead, the changes involve more the entry of new groups into the ambit of those with genuine political clout, with the consequent necessity of responding to the demands of these groups. As the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer writes in the revealingly titled We Are All Multiculturalists Now, multiculturalism “raises the general question of how we are to understand our nation and its culture. What monuments are we to raise (or raze), what holidays are we to celebrate, how are we to name our schools and our streets?” Ironically enough, the answer to these ques20

tions may be easier in localities that undergo sharply delineated regime changes than in countries wrestling with the problems of achieving a truly multicultural identity. Do we, then, have political and legal theories adequate to assess the fate of the Millennium Monument or, far closer to home, to determine who is a suitable candidate for inclusion along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia? If one, for example, offers the contemptuous epithet “Stalinist” to describe the suggestion (discussed at length below) that one destroy a monument to Louisiana racists who attempted to overthrow the biracial Reconstruction government, then why not condemn as “Stalinist” the removal, in Russia and other successor states within the former Communist empire, of statues of Stalin and Lenin from public squares and their replacement with what are thought to be more fitting figures of public honor? One potential solution is to add new statues without displacing the old. So, for example, a statue of Andrey Sakharov or, for that matter, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, could share space with their persecutor Leonid Brezhnev, just as Imre Nagy and Janos

Kadar have graves together in Budapest’s Kerepesi Cemetary and rallies commemorating both funerals were held at Heroes Square though it was Kadar who had Nagy, a leader of the 1956 insurrection against the Soviet Union, executed as a traitor. (And, as a matter of fact, it is Nagy who is honored in a moving statue about a block from the Hungarian parliament.) Perhaps the ability to accept such a sharing represents political maturity and acknowledgment of the almost endless complexity of political life, though one might be excused for believing that political language takes on Orwellian aspects when we equally honor insurgents and executioners. In any event, we might be curious about which societies could agree to pay equal homage to ideological opposites and which, on the other hand, choose a more consistent group of honorees. Although most of the examples up to now have been drawn from “foreign” locales, there is certainly no lack of similar controversies in the United States. It is a notorious truth that the United States is home to an ever-­more-­fractionated population tempted to engage in what has come to be termed “identity politics.” And, of course, everyone (or at least everyone so disposed) can play the identity politics game. Indeed, once one becomes aware of the issue, it is almost literally impossible to pick up any issue of a newspaper or magazine without finding examples in our own times and settings. Let me offer four, before moving to the examples that will be the central focus of this book. First, a Connecticut town recently decided to move “an imposing statue of Capt. John Mason” because of protests by American Indians that, far from being a heroic English settler, he is in fact better described as one who had massacred the Pequot

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Indians in 1637. As the writer for The Hartford Courant noted, the discussion about the fate of the statue is part not only of “a wider historical debate over whether American history, much of it written decades ago by European descendants, accurately reflected the role of Native Americans,” but also a reflection of “the reemergence of the Pequot tribe as a powerful regional influence” in the Connecticut of 1995. The second example comes from the opposite coast. A New York Times article, “San Francisco Journal: Century-­Old Monument Feels the Clash of History,”6 tells of the discord provoked 22

by the Pioneer Monument, a “huge granite pedestal topped by a bronze statue [that] has four life-­sized groups of sculpture around the base, including one that shows an Indian on the ground, with a friar standing over him who is pointing to heaven and a Spanish vaquero raising a hand in triumph.” The monument was moved from what had become a somewhat seedy area of the city to a place “between the old and new libraries and across a park from the new City Hall.” However, “preservationists objected to moving the statue at all; Indians wanted it junked.” Thus one member of the American Indian Movement Confederation described the monument as “symboliz[ing] the humiliation, degradation, genocide and sorrow inflicted upon this country’s indigenous people by a foreign invader, through religious persecution and ethnic prejudice.” The solution to such objections was a decision by the city’s Art Commission to “install a brass plaque to explain the misfortunes suffered by the indigenous population.” Lest one believe that this offered any easy way out, note that the original draft of the plaque— “With their efforts over in 1834, the missionaries left behind about 56,000 converts and 150,000 dead. Half the original Na-

tive American population had perished during this time from disease, armed attacks and mistreatment”—provoked angry responses both from a Catholic Archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and the consul general of Spain. Moreover, Kevin Starr, the most distinguished contemporary historian of California’s past, complained that the wording was “a horrible and hateful distortion of the truth,” while yet other commentators suggested that it was in fact too easy on the church. Following extended debate the Art Commission voted to delete “and 150,000 dead” as well as to add a phrase that, in the words of the New York Times reporter, “attribut[es] the decline of the Indian population to European contact, taking the onus off the church. The commission also discussed soliciting an additional monument giving the Indian point of view.” I note without additional comment the bland assumption that there is a single “Indian point of view.” Moving to our nation’s capital, we find a wonderful contretemps surrounding the decision by Congress, after some seventy-­five years, to place a statue of three female suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott in the rotunda of the Capitol. The statue had originally been donated to Congress by the National Women’s Party in 1921, in part because all of the statues displayed at the Capitol were of men. It was, however, consigned to the crypt of the Capitol, in part, allegedly, because of aesthetic objections to the sculpture, which, according to the Washington Post, had been “deliberately left . . . in an unfinished state to signify that the struggle of women would continue with future generations.” One might think that the final decision to place the work in the rotunda would receive general applause, but this is not the case. The National Po-

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litical Congress of Black Women protests that the “statue does not represent the suffragette movement” in its entirety. According to C. Delores Tucker, chair of the congressional black women’s congress, “It’s wrong and we’re going to do everything we can to stop it. We have been left out of history too much and we’re not going to be left out anymore.” The solution, according to the protesters, is to add to the statue a depiction of Sojourner Truth, the black nineteenth-­century feminist-­abolitionist. This was, incidentally, only one of the “monumental” controversies roiling Washington in the spring of 1997. There was also the fight 24

over how FDR would be depicted in a wheelchair or not, holding his signature cigarette holder or empty-­handed in his long-­ delayed monument, which finally opened in May 1997, as well as a struggle over the placement on the National Mall of a new monument to the veterans of World War II. Finally, in a June 23, 1996, story aptly titled “Little Bighorn Again Inspires Passion,” the New York Times details some of the plans that the new superintendent of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, Gerard Baker, a Mandan Hidatsa Indian, has for the site. Baker’s desire is to make the site “more user friendly for Indians,” which involves, among other things, supplementing the present monument honoring the U.S. soldiers slain during what used to be known as Custer’s Last Stand with a new monument that would commemorate the fifty Indians who died in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And he would like to put that monument on Last Stand Hill, just yards from the monument to the U.S. soldiers. The Times quotes Bob Wells, an editor of the Custer Little Bighorn Battlefield Advocate: “Gerard has a crusade going, the Indianization of the battlefield. He’s gone way overboard. It would be a serious mistake to plant the

Indian Memorial anywhere near the memorial of the Seventh Cavalry. The magnetism and dignity of that monument is that it occupies that hill.” To put it mildly, one would be surprised if there is any consensus on what counts as going “overboard” or whether the “Indianization” of the site of one of the few triumphs over the conquering United States Army is necessarily something to be criticized. One should note that Baker also endorsed an Indian celebration of the 120th anniversary of the battle that would include the Indians riding on horses to the gravesite where the two hundred U.S. soldiers are buried and “counting coup” by hitting with a stick the stone obelisk marking the grave. According to the Times, “Counting coup was a battle tradition in which warriors proved their skill and courage by striking an enemy with a special stick and returning safely to the tribe.” As to this, Wells asks, “What would people say if cavalry re-­enactors went to Wounded Knee and touched the monument [to the Sioux dead] with sabers?” Upon being asked whether Baker in effect was supporting the gloating by Indians of their victory at Little Bighorn, Baker said, “That’s right. It’s about time.” I cannot resist noting the wonderful double entendre of this last phrase, for, of course, monuments are quintessentially “about time” and who shall control the meaning assigned to Proustian moments of past time. All regions of the country no doubt offer fit examples for discussion. The rest of this book, however, focuses on the American South. One reason, perhaps, is that it is the region I most call home, having been born and raised in North Carolina and having lived now for eighteen years in Austin, Texas. Beyond this parochial reason, though, is the fact that the issues presented by the South, as a distinctive region of our nation,

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have, since the founding of our nation, presented the most exquisite difficulties in terms of establishing a truly coherent national identity. Although both were formally English, one can hardly amalgamate the Puritan “Roundheads” who settled New England with the “Cavaliers” who founded Virginia, let alone the Scotch-­Irish who dominated the settlements in the lower South, and the cultural differences between North and South have been a staple of those who would analyze America at least since the nineteenth century. Even if it took until recently to coin the term, “multiculturalism” has long been the reality in 26

the United States. My particular concern is the following: Do we, as a society, have a duty to the past to continue to give pride of sacred place to monuments to our—and what one means by “our” is perhaps the central question of this essay—own “Lost Cause” of the Confederate States of America in spite of altogether persuasive arguments not only that this cause was racist at its core, but also that some of the specific monuments, such as New Orleans’s Liberty Monument, leave nothing to the imagination in terms of their racism? These are scarcely academic questions, at least in the pejorative sense of treating the academy as the place for idle speculation about things that scarcely concern ordinary Americans. Within a recent week, for example, two of our leading national newspapers published stories illustrating the depth of such issues within the contemporary culture. “A Confederate Flag Vexes America Once Again, As Southerners Battle Each Other Over Heritage,” stated the February 4, 1997, Wall Street Journal as it reported on the controversy raging through South Carolina as to whether the Confederate battle flag should be removed from its present place of honor atop the South Carolina capitol,

where it has flown since 1962. (More shall be said below about the importance of that date.) Although Governor David Beasley, who has proposed that the flag come down, is a Republican (as is, of course, Senator Strom Thurmond, who, along with three other Republican former governors, supported Beasley’s proposal), the Republican-­controlled House of Representatives refused to go along. It settled for submitting the issue to a referendum of South Carolina voters. Interestingly enough, even the so-­called “Heritage Act” submitted by the governor would, according to the Journal, “protect the names of all streets, monuments and public squares bearing the names ‘of our Confederate leaders.’ ” The New York Times in turn placed on its front page a story, “Symbols of Old South Feed a New Bitterness.”7 Though it, too, referred to the South Carolina flag controversy, it noted as well the increasing acrimony over statues to the Confederate war dead. This being America, the Times notes that at least one lawsuit has been filed, in Franklin, Tennessee, seeking not only removal of a statue of a Confederate soldier that towers over the town square but also $44 million in damages. Charles Reagan Wilson, a University of Mississippi historian, is quoted as observing that such battles “really deal with issues of identity and world view and ethnicity. Are we one people or two?” To force white southerners to lower the flag or take down the monuments and, therefore, “to cut that tie with the symbols, with the genealogy, is for them a kind of cultural death.” As if directly corroborating this analysis, the Times quotes a South Carolina legislator who describes his opponents as demanding nothing less than “cultural genocide.” It is worth noting how much this legislator and his allies are

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adopting the language of cultural victimization that one often expects to hear from sources other than Southern white males. In this regard consider some remarkable sentences from Eugene Genovese’s recent book, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Genovese, one of our leading analysts of American slavery and of Southern culture, who gained fame as an explicitly Marxist historian, confesses at the outset that part of his interest in the specifically conservative aspects of the Southern tradition comes from his dismay at the “ ‘modernization’ that is transforming the South” 28

in which he now lives. While recognizing the beneficial aspects of such changes, including “long overdue if incomplete justice for black people,” he is also concerned with the “price” accompanying modernization, which, he says, “includes a neglect of, or contempt for, the history of southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain incomprehensible.” “The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern interpretation of American history and national identity, and it promoted a contemptuous dismissal of all things southern as nasty, racist, immoral, and intellectually inferior.” The language shortly escalates into the assertion that “we are witnessing” nothing less than “a cultural and political atrocity an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners, and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore, their identity.” In a brilliant rhetorical move, Genovese completes his preface by quoting from W. E. B. DuBois’s essay on Atlanta, in which that most radical of all African American historians, who introduced all of us to the

multiple consciousnesses contained within the deceptive term “American,” nonetheless reminded his readers “that with all the Bad that fell” with the defeat of the Old South, “something was vanquished that deserved to live. . . .” Given a cultural atmosphere where many worry about the silencing of those who have been the victims of various political movements, it is especially worth noting Genovese’s appropriation of the language of silencing and his lament for the concomitant negation of the political and cultural identities of some of our fellow Americans. He calls for the recognition of the dignity of those who have been silenced and who should, therefore, be allowed to speak their own tongue, however potentially grating the sound. Can one take such claims seriously in the context of those who speak on behalf of the white survivors of the great war of 1861–65 and of the culture formed in part to limit the consequences of the defeat at Appomattox? One wonders how Genovese would respond to recent efforts by University of Mississippi Chancellor Robert C. Khayat to encourage what the New York Times has described as “a period of campus-­ wide self-­analysis that could lead to the elimination” of the various Confederate symbols “that are regarded as sacred at this most tradition-­bound of Southern universities.” This includes not only the monument, but also the name of the university’s athletic teams, the “Ole Miss Rebels.” Whether one talks about the meanings of the two world wars for Hungarian identity or, in our own case, the meaning of the struggles of 1861–65 and, of course, what we call that struggle, whether Civil War, War between the States, a War for (or to Suppress) Southern Independence, or an insurrection, is scarcely

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an innocent choice; they are essentially contested. Partisans on all sides proclaim, perhaps even accurately, that nothing less than the national culture is at stake, especially insofar as material representations of such events, such as monuments or even street names, or the Jefferson Davis Highway that remains a central connector between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia are thought to play some role in inculcating particular understandings of society within future generations. One manifestation of this contest concerns the control of “sacred space.”8 Such space is exemplified for Americans by the 30

National Mall in Washington described by one historian, objecting to the proposed location of a new monument honoring the veterans of World War II, as “the most precious plot of ground in the country . . . our most sacred space,”9 public cemeteries, state and national capitol grounds, and other ground that is invested with special meaning within the structure of the civil religion that helps to constitute a given social order. Or the space can be more obviously metaphorical, as with the design of flags, the declaration of public holidays, such as Martin Luther King’s birthday, or even the designation of official state songs. As to this last, for example, Virginia has recently retired its state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.” Composed by James A. Bland, a black minstrel from New York, it is written from the perspective of a Virginia-­loving freed slave whose fondest wish, apparently, is to be reunited after his death with his beloved “massa and missis.” Contemporary Virginians have decided that it is time for this evocation of “Old Virginia” to leave the stage, to be replaced, one presumes, by a song more congruent with the social realities of the contemporary commonwealth.

Sacred grounds characteristically serve as venues for public art, including monuments to social heroes. Yet a sometimes bitter reality about life within truly multicultural societies is that the very notion of a unified public is up for grabs. As already suggested, one aspect of multiculturalism is precisely that different cultures are likely to have disparate and even conflicting notions of who counts as heroes or villains. And, as we shall see below, the debate over the fate of the Liberty Monument in New Orleans is now in at least its third decade. The reason why the debate continues, rather than being settled, is precisely that we are a multicultural society wrestling with the question how, if at all, one produces unum out of the pluribus of American society. The section below offers some reflections on the role of public art within the social order, with specific reference to memorialization of the events of 1861–65. Perhaps because my principal identity is as a constitutional lawyer, I go on to ask if the United States Constitution offers any aid in resolving the sometimes volatile controversies generated by memorialization. I well recognize, though, that whatever one’s answer about the importance of specifically legal argument, that no society lives by law alone, and I go on to discuss how we ought to respond to certain complaints even if the law properly does not compel a given resolution.

Public Art and the Constitution of Social Meaning

Art has many functions, only some of which can be reduced to learning to appreciate standard aesthetic criteria of beauty and form. Art is, among other things, both the terrain of, and often

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a weapon in, the culture wars that course through societies. This is, of course, especially true of public art, the art chosen self-­consciously by public institutions to symbolize the public order and to inculcate in its viewers appropriate attitudes toward that order. Although occasional museum curators may devote themselves to “art for art’s sake,” I think it fair to say that this concept makes no sense to anyone concerned with the art that is found in those spaces that are most truly “public” in a political sense, such as the space surrounding capitol buildings, city halls, national cemeteries, and the like. Art placed within 32

those spaces is almost always the product of some instrumental purpose outside the domain of pure aesthetics, and one’s analysis (or response) to such art will inevitably be influenced by knowledge about its topical subject and the political resonance that surrounds it. One might, I suppose, deny the honorific “art” to such creations, but I am not sure what purpose that denial would serve, especially given that great museums all over the world are filled with objects whose original purpose was to serve political ends and whose formal aesthetic merits may sometimes be questionable. As already noted, I am interested primarily in Southern cities and their use of public space. I thus begin with Richmond, Virginia, and its aptly named Monument Avenue, one of its principal thoroughfares. It gains its name from the fact that over many blocks one sees impressive statues of Confederate leaders, including Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, and three of his most prominent generals, J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and, of course, Robert E. Lee. A final statue memorializes Matthew Fontaine Maury, “the

father of modern oceanography” who resigned his commission in the United States Navy to command, albeit from the shore (because of an injury), the naval forces of the Confederacy. It perhaps goes without saying that there is no memorial to Abraham Lincoln or to Ulysses S. Grant on Monument Avenue or, so far as I know, elsewhere in Richmond. Michael Kammen laconically notes that a 1902 effort by some Confederate veterans to erect a memorial to Grant in Richmond foundered after receiving only sixteen dollars! And consider this outraged response by President Lyon G. Tyler of William and Mary to a 1908 proposal to erect a statue to Lincoln: To ask the South to put a monument to Lincoln, who represents Northern invasion of the homes and firesides of the South, would be as absurd as if I were to ask the North to put up a monument to Jefferson Davis. . . . I do not care to force [Davis’s] memory upon a people with whom he is not identified. In the same way, I am sure that the South can never be brought to regard Mr. Lincoln in any other political light than that in which Mr. Davis is regarded by the North as the champion of a section.10 Although one might be forgiven the surmise that Lee and Davis are unmemorialized in any Northern city, a monument to Lee was erected at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1917, upon the initial sponsorship of Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1903, just as a monument to the Confederate dead had been unveiled at Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. These were scarcely uncontroversial. Edward Linenthal notes an 1887 vote by the national encampment of posts of the Grand Army of the Republic

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Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia: Jefferson Davis (above), Robert E. Lee (above right), Stonewall Jackson (right), J. E. B. Stuart (facing page, left), and Matthew Fontaine Maury (facing page, right) (photos by John Paul Jones).

“that no local post should support ‘erection of monuments in honor of men who distinguished themselves by their services in the cause of treason and rebellion,’ ”11 and the G.A.R. successfully blocked Virginia’s attempt to place Lee in the statuary hall of the United States Capitol. For better or worse, such passions had presumably dissipated thirty years later, as charges of “treason and rebellion” were forgotten and replaced by new narratives of the courage and valor displayed by adherents of the Lost Cause now joined together with their former opponents in an ever-­more-­truly United States. The most notable tribute to Lincoln is obviously found some 120 miles north of Richmond, in Washington, D.C. The Lincoln Memorial is the central temple of the American civil religion, though smaller memorials to the sixteenth President dot espe-

cially the Northern and Midwestern landscape. One can, of course, find jointly shared heroes of the two cultures, the most obvious one being George Washington, venerated both in Richmond and the city that bears his name. (Though recall that the current New Orleans school board refuses to honor Washington at all, given his status as a slaveholder.) Consider, however, the fact that the great obelisk called the Washington Monument is surrounded by American flags and is clearly meant to celebrate Washington the national liberator, the founding father of a new Union, not Washington the Virginian. One doubts that 36

this is altogether true of the Houdon statue of Washington in Richmond, whose local admirers might want us to believe that Washington, like Robert E. Lee, would have given priority to his Virginia identity over his national one had the two ever emerged sharply in conflict in his own lifetime. After all, Washington had given priority to his parochial American identity against wider loyalties to the Great Britain that claimed sovereign authority over its colonies. Moving farther south, to Columbia, South Carolina, one can see not only civil statuary reminiscent of Richmond’s (though nowhere so grandly displayed as on Monument Avenue), but also, waving over the state capitols (though under the American flag), the battle flag of the Confederate States of America to which South Carolina, like Virginia, proudly belonged (or, depending on one’s theory, attempted to belong) between 1861–65. This flag, the “Southern Cross,” is commonly, though incorrectly referred to as the “Stars and Bars,” which properly refers to the “official” flag of the Confederate States of America, which consisted of three stripes two red separated by a white and a circle

of seven stars in the upper corner. Most Americans, one suspects, could not identify this official flag, whereas few indeed, whatever their regional background, could fail to identify the battle flag. This no doubt helps to explain why the state flags of Georgia and Mississippi explicitly incorporate the battle flag of the Confederacy, rather than the official flag, into their current state flags. One quite dramatic difference, then, between many Eastern European capitals and those of the present United States is precisely the extent to which memorials to lost (and ostensibly defeated) causes continue to occupy places of public honor. Unlike the displaced statues of Stalin or Hoxha, the statues on Monument Avenue (and elsewhere throughout the South) remain for all to see (and learn from). Since 1884, for example, visitors to New Orleans have been able to see a statue of Robert E. Lee rising high above the landscape, and even the buildings of modern New Orleans have not entirely diminished its power at the center of Lee Circle. Far more startling to a contemporary consciousness is another New Orleans monument, this one erected in 1891 commemorating the so-­called Battle of Liberty Place, an 1874 encounter in downtown New Orleans.12 An admiring local historian describes the battle as “The Overthrow of Carpet-­Bag Rule in New Orleans September 14, 1874,” and he is clearly not alone in his feelings about the battle. An extensive review of the event in a 1920 issue of the Louisiana Historical Quarterly concludes as follows: Well may New Orleans glory in its Liberty Monument, for it commemorates a wonderful page in its history; but not

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The Liberty Monument, as of 1996, removed from its previous setting at the base of Canal Street in New Orleans.

much less distinct should be the pride therein of all the people of this great country, for it tells of the binding up of old wounds and of the cementing of ties, that have enabled this nation of ours to grow and prosper and to become, as it is today, a worthy example to all the world. The denizens being honored were members of the aptly named White League, who engaged in the violent overthrow of the existing Louisiana government, composed of an alliance of Republican whites and newly enfranchised African Americans. Thirty-­two lives were lost on both sides, with about three times that many persons injured. The ousted administration of the Republican William Penn Kellogg was in fact restored by force of federal arms, but it was only a matter of time until the Compromise of 1877 resulted in the full-­scale restoration of conservative white rule sought by the White League, with attendant consequences for the future of African Americans. Immediately following the battle, with the partisans of the White League in apparent control of the state (of which New Orleans was then the capital), the New Orleans Daily Picayune saluted the downfall of the former government. “Big, inflated, insolent, and overbearing, it collapsed at one touch of honest indignation and gallant onslaught.” This leading voice of New Orleans called for the erection of a memorial to the eleven whites who had died on behalf of the insurgency. The New Orleans City Council formally agreed in November 1882, when it passed an ordinance renaming the area of the battle as “Liberty Place” and authorized the erection of a monument “in honor of those who fell in defense of liberty and home rule in that heroic struggle of the 14th of September, 1874.” By 1891 these hopes were

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achieved with the construction of an obelisk near the Mississippi River at the foot of Canal Street, a principal thoroughfare in the city. The Liberty Monument included the names of those White Leaguers who gave their lives in attacking the hated mixed-­race government, as well as the names of some of the League leaders. It goes almost without saying that the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the largely black militia who died fighting the White League were unmemorialized. The 1891 dedication of the monument apparently initiated what became a yearly parade thereafter on each September 14th, with suit40

able wreath-­laying ceremonies to honor the civic heroes. Lest anyone fail to get the intended message, the city, using artisans funded by the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration, added in 1934 two plaques setting out what might be called, in our postmodernist times, the officially privileged narrative of the events. On one side of the base was chiseled, “United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election in November 1876 recognized white supremacy and gave us our state.” On the opposite side appeared, “McEnery and Penn, having been elected governor and lieutenant governor by the white people, were duly installed by the overthrow of the carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers Gov. Kellogg (white) and Lt. Gov. Antoine (colored).” As one might well expect, the Liberty Monument has remained a source of controversy in New Orleans, especially as African Americans have become a dominant political force in the city (though no one should confuse this with a genuine regime change à la Hungary). In 1974, for example, Mayor Moon

Landrieu agreed to the installation of a bronze plaque describing the battle as an insurrection and noting that the controversial language had not in fact been part of the original 1891 monument. Most important, no doubt, was the plaque’s additional message that “the sentiments expressed are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-­day New Orleans,” a statement itself raising delicious political and philosophical questions. Is New Orleans an entity that can have a “philosophy and beliefs,” and, if so, how precisely does one identify what they are? Who is granted the power to speak authoritatively as to their content? One might well believe, of course, that the statement was designed more to create a desired state of public consciousness than to describe accurately the actual constellation of public opinion in New Orleans as of 1974. Still, there can be no doubt that New Orleans adopted an overtly tutelary role in attempting to limit the pernicious consequences upon the untutored who might otherwise have been tempted to treat the words contained on the monument and placed there, after all, at public expense as an authoritative enunciation of the meaning of the commemorated event. When Ernest Morial became the first black mayor of the city in 1981, he attempted to remove the monument but was stopped from doing so by the majority-­white city council, which forbade the moving of any monuments without its consent. The council did, however, authorize the removal of any offensive wording on the monument. Smooth granite slabs were then placed over the 1934 additions, presumably obviating the need for the adjoining plaque’s renunciatory sentiments. During the late 1980s the administration of a second black mayor, Sidney Barthelemy,

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tried to remove the monument permanently during the course of general riverfront reconstruction, when it had been taken down temporarily from its Canal Street location. However, an interesting alliance of traditionalists, historical preservationists, and white supremacists successfully blocked the effort. Nevertheless, the monument was ultimately moved from its quite prominent Canal Street spot to a decidedly more obscure setting about a block away, where it now languishes out of the sight of most of the tourists who otherwise crowd Canal Street and its fine shops, casinos, the municipal aquarium, and vistas 42

of the Mississippi. It remains in the general area only because of a consent agreement between the city and the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Officer, based on federal historic preservation laws, that the monument remain in the general area of the battle. Once again, though, the official narrative changed, as yet another large plaque was placed on the monument itself. It contained the names of the eleven members of the Metropolitan Police who lost their lives in the conflict. More important, for our purposes, is the new official message of the monument: “in honor of those americans on both sides of the conflict who died in the battle of liberty place. a conflict of the past that should teach us lessons for the future.” What these lessons might be is left wholly unarticulated. The voice of the tutor is quite muffled, leaving the monument to speak for itself without further elaboration. If the Millennium Monument evokes Musil’s Man Without Qualities, this latest inscription on the Liberty Monument brings to mind either George Orwell, with his castigation of govern-

The Liberty Monument.

ment doubletalk, or, perhaps less ominously, Sir Arthur Strebe-­ Greebling (a character created by the late comedian Peter Cook), who unforgettably stated, “Oh yes, I’ve learned from my mistakes and I’m sure I could repeat them exactly.” One wonders if this present inscription on the Liberty Monument genuinely represents progress over the 1974 point and counterpoint that at least educated the careful reader in the ideological stakes behind the ascription of meaning to the Liberty Monument. Similarly, the Confederate flag continues to fly over some official buildings and to plague contemporary politics after the 44

hammer and sickle has become but a memory (or, at least, been reduced to an object of flag-­waving protest by private individuals dismayed by the sea change that has occurred since 1991). Many Southerners, in particular, would gladly echo the comment of Theodore Herzl, one of the founders of Zionism: You might ask mockingly: “A flag? What’s that? A stick with a rag on it?” No sir, a flag is much more. With a flag you lead men, for a flag, men live and die. In fact, it is the only thing for which they are ready to die in masses, if you train them for it. Believe me, the politics of an entire people . . . can be manipulated only through the imponderables that float in the air.13 Even Georgia’s popular Governor Zell Miller was unable to prevail in his efforts to change the flag back to the pre-­1956 Georgia emblem, which, ironically, is different from the current flag only insofar as the earlier emblem was apparently modeled after the official Confederate flag, the historic “Stars and Bars,” rather than the crossed lines of stars of the battle flag. And the newly

elected Republican attorney general of South Carolina in 1994 reversed the policy of his Democratic predecessor by announcing that he would defend against a lawsuit challenging the right of the state to continue flying the Confederate battle flag atop the South Carolina statehouse. And we saw above the uncertain response to South Carolina Governor Beasley’s more recent attempt to lower the flag. I offer one final example of public sculpture, a monument found in front of the Texas state capitol in Austin. The approximately twenty-­feet-­high statue is the first thing the visitor entering the south capitol grounds will see, even before the monument celebrating the defenders of the Alamo. Erected in 1903 by their “surviving comrades” in the John B. Hood Camp, United Confederate Veterans, it commemorates those who died fighting for the Confederacy between 1861–65. On a pedestal stand seven-­foot statues of an artilleryman, an infantryman, a cavalryman, and a sailor, representing the four branches of the Confederate armed forces. Rising from the center of the pedestal is a seven-­and-­one-­half-­feet-­tall statue of Jefferson Davis. According to the contemporary state librarian who compiled a breathless history of the monument, the viewer “will instinctively look up at the commanding, heroic form above him, a personification of the Genius of the Confederacy, its faith, its intelligence, its enlightened appreciation and love of liberty, its lofty purpose, its dauntless courage, and its inflexible iron will.”14 On the side of the top pedestal is a listing of each of the Confederate states (plus Missouri and Kentucky, two of the Unionist slave states). Lower down, on three of the monument’s sides, are carved

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Memorial to the Confederate Dead, state capitol grounds, Austin, Texas.

the names of every battle fought during the four-­year carnage. On the fourth side appears the official message of the monument: died for state rights guaranteed under the constitution the people of the south, animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew

from the federal compact in 1861. the north resorted to coercion. the south, against overwhelming numbers and resources, fought until exhausted. * The monument is dated 1901, though it seems not to have been completed until 1903, when it was formally unveiled and dedicated on April 16. An onlooker described the dedication speeches, first of former Governor Lubbock, who had been an aide to Davis, and then of Texas’ current Governor Lanham: Lubbock was “delighted to see the grand work of perpetuating the Confederacy. . . . He declared one thing which grates on his ear is to hear someone say that we fought for what we considered was right. ‘We fought for what we know was right,’ declared the speaker.” As Governor Lanham spoke, he “pointed directly at the statue of President Davis, and eloquently exclaimed, ‘I salute thee!’ ” and then saluted the statues of the four soldiers. According to the Austin Daily Statesman, this “brought forth a mighty shout of applause from those present,” as did the governor’s declaration “that, if he ever heard any one abusing President Davis or the noble cause he championed, he would first remonstrate with him, and if that did not suffice, he would feel sorely tempted to strike the offenders with a shillalah.” * One might compare this inscription with that found on monument to the Union dead located in the Boston Common: To the Men of Boston / Who Died for their country / On Land and Sea in the War / Which Kept the Union Whole / Destroyed Slavery / And Maintained the Constitution / The Grateful City Has Built this Monument / That Their Example May Speak to Coming Generations.

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Monument to the Union Dead, Boston Common.

Two competing messages about the meaning of the war and of the lives lost.

I have been fascinated by the monument since discovering it shortly after moving to Austin. I include its “message” in the casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking, that I coedit, and I usually devote a class to assessing the interpretation of the Constitution that it offers. Can one describe the people of the South as simply engaging in their right of self-­determination, as set out in the Declaration of Independence and, perhaps, implicitly guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as a reserved right to revert to their sovereign power to secede from the United States and forge a new 50

path in a different political setting? This also requires asking if it is truly thinkable that one might describe Abraham Lincoln, the cult figure of our national civil religion, as an illegitimate coercer, perhaps similar to George III (not to mention more ominous twentieth-­century nationalists who have refused to let dissident, regionally organized, minorities go in peace). I certainly do not want to argue that the monument’s view of secession is the only legitimate view. I am willing, though, to proffer a defense of the legitimacy of secession as a general proposition of normative political theory; perhaps more to the point, I am also willing to defend its plausibility even within our particular political system. I do not think it is impossible to interpret the Constitution as allowing secession even within the United States, at least if carried out with full popular deliberation and consent of those doing the seceding. Like Confederate Vice-­President Alexander Stephens, I believe that Abraham Lincoln had more than a trace of “union mysticism” that led him to underestimate the theoretical force of the Southern argument for voluntary dissolution of the Union.

At this point, though, one might protest that the discussion is turning “academic” in the pejorative sense. After all, can one really maintain a stance of academic distance in discussing the legitimacy of the secessionist movements of 1860–61? One reason for our skepticism is that we are talking about our very own country, whose identity has been profoundly shaped precisely by the national decision, purchased between 1861 and 1865 by the lifeblood of one of every fifty Americans, to reject the possibility of secession. It is a bit like trying to analyze dispassionately whether our own parents really should have married one another; perhaps, after all, they were unsuited to each other and would have been happier had they never met. The one thing we know for sure about any such counterfactual possibility, whatever consequences it might have had for our parents, is that we would not exist with the specific identity that constitutes whatever individuality we possess. Similarly, it is truly impossible to imagine what our political identity would be like had the separations of 1861 stuck. For those of us who take politics and identity seriously, that is an important consideration. But even these musings remain much too abstract, an almost obvious attempt to evade what for most of us is the overwhelming reality of the events of 1861–65. Along with discussion of the high theory of sovereignty, popular and otherwise, one must attend to the reality of the chattel slavery that certainly exemplified the greatest difference between North and South and explained much of the impetus for national dissolution. Indeed, for me the reality of slavery provides the only justification for the suppression of the Southern effort to gain political independence.

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If partisans of Lincoln’s policy tend to focus on slavery to the exclusion of the abstract merits of arguments in behalf of secession, so do those who defend the Lost Cause tend to emphasize only the latter while ignoring the most ignominious realities of the Southern way of life. Thus, those who designed the Texas statue and its inscription were conforming to what the historian Gaines Foster has described as the standard line adopted by Confederate memorializers, who insisted that the Southern cause had been just and legal, with “Confederate armies [having] fought not for slavery but for constitutional rights, 52

the principle of secession, and the preservation of their homeland.” The Texans were also altogether typical in ascribing the loss to the result of the “overwhelming numbers” of Northern troops rather than, for example, to Confederate shortcomings. The spirit of the statue is aptly captured in the comment of an ex-­Confederate soldier, quoted by Foster, upon the occasion of a reunion at Gettysburg that was addressed by the first Southern president elected since 1848, Woodrow Wilson. This former Confederate proudly proclaimed that Southern veterans presented “no apology, no explanation, no expression of regret, no humiliation, no retraction, no recanting.”15 Whatever one’s views on the theoretical merits of secession and self-­determination, they must always be tempered by recognition of the particular context within which a secessionist argument is being made, whether in South Carolina in 1861 or in Bosnia in 1995. And that context, so far as the United States is concerned, includes, overwhelmingly, slavery and state political systems devoted to maintaining what was euphemistically called our “peculiar institution.” Thus one must always ask

if a monument to the Confederate dead and the articulation of secessionist constitutional theory is equivalent to memorializing those who fought to maintain chattel slavery and the abuse of African Americans. And, if so, does this mean, like medieval suicides, that those who died in that fight should be denied the consecrated burial in sacred soil that is symbolized by the monument? (Indeed, this is one of three monuments to Confederate veterans found on the Texas capitol grounds, though it is certainly the largest and most visible.) Consider the German cemetery at Bitburg, with its graves and, more importantly, memorial tombstones to members of the SS. For many of us, the lowest symbolic point of the Reagan presidency was his capitulation to Chancellor Kohl’s desire that the president of the United States in effect offer these Nazi war criminals the symbolic absolution of his charismatic presence at their gravesites. Ian Buruma, in his superb book Wages of Guilt, about the German and Japanese cultural responses to World War II, notes that there were, after World War I, many Denkmale, war memorials celebrating the sacrifices of German soldiers. Unsurprisingly, this did not occur following 1945; instead one sees Mahnmale, memorials to the victims of Hitlerian Germany. “The warning monuments and memorial places (Gedenkstatte) are mostly products of the reaction, which set in during the 1960s, propelled by the postwar generation, as eager to warn and remember as their parents were to forget.” Bitburg was a manifestation, if not of a desire to forget, at least of a desire in some ways to normalize the experience of fighting on behalf of the German state between 1939–45. It was, perhaps, the ultimate repudiation of the ban, until the 1950s, on build-

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ing military cemeteries, a ban that was coupled with the pulling down, by the occupying Allies, of many of their older memorials that commemorated the Prussian military tradition. To the extent that we credit even the slightest equivalence to these comparisons, or to earlier implicit comparisons between the Old South and the Soviet Union, then what ought we do today in regard to statues like the one in Austin, not to mention those that line Monument Avenue or the streets of New Orleans? Do the newly empowered citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg provide role models of how to respond to offensive 54

public sculpture that owes its genesis to the attempt of a specific sociopolitical regime to reinforce its dominion and promote a particular kind of political consciousness? After all, as Kirk Savage reminds us, “Public monuments do not arise as if by natural law to celebrate the deserving; they are built by people with sufficient power to marshal (or impose) public consent for their erection.” A “public monument represents a kind of collective recognition in short, legitimacy for the memory deposited there.”16 Once one recognizes this basic truth, then it surely seems possible to argue that at least some sculpture, whatever its aesthetic merits or utility as an example of how material artifacts are used to constitute a culture, properly faces destruction as the penalty for its association with a hated political regime. Is there any merit to the suggestion that this is just the kind of destruction of historical memory that bespeaks the totalitarian impulse and should be resisted even (or especially) when its claims seem most compelling? There are, to be sure, intermediate solutions. During the period of maximum controversy within New Orleans about the

fate of the Liberty Monument, the noted Yale historian Robin Winks attacked those who counseled its destruction.17 He took direct issue with those who viewed the struggle over its appropriateness as a public monument as a “clash between those who look to the future and those who hang on to the past, or even more sharply put, between racists and those who regard race as irrelevant.” Instead, he opined, the struggle is really about the nature of historical memory. “Different concepts of history are at war.” The first “holds that society should never forget any part of its past,” that “it is wrong to purge the record” of past events. Winks evoked the classic negative example of the justly derided “Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” which was subject to constant revisions based on the ideological desires of those ruling at any given instant. “History became what the written texts said it was” instead of a rendering of history as it actually happened. But Winks is much too sophisticated to stay with this polarized opposition. “We all know,” he writes, that “history is, simultaneously, three things: what actually happened, what historians choose to re­cord, and what the people and people, some people, these people, those people believe to be true about the past.” Were he writing for a more academic audience, he might well have segued into a language about the existence of competing discourses that compete for cultural hegemony and whose partisans attempt, by use of the state apparatus, to privilege. He might also have contrasted the versions of history predominant within the academy, at any given point, with those held by the untutored or, perhaps more precisely, those who accept as their tutors uncertified amateurs instead of the credentialed academy. It was just such a struggle between professional histo-

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rians and the untutored (other than by their own experiences) populace that was at the center of the struggle over the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the plane from which the Hiroshima atomic bomb was dropped, at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of end of World War II. It was altogether appropriate that the editors of a series of essays on the controversy titled their book History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. “The past,” Winks points out, “is also what is commemorated by monuments and markers, plaques and parades, his56

toric sites and museums. Almost always a monument is an attempt to interpret an event in which those who have erected it take pride.” They are ways by which a specific culture names its heroes, those “people who made us what we are in a prideful way.” There is, I believe, a linkage between Winks’s comment and Catharine MacKinnon’s argument, expressed in somewhat more radical language: Words and images are how people are placed in hierarchies, how social stratification is made to seem inevitable and right, how feelings of inferiority and superiority are engendered, and how indifference to violence against those on the bottom is rationalized and normalized. Social supremacy is made, inside and between people, through making meanings.18 So what we have is a monument whose origin was the desire to honor those who took up arms against a multiracial government and whose present meaning (even 120 years later) for many is to pay homage to the racist culture for which they

fought. Though even here a cautionary note may be necessary. Thus University of Texas professor of literature (and poet and Jungian depth psychologist) Betty Sue Flowers contends: Surely the “desire” insofar as we can claim to know was to honor those who fought for the right to a representative government. It’s easy to get a mob to ignite against a “multi-­racial government” but to get a sustained fundraising effort going, you have to have a principle at work rather than simply a prejudice. The principle in this case was connected (in the [white] Southerners’ minds at least) to the reason they came to America in the first place. In the carpetbagger governments set up, they had no vote; their property was often confiscated, etc., etc. I think you have to take seriously the stated reason for the “honor” bestowed on the fallen they fought for “liberty and home rule.” Were they also anti-­black racists? Yes. But the meaning of the statue must surely take into account the point of view of these Southerners as well as our more enlightened one. Whatever the importance of Flowers’s reminder, it is worth noting that some supporters of the monument, like the Louisiana White Citizens Council, essentially agree with opponents like the local naacp that the central purpose of the monument is to celebrate those who took arms against the Reconstruction government save only, one presumes, by the refusal on the part of the former to describe the ancien régime as racist. So if one rejects the Citizens Council and the White League that was in a significant sense its predecessor, why not emulate the Russians

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in tearing the monument down and proclaiming through the very act of destruction the commitment to a new, and presumably better, vision of reality? Winks demurs. “The monument must go back up.” Escalating his rhetoric and adopting what is surely among the most censurious epithets in an intellectual’s vocabulary, he says that “not to put it back up would be an act of the clearest Stalinism, of intellectual vandalism.” Interestingly, though, this scarcely concludes Winks’s discussion. For him the real issue is not whether to keep it standing but, rather, where to place 58

the statue. He agrees that it is not appropriate to keep it near its historic Canal Street setting, whatever the arguments of the historic preservationists. There it serves primarily as “an insult to most of the present population of New Orleans, . . . rub[bing] salt in open wounds not yet healed,” and a decent political order can presumably act to remove the source of such hurt, to silence the message it sends. What, then, is Winks’s solution? It is to encapsulate the monument within a museum, where it presumably takes on a different semiotic status. In some museums the new status would be that of “aesthetic object,” in which form is substantially separated from content. But no one defends the totally undistinguished Liberty Monument as art. So the museum being referred to is one devoted particularly to history. And the message, presumably, is that the object in question is now safely displaced to the past, at some distance both emotional and intellectual from the exigencies of the present. Winks offers the example of Zimbabwe, which, upon its creation as the successor-­state to Rhodesia, was faced with the issue of what

to do with the “great statues of Cecil Rhodes, Lord Salisbury and others who dreamt of empire” that filled “the central squares of [Rhodesia’s capital] Salisbury.” “Of course the new civil servants of Zimbabwe did not wish to walk past larger-­than-­life figures of Cecil Rhodes or Lord Salisbury as they went to their new jobs.” They did not, however, destroy the statues or otherwise “deny the significance of Cecil Rhodes to the history of modern Zimbabwe.” Instead, they moved the statues from the great public spaces of the city “and carefully and skillfully put them once again on the grounds of the nation’s new national archives and museum, a clear statement that the figure spoke to the past, not to the future.” Presumably the movement of the statues, together with the change of the country’s name itself and its capital’s name from Salisbury to Harare, served to secularize them, turning them into detached objects of historical reflection rather than icons of an ongoing civil religion. Moreover, I strongly suspect that not all of the memorials to Rhodes and Salisbury were moved to historical museums. There were undoubtedly too many of them; this was clearly the case in the former Soviet Union, where far more statues of Lenin had been produced than could possibly be absorbed by museums. So, presumably, most of the statues were destroyed even if the aesthetically best, or most publicly prominent, individual statues were given a type of immortal life in museums. Even if one agrees with Winks that complete destruction of these monuments is unwise, whether or not “Stalinist,” one might obviously wonder if the state should be content to count on the placement within a museum setting to convey the proper

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message. Even if this removes some of the force that placement in sacred space gives any statue, it scarcely offers a complete resolution for the dilemma, for those particular state employees called museum curators must still decide how, precisely, they should be presented within the museum setting. Perhaps the museum should play a much more active tutelary role in setting out the moral it wishes those viewing the statues to draw. For the state to profess to be truly neutral or indifferent to the social meaning of given statuary would be not only remarkable (assuming, of course, it is possible), it might also, under many 60

circumstances, be pernicious. I presume that Winks would counsel that the new government of South Africa follow the Zimbabwean example of keeping in place public monuments to oppressors. Afrikaaners should presumably still be able to see mighty monuments to their ancestors, though in museums rather than at great public squares. Perhaps one would similarly advise the new governments of Russia, Poland, and other countries formerly ruled by Communists to place various statues of Lenin, Stalin, and others in the equivalent of Communist theme parks, where parents could bring their children and impart whatever lessons they wished. This has happened in contemporary Budapest, where one can find Statue Park Museum on the outskirts of the city. One enters the park through a suitably imposing facade, which reveals the statues sitting in a field. As a guidebook to the park explains, “Here gathered together are all the statues of Budapest that once stood in public places, as beacons for the political and ideological culture of the former socialist period.” The architect of the park, Akos Eleod, noted

The entrance to Statue Park, Budapest, Hungary (1997).

that he tried his “utmost to treat this terribly serious theme with the proper amount of seriousness,” but this was no easy matter. “I had to realise that if I constructed this park with more tendentious, extreme or realistic methods . . . I would ultimately be doing nothing more than constructing my own Anti-­propaganda park from these propagandist statues, and following the same thought patterns and prescriptions of dictatorship that erected these statues in the first place.” Thus the park, “about dictatorship,” is “at the same time . . . about democracy. After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship.” Only one Communist monument remains in the city itself, a memorial to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Budapest from the Nazis in 1945. Opposite the American embassy in one of Budapest’s principal public squares, it remains, red star and all, in part because a number of the soldiers slain during the liberation are buried beneath it. (One of the wonderfully rich ex-

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Communist statues in Budapest, Hungary (1997).

periences of contemporary Budapest is to place the unpretentious memorial to the slain Imre Nagy in the same sightline as the imposing monument to the Soviet soldiers.) Would we have found the Budapest solution acceptable in Germany and Japan following their defeats in World War II? Surely most of us would have been profoundly dissatisfied had the successor regimes moved any public statuary of Hitler, Tojo, and their minions to the carefully tended grounds of a state museum where they would stand, without further adornment or

explanation, for the presumed edification of onlookers. Postmodernist irony would scarcely have seemed a sufficient response to the horrors of the Nazis (which suggests that, in spite of everything, the Communist rule is treated as far less loathsome than the Nazi hegemony). Similar questions can be asked in regard to public display of the flag. It is truly impossible to believe that Russia is under some duty to maintain the hammer and sickle as its national symbol, or that the swastika should have been kept as a part 63

Commemoration of the Soviet liberators of Budapest from the Nazis: This is the only remaining Communist statue in public Budapest.

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The Memorial to Imre Nagy, executed by the Communists in the aftermath of 1956 and now portrayed as glancing over his shoulder to the parliament building a block away.

of the German flag? I presume that no one finds morally innocent the waving of the swastika by contemporary skinheads in Germany or other countries. Imagine our reaction if a German staat, perhaps inspired by South Carolina, decided to fly the swastika above its state capitol. Does our reaction to these flags suggest anything at all in regard to the Confederate flag and its distinctive set of associations?

The Fourteenth Amendment, State Speech, and Public Symbols

What stance should we take regarding those who wish to tear down (or maintain) monuments and other historical artifacts? Can we construct some general theoretical positions that will provide answers to the conundrums facing us, or, on the contrary, is each situation so context-­dependent that generalizations get us nowhere? One is reminded of Justice Stewart’s famous statement about the possibility of developing a general definition of pornography. He could not, he said, come up with such a definition, but did say, “I know it when I see it.” Similarly, it is possible that we cannot agree on a general approach to the problems presented by public homage, but, nonetheless, regarding acceptability, “we know it when we see it.” As a constitutional lawyer, I am particularly interested in whether legal analysis is helpful in approaching such questions. Law is certainly the most systematic attempt to provide high-­ level, generalized, rules for covering complex social conflicts. It is tempting, therefore, to ask if the United States Constitution speaks with enough clarity to invalidate the display of the Confederate battle flag or the raising of certain monuments, at least when done by state officials. Consider a Texan who claims that the presence of the statue in front of the capitol is not only personally offensive, which could certainly be the case, but also a violation of his or her constitutional rights. Or a Georgian asserts similar claims regarding the Georgia state flag, redesigned by the Georgia Legislature to add the Confederate battle flag, which now covers roughly two-­thirds of the flag’s area only in

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1956 as an expression of disdain for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. What arguments for their illegality, at least as explicitly public symbols, might be made and, more importantly, accepted? It must be noted that, whatever else may be said about flags atop state capitols (and about most public art), there is no need to dispute this as an action of the state and thus subject to constitutional constraint. Many of the debates about the Confederate flag have concerned its display by private persons and their rights under the First Amendment to be protected against state 66

interference in the expression of their views, however obnoxious the form of that expression might be. As a long-­time card-­ carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, I have no trouble protecting such display, not least because I do not trust the state to make refined judgments as to whose symbols are sufficiently obnoxious to merit criminal punishment. But public entities have no rights to free speech as such, nor are we talking of “criminalizing” the speech of the reified State. A moment’s reflection should make clear that certain speech that is almost absolutely protected when uttered by ordinary individuals e.g., “You ought to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” is clearly unconstitutional when presented by the state as official public policy. But why would that expression be unconstitutional? The answer is almost certainly not because it gives offense to non-­Christians or exemplifies a Christian hegemony that has often had the most deleterious consequences for non-­Christians, however important those facts are as a practical matter. Rather, the invalidity, at least under conventional legal analysis, is the consequence of the meaning

given a patch of constitutional text, the First Amendment, that explicitly bans the establishment of religion. This is correctly interpreted to prohibit, among other things, the endorsement by the state of specific theological views. The question is whether there is a way of reading the Confederate flag or a Confederate public monument to include it within the universe of state declarations that the Constitution, correctly interpreted, prohibits. The quixotic quest for “neutrality” in public space One might try to answer this question by adopting the language of neutrality that is so influential in regard to religion. Thus the Supreme Court has stated, in one of its foundational Establishment Clause cases, that the Constitution means not only that the state cannot “set up a church,” but also, and, in practical effect, more significantly, that it also cannot “pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” That is, the state must be relentlessly neutral, neither favoring nor burdening any given religious view or even the view that religion, in some general sense, is to be preferred to irreligion. Among the most distinguished proponents of a somewhat similar neutrality thesis regarding speech in general is Yale law professor Owen Fiss. “The ideal of neutrality in the speech context,” he writes, not only requires that the state refrain from choosing among viewpoints, but also that it not structure public debate in such a way as to favor one viewpoint over another. The state must act as a high-­minded parliamentarian, making certain that all viewpoints are fully and fairly heard.19

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What is anathema, according to this view, is the state’s active tilting on behalf of a particular vision of how best to live one’s life, including its political dimensions. Those decisions are to be left up to autonomous citizens, who make up their minds independent of the presumptively baleful influence of the state. But Fiss offers an interesting twist on the neutrality argument, for he would in fact allow the state to take account of specifically unorthodox points of view that are in danger of being swamped in public conversation by the flood of conventional wisdom. Fiss’s First Amendment is rooted in a vision of “col68

lective self-­determination” that requires a rich and full public debate once famously described by Justice Brennan, Fiss’s hero, as “uninhibited, robust, and wide-­open.” This seemingly entails that the state can never inhibit or narrow the scope of public debate. Indeed, writing of public funding of the arts, Fiss condemns the failure to fund controversial projects on the ground that this in effect “impoverish[es] public debate” by “reinforc[ing] the prevailing orthodoxy.” Fiss’s ideal neutral state in fact turns out to be a self-­conscious antagonist of congealed conventional wisdom. There is a rich and nuanced literature that criticizes this view. I want to treat only the facet of the issue that is especially relevant to this book. I have been asking which people or what ideas are worthy of state honor, leaving quite unexamined an important prior question: Can the state properly honor anyone, or celebrate any particular views, at all? Although this question might well strike many readers as more than a bit odd, it follows quite easily from such views as the neutrality thesis. One might well ask why its devotees do not find highly problematic such

standard practices as erecting monuments, naming streets, airports, and other public places after presumptive heroes, or issuing stamps commemorating “great Americans.” This image of the state as either benignly neutral or, perhaps even more remarkably, supportive of unorthodox ideas, is quite naive, not least because it almost wholly fails to pay adequate attention to the fact that the state is often an active participant in the intellectual marketplace. The easiest examples, of course, involve presidents giving major policy addresses or teachers using state-­mandated textbooks within the public school system. Both regularly articulate, clothed in the full symbolic and actual authority of the state, highly contestable and completely unneutral views on important political and cultural matters. The danger facing those who disagree with the state’s views comes, most often, not from any plausible fear of classic censorship i.e., overt punishment for offering views repugnant to state authorities but, rather, from being drowned out of the marketplace by the often superior resources of the state. The state may benefit from having more economic resources to articulate its position than do its opponents. But one should be aware that not the least valuable of the resources available to the state is its ability to legitimate certain arguments merely by virtue of being the state. From this perspective, the main threat posed by the state is that it will become an overweening tutor of the public, molding a distinct consciousness, and subtly (or not so subtly) delegitimizing others who would wish to play a similarly tutelary role. This, among other things, is the reason why the New Orleans City Council tried to establish and articulate, for educational purposes, an official view of the Lib-

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erty Monument quite at odds with the one carved on the monument’s sides. What might be termed “cultural regulation” occurs not only indeed, increasingly rarely, in the United States through the negative acts of overt silencing by threat of punishment to those with given views; more often, in the modern state, it occurs through the affirmative acts of the state as when it speaks on behalf of the people, or community, in whose name the state commonly claims to rule. Anyone influenced even slightly by Michel Foucault will recognize that the state devotes much of 70

its resources to defining what is “regular” or, ultimately, “normal,” within a given political-­cultural order. Formally interdictive norms of the “thou shalt not” variety are only one method and not necessarily the most important one by which a state regulates and helps to manufacture what will count, in the language of our day, as politically correct. In any event, many citizens, from a variety of political perspectives, increasingly express their fear of a state that so dominates the marketplace that alternative conceptions of the public good will find themselves not so much silenced at least in the specific sense of becoming legally unsayable as relegated to the margins of the social order because of the lack of resources possessed by those who wish to speak contrary to the state’s preferred vision. Those fearful of a tutelary state may even suggest that state speech itself on occasion be subject to censorship, though, from a traditional liberal perspective, it sounds wilfully paradoxical to speak of the state as the object of censorship rather than the agency that (usually illegitimately) censors others. To be sure, one should note that the dominance of the state

is at bottom an empirical question rather than a conceptual given. A pervasive theme of our time, after all, is the de facto dissolution of the state as a hegemonic entity that can exercise control over anything very important, whether it be economic development or general cultural developments. One need only point to the desperate attempts of states to control the Internet. The state does, of course, continue to enjoy the ability to inflict death and destruction on large numbers of people, though even here we saw that the possession of nuclear weapons did not enable the Soviet Union to survive or Israel successfully to supress the Palestinian intifada. Though it is undoubtedly premature to speak of the “withering away of the state,” it seems clear that one must recognize an institutional pluralization in which the state is only one of many competitors for whatever goods power, legitimacy, economic resources are being sought. One might acknowledge all of this while still wondering how the empirically waning power of the state, assuming that this is occurring, affects the conceptual critique of the unneutral state. The central question, then, is whether the United States Constitution can legitimately be read as limiting the power of either the national or state government to state certain views. The easiest justification of an affirmative answer, as already suggested, lies in the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion and the “no endorsement” interpretation given it by a majority of the current Supreme Court. Thus there is wide, even if not unanimous, agreement that Congress could not constitutionally legislate the addition of “In Christ Is Our Redemption” to the flag or the coinage. Nor is it clear that a city being founded today could choose to name itself Corpus Christi or, for

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that matter, St. Paul, insofar as such naming could plausibly be viewed as a way to regulate basic aspects of our culture in favor of religion. Indeed, apropos the principal topic of this book, it seems clear that public bodies could not place crosses in public space, and I would find problematic building a monument, say, to Billy Graham insofar as his life’s mission has been Christian evangelism. (I should note, though, that there is indeed a Billy Graham Parkway in Charlotte, North Carolina.) Although there are many monuments now to Martin Luther King Jr., I would justify them, in contrast to the hypothetical monument 72

to Graham, on the basis of King’s passionate devotion to American society. Admittedly, it is misleading to separate King’s religious identity from his public persona. Still, the point is that there was in King (or in Mother Teresa or the late Joseph Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago) a distinctly public dimension that complemented what might be termed their religious selves, and it is that public dimension that the state must emphasize even though other institutions, such as the Catholic Church, might well choose to focus on their religious identities. In the age of the activist state, governmental speech is a pervasive method of regulation, and we have yet to achieve any satisfying way of coming to terms with it. It has become a cliché of contemporary social theory that political communities are the products of imagination, constructed by a variety of sociocultural projects, many of which are sponsored by the state. The setting for creation of these political communities is, almost always, what the detached social scientist would readily describe as a fractionated social order sometimes multicultural or multinational, sometimes only divided along class or ideo-

logical grounds whose centrifugal pressures may well put any notion of a unified polity under great stress. One might suggest, therefore, that a central task of the state is, by apt speech, to draw together an otherwise fractured community and thus, as promised by our own national motto, create e pluribus unum. This is, of course, one rationale for a highly self-­conscious program of civic education, where the metaphor of the state as tutor becomes most clearly instantiated. Benjamin Rush, one of our own founders, referred to the task facing the American republic as the creation, through education, of “republican machines,” which means, among other things, that a youngster should “learn that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught, at the same time, that he must forsake and even forget them, when the welfare of his country requires it.” Less extreme, but nonetheless in the same spirit, is the statement of Abraham Lincoln that every child receive “at least a moderate education, and [be] thereby enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of free institutions.” The most obvious forum for such education is the public school, and ever-­more-­bitter debates course through our society as to state regulation of public education and its ostensible censorship of unpopular views. Fundamentalist Christians tend to focus on such issues as the failure to engage in respectful presentation of the claims of creation science, while some of those who speak in the name of contemporary multiculturalists angrily scrutinize public school textbooks to determine if enough space was devoted, with the proper attitude, to their favorite

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groups. What no one can seriously doubt, though, is that the state, when deciding upon curricula, is necessarily choosing one particular view (or set of views) among many others that might be suggested and, at least in other states, adopted. If formal schooling is the most obvious example of self-­ conscious civic education designed to create, or at least to maintain, a privileged notion of community identity, the relevance of public monuments and the like should by now also be clear. As Will Kymlicka writes in his recent book Multicultural Citizenship, “Governmental decisions on languages . . . , pub74

lic holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing, accommodating, and supporting the needs and identities of particular ethnic and national groups. The state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities, and thereby disadvantages others.” Another political theorist, Michael Walzer, writing in On Toleration, suggests that even the most tolerant state is likely to have only one civil religion that necessarily disadvantages alternative understandings. “Civil religion,” writes Walzer, “consists of the full set of political doctrines, historical narratives, exemplary figures, celebratory occasions, and memorial rituals through which the state impresses itself on the minds of its members. . . . How can there be more than one such set for each state?” Few questions are more important, especially in the age of the truly multicultural state. Fiss’s vision of the neutral, parliamentarian state can scarcely survive this much more vigorous vision of the state as inevitably privileging certain understandings of the community. Given his emphasis on the state’s role in “bringing before the public viewpoints and options that otherwise might be slighted or ignored,” perhaps he would allow the naming of a street after, say, Louis

Farrakhan, but, surely, it would be far more problematic to reinforce a preexisting public orthodoxy by building yet another statue of, or naming one more street after, Martin Luther King Jr. (Indeed, perhaps one should suggest building a statue of one of King’s savage opponents, such as Birmingham Police Commissioner “Bull” Connor.) If one rightfully finds these suggestions bizarre, then perhaps this suggests the limits of “neutrality” as a comprehensive approach to the role of the state in structuring the social consciousness. Surely Kymlicka and Walzer are correct in arguing the near impossibility of imagining a state that does not try to structure some set of privileged, constitutive, understandings of the society it purports to represent. And this is true, perhaps even especially true, of a liberal state whose law tolerates direct attacks on those understandings by ordinary citizens. It simply cannot plausibly be argued that a conscientious constitutional interpreter, whether judge or legislator, must rigorously deny the state the right to speak unneutrally insofar as it selects out some small fraction of humanity as heroes whose lives (and life choices) should be emulated by us today. Public monuments that designate communal heroes or sacred communal events throughout time have been ways by which regimes of all stripes take on a material form and attempt to manufacture a popular consciousness conducive to their survival. Recall Kirk Savage’s comment that public namings, whether of monumental heroes or simple street sites, “represent a kind of collective recognition in short, legitimacy for the memory deposited there.” Legitimacy is a classic scarce resource; no social order bestows it promiscuously (even though many bestow it unwisely).

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Should one look for support from the United States Supreme Court, one finds the fascinating 1896 case of United States v. Gettysburg Electric Co., which involved the condemnation of electric company land in order to build a variety of monuments to the Battle of Gettysburg. The question was whether using the land as a venue for monuments constitutes a “public use” that the Fifth Amendment seemingly requires as a prerequisite to condemnation of private property by the state. Writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, Justice Rufus Peckham, one of the most stalwart devotees of property rights ever to serve 76

on the Court, had no difficulty agreeing that the electric company could be forced to turn over its property to the state (after receiving “just compensation,” of course). The monuments to be erected were, according to the Court, “so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the Constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.” And why is this the case? The answer is that monuments will provide “proper recognition of the great things that were done there on those momentous days. By this use the government manifests for the benefit of all its citizens the value put upon the services and exertions of the citizen soldiers of that period.” And this is no idle obeisance to the past. The efforts of these citizen soldiers to preserve the republic “is forcibly impressed upon every one who looks over the field.” Congress’s willingness to expend public funds and construct the monuments, said Peckham, touches the heart, and comes home to the imagination of every citizen, and greatly tends to enhance his love and respect for those institutions for which these heroic sacri-

fices were made. The greater the love of the citizen for the institutions of his country the greater is the dependence properly to be placed upon him for their defense in time of necessity, and it is to such men that the country must look for its safety. There is, to put it mildly, nothing neutral about this public use, anymore than there was in the exhortation by Senator Moyhnihan that the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Commission encourage buildings of “monumental quality” that would “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, and vigor of the federal government.” Nor is neutrality what comes to mind when reading the congressional statute establishing the National Air and Space Museum and mandating what kind of exhibits it should contain: “The valor and sacrificial service of the men and women of the Armed Forces shall be portrayed as an inspiration to the present and future generation of America.” Not surprisingly, this statute was cited by some of those who opposed the very controversial exhibit concerning the Enola Gay and the bombing of Hiroshima; they argued that, by questioning the necessity or morality of using the atomic bomb, the museum would necessarily be violating its duty to pre­sent an inspirational picture of the use of air and space technology by the United States. Finally, it is worth mentioning that “public,” in this context, refers primarily to the placement and ideological function of the objects in question. Quite often, of course, as in the Gettysburg case, they will be funded by the taxpayers, and be “public” in that very fundamental sense as well. Yet it is not at all unusual for private individuals or groups to finance monuments

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while seeking, through their display in a particular setting, the state’s special imprimatur for the message contained within the monument. Michele H. Bogart notes, for example, that New York’s Central Park quickly became a target of various groups, “especially those representing European immigrants,” who “saw gifts of statues for Central Park as an appropriate way to beautify their city and to legitimate their heritage as well as their newfound status as Americans.”20 It is this imprimatur, however funded, that makes the state an active participant in the molding of the general culture. As a practical matter, then, a 78

legal attack on memorials to the Confederate dead or the flying of the Confederate battle flag over state capitols must surely rest on something other than the purported duty of the state to maintain neutrality on basic political issues (other than the virtue of robust debate itself). The Fourteenth Amendment and the suppression of racist speech If neutrality as such is unavailing, then perhaps the answer lies in a vigorous, and decidedly unneutral, reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in regard to its role in overcoming America’s legacy of racial hierarchy and subordination. James Forman Jr. offers such a reading in arguing that Alabama was violating the Constitution in flying the Confederate flag on its state capitol.21 Forman analyzes a 1990 case, NAACP v. Hunt,22 which involved a challenge to the flying of the Confederate flag atop the Alabama capitol in Montgomery, where it flew immediately below the U.S. and Alabama state flags. The flag was first placed there in 1961, during a commemoration of the centennial of the Civil

War. Apparently it was taken down shortly thereafter, for the opinion informs us that “the flag was raised again on the morning of April 25, 1963, the day that United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy travelled to Montgomery to discuss with then-­Governor George Wallace the governor’s announced intention to block the admission of the first black students to the University of Alabama.” It flew for almost thirty years, until Governor Jim Folsom ordered its removal. Interestingly enough, Folsom apparently ordered that the Confederate battle flag continue to be flown across the street from the capitol at the First White House of the Confederacy, which presumably serves as a museum rather than the instantiation of contemporary Alabama. So it was not truly removed from public view even though it lost the special imprimatur provided by its place above the capitol dome. Litigation challenging the flag had been undertaken as far back as 1975, and a second suit was filed in 1988. The naacp’s effort to use the Constitution to force Alabama to lower the Confederate flag gained no judicial support. “It is unfortunate,” said the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, “that the State of Alabama chooses to utilize its property in a manner that offends a large proportion of its population, but that is a political matter which is not within our province to decide.” Apparently, appeal lies with the voting box and not the judiciary. It is worth noting that the author of this opinion was Judge Frank Johnson, who as a district judge in Alabama was often a lonely beacon of commitment to civil rights. From the perspective of most white Alabamans, Judge Johnson was always ready to invalidate majority decisions whenever they conflicted with constitutional values

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of racial equality. His refusal to find that such values required lowering the Confederate flag, even as he freely admitted that many Alabamans were offended by its display over the capitol, thus has a special resonance. James Forman disagrees with the court: He argues that “removing the Confederate flag is constitutionally required.” For him there is nothing innocent about the flag as a political symbol. It signifies an entire system of racial oppression: The flag’s force as a symbol stems from its history. The flag 80

was initially designed as a rallying symbol for Confederate troops heading into battle. The rebels were fighting for territory, for economic control, and it goes without saying for slavery. . . . The Confederate flag glorifies and memorializes this brutal regime [of chattel slavery]. But the Confederate flag symbolizes more than the Civil War and the slavery era. It also stands for a history of resistance to change in the twentieth century. . . . The flag has been adopted knowingly and consciously by government officials seeking to assert their commitment to black subordination. Thus, when a state government chooses to fly the flag above its capitol’s dome, it “sends a message . . . glorif[ying] and memorializ[ing] slavery, Jim Crow, and subsequent resistance to change.” Not only does the Confederate flag not serve as a symbol of a united nation, as does, one may hope, the American flag; it more properly is a marker for a herrenvolk democracy in which the members of one specific nation, Southern whites, exercised hegemony over another, Southern African Americans.

Forman quotes a telling comment by Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar: “Confederate symbols flags, monuments, and so on all too easily exclude large numbers of citizens, most notably blacks.” One need not be a Yankee law professor (or an African American) to have this view. Surely a similar perception underlies the remark of South Carolina’s Governor Beasley that “any banner we choose to fly over the Capitol . . . should be one that everyone can claim as their own.” His own, albeit unsuccessful, call for the lowering of the flag presumably concedes the unreasonableness of expecting all South Carolinians to claim the flag as their own. These are, of course, general statements that would presumably refer to any and all displays of the flag. But key to Forman’s analysis is the fact that the flag was ultimately given its place of honor atop the capitol as one aspect of Alabama’s attempt to resist desegregation of its public institutions. Thus he quite plausibly reads the raising of the flag in 1963 as “part of [George Wallace’s] continuing effort to maintain white supremacy” and, therefore, under standard readings of the Fourteenth Amendment, proscribable as part of a remedial system designed to overcome the legacy of unconstitutional oppression. To be sure, Alabama offers a contrary historical analysis, claiming that it flew the flag in order to promote tourism and to preserve “historical value,” as well as to symbolize “accomplishment, development, and progress towards racial equality.” However, we are surely entitled to take this with an especially large grain of salt, just as we would be disdainful of any explanation of South Carolina’s decision to fly the flag in 1962 that failed to mention the politics of resisting the civil rights movement.

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Given Alabama’s lack of any affirmative protection by the First Amendment, Forman argues that Alabama must defend the “legitimate government function” served by flying a symbol of such oppression. “It will take a creative legal mind,” he wryly suggests, “to explain the utility of flying Dixie.” “Utility” is an odd word in this context, for of course one explanation of the flag’s presence is simply the presumptive pleasure gained by the majority of the voting population from seeing the flag waving over the capitol. Certainly one theory of democratic governance is that government can legitimately honor the preferences of the 82

majority, especially if that majority can plausibly deny that its pleasure is simply a function of the displeasure caused their fellow citizens who are African American. Consider in this context the heart-­felt comments of Willie Morris, the brilliant, Mississippi-­born, former editor of Harper’s, author of a wonderful memoir called North Toward Home, who in fact ended up returning to Mississippi: In modern-­day America, there is too much fashionable tampering with authentic tradition. At the peril which such contentions evoke, I argue that this juggling with expressions of the past is reminiscent of the way the communists are eternally rewriting history, obliterating symbols with each new guard. Finally, one could make a strong case that Dixie and the flag and the names “ole Miss” and “Rebels,” deriving from old suffering and apartness and the urge to remember, are expressions of a mutual communal heritage, white and black, springing from the very land itself and its awesome strengths and shortcomings. As a historian friend of mine once remarked, “There’s

nothing wrong with the Confederate flag. The Civil War was fought over more than slavery.”23 The historian Shelby Foote, one of the stars of Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War, agrees. Although he recognizes that the battle flag “causes pain and that it has been misused by ‘yahoos,’ ” he nonetheless views it as “a symbol of gallantry and other good and bad things,” carried into battle by soldiers “who believed they were fighting for a noble cause.” His solution is apparently to educate the “yahoos” about the deeper meanings of the flag as it continues to fly over the South Carolina Capitol.24 There can be no doubt that these two eminences speak for many of their less famous Southern neighbors. It is at this point that the issues raised by contemporary postmodernism become so relevant: One of the issues hovering over this entire debate is the hermeneutics of culture and the presence of sufficient interpretive clarity to say with confidence that what theorists might refer to as the flag-­as-­signifier refers to a unique signified (i.e., the system of chattel slavery). One might well believe, however, that the meaning of the flag is overdetermined, that is, subject to varying (and conflicting) interpretation. It is not that just any meaning can be assigned the flag; one need not embrace theories of radical indeterminacy. Rather, there are simultaneously present at least two determinate meanings of the flag-­as-­symbol-­of-­slavery and the flag-­as-­symbol-­of-­Southern-­culture (independent of slavery)-­ and-­local-­autonomy. The flag is simultaneously an effort to remember what many Americans honor as a cherished past and to forget or to otherwise gloss over what many other Americans consider to be the single most important aspect of that past.

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One might imagine in this context a battering husband who invites the victim of his violence to “remember the good times,” especially if it is the case that there were in fact good times that might well be worth remembering. How does anyone, let alone a culture, come to terms with the inevitably mixed meanings of the symbols around which we organize our lives? Then-­Yale professor of law (and native Texan) Charles Black unforgettably argued thirty-­five years ago, when chiding some of his legal colleagues for their doubts as to the legitimacy of Brown v. Board of Education, that only the most obtuse could fail 84

to read the meaning of segregated schools in the South as inextricably linked with the centuries-­long practice of racial subordination and humiliation. Most of us, regardless of our theoretical commitments, have little trouble accepting Black’s analysis of the realities of 1954, even if we might wish to argue that the meaning of racially separate facilities is more complex today, an obviously debatable proposition. The question, though, is how often we have such high confidence in our own readings of our multicultures. And even if we do have such self-­confidence, we might still ask how much we want courts to supply legally privileged readings backed up by the force of the state of culturally contested icons. In some of her Establishment Clause opinions, Justice O’Connor refers to the viewpoint of the “reasonable observer” in regard to deciding whether a particular phenomenon say a Christmas-­season crèche surrounded by Santa Claus and reindeer endorses religion. As her critics point out, what counts as a reasonable response is precisely the heart of the problem, and it is not clear that those in judicial office, almost invariably denizens of the political establishment, are the best people to

evaluate the claims asserted by those who will often be from well outside that establishment. Forman’s argument depends on just such a privileging of one particular interpretation and on the authority of one particular institution to offer authoritative interpretations of cultural artifacts. It is hard to see how anyone who has been touched (some would say “infected”) by one or another variety of postmodernist theory can be entirely comfortable endorsing Forman’s argument. At the very least it requires dismissing arguments like Morris’s and Foote’s (or Betty Sue Flowers’s similar argument seen earlier in regard to the Liberty Monument). For me, at least, Morris is a credible witness as to the possibility of a nonracist meaning of the flag, in large part because of the nature of his general political and social commitments. The same is also true of Professor Flowers. I confess, though, that I have no hesitation in dismissing similar arguments when made by such people as the egregious Oliver North, who defended flying the flag during his unsuccessful Virginia campaign for the United States Senate in 1994, or by the New Orleans attorney who defends the Liberty Place monument on the ground that the battle it commemorates “had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with angry people trying to take their rightful government back from an ignorant and corrupt Administration.” It is the insistence that the battle “had nothing to do with race” that brands the statement as racist. As already suggested, an especially effective part of Forman’s argument is his emphasis on the specific context of Alabama’s 1963 decision to add the flag to its capitol dome George Wallace’s defiance of federally court-­ordered desegregation.

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Forman might well have offered a similar analysis of the 1962 decision by the South Carolina legislature to place the flag atop its statehouse, or, indeed, of Georgia’s 1956 redesign of its flag, in which one is confident that the desire to send a political message dominated any aesthetic concerns about flag design or desire to build a more truly united Georgia community. For Forman, incorporating the Confederate battle flag in the state flag is the equivalent of a decision by the Georgia legislature to add the words “white supremacy” or “keep blacks in their place” to the state seal that is also featured on the state banner. Would 86

it be any more legitimate to add those words than to add the words “Jesus Saves”? If one agrees with the earlier argument that the First Amendment prohibits the latter, then it seems equally thinkable that an amendment associated with a “new birth of freedom” would prohibit the state from articulating on its flag a message of white hegemony and African American subordination. And if one can accept this latter premise, then it would seem easy enough to extend it to what some regard as a symbolic, if not literal, utterance of the same sentiment. As a careful lawyer, Forman frames his analysis within current legal doctrine, which requires, among other things, that government be shown to have intended the discriminatory consequences of its acts. To quote a term used in many recent Supreme Court cases, to be adjudged in violation of the Constitution, government must be shown to have acted “because of, rather than in spite of,” any negative consequences visited upon minority groups. But it is notoriously difficult to prove malevolent intent, for reasons similar to those that plague the problem of interpretation in general.

Still, I do not embrace a universal skepticism. In fact, Forman is grimly lucky to have what lawyers call good facts, at least in regard to Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. It is almost impossible to view those states, at least as of 1956 and 1963, as motivated by anything other than the desire to engage in “the annoyance or oppression of a particular class” that even the Supreme Court of Plessy v. Ferguson pronounced itself ready to restrain. But, in their own way, these facts are almost too good. And, even in regard to these facts, it is not entirely clear how much events in 1963 should control our responses to a significantly different Alabama in 1997, nor is it clear how an analysis based on this 1963 facts would apply to decisions made under different circumstances. Consider, for example, two high schools, one outside Chicago, the other outside Cleveland, Ohio. The Thornton (Illinois) Fractional High School was divided in 1958 into North and South high schools. “At the time,” wrote a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, “when the school was entirely white, it seemed clever and historical to connect South High School with Rebels [the name of the athletic team] and a Confederate flag.” Similarly, the Willoughby (Ohio) South High School, when established around 1960, chose to call its teams “the Rebels and the Confederate flag gradually became part of the school’s athletic traditions.” As it happens, both schools chose to take down the flag when African American (and other) students protested. Would Forman require such elimination even though the initial choice almost certainly betrays far more a dreadful ignorance about American history and political symbolism rather than any conscious desire to make a political statement? (Sometimes,

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though, ignorance is itself so shameful as to warrant a vigorous response: Imagine our reaction to a decision by students at a new Germantown, Pennsylvania, high school to name themselves the “Germantown Nazis” and to adopt as their symbol the swastika because it is distinctive.) Imagine also a possible decision by the state of Texas to fly on its capitol grounds the five flags (besides the American flag) that have, at one point or another in its history, represented the political territory now called Texas. Those are the flags of France, Spain, Mexico, the Lone Star Republic, and the Confed88

erate States of America. Indeed, at least one state office building has these flags etched on its walls. Would Forman argue that only the first four should be unfurled or that the Confederate flag should be sandblasted away from state buildings on which it now appears? One hopes that the answer is no, but perhaps the reason is that the best way to read such a display is as a narrative featuring the displacement of alien and long-­since-­ forgotten identities by the ultimate embrace of the Texan-­as-­ loyal-­American. The very placement of the Confederate Flag with the French one suggests the irrelevance of the former instead of the continuing presence of a strongly French strain in contemporary Texan values. The more the Confederate Flag is dehistoricized, as it were, the more an onlooker can legitimately wonder what it says about the contemporary entity that chooses to fly it. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of any argument that concentrates on the unique malevolence of the Confederate flag comes from the fact that it is surely, and tragically, not the case that slavery was protected only within the Confederacy. Why

single its flag out for unique opprobrium? It is all too clear that it might be politically useful to demonize the Confederate flag precisely in order to avoid coming to terms with the potential negativity of the American flag, presented by its own apologists as necessarily evocative of “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Veneration of the Stars and Stripes, including the Pledge of Allegiance, can easily be regarded as means by which the state attempts to impose a certain narrative whose function is to blind us to the extent that the nation symbolized by the flag most certainly has not achieved such universal liberty and justice even for its own citizenry. And this has been true, of course, even after the defeat of the sociopolitical order symbolized by the Confederate flag and the formal abolition in 1865 of slavery that had hitherto been protected by established legal institutions. These issues are all present in a distinctly nonhypothetical episode in which a Virginia judge ordered the removal of the Confederate flag from a Stafford, Virginia, courthouse exhibit on Virginia history, which included all of the emblems, including the British Union Jack, that had flown in the town of Stafford since the seventeenth century. The county’s only African American judge, complaining that it was “not a symbol for equal justice for all,” described the county law library, where the exhibit appeared, as an improper venue for historical education. “This is not a museum. This is a courthouse.” A circuit judge ordered the removal of the Confederate flags, at which time the historians who arranged the exhibit removed all flags save for the Virginia and U.S. flags. “If you’re going to take [the Confederate flag] down, take them all down,” a historian was quoted. “You

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have to tell the history, warts and all.” This last statement seems to me clearly correct. I think that I might have the same reactions to the flying of the swastika as part of a similar exhibit in a German city devoted to careful acknowledgment of all facets of its past. It would be bizarre to jump from the flag of the Weimar Republic to that of the postwar successor states of East and West Germany and deny the fact that there was a German state, with its own distinctive flag, between 1933–45. But it is hard to deny the power of Forman’s arguments in regard to the specifics of the 90

Alabama decision to fly the Confederate flag or the Georgia decision to redesign the state flag. Still, even there, my inclination is to agree with the Hunt court, though I certainly believe that a well-­trained lawyer could accept Forman’s analysis. Part of the reason for my own hesitation is my belief that, whatever the value of courts and constitutions in limiting tangible oppression, they are quite limited in their actual power when what is at stake is the politics of cultural meaning. I think it unwise, as a general matter, to encourage judicial intervention in circumstances where the consequences are unlikely genuinely to advance one’s overall social or political agenda and, indeed, are likely to provoke an unfortunate backlash. Return for a moment to the example of religion and the Establishment Clause. I happen to believe that the placement of “In God We Trust” on the coinage is unconstitutional governmental speech, and I confess a temptation to force a number of the states whose state mottoes include reference to God consider only Arizona (“Diat Deus,” God Enriches) and Ohio (“With God, all things are possible”) to find more secular mottoes. That

being said, I do not really believe that courts should invalidate the coinage or require the finding of new mottoes. Not everything that is arguably unconstitutional should be enjoined by the judiciary. Judicial caution is especially merited when the challenged practices have become sedimented in historical memory and are simply accepted as a status quo. Judicial invalidation would be viewed as disruption of this status quo, in contrast, say, to the proper invalidation of an attempt to revise the coinage to read even “In Jehovah We Trust” thus identifying a specific God. It would be the adherents of the change who would be viewed as the disrupters, and the courts would more easily be able to gain support for their intervention. Not all status quos, obviously, deserve respect, as illustrated most easily by the pre-­1954 status quo of segregated schools. Yet, invariably, a certain amount of prudence must necessarily determine what role courts play in resolving social disputes. To be frank, the costs to the nonreligious (or simply to constitutional purists) of having to handle the tainted coinage are not sufficiently high to justify the political costs of judicial intervention in circumstances that would very clearly generate a firestorm of protest and, potentially, lead to much greater political mobilization by those opposed to such a decision than by those who support it. Courts, like all political institutions, have invariably limited resources, and it is foolish for the courts to pick fights that they almost certainly cannot win, unless the very highest issues of political morality are being raised. Even if one believes that justice must be done or else the heavens fall, such dire behavior is presumably required only in cases of the most extreme injustice. Otherwise, only the utopian can believe that even the

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best legal regime can escape from tolerating one or another degree of milder injustice. Lest this sound too purely prudential, I also invoke the ideas of Yale law professor Robert Burt, who emphasizes in his work the value of courts as initiators of conversations and the undesirability of the judiciary’s foreclosing such conversations by a too-­quick readiness to use their coercive powers to declare that one conversational partner must simply capitulate to the other. Force of law is often little better than force of arms in genuinely bringing about a political community in which people of 92

radically different cultures and political views can live in truly mutual respect and equal citizenship. That being said, I must also recognize that I am not at all clear about what will bring about such respect in a self-­consciously multicultural society like our own. The Hunt court wisely chose not to invest its inevitably scarce political capital in a decision that would most likely have generated similar firestorms without either making the lives of Southern African Americans noticeably better off in tangible terms or truly generating the kind of political community built on the mutual respect and affection that a democracy needs. Forman might well remind us that we do not live by bread alone; Justice Holmes reminded us long ago, after all, that “we live by symbols,” and foolish indeed is the person who underestimates their importance. Symbols are an important part of the cultural exchange system that, among other things, establishes relationships of hierarchy and domination. The result of a court’s staying its hand may not be the initiation of conversation but, rather, the maintenance of an unacceptable status quo of domination

and oppression. But one must still ask what it is that courts can best do and when they should stay their hand, and I remain inclined to believe that the judges were properly cautious in Hunt. I do not know the specific circumstances of the decision by an Alabama state judge to order the removal of the flag from the capitol under an 1895 state law. Suffice it to say that I find it far preferable that such a decision be made by a local judge applying Alabama’s own law instead of a federal court invoking constitutional norms. My caution concerning legal invalidation of the Confederate flag is heightened in regard to the monument for the war dead, which, if anything, pre­sents even more wrenching semiotic issues than does the flag. Recall that its self-­presentation had literally nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with basic American notions of self-­determination by the constituent states of the union. To be sure, those notions have lost out over time to Marshallian conceptions of a single constituent entity called the people of the United States, with states playing no fundamental constitutive role. But does this mean that we should indeed consign these losing ideas to the dustbin of history, or might they be worth memorializing and reflecting upon as worthy alternatives to the road actually taken? Consider also the date of the construction of the Texas monument: 1901. Michael Kammen writes that “the decades between 1870 and 1910 comprised the most notable period in all of American history for erecting monuments in honor of mighty warriors, groups of unsung heroes, and great deeds.” The great period of monument building in the South was the first decade of the twentieth century, in part because it took so long

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to emerge from the poverty generated by the war. In addition to economic considerations, though, one can assume that by 1901 most survivors of the battles of 1861–65 were at least in their late fifties, if not older, and it would be strange indeed if they had no intimations of their own mortality. For many of these men, service in the war was presumably the most meaningful act of their lives. One can well understand the desire to memorialize that service in a suitable monument, as well as the state’s decision to accept the monument for display before what was then the rela94

tively new capitol, where it would join other monuments, including one to the heroes of the Alamo. It is, I think, implausible to view the memorial as a latter-­day attempt to vindicate slavery, even if one necessarily recognizes the intimate linkage between slavery and secession (and even if one wishes to condemn the monument builders for ignoring that linkage). Indeed, one might well interpret the almost desperate insistence to avoid slavery as implicitly recognizing its illegitimacy. After all, the text of the United States Constitution itself maintains a studied silence in regard to the nomenclature of slavery, and many have used this silence as evidence of the tacit opposition of the framers to the institution, whatever their pragmatic decision to collaborate in its maintenance. But how important is the nomenclature? Imagine that the monument lacked the inscription set out above and said only “in memory of those who gave their lives fighting for the Confederacy.” Would that be any more acceptable, or would one want to rule out all commemoration of Confederate soldiers? Does the Constitution indeed require the state to remain ab-

jectly silent rather than honor the losers in the great American epic of 1861–65? How one answers these questions would presumably have implications for that particular form of governmental action known as the public holiday. In Virginia, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday is celebrated on the very same day as the equally official (Robert E.) Lee–­(Stonewall) Jackson Day. In New Hampshire, the one state that has refused to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday, some have proposed establishing a “Civil Rights Day,” which has drawn opposition from those who view this as implicitly attacking the status of Dr. King. An interesting variant can be found in Texas, which officially celebrates Confederate Heroes Day, which happens to occur during the same week as Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, also celebrated as an official holiday in Texas. On King’s birthday all state offices are closed, whereas on Confederate Heroes Day state offices remain open with skeleton crews and other employees who receive their supervisor’s permission to come in and work. Many people, therefore, can, in effect, refuse to honor the Confederate heroes. But consider those who do not receive authorization to come in and work; they are forced to take a vacation day on behalf of the Confederates. Some would argue, though, that even those who do not in fact honor Dr. King are equally coerced, as is even more clearly the case with non-­ Christians who are forced to observe Christmas but who must take leave on non-­Christian holidays out of their scarce allotment of personal vacation time. Ought the Constitution be read to control the declaration of such holidays and the public sub-

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sidy, through vacations, of celebrants? Under some circumstances, I would certainly say yes in regard to religious holidays. Christmas is, like the words “In God We Trust” on the coinage, a fait accompli that ought not be disturbed. But I enthusiastically support those courts that have struck down attempts by states to mandate Good Friday as an official holiday. Still, for many of the reasons set out earlier, I am dubious about extending such analysis to what might be termed “civil religious” holidays, including Confederate Heroes Day. 96

Beyond law: What does political decency require?

It should be obvious that legal analysis is only one way to approach the subject. That courts ought not strike down some practice does not in the least suggest that the practice is in fact commendable and ought not be changed, voluntarily, by decent people. And ordinary individuals, whether by writing letters to the editor or marching in demonstrations, might well encourage those in power to mend their ways. So, more important in many ways than the question of what courts ought to do, or even of what the Constitution, properly interpreted, is best understood to mean, is what we as ordinary citizens should do when claims such as Forman’s are laid before us. He concludes his article with a heartrending reminiscence of his schooldays as a senior at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Atlanta and the discomfort, physical as well as emotional, caused by the incongruity of having black children, in a largely black city, watch a black man raise the symbol of the Confederacy for us all to honor. I tell myself to laugh, hoping that

this will keep me from crying. But I cannot laugh, and I dare not cry, so I close my eyes and try to forget. If I could just forget. . . .[O]vercoming the flag has taken a piece of me a piece that I will not easily recover. Decent people should, I think, be repelled by a political system that leads to such consequences. Thus, in regard to the specific example of the Confederate flag, I think the answer is easy. Although I would, as a matter of civil liberties, defend the right of a private individual to wave the flag, and, as already noted, I would not have the courts prohibit a state from flying the flag, that does not in the least entail my support of any such behavior. The Confederate flag should be lowered from the state flagpoles on which it now flies. The governors of Georgia and South Carolina merit our applause for their attempts, even if so far fruitless, to wean their states from their addiction to the Confederate battle flag. In regard to the former, though, one might still wonder if it is adequate merely to adopt Governor Miller’s suggestion, which is to change the design of the Georgia flag by returning to the 1905 flag, which was itself based on the official Confederate flag. After all, one could instead return to the 1799 flag, which featured the state seal, depicting wisdom, justice, and moderation, standing on a blue background representing loyalty. Even if one can believe that the Confederate flag symbolizes something other than the brutal regime of chattel slavery, it seems insensitive, to put it mildly, for a state to persist in adopting as its official emblem something that so easily, and legitimately, can be given a thoroughly negative meaning. Still, even in regard to the flag, I would support its display in the “flags

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over Texas” exhibit hypothesized earlier or, for example, over some historic building that is strongly associated with the Confederacy or, even more strongly, within a cemetery for Confederate soldiers. It is also clear, I think, that the flag could be displayed within a museum setting. Indeed, the chair of the Alabama House of Representatives Black Caucus did not oppose the flag’s flying over the Confederate White House across the street from the Capitol. “We have maintained all along,” said Representative George Perdue, that “the Confederate battle flag should be relegated to some kind of historical display or mu98

seum.” Perhaps the Confederate flag should be put in its place, but I cannot believe that it has no place in any conceivable public setting. To say that the state cannot speak strongly through the medium of the flag does not mean that the state must on all occasions erase it from its lexicon. Monuments pre­sent altogether more difficult issues. For example, Dr. Clifton Johnson, director of the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, one of the largest archival centers for research in African American history in the United States, defends preserving the Liberty Place monument on the ground that “racism is part of our history.” The monument, he says, is a symbol of “racism’s shame” and a reminder, especially to youngsters “of the courage of the whole civil rights movement.” Similar analy­ses could presumably be offered of statues to Jefferson Davis, even though it is obvious that partisans of such statues would resent bitterly the “defense,” if that is the proper word, offered by Dr. Johnson. I conclude by offering a detailed menu of possibilities in regard to the Austin monument to the Confederate dead: 1. Leave it precisely as it is at present, doing nothing at all.

2. Erect, by the monument, a sign saying something to the effect of “The State of Texas takes no position on the views expressed on this monument.” 3. Erect, by the monument, a sign saying something to the effect of “The views expressed on this monument do not represent the views of the State of Texas.” 4. Erect, by the monument, a sign saying something to the effect of “These views were once held by many people, but we now know that this is a false view of the United States Constitution, and Texas in fact committed constitutional treason in attempting to secede,” or, “Although these views represent a plausible constitutional theory, it is essential to recognize that what precipitated secession was the desire to maintain an immoral regime of racially-­based chattel slavery. The failure of the white South to recognize the claim to equality and self-­determination of black slaves thus invalidates the appeal to the principles of the Declaration of Independence that might, in another context, have justified secession and defense against Union efforts to prevent it.” 5. Erect an adjoining monument to the Union dead, with (or without) some suitable Lincolnian statement about the inadmissability of secession and the necessity to preserve the Union. 6. Erect additional monuments, among which the following are possible: a) A monument to those enslaved by Texans and other denizens of the Confederacy. This would, obviously, be similar to the Mahnmale in Germany. b) A monument to those blacks who in fact fought for the Confederacy. This was actually suggested by one Virginian in regard to a debate that recently raged in Richmond about the

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meaning of Monument Avenue. The Richmond Times-­Dispatch responded, “Well, why not dedicate a memorial somewhere to African-­Americans who fought bravely for both sides?” This would, inevitably, be a monument to Unionist soldiers, insofar as “200,000 African-­Americans, most of them freed slaves, fought in the Union Army.” In fact, notes Columbia historian Eric Foner, many thousands of Mississippians fought for the Union. It’s simply that most of us do not identify anyone nonwhite, especially those who had been held in slavery, as “Mississippians.” Surely there were black Texans who fought for the 100

Union who might be honored. c) A monument to some appropriate African American. Potential candidates are legion. In Detroit, for example, one can find the deliciously mixed-­meaning sculpture of a large fist, a memorial to the great boxer and, in the language of my youth, “credit to his race” Joe Louis. More recently a successful campaign was waged in Richmond, Virginia, led by former Governor Douglas Wilder, the first African American governor of Virginia, to raise funds to cast and place a twenty-­four-­foot statue of the late Arthur Ashe, who was originally from that city. What is most interesting, from the perspective of this essay, is the debate on precisely where to place the statue. Governor Wilder, for example, felt that “it needs to be on Monument Avenue. It will send a transcending message.” A columnist for the Richmond Times-­Dispatch agreed: The avenue is an undeniable source of pride among many city and state residents. But the bronze Confederates who sit astride their steeds produce no small amount of ambivalence among the state’s African-­Americans. . . . Monu-

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Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia (Photograph by John Paul Jones).

ment is the city’s showcase boulevard. Let’s make it a place where blacks and whites can share a sense of pride, in a spirit of reconcilation. Perhaps the admirable spirit of reconciliation underlying this suggestion would have been even better manifested had the author recognized that ambivalence (at best) about the bronze Confederates might well be felt by many non-­African Americans as well, a response that seems unthinkable to the editorialist. Would only Jews be upset by a German statue honoring the SS? However, in an editorial, the Richmond Times-­Dispatch dis-

agreed with its own columnist: though warmly supporting the monument, it differed in regard to the site: Enshrining the tennis star among Confederate War heroes on Monument Avenue . . . would strip Ashe’s memory of context and deprive it of meaning. Further, many of those pressing for that site admit their chief motivation is to settle a racial score. Ashe deserves better than to be used as a political pawn by those who refract all perceptions through the prism of race. 102

If Ashe is to be honored for who he was and what he accomplished, then [a local park that includes tennis courts] makes a fitting site. What could offer more poetic justice than enshrining there a man once barred by segregation laws from playing on its courts? Some analysts have suggested, incidentally, that Ashe himself, who apparently disliked being made use of as a racial or political symbol, might well have preferred the placement of his statue in the park rather than have it so obviously used to make a statement by being put on Monument Avenue. This raises additional questions of how people become appropriated by their culture for use as symbols independent of any of their own wishes. However, it appears that the Ashe family agreed to the Monument Avenue placement, though, of course, this may only be evidence for the proposition that Ashe would not have been actively opposed to that placement. Interestingly enough, someone suggested that the better addition to Monument Avenue would be a memorial to one of “the 200,000 men of African descent who fought for freedom and the Union in our nation’s bloodiest conflict men like

Richmond-­born Powhatan Beaty,” a first sergeant who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his courage in the battle of New Market Heights, where he led a charge on entrenched Confederates despite his severe injuries. Similarly, Professor Foner, one of our most distinguished students of mid-­ nineteenth-­century America, has urged that Virginia consider raising a statue to “Gabriel, who in 1800 plotted to liberate Virginia’s slaves. . . . His followers planned to carry a banner bearing a slogan borrowed from Patrick Henry: ‘Death or Liberty.’ ” Whether or not with tongue in cheek, Foner writes that “Gabriel epitomizes the heritage of freedom that Virginia claims.” One may well be skeptical that either of these proposed monuments would have gained more genuine support than the one to Arthur Ashe. No such support would have been received, for example, from Samuel Francis, who, in a column entitled “The Second Civil War Comes to Richmond,” writes that the purpose of Monument Avenue is explicitly to honor Virginians who led the Confederacy, and whatever the future of the state, the region or the nation, the Confederacy remains a real and central part of their real past. . . . If Virginians are going to preserve their real past and the real culture the past informs, they’ll have to show at least as much solidarity in its defense as the Afro-­racists [sic] do for their cause. If they don’t or won’t, maybe the Confederate statues ought to take a hike to some other place where their heritage still means something. Perhaps Francis would have endorsed the revival of a bill actually passed by the United States Senate in 1923 directing accep-

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tance of a monument to be given by the Jefferson Davis Chapter No. 1650 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy “in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South.” (For whatever reason, the bill never got out of committee in the House of Representatives.) In any event, the Richmond Planning Commission settled the matter on June 19, 1995, when it agreed to place the monument on Monument Avenue, though it subsequently took an extended meeting of the Richmond City Council to ratify the decision. As a writer for the Richmond Times-­Dispatch put it, “Arthur 104

Ashe’s statue will penetrate the Confederacy’s second line of defense after all.” The penetration was successfully achieved in 1997, when the statue was indeed placed on Monument Avenue. As for contemporary Texas, I have no doubt that it would be easy to gather support for placing on the capitol lawn a statue of former Representative Barbara Jordan, the first African American to be elected to Congress from Texas and, thereafter, a powerful voice in American politics. Indeed, the Austin City Council recently voted to name its new municipal airport (which will replace the Bergstrom Air Force Base) after her, though this decision drew an angry letter from someone who objected to the erasure from Austin’s public memory of Bergstrom, an Austinite who fought heroically in World War I. (Similar objections were raised, incidentally, to the renaming of the University of Texas’s Memorial Stadium to the Darryl Royall-­ Memorial Stadium, in honor of Texas’s most successful football coach. Although Royall is in fact still alive, critics of the name change noted that almost no one will continue to commemorate the veterans intended to be honored by the original name.)

Assuming that Texas would like to build a statue honoring Jordan, one can still wonder where, precisely, it should go. Should it be placed in explicit juxtaposition to the edifice to the Confederate war dead or should it receive an entirely separate (and equal?) setting somewhere else on the expanse of grass surrounding the Capitol? 7. Move the monument to the museum of Texas history, where it would be placed in some suitable context involving Texas history between 1865–1901. An American precedent of sorts for such a move involves the statue representing the Fort Dearborn massacre in Chicago, which featured a presumably savage Indian about to plunge his tomahawk into the breast of the white maiden. The statue was taken off the lawn and placed within the walls of the Chicago Historical Society when a new entrance area was added in the late 1960s. Interestingly enough, one person recalls visiting the society in 1973 or 1974 and discovering “a basket of fruit and vegetables at the base of the statue, an ‘offering,’ a Scotch-­taped sign read, ‘of peace and love from the native American community which has been insulted and neglected by the Chicago Historical Society since its beginning.’ ” This only reinforces the fact that “museumization” will scarcely resolve the issues of multiple interpretations and the social cleavages underlying them. 8. Sandblast the presumptively problematic narrative of the war off the monument and either leave that side blank or replace it with some more acceptable statement, as was done by New Orleans in regard to the Liberty Place monument. 9. Destroy the monument. It is probably easiest to begin with the last possibility, for I find it only slightly less diffi-

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cult to support destruction of the monument than to imagine an actual decision by the State of Texas to do so. At the very least, advocacy of its destruction involves embracing the politics of kulturkampf cultural warfare to the ultimate degree. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners lost their lives in the misguided attempt at secession and maintenance of slavery. Is it really impossible to convey a certain amount of public honor to those dead, the overwhelming majority of them decidedly ordinary people who responded to primordial notions of loyalty and service on behalf of what they viewed as their 106

country? If the obnoxiousness of the Lost Cause prevents any public memorialization, then why do many of us find so immensely moving the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington even if (or perhaps especially if ) we believe, as I continue to do, that that war was little (if any) more defensible than that fought by the Confederacy? Perhaps one would emphasize that the Vietnam Memorial, very importantly, does not include any writing specifying the “correct” political message of the black granite and the fifty thousand names. But this can’t be the whole truth either, even if we ignore the fact that a more conventional and heroic statue was added at the site at the insistence of veterans groups who found Maya Lin’s great memorial too unheroic. I would object to memorializing the SS at Bitburg even if the only message contained on a monument was “Rest in Peace.” I wish to offer no respect at all to these soldiers, and I most certainly do not hope that they are resting in peace, whatever that might mean. What I view as key, though, is that SS members were not ordinary citizen-­ soldiers like those commemorated on the Vietnam Memorial (or the Confederate monuments).

The other alternatives that I have offered Texas are obviously more complex, even though, practically speaking, one doubts that Texas would adopt any of them other than the first, which is to do nothing at all. The seventh alternative represents the full historicization linked with the museum itself as a cultural phenomenon. But historicization is itself obviously a complex phenomenon, for one always wonders whether the message is that “this was once, but can ought never be again” or, instead “this was once and can, with imaginative effort and physical courage, be repeated in our own lifetime.” I suspect that museum curators themselves, especially if the museums themselves are public entities, would be faced with genuinely difficult choices concerning the presentation of the material. One certainly could take no encouragement from the fiasco in the spring of 1995 concerning the proposed exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum of the Enola Gay, the plane from which the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Outraged (and, in my opinion, outrageous) protest from veterans groups and others made it impossible to mount a professionally competent exhibition regarding the controversy surrounding the use of the bomb. The exhibition was canceled, and Dr. Martin Harwit, director of the museum, resigned. An editorial in the Washington Post noted that the “much-­abridged version of the Enola Gay exhibit,” consisting apparently of the bare fuselage of the plane, would be, in the words of the museum itself, “commemorative rather than interpretive,” thus avoiding any confrontation with the issues of historical interpretation that doomed the original project. The editorial further describes officials of the Smithsonian, including its secretary, former Berkeley law professor

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Ira Michael Heyman, as conceding that “mixing 50-­year commemorative anniversary ceremonies with hotly contested revisionist analysis is a bad idea generally.” The Post gives no indication that it disagrees, which is dismaying in regard to the capacity of a society genuinely to confront its past, warts and all, rather than to settle for almost mindless celebration and the complacent maintenance of unexamined assumptions about the events in question. Would building a monument to the Union dead, accompanied by Lincolnian denunciation of secession and slavery, suf108

fice? Or does it simply create a semiotic jumble satisfying to enough political constituencies to bring civil peace in its wake? Civil peace is no small matter, and great political theory has been written in behalf of its centrality. So should Texas emulate Jefferson by proclaiming “We are all Unionists, we are all Confederates”? Perhaps the correct answer to this question is an all-­too-­easy yes. Edward Linenthal, for example, has noted that what enabled Gettysburg to become a jointly shared vehicle for the reconciliation of North and South was a mutual glorification of martial courage, coupled with the subordination of any emphasis on the issue of slavery and the quality of the freedom that followed 1865. This subordination, of course, underlay the Compromise of 1877 that reconciled Southern and Northern whites by ending Reconstruction and accepting the return of the South and its millions of former slaves to the rule of white Democrats. So perhaps more to the point is whether anyone disinclined to accept the Compromise and its devastating consequences for racial justice would offer such a proclamation. Linenthal indicates his own position by quoting Frederick Douglass’s 1894

remark, “I am not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness, but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” One assumes that Douglass equates saving the Republic with overcoming slavery. Several alternatives involve overt state speech, in which those who control the contemporary state apparatus comment on the views of their ancestors. One of the alternatives does involve Texas articulating an official view of the war that negates the monument’s message. The problem with this alternative (again putting political practicality aside) is that, as suggested earlier, there is no very good reason to accept the view of “an indivisible Union of indestructible States” articulated, appropriately enough, in a case called Texas v. White as the undoubtedly correct view of the Constitution. I personally find the constitutional arguments on behalf of secession quite plausible, especially if one reads the Constitution in light of the Declaration of Independence’s emphasis on the consent of the governed. What undercuts any support I might have for the Confederacy is not the Union metaphysics enunciated by Lincoln and endorsed in White, but rather the reality of chattel slavery. Rather than have Texas, in effect, apologize for attempting to secede, I would prefer that Texas, even while acknowledging the abstract plausibility of secessionist theory, address the fact that it was used to defend an indefensible way of life. This would, as a formal matter, leave the original 1903 monument untouched, still able to work its own power on an onlooker who ignores the sign or dismisses it as an egregious example of contemporary political correctness.

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The second alternative, in which Texas simply disclaims adherence to the message without offering one of its own, is analogous to those seen in many airports in regard to solicitors engaging in their own constitutionally protected speech. But, of course, what makes airport disclaimers persuasive is precisely the fact that the speakers are private citizens exercising their own constitutional rights without any real cooperation from the state beyond recognition that they cannot be removed from public property. It is altogether plausible to believe that the administrators of O’Hare airport are indifferent, and quite possibly 110

hostile, to the ideas that they are required to tolerate. But Texas is scarcely in that position, at least in regard to the monument. Even if it did not commission the statue, it nonetheless accepted it on behalf of the state. As of 1903, at least, one presumes that the message of the statue was altogether compatible with the views of dominant political elites. It is certainly crystal clear that there is no right to place on the grounds in front of the capitol any statuary one wishes, any more than one could claim that the presence of the Washington, Lincoln, and Vietnam Memorials on the national Mall in Washington would entitle one to construct, even without governmental funds, a monument, say, to the Native American victims of American aggression or to the Japanese victims of atomic warfare. Government does indeed speak when it offers sacred space even for privately commissioned entities like the new Holocaust Museum in Washington. One could not, therefore, credit a simple disclaimer of support by Texas, especially so long as Texas continues to include Confederate Heroes Day on its official cal­endar. If forced to choose, I would opt for a set of monuments, of suf-

ficient grandeur and placed in the heart of the Capitol grounds, commemorating different aspects of the African American experience. Given the reality of Texas history, this would include slavery and the exploitation and racial segregation that followed the demise of legal slavery, but I would be shocked if African Americans would want to reduce their history only to these realities, any more than I, as a Jew, accept reduction of Jewish history to victimization in the Holocaust. Thus a monument to Barbara Jordan, among others, should also be an important part of any such display. Though I would welcome the development of a consensus among Texans that would accept the move of the Confederate monument away from the capitol to a museum, I would certainly not do so in the absence of any such development. Perhaps the most attractive idea comes from University of Colorado historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, writing in the New York Times about the controversy over adding to the Little Bighorn National Monument a $2 million memorial to American Indian dead as a complement to the memorial to the U.S. soldiers who died there.25 The debate currently focuses on the issue of which particular interpretive perspective is to dominate. Limerick, however, “imagine[s] a different kind of memorial one in which no point of view dominates,” in which many monuments to all sorts of people would contend for recognition. “Would this add up to a coherent and clear historical lesson? Of course not. But the event itself was not the least bit coherent or clear.” This leads to her most delicious suggestion, that the National Park Service “designate a nearby area as a Managed Contention Site,” which “would provide an arena for presenta-

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tions by today’s partisans. Physical violence would be prohibited, but heated verbal disagreements over history would be encouraged.” There is something extraordinarily attractive about the idea of “managed contention sites,” but only, of course, if we accept the proposition that there are legitimate debates to be held. Consider that within five days the Times published a letter to the editor complaining that Professor Limerick’s desire that no single point of view dominate historical memorials leads to the possibility of “future proposals from revisionist historians on the construction of memorials to the Mexican dead at the 112

Alamo and the Japanese at Iwo Jima.” What is interesting about this jibe, of course, is the assumption that the very idea of such memorials (or, perhaps more accurately, “countermemorials”) is self-­evidently absurd, which is true only so long as the winners of those particular battles maintain their hegemony over historical memory. Having said this, though, I acknowledge my own discomfiture at the idea of using the legitimacy of disagreements over history as the excuse for offering a platform to those, for example, who deny the historical reality of the Holocaust or the malignity of chattel slavery. At that point, a due respect for the legitimacy of multiple perspectives, which I endorse, would indeed become the anything-­goes kind of historical relativism that many of the critics of multiculturalism decry. So we return to the central dilemma sketched in this book.

Coda

We do indeed live by symbols, whether they are tangible pieces of colored cloth or marble depictions of those the culture wishes

to honor, or the more intangible messages generated by days of commemmoration and celebration. To the extent that our world increasingly features either dramatic regime changes, as in Eastern Europe, or the self-­conscious recognition of the multicultural status even of stable political states, it should not surprise us that these symbols have become, in the language of contemporary philosophy, “essentially contested,” with significant political energy put into achieving one or another resolution of such contests. We must, of course, try to clarify our own responses to these symbols, but it is naive in the extreme to believe that we can achieve any genuine consensus as to their place in the public realm. That would require the existence of a singular public, whereas the reality of our society is its composition by various publics who are constituted at least in part by their relationship to conflicting symbologies. And, needless to say, all of these publics seek the particular validation that comes from their symbols occupying some place of respect within the general public realm. It is, therefore, no small matter whether these publics can indeed agree on some common civil rites and symbols or whether we are indeed doomed to an ever-­more-­fractionated discourse about the most basic use of public space and the construction of a public narrative (and, ultimately, a public psyche) that pays due heed to the complexities of the past that we share, with whatever unease. While trying to think through the issues raised in this book, I found myself imagining a divorced couple or, perhaps more accurately, two such couples. The first was torn asunder by the abusive practices of one of the spouses. In this instance, I assume that we would surely not criticize the victimized party not

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only for ending the marriage, but also for taking down pictures of her former spouse or, perhaps, taking advantage of contemporary technology that allows one simply to excise from a picture those people one does not wish to see. This could indeed be a most healthy step in “getting on with one’s life,” which in this instance might require the psychological eradication of the Other. Our understanding of, or even sympathy with, such acts would not, however, mean that we might not wish to cheer a second couple who, having decided on an amicable divorce upon the joint realization that their mutual growth lay elsewhere than 114

in continuing bonds of matrimony, prove able to honor their past lives and to retain material representations nongrandiose monuments of those lives together within their now separate homes. Jack Balkin has suggested, though, that this evocation of a divorced couple is profoundly misleading, that the real point is not what they would do, but, rather, how their children (or, indeed, grandchildren) would respond. The one thing we know for sure is that all veterans of the great struggles of 1861–65, and all of the slaves whose lives were so affected by that struggle, are long since dead. We must decide to what extent we wish to acknowledge, or to repudiate, our symbolic ancestors. What do we do with otherwise cherished family pictures upon the discovery that one’s ancestors were far more checkered, indeed perhaps even villainous, than the earlier, more comforting, family narrative had suggested? One might hope that even the partisans of quite radical regime changes would nonetheless recognize that their now-­ supplanted predecessors were not without valuable qualities, perhaps worth honoring by maintaining existing public monu-

ments or even by building some new ones. But such pacific and ideologically generous regime changes are almost certainly the exception rather than the rule (as may be the case with truly amicable divorces and children who escape unharmed from those divorces). As noted earlier, whatever the specialness of our relationship to the mother country of Great Britain, the United States has put up no monuments honoring even Benedict Arnold, let alone General Cornwallis. Far more ominous is Eric Foner’s reminder that “participation in Reconstruction is enough to exclude even some prominent Confederates from the pantheon of Southern heroes. No monuments to [Confederate] Gen. James Longstreet grace Southern towns because he supported black rights after the Civil War.” Or consider the lowly commemorative stamp, issued by most countries as a quite inexpensive way to memorialize civil worthies. The British have never published a stamp commemorating Oliver Cromwell, nor have the French put any of their former kings on their postage. It would presumably, and, more importantly, properly, occasion international scandal if Germany, as part of a process of normalizing its history, put out stamps with the portraits of Hitler, Goering, or any other Nazi leaders. Indeed, one suspects that the atmosphere would be little less heated even if a German philatelic series involved great generals, and Erwin Rommell, by all accounts a military master, appeared on a German stamp. What should one say, then, about the fact that the United States Postal Service in 1995 issued a set of stamps commemorating various figures of the Civil War (or, as was indicated in lower-­point type, “The War Between the States”)? At the four

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corners of the block are stamps commemorating four battles, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the encounter between the Monitor and the Virginia ( formerly identified as the Merrimack). The most semiotically complex of these is probably the Gettysburg stamp, which shows a Union soldier holding a gun as a club, presumably ready to come down on the Confederate soldier pointing a bayonet at his heart. More to the point, perhaps, are the stamps of individual honorees, for there on official documents of the United States of America appeared Robert E. Lee (engaging in what was apparently his third ap116

pearance on a commemorative stamp), Jefferson Davis, and “Stonewall” Jackson, among other Confederates. Especially interesting is a stamp honoring Stand Watie, who organized a Cherokee regiment to fight on behalf of the Confederacy and was, according to the Postal Service history printed on the back of the stamp (which includes Watie’s Cherokee name, De-­ga-­ do-­ga), the “last CSA General to surrender.” One might interpret this simply as almost a parody of contempory political correctness, though it also points to one of the most fascinating (and, perhaps for obvious reasons) least discussed aspects of the war, which is the fact that most American Indians who participated at all did so as partisans of the slave-­owning South. As one might expect, all of these Confederate worthies were balanced in the sheet of stamps by their Union counterparts, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Admiral David Farragut. (Interestingly enough, the Postal Service did not see fit to commemorate one of the two hundred thousand African Americans who Foner tells us actively fought for the Union.) The one honoree who seems without a partner is Frederick Douglass; perhaps

the Postal Service just couldn’t bring itself to honor George Fitzhugh, the author of the most brilliant defense of slavery, Cannibals All, or Edward Prigg, the Maryland slavecatcher who became the subject of an important case, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, in which the United States Supreme Court invalidated Pennsylvania’s attempt to protect African Americans against being returned to slave states as purported “fugitive slaves.” But perhaps the perfect honoree, exquisitely capturing the theme of unity embraced by the collection, would have been Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. He was at once the author of Dred Scott and its holding that blacks, having “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” were ineligible to become citizens of the United States, a vigorous defender of the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Laws, and severe critic, during the war itself, of Lincoln’s high-­handedness toward those suspected of Confederate loyalties. Taney well serves to summarize many of the themes of this book, for his death in 1864 occasioned in the following year an intense debate about the propriety of following tradition and placing his bust in the chambers of the Supreme Court.26 Charles Sumner, the great abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, who had been severely caned in 1856 by South Carolina’s Preston Brooks for his views, opposed the Republican Lyman Trumbull’s motion to allocate one thousand dollars to pay for a memorial bust. Let me tell [Senator Trumbull] that the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history. Judgment is beginning now; and an emancipated country will fasten upon him the stigma which he deserves. The Senator says that he for twenty-­five years administered justice. He admin-

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istered justice at last wickedly, and degraded the judiciary of the country, and degraded the age. . . . “Nothing but good of the dead.” This is a familiar saying, which, to a certain extent, may be acknowledged. But it is entirely inapplicable when statues and busts are proposed in honor of the dead. Then, at least, truth must prevail. If a man has done evil during his life he must not be complimented in marble. Sumner was temporarily successful: Taney did not receive his 118

commemorative bust until after the death of his successor, Salmon P. Chase, when Congress appropriated funds for busts of both jurists. The central question raised by this book is whether one ultimately sides with the intransigent, unforgiving Sumner or the ultimately more tolerant Congress. Or, perhaps even more accurately, when are intransigence and unforgivingness the appropriate responses to historical actors, whatever the distinction of the offices they held? Senator Sumner noted that the Hall of the Doges in Venice included “pictures of all who filled that high office in unbroken succession, with the exception of Marino Faliero,” who had been executed in 1355 as a traitor to the Venetian republic. “Where his picture should have been there was a vacant space which testified always to the justice of the republic. Let such a vacant space in our courtroom testify to the justice of our Republic. Let it speak in warning to all who would betray liberty.” Surely the Venetians made the correct decision, and the vacant space spoke with high eloquence to the central values that Venice presumably wished to inculcate in its citizens. Perhaps this is the message, for those who are aware of

the Postal Service’s silence, of the fact that Taney, in contrast to Jefferson Davis, has never received the degree of honor as is signified by one’s presence on a commemorative stamp. I personally have no wish whatsoever to honor, in however limited a way, Jefferson Davis, any more than Catharine MacKinnon, whom I have quoted earlier, would easily acquiesce in a decision to place Hugh Hefner on a stamp. This obviously has nothing at all to do with the significance of these men. I presume that MacKinnon would readily agree that Hefner, with his “Playboy philosophy” and magazine, is one of the true shapers of contemporary American culture, just as any objective historian would concede Davis’s impact on American life in his own time. Scholars certainly should try to understand both men, and no one could cogently object to their being the subjects of probing biographies. If causal importance is enough to merit a stamp, though, then one would expect to see Al Capone or Lee Harvey Oswald gracing our nation’s letters. But it is surely obvious that such causal significance is not enough to merit public homage, even the relatively limited homage that comes from being placed on a stamp. To commemorate is to take a stand, to declare the reality of heroes (or heroic events) worthy of emulation or, less frequently, that an event that occurred at a particular place was indeed so terrible that it must be remembered forever after as a cautionary note. To be sure, the semiotician of commemorative stamps in the contemporary United States has to account for Elvis, Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, as well as for Robert E. Lee. Perhaps the American predilection for celebrity is enough to explain all of the former. One way that the financially embattled Postal Service makes money is by putting out popu-

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lar stamps that will be bought and saved, even (or especially) by noncollectors, rather than used to purchase the actual services of the agency. That being said, I remain doubtful that Hefner, easily as important (and probably as well known to most Americans) as Buddy Holly, will grace one of our stamps after his death, even if the Postal Service’s marketing specialists predict that millions of would-­be playboys would buy them. Nor would I bet that General George Armstrong Custer will ever join Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in being officially designated by the United States Postal Service as “Great Americans.” As for Lee, 120

I confess that I find him ultimately no more commendable than Custer; there is much truth in Hugh Brogan’s recent denunciation of Lee as “a bloodstained traitor, one who did more damage to his country than any other in the history of the United States,”27 though I recognize that this is a distinctly minority position within American culture (and I would criticize Lee less for being a traitor than a defender of the slavocracy in a way that, say, George Washington was not). In any event, it seems to be as little tenable to pretend that the United States Postal Service must be neutral in regard to deciding who is fit to be commemorated as to realistically expect city councils to adopt politically neutral theories of street naming and the like. Indeed, even if offered the possibility of a scrupulously neutral state, I doubt that very many of us would accept the offer by tearing down existing monuments, prohibiting the building of new ones, and renaming all of the streets, parks, and airports after trees, oceans, and birds. To the extent that I am correct, I believe that we should have the grace to admit that our hope, when we support specific state speech in the circum-

stances I have been describing, is that the consciousness of the polity, especially of its future generations will be regulated in the proper direction. We might hope, for example, that the memorialization of Martin Luther King Jr. will cause current adults to refrain from casting aspersions on him. Far more important, though, is our hope that certain critical speech will not even occur to citizens of the future because it would be viewed as a blasphemy visited upon a civic icon. It should be clear that there is nothing innocent in any such hopes, that what is written in stone has no necessary permanence unless successor generations can be successfully socialized to view granite as less evanescent than a flag waving in ever-­changing winds. Notes

1. See András Gero, Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience, trans. James Patterson and Eniko Koncz, chapter 11, “The Millennium Monument,” pp. 203–22 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995). As will be true throughout this essay, I shall mainly cite scholarly sources and not offer separate citations for each quotation taken from sources that have been clearly specified in the text. 2. See Musil, “Monuments,” in Burton Pike, ed., Robert Musil: Selected Writings (New York: Continuum, 1986), p. 320. 3. “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Tray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 98. 4. Alan Cowell, “Marlene’s Street of Dreams? To the Barricades!” New York Times, 16 December 1996, p. A4. All quotations in this paragraph come from this article. 5. Kevin Sack, “Blacks Strip Slaveholders’ Names Off Schools,” New York Times, 12 November 1997, p. 1 (national edition).

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6. See Michael J. Ybarra, “San Francisco Journal: Century-Old Monument Feels the Clash of History,” 7 May 1996, p. A8 (national edition). 7. Kevin Sack, “Symbols of Old South Feed a New Bitterness,” New York Times, 8 February 1997, p. 1 (national edition). 8. On “sacred space,” see the important introduction by David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal to Chidester and Linenthal, eds. American Sacred Space (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995), pp. 1–42. 9. Joseph Ellis, “Right Time, Wrong Place,” New York Times, 24 March 1997, p. A21 (New England edition). Ellis objects to “the planned site for the World War II memorial, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The large size of the World War II memorial a

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sunken plaza flanked by two curving colonades backed by 50-foot-high walls would mean that our most sacred space is to be occupied by a new and obtrusive tenant.” The debate about the monument is well set out in Janny Scott, “Taking Its Place in U.S. History,” New York Times, 6 March 1997, pp. D1, D6 (New England edition); Janny Scott, “Planned War Memorial Sets Off Its Own Battle in Washington,” New York Times, 18 March 1997, pp. B1, B2 (New England edition). 10. Quoted in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 127. 11. See Edward Linenthal, Sacred Ground, p. 123, n. 47 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), citing Wallace Evans Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 256. Linenthal’s chapter on Gettysburg is a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in the meaning of public monuments. 12. See Christina Cheakalos, “Monumental Debate Divides New Orleans,” Atlanta Constitution, 15 December 1992, p. A3. The White League is briefly described by John S. Kendall in Dictionary of American History, vol. 7 (New York: Scribner, 1976), p. 292. See generally Judith Kelleher Schafer, “The Battle of Liberty Place,” in Louisiana Cultural Vistas 5.1 (spring 1994): 8–17. In an e-mail message, Schafer noted that of the eleven members of the Metropolitan Police who died fighting the

White League, “seven were white, and none of these was native born. All were either born in Ireland or Germany, except for one Russian.” Interestingly enough, the local perception in the New Orleans African American community is apparently that everyone killed by the White League in the battle was black, though this was obviously not the case. 13. Theodore Herzl, quoted in Robert Justin Goldstein, Saving “Old Glory”: The History of the American Flag Desecration Controversy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), p. ix. 14. “History and Description of the Monument in the Capitol Grounds to the Confederate Dead,” in C. E. Raines, ed., Yearbook for Texas, vol. 11 (1903), pp. 80–82. 15. Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 125, 194. 16. Kirk Savage, “The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 135– 36. 17. Robin W. Winks, “A Place for Liberty Monument,” New Orleans Times Picayune, 17 August 1992, p. B7. 18. Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 31. 19. Owen M. Fiss, State Activism and State Censorship, Yale Law Journal 1087, 1101 (1991): 100, reprinted in Owen M. Fiss, Liberalism Divided: Freedom of Speech and the Many Uses of State Power (Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1996), p. 101. Other quotations from Fiss come from The Irony of Free Speech (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 20. Thus two early donations were statues of Alexander von Humboldt in 1869 and Giuseppe Mazzini in 1878. See Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City: 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 18–19. See also Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking Press, 1995), where placement on the edge of the National Mall in Wash-

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ington, and the legitimation such placement was thought to give, was an important objective of the museum’s private sponsors. 21. James Forman Jr., “Driving Dixie Down: Removing the Confederate Flag from Southern State Capitols,” Yale Law Journal 505 (1991): 101. 22. 891 F.2d 1555 (1990). 23. Willie Morris, “The Ghosts of Ole Miss,” in Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home (Oxford, Miss.: Yoknapatawpha Press, 1981), p. 258. 24. Quoted in James M. Perry, “A Confederate Flag Vexes America Once Again, As Southerners Battle Each Other Over Heritage,” Wall Street Journal, 4 February 1997, p. A20. 25. See Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Battlefield of History,” New York

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Times, 28 August 1997, p. A37. 26. The debate can be found in Paul Finkelman, ed., Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), p. 220–26. 27. See Brogan’s review of Ernest B. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War, New York Times Book Review, 29 September 1996, p. 24. Part of the power of Brogan’s comment undoubtedly comes from the fact that it so dramatically counters the veneration of Lee that has become part of official American culture.

Afterword

Introduction: Polarization, Identity Politics, and Political Memorialization

T

he twenty years since the original publication of this book have seen the escalation in polarization that increasingly characterizes internal politics within the United States and many countries abroad. Almost all contemporary countries

are not only multicultural, but also multinational. The age of the easily identified nation-­state, where the political boundaries of a state are congruent with those of an ethnic nation, is over, save perhaps for Iceland and a very few other small countries. Even Fiji, with its population of almost seven hundred thousand, experiences often-­bitter struggles between native Fijians and Fijians of Indian ancestry. Almost all of us now live in countries riven by identity politics, that is, collections of individuals asserting their identity as members of identifiable groups or ethnic peoples who clamor for recognition in a wider society that has been prone to ignore them. At the same time, those who had hitherto controlled public space—in part because they also controlled public offices—are resentful that their heroes

currently occupying such space may have to share it with these upstarts, let alone on occasion be out-­and-­out displaced from places of honor as statues are removed or buildings renamed. Though perhaps more noticeable now, identity politics are in no sense a new phenomenon. It has been with us forever. Given hegemons in the past generally assumed that their own identity constituted the overall identity of the polity in question. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his remarkable book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, traditional “nationalism is nothing more than an identity politics so triumphant 126

that it can deny being about identity and politics, as nationalists accept both identity and politics as being simply natural.”1 But there is nothing “natural” about either. They are the products of often-­bloody contestations, followed by the systematic effacement of the losers, save for their depiction as the enemy Other. It is not necessarily (or even often) that the losers truly disappear; rather, they may remain as systematically subordinated groups who are unrecognized as anything other than inferiors to those clearly in control. This situation has certainly been true of the United States, particularly in the subnational localities carved out by American federalism. As illustrated by the Jim Crow South, control is often maintained by systematic denial of political rights such as access to the ballot. The existence of identity politics is simply far more likely to be recognized when multiple groups start competing for the space, both physical and psychic, devoted to public honor. Once we become attentive, we find dilemmas of identity politics—and memorialization and public honor—to be pervasive. Consider that it has become a matter of debate among ten-

nis players as to whether a leading sports venue in Melbourne, Australia should continue to be named after Margaret Court,2 “a tennis superstar who holds the record for the most singles titles in the sport.”3 After retirement she became an active minister for a conservative Christian sect viewed as distinctly hostile to gays and lesbians, including the practice of same-­sex marriage. According to Martina Navratilova, herself obviously a superstar (and a publicly identifying lesbian), “We should not be celebrating this kind of behavior, this kind of philosophy.” Obviously, Court’s primary “behavior” was winning a lot of tennis tournaments. One can doubt that anyone supporting the initial naming of the arena was aware that she possessed a “philosophy,” but she does. In her own way, Court pre­sents most directly the key question both of the original book and now this afterword: Can society honor only those particular personal achievements that may indeed be admirable—we shall be discussing below such figures as Cecil Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert E. Lee—while simply ignoring other more controversial (or outright discreditable and even despicable) aspects of their lives? To what degree should we be expected to compartmentalize our responses to persons or causes selected by those with political power to serve as would-­be heroes for the society in general? Can feet of clay be overcome by a laser-­like focus on what might have been a genuine achievement (including winning many tennis tournaments)? But would anyone support celebrating Mussolini’s ostensible achievement in “making the trains run on time” in Italy while overlooking as irrelevant other important details of his persona and political commitments? Or would we even ac-

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cept a statue to Mussolini’s transportation achievements that included an accompanying plaque noting the less attractive aspects of his career? Would it be acceptable to name a philosophy building after Martin Heidegger, surely a major figure in twentieth-­century philosophy who also, alas, actively collaborated with the Nazi Party? Marx and Engels memorably suggested that one reality of the great energy of the global capitalist revolution was that “all that was solid melts into air.” Rocks may beat scissors, but paper can in turn defeat rocks. That is, persons excited by the ideas 128

they read on various pieces of paper (or, today, social media) may lead to realizing that there is nothing necessarily permanent about the apparently most solid stone. And recall the distinctly anti-­Marxist economist Joseph Schumpeter’s emphasis on the reality of “creative destruction” as part of the relentless consequences of free-­market capitalism.4 The most obvious examples are outmoded industries like manufacturers of buggy whips or, it may shortly be, gas-­powered automobiles. But we ought to realize that the myths and symbols that one might well view as constituting the basis of “cultural capital” and undergirding a hitherto stable political-­cultural order are themselves subject to destruction, whether “creative” or not. “Destruction” itself is scarcely a comforting notion; it can be become brutal, as was the case when the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up the Bamiyan statues of the Buddha. As the Daily Telegraph headlined on May 12, 2001, “After 1,700 years, Buddhas fall to Taliban dynamite.” Behind the dynamite, though, was Taliban ideology and notions of political and cultural purity. Consider that one of the most stunning sites in Cordoba, Spain is

the former mosque during the period of Moorish rule, which was transformed—and, many would say desecrated—by its becoming instead the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. One can well believe that the two decades since the original publication of Written in Stone have revealed principally that debates about what is politically correct or, conversely, entitled to respect and toleration even if one disagrees with particular statements or sentiments, have become even more intractable. The term “culture war,” translated from the word kulterkampf used in the nineteenth century to describe the clash between rising democratic (and secularizing) nations and the Roman Catholic Church, became part of the general American lexicon in part as the result of a book published in 1991 by University of Virginia professor James Davison Hunter.5 The term captured the intensity attached to debates about what constitutes “our” culture. Perhaps the most frightening realization is that in a profound sense there may no longer be a singular “our.” Andrew Sullivan has recently written an article with the provocative title “America Wasn’t Built for Humans,” suggesting that the grandiose vision of a country united around the grand abstractions of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution has given way to the all-­too-­human propensity for tribalism based on cultural differences.6 John Jay, writing as Publius, had declared in Federalist Number Two that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” As I have recently

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argued, that declaration was preposterous at the time it was written in 1787.7 But it is even more self-­evidently questionable today, when “We the People” have become astonishingly diverse in our multiculturalism. To draw from an example in the original book, it is simply the case that partisans of George Armstrong Custer, the Sioux, and the Crow, with their distinctly different takes on what occurred at Little Bighorn in Montana in 1876, must agree to share public space (and contending statues). Multiculturalism, almost by definition, differs from “assimilation” inasmuch as various 130

groups must increasingly share space without, at the same time, sharing a common narrative of what bound them together, other, perhaps, than (at least for non-­Native Americans) a history of leaving a home country—or, as with enslaved persons, being wrenched from a home country—to come to America. But there are obvious limits to the suggested happy ending of a robust multiculturalism in which everyone accepts a live-­and-­ let-­live policy regarding those who are honored (or despised). As the N.Y. Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Makers recognized, in 2018 “the values embedded in [public] monuments are understood simultaneously as symbols of pride by one group and as reminders of systematic oppression for different peoples.”8 It is this almost necessary plurality of meaning that renders naive the commission’s stated hope that the city should take “bold action” that will “make strides toward truth-­telling toward the eventual goal of reconciliation,”9 unless, paradoxically or not, what we should become “reconciled” to is the irresolvable plurality (and animosity) of views about the most basic features of our society and its history.

I am put in mind of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa established following the demise of apartheid. What was required was that those who had enforced apartheid, including inflicting torture, confess to their wrongs and tell the truth about what they did. In return, they received an amnesty from being punished. Did this lead to any genuine reconciliation? One might doubt it, but it did appear conducive to a certain kind of social peace in lieu of the violent confrontations and informal retributive justice that one might well have feared. Acceptance, happily or not, of the reality of pluralism need not mean even genuine tolerance, let alone applause, of those viewed perhaps as heroes by a distinctive cohort of the society. Reconciliation to the necessity of sharing political territory with former oppressors is quite different from what I suspect is meant by the meaning of reconciliation alluded to by the commission. All wars, including those about culture, require creating enemies who must be vanquished; often one wishes to elicit an unconditional surrender if at all possible. There is a difference, after all, between grudging toleration or compromise, given only because one does not have the power to prevail, and a genuine embrace of the pluralism now exhibited at Little Bighorn ( formerly the Custer Battlefield National Monument). As noted in the original edition, it proved impossible to offer a pluralistic overview of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum a full fifty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, when one might have believed visitors could address the wisdom of annihilating that city, as well as Nagasaki only three days later. It was surely more truly unthinkable that the monuments

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and museums built in New York to commemorate September 11, 2001, would include any attempts to offer the perspectives of the twenty-­one suicide bombers who destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and, if they had been fully successful, would have destroyed the Pentagon and perhaps the United States Capitol or White House as well. Fortunately, American politics have become far more inclusive over the past two centuries; no longer is it simply assumed, as was the case in Philadelphia in 1787, that the United States would be governed by a narrow elite of white Christian males, 132

while all others accepted their diminished place in what elites perceived as the natural order of things. But the welcome opening and greater inclusiveness, especially since World War II, and within the United States themselves, have in many ways highlighted the difficulty of achieving genuine concord in what remains a fragmented social order. As Dell Upton has demonstrated in a brilliant book on public monuments, tellingly titled What Can and Can’t Be Said,10 what distinguishes our own time is the far greater presence of disparate groups within the overall polity who must necessarily contend with one another for the scarce space of key locations of public honor and the official imprimaturs of approval attached to those who are commemorated there. Even if one can imagine multiple—and contradictory—statues in the public square, there is likely to be only one airport or central public square or major bridge to be named (or renamed). In February 2018, for example, Girl Scouts in Savannah, Georgia sought to rename the Eugene Talmadge Bridge (named after a notoriously racist governor of Georgia) the Juliette Low Bridge, to honor the Savannah-­born founder of the Girl Scouts.11

The ubiquity of identity politics and the linked notion of who is within and, concomitantly, who is outside the relevant community, indicates that there is no necessary political tilt—­ leftward or rightward—to the practice. The most relevant question may well be whether the groups expressing such a view of their political interests (and passions) and demanding respect are those who currently possess power (and are afraid of losing it) or, on the contrary, are those newly claiming full membership in the sociopolitical community. One might well understand the development—and symbiosis—of the alt-­right within the United States as well as various analogues abroad— in countries including France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Poland—as “identitarian” responses to what they view as forms of competing identity politics that threaten the maintenance of the social orders (and hegemonic identity politics) in which they grew up. At the time of the first edition of this book, Hungary seemed determined to establish some kind of liberal constitutionalist regime. That is now very much in doubt, as the country two decades later seems to be firmly ruled by a highly nationalist party that intends to prevent any immigrants from entering the country, not to mention the fact that one of the major political parties is openly anti-­Semitic. This reversal underscores the ever-­contingent features of polities, as suggested milllennia ago by Aristophones, that “the whirlwind, that has driven out Zeus . . . is king now.” Just such a whirlwind seems to characterize contemporary American politics. One could easily compile a bibliography of literally thousands of articles written in the twenty-­first century touching on debates in towns, cities, and states about statues,

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the displays of certain flags, or the naming—and renaming— of public schools and other buildings (as well as bridges). Even automobile license plates have become sites of contention. The United States Supreme Court was called upon in 2015 to decide whether Texas could constitutionally prevent the Sons of the Confederate Veterans from sponsoring vanity license plates— Texas allowed many groups to sponsor such plates, with all sorts of messages—that included the Confederate battle flag.12 The Court’s acquiescence in Texas’s ban was based on a theory— not at all self-­evident—that whatever appeared on the license 134

plate was “state speech” that the state could therefore control; it was understandable, said the narrow five-­justice majority, that Texas would not wish to be interpreted as celebrating the Confederacy and its battle flag. The Court took no notice of the fact that Texas has been, for more than a century, more than happy to celebrate the Confederacy in a number of statues that dot the state capitol grounds. The State of Texas is speaking with a decidedly forked tongue. It is not surprising that a disproportionate number of the controversies over public monuments in the United States deal with the aftermath of the conflagration of 1861–1865, though one should certainly be aware that many other examples pre­ sent themselves both here and elsewhere. Columbus Day 2017 occasioned a number of protests at our continuing to honor the ostensible “discoverer” of America; both Alaska and Vermont have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, as is true of cities ranging from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Berkeley, California. New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio was booed at the Columbus Day Parade

in Manhattan and disinvited from the Columbus Day Parade in the Bronx. The reason is that he created a Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers charged with reviewing all public monuments in the city to see whether any are “symbols of hate,” and he refused to remove from the commission’s agenda discussion of the statue that towers over and gives its name to Columbus Circle in Manhattan.13 Nguyen’s own title, Nothing Ever Dies, echoes William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Though now a cliché, it remains true about many aspects of American political culture in general and most particularly regarding the feelings attached to the specifics of the Civil War (or the War between the States) to which the Mississippian Faulkner was referring. Americans obsess about that war, whereas Nguyen writes about a very different, but no less traumatic, event that Vietnamese themselves call the American War. Soon after publication of Written in Stone, the presence of the Confederate flag atop the South Carolina State Capitol became a key issue in the 2000 Republican presidential primary in that state. Senator John McCain took great care to avoid criticizing this civic valorization of those who attempted to secede from the United States. “As to how I view the flag,” he said at the time, “I understand both sides.” Although some people may see in the flag “a symbol of slavery,” he went on to say, “personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage.” McCain was obviously not successful in that campaign. In his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For, McCain wrote a truly remarkable passage condemning his own conduct:

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I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph reporters that I really didn’t mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president. I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn’t make it less a lie. It compounded the offense. . . . 136

I had not just been dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country’s. That was what made the lie unforgivable. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me. What triggered McCain’s “coward[ice]” was the felt necessity to compete effectively against his principal opponent, then-­ Governor George W. Bush of Texas. Bush repeatedly insisted that he could avoid taking a stand on the flag inasmuch as the issue was, he claimed, one exclusively for the citizens of South Carolina to decide. He therefore resolutely refused to express a personal opinion on the meaning of the Confederate flag or the desirability of its continuing to occupy pride of place in Columbia. It was apparently a winning argument, given the results of the primary contest. Even if one finds Bush’s hesitation credible—he has certainly never issued any kind of apology—it was remarkable at the time that not a single reporter asked Bush his views, as an American, a Texan, and a candidate for the presidency, about the three statues to Confederates that inhabit the Texas State Capitol.

The most prominent of those statues, honoring the Confederate war dead in general and Jefferson Davis in particular, is a central focus, with illustrations, of Written in Stone. Since then, an impressive African-­American History Memorial was dedicated on the grounds of the capitol in November, 2016. Still, the Davis statue retains twenty years later its own pride of place on the capitol grounds, and there is no reason to believe that will change in the foreseeable future. No doubt the addition of the new memorial will be used by some to vindicate the (separate-­but-­equal) honoring of Davis and the Confederate dead who fought to maintain slavery. In contrast, as will be discussed further below, statues of Davis and Robert E. Lee that enjoyed almost equal prominence on the campus of the University of Texas were removed and transferred to a more academic museum setting from their former pedestals on the Main Campus. Written in Stone was not intended to be a comprehensive treatise or philosophical examination of all of the issues latent within the general topic. But it did note two fundamental realities of any arguments about public monuments. One, as illustrated by some of the examples above, is that almost everyone believed that some monuments should in effect be treated as sacrosanct—the Bamiyan Buddhas are presumably the easiest example, though one assumes this is the case as well with the great statues at Karnak, in Egypt, many of which celebrate undoubtedly tyrannical pharaohs—while others should not. I assume that for all likely readers of this book public monuments celebrating Adolf Hitler would exemplify the latter. But then that generates the second question: Can we develop a suitably abstract and general theory that would allow one, in a suitably

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New African American History Memorial on Texas Capitol Grounds (with front and back views of the memorial). Photographs by author.

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Jefferson Davis welcomes visitors to the Texas State Capitol. Used courtesy of Trish Do, photographer.

disinterested and apolitical way, to decide the specific controversies presented in the book and by later events? When asked for a sound bite description of what Written in Stone was about, I usually answered with the question as to whether it was Stalinist—a word denoting for most of us de facto unacceptability—to tear down a statue of Stalin (or to change the name of Stalingrad to Volvograd). Can we possibly answer such questions without offering highly political assessments of Stalin (or Jefferson Davis) that undoubtedly reflect changes over time?14 How do we respond, for example, to a Russian camp counselor, who in 2017 told a New York Times reporter, by way of justifying the presentation of Stalin to a group

of teenagers studying “military patriotism,” that “Whatever your view of Stalin, you can’t deny that he was a strong leader. Stalin won the war. He made it possible for us to go to space. You can’t just throw out a person like that from history.” No one, presumably, believes that Stalin should be omitted from the historical record. But this is obviously different from valorizing him as “a strong leader” to a group of presumably impressionable teenagers being imbued with what appears to be Vladimir Putin’s neonationalism. Lawyers especially, are tempted by the quest for “neutral 140

principles”—or “bright line rules”—that can be applied almost algorithmically to resolve the messy controversies called up by human beings as they try to live with one another. Though I am a lawyer, I am distinctly skeptical about the existence of such truly helpful principles or the ability to construct truly satisfying bright lines. The devil is always in the details, and highly abstract maxims are unlikely to provide real guidance when we focus on concrete problems. Nothing in the past two decades has changed my mind with regard to how we decide the fate of public monuments in changing societies. It is illuminating, I believe, to realize that the actual arguments presented in given controversies involving public monuments turn out to be highly contextual, limiting the relevance of abstract principles and referring instead to specific concrete facts. One might, if one wishes, compare this to the development of common law, which is fact intensive and generates important differences in outcome on the basis of what might be perceived as relatively minor details. “General theories,” Justice Holmes once wrote, “do not decide concrete cases.”15 He was, for better or worse,

correct. We must think from the bottom up, beginning with cases and trying to discern, as through a glass darkly, any principles beyond sheer ad hoc intuitions. Top down theories, in which we try to apply grand general principles to the facts as they arise, are almost useless.

Racial Massacres, Racist Protests, and Confederate Statues

The removal of Davis’s statue from the University of Texas campus was in part a consequence of the racist massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. Lee’s statue was removed in the aftermath of the 2017 events in Charlottesville, Virginia, some of them organized by acknowledged white supremacists and neo-­ Nazis, which have been even more consequential with regard to the reconsideration of the propriety of memorialization—and de facto celebration—of Confederate leaders. There is no way of knowing in May 2018 what subsequent events might become even more salient, for good or for ill, regarding debates now raging throughout the country. The Charleston massacre, and photographs of its perpetrator, the white supremacist Dylann Roof, with Confederate paraphernalia that had presumably reinforced his proclaimed desire to foment a race war in the United States, sparked a nationwide conversation about the propriety of continuing to honor Confederate “heroes.” For obvious reasons, the debate was most pointed, and contested, in the former Confederate states themselves. In South Carolina, it focused on the fact that the Confed-

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erate flag continued to fly on the grounds of the state’s Capitol, at a Confederate memorial, even though it had been removed from its place of honor over the Capitol building itself in 2000. Shortly after the Charleston massacre, Republican Governor Nikki Halley, reversing her earlier position, strongly advocated removing the Confederate battle flag from the capitol grounds entirely; after contentious debate, the legislature agreed. It is also the case that even before Charleston, the state had put up a quite striking public monument on its state capitol grounds focusing on African American history, including the civil rights 142

movement, though it continues to share the grounds with avid defenders of slavery and secession. Indeed, one such statue invites “the stranger” to “recognize that these were men whom defeat could not dishonor, and let their virtues plead for just judgment of the cause in which they perished.” Americans remain sharply divided over the particular public honor represented by monuments of Confederates, not only because of different points of view among the general population, but also because there are so many spread throughout the land that implicate all levels of government—local, state, and national. One column in the Washington Post, titled “Rebel Base Names, Statues Disgrace U.S. Military Facilities and Congress,”16 identified ten military bases, all located in the would-­ be secessionist states that became part of the Confederacy, that are named after Confederate generals “who waged war on the United States government and killed its troops.” Most obvious, of course, is Fort Lee, in Virginia, but there is also a base memorializing the eponymous leader of Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. And a camp in Louisiana is named after General

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South Carolina celebrates those who fought to secede from the Union. Photograph by author.

P. B. T. Beauregard, who ordered the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861. Within the United States Capitol one can find statues of both the president and vice president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, and Alexander Stephens, as well as Confederate general Wade Hampton of South Carolina. Also present is John C. Calhoun, who will be treated at length below

when examining Yale’s decision to rename John C. Calhoun College on its own campus. The capitol grounds include four further statues honoring Confederate military officers, including, perhaps one should say “of course,” Robert E. Lee. As of this writing, no prominent politician has suggested removing these statues or renaming the military bases. Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was fated to become a site of especially violent contestation over decisions to redo public space in that city. In April 2017, the Charlottesville City Council had, albeit nonunanimously, ordered that a statue of Robert E. 144

Lee be removed from Lee Park to another park farther away from the city center. In May, the council unanimously voted to change the name of Lee Park to Emancipation Park.17 Meanwhile, Lee’s statue remained, because a state judge ruled that moving it violated a state law. Similarly, Jackson Park, honoring Confederate General Stonewall Jackson—and the site of a statue of Jackson—was renamed Justice Park.18 Protests ensued, several led by members of the Ku Klux Klan and other avowed white supremacists, and August 2017 saw a death caused by the violence of a white nationalist who had traveled from Ohio to engage in a protest against the city council’s decision. Many people quickly—and President Trump belatedly— denounced the ideology of white supremacy that underlay the protest, which included the use of both the Confederate battle flag and the Nazi swastika. Perhaps more important, at least for this book, even than Trump’s tepid denunciation, which was coupled with repeated assertions that there were “fine people” on both sides of the demonstrations in Charlottesville, were his August 17 tweets in behalf of the Confederate monuments:

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish? Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!19 It is worth noting that Trump is almost unique in praising the statues and monuments, which he has surely never personally seen, as “beautiful.” Few proponents of the monuments emphasize their beauty, nor do their opponents focus on ugliness divorced from the meaning of the statues. The argument is not being waged over aesthetics. Like Charleston, Charlottesville immediately influenced many other cities. The mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, for example, endorsed the removal of two statues honoring Confederate officials occupying prominent places near the county courthouse that is about to become a visitor center for tourists.20 They will be moved to another public park explicitly devoted to honoring veterans. Protesters and some politicians in Nashville, Tennessee, including the Republican governor, called for the removal of a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who was involved in a massacre of black soldiers in 1864 before helping to found the Ku Klux Klan following Appomattox. The president of the Jacksonville, Florida City Council asked the city to develop an inventory of all Confederate symbols on public property with the purpose of developing “an appropriate plan of action” to remove them to places such

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as museums and other educational institutions that do not attest, as it were, the present moral value of what is presented and studied. Many more examples could be offered, not all of them from the states linked with the Confederacy, especially if we broaden the inquiry from specific support of Confederate secession to taking part in the horrific practice of chattel slavery itself. In a New York Times op-­ed titled “The South Doesn’t Own Slavery,” Tiya Miles noted that Macomb County in Michigan is named after William Macomb, who was “the largest slaveholder in 146

Detroit in the late 1700s.” Upon his death, descendants “inherited the family fortune, later becoming—along with other Detroit slaveholding families—among the first trustees of the University of Michigan.”21 New York State did not outlaw slavery until 1827, and many New Yorkers helped finance the shipment abroad of cotton picked by enslaved persons in the South. This fact may help to explain why Seth Low, New York City’s Democratic mayor from 1860 to1862, was a “copperhead” very sympathetic to the Confederacy. Moreover, an especially interesting phenomenon is the presence in some northern cities of cemeteries of Confederate war dead who had been prisoners of war. Madison, Wisconsin, for example, was the home of Camp Randall, where captured Confederate soldiers were imprisoned and some died. Forest Hill Cemetery, described as a “city-­owned property near the University of Wisconsin campus,”22 contains not only the graves of many soldiers from Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, but also a memorial erected in 1931 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy that honors both the soldiers and a local woman

who had faithfully tended the graves of her “boys.” Although no one suggests removing the gravesites, there are those in Madison who believe the monument should be removed. A similar controversy arose in Boston, where several Confederate soldiers are buried on Georges Island, located in Boston Harbor and the site of nineteenth-­century Fort Warren. As in Madison, the ubiquitous United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1963, during the centenary of the Civil War, erected a monument to the thirteen soldiers buried there, and the state in June 2017 ordered that it be removed. One might, of course, ask if giving recognition to ordinary soldiers who died in even an unworthy cause is the equivalent of honoring their leaders. One could do worse than quote Eugene V. Debs: “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” It is recognition of this truth that allowed me, in the original edition of Written in Stone, to differentiate, at the Bitburg Cemetery that Ronald Reagan visited, between the graves of ordinary German soldiers and those of members of the SS, who were decidedly not mere conscripts into the Nazi cause. Moreover, one can ask if cemeteries, as places ultimately to reflect on mortality, are the equivalent of public squares or state capitol grounds. As the Times reporter wrote, “While a Confederate statue in a busy town square honors the dead, does a monument in a tranquil, little-­trafficked cemetery have the same effect?” Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, strongly attacked the state’s decision to move the Georges Island memorial. He adverted to the presence near Normandy, in France, of separate cemeteries for the American, Canadian, and German war dead.23 I was personally moved to

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tears when visiting the cemetery to the American war dead who braved the Normandy beaches (in fact cliffs) on D-­Day, and I had no desire to visit the German cemetery. But Beam quotes a sign at the entrance to the latter: “With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight. They too have found rest in our soil of France.” Perhaps one wants to distinguish gravesites from even the most anodyne monument, especially if, as in Boston, it not only names the thirteen dead soldiers, but also refers to the loaded notion of the “War between the States.” Fortunately, per148

haps, this book concentrates on town squares and clear efforts to create a consciousness of public honor, but it is important to make necessary distinctions. As noted, the Lee statue remains in its original site in Charlottesville because a judge held that its removal conflicted with a state law. This underscores the fact that cities are not necessarily masters of their own use of public space, as is true, for example, with regard to deciding whether to preserve or change the name of the Talmadge Bridge in Savannah, a decision that is ultimately in the hands of the Georgia legislature. There is contention not only about the specific merits of retaining monuments in their current places, but also about what level of government should be allowed to make the decision. Whether the Forrest statue in Nashville or a similar one in Memphis can be moved by the city may depend on state law. In 2015 the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Tennessee Heritage Preservation Act, providing that statues or monuments erected in honor of a war cannot be “relocated, removed, altered, renamed, rededicated, or otherwise disturbed” unless a waiver is granted by

the Tennessee Historical Commission. As if this weren’t enough, a 2016 amendment extended the prohibition to monuments honoring all historic military figures.24 The city of Memphis in December 2017 was able to do an end run around the state law by voting to sell two public parks, one with a statue of Jefferson Davis, the other with one of Nathan Bedford Forrest, for $1,000 each to a nonprofit entity that was apparently formed for the purpose of taking title to the parks and then removing the monuments. The institutional ballet continued, however, when in April 2018 the Tennessee legislature removed $250,000 from funding for Memphis’s bicentennial as retaliation for the sale of the parklands and removal of the statutes. 25 One may applaud the cleverness of this decision while at the same time recognizing that one might not be so approving if one disagreed with the politics behind it. After all, some southern cities in the 1960s sold their public parks rather than obey desegregation orders; the new “private” owners were free of constitutional constraints against racial discrimination. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed on May 25, 2017—very soon after the initial decisions by the Charlottesville City Council—a bill passed by the Alabama legislature that prohibited localities from moving any statues that had stood on public property for more than forty years. Similar restrictions were put on renaming streets or schools named after historical personages.26 And any actions that localities wish to take with regard to monuments, streets, or schools that are at least twenty years old are now subject to receiving approval from a newly created Committee on Alabama Monument Protection. It seems unlikely that such legislation reflected an abstract decision by the

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legislators that all statues deserved to remain in place. Surely the issue was the preservation of Confederate statues in key public venues and, even more to the point, of the former hegemonic control enjoyed by those who looked at such statues with pride instead of revulsion. The original edition of this book concluded with a discussion of Chief Justice Roger Taney, known best for his authorship of the egregious decision in the Dred Scott case that declared blacks had no rights that white rulers were bound to respect and that blacks were ineligible to become American citizens. A 150

statue of Taney had been removed in March 2017 from the entrance to the city hall of Frederick, Maryland, his hometown.27 Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan first denounced as “political correctness run riot” suggestions that Taney’s and other similar statues be removed from state grounds, but he reversed his position following Charlottesville. No longer, apparently, will a statue of Taney remain in front of the Maryland statehouse in Annapolis. “While we cannot,” Hogan declared on August 15, 2017, “hide from our history—nor should we— the time has come to make clear the difference between properly acknowledging our past and glorifying the darkest chapters of our history. I believe removing the Justice Roger B. Taney statue from the State House grounds is the right thing to do, and we will ask the State House Trust to take that action immediately.”28 The State House Trust is a reference to the four-­member committee, chaired by the governor, which controls the placement of statues on the state capitol grounds. All of them have indicated their assent to the removal. Especially interesting, and perhaps ominous, is the direct

action taken by what some people would undoubtedly term a “mob” in Durham, North Carolina, to pull down a monument honoring an anonymous Confederate soldier.29 This manifested a clear rejection of any orderly process at all, coupled with the extension to an ordinary soldier of the animus often and understandably directed at Davis or Lee. The New Yorker magazine published in the aftermath of Charlottesville an article asking “Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?”30 Robin Wright, its author, is certainly not suggesting a repeat of 1861, with full-­scale armies clashing in monumental battles. But she points to the existence of what appears an ever-­more-­divided country. It is not hard to imagine repeated, perhaps escalating, clashes over how America chooses to identify—and remember—its past and attempt to construct a unifying ­present. We do well to recall Justice Holmes’s reminder that “we live by symbols,” especially in sharply polarized societies that are riven by acrimonious debates about political correctness. Perhaps one would want to amend Holmes’s comment by noting that we not only live, but also sometimes sacrifice and kill by reference to such symbols. But what makes public monuments so interesting is that they constitute highly self-­conscious attempts to create a culture that determines what is politically correct—i.e., the honoring of certain individuals or causes. As Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders said in opposing the Alabama bill, “it says whoever was in power and was able to put their history in monuments, they are protected.”31 Not surprisingly, though, the bill’s primary sponsor, Senator Gerald Allen described his goal as ending the “wave of political correctness” sweeping the nation. “Where does it end?” he asked, offer-

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ing the slippery-­slope question that would later be presented in Donald Trump’s tweet. “Are all parts of American history subject to purging,” Allen went on, “until every Ivy League professor is satisfied and the American story has been rewritten as nothing but a complete fraud and a betrayal of our founding values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?”32 These two Alabamans do a splendid job of capturing the spectrum of arguments likely to be raised by those engaging in political debate about public monuments. One can ask Senator Sanders if there are any limits to newly 152

empowered political winners effacing the existing public landscape. Former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson wrote what one might well consider a snarky column for a Dallas newspaper noting that Abraham Lincoln, along with being “the Great Emancipator,” also made some uncomfortably racist comments in the Lincoln–­Douglas debates in 1858; Patterson also emphasized Lincoln’s support for recognizing the legality of slavery where it already existed in his First Inaugural Address in March, 1861.33 Does this disqualify Lincoln from receiving public honor in 2018? Most of us find it easy to distinguish Lincoln from Lee, but Patterson’s question, whatever his own motives in asking it, must be answered rather than simply brushed aside, at least by academics like myself. In turn one can wonder if Senator Allen believes that it was only a discreditable political correctness that led Russia to abolish the name Leningrad and replace it with Saint Petersburg or for Ukraine to make systematic efforts to displace literally thousands of monuments of Lenin that were part of its landscape with a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-

lics. Similarly, should post–1989 Hungarians not have removed a spate of Communist statues from various places of honor in Budapest? Or, for that matter, should American “patriots” in 1776 have refrained from toppling statues of King George III and using the lead to make bullets to fight the king’s soldiers? And recall, as set out in the preface to this new edition, that there was seemingly unanimous support, at least within the United States, for destroying the Baghdad statue of Saddam Hussein. Allen’s own dismissive reference to “Ivy League professor[s]” ignores the fact that many opponents of continuing to honor those who led the fight to maintain slavery are citizens of Alabama. They includes not only African Americans but also many whites who feel justified shame at the continued valorizing of men like Davis, Lee, and, for that matter, Edmund Pettus, an Alabama Confederate general who was the honoree of the infamous bridge that was the site of a police-­instituted melee in 1965 when African American and white demonstrators tried to initiate a march from Selma, Alabama on behalf of the right to vote.

Universities, Benefactors, and Honorees

The next two sections focus particularly on the actions—and justifications offered—by a number of American universities to the challenges sketched above. It is not surprising that the American academy has become a central venue of contestation. Campuses in general have an unusual number of examples of public honor, whether statues or, perhaps more commonly, the names of university buildings. Many of the latter, especially,

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will honor benefactors whose wealth might have been gained in what is now considered objectionable ways. Moreover, there are critical masses of students (and some sympathetic faculty) willing to raise questions about the public honorees, coupled with an institutional commitment to engaging in systematic analysis of controversies. Universities pre­sent perhaps maximum conjunction of both motive and opportunity to become aware of the problems attached to public recognition and to discuss them with suitable rigor. “Ole Miss Edges Out of Its Confederate Shadow, Gingerly”34 154

was the title of a New York Times story about a variety of decisions made by the University of Mississippi over the years. “Though the Confederate flag was banished from the campus two decades ago and ‘Dixie’ is no longer played at football games, the ghosts of the Old South still roam the magnolia-­scented campus, and many alumni hold fast to traditions.” The story refers to Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a notable son of Mississippi; after fighting in the Civil War, he represented Mississippi in both houses of Congress and then became the first Southerner appointed to the Supreme Court following Appomattox. Oxford, Mississippi’s main thoroughfare is named after Lamar; there is also a museum in what was his home, as well as a building on the campus named after him. As the Times writes, “That building will soon get a plaque more fully describing Lamar’s legacy.” The plaque will presumably explain that Lamar also drafted Mississippi’s ordinance of secession and held thirty-­one slaves. During a violent 1875 election within Mississippi, he delivered a speech in which he said that it centrally “involved the supremacy of the unconquered and unconquerable Saxon race.” Four other

plaques will also presumably touch on some of the less attractive aspects of Ole Miss history. And a university committee has recommended changing the name of a building named after Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman, who had once declared that “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”35 One wonders, of course, if he actually used the word “Negro.” Buildings—and their namings and renamings—present almost limitless opportunities for contention. A symposium was held in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina in 2008, for example, regarding a building named after Thomas Ruffin, an ostensibly distinguished state judge of the antebellum period. Among other things he was famous for was writing a judicial opinion upholding the almost limitless power of a slavemaster over his enslaved property.36 Paradoxically or not, he had been esteemed even by Harriet Beecher Stowe as an “honorable judge” who was tasked with the duty of enforcing the legal regime of chattel slavery. But what dominated the symposium was the discovery of new materials indicating that Ruffin had himself been more actively involved in the slave trade than was previously known. Like John Marshall,37 he not only owned slaves but also bought and sold them. In writing an opinion defending the prerogatives of slaveowners, he was in effect enhancing his own personal power within a decidedly unjust system. Ruffin illustrates a double problem: The first is the propriety of honoring a judge who seemingly had little difficulty enforcing the laws that were the backbone of the legal regime of slavery. But there is also the fact that later historical research has dem-

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onstrated that he was more than the dedicated servant of the law; he was also an active participant in the business of enslaving persons. Does either of these considerations require the university to change its 1922 decision, when it originally honored him by naming a building after him? It should be obvious that the determination at time X that someone was in fact worthy of the honor and commendation attached to having buildings or other sites named after him— and, until recently, the gender was almost exclusive—can run into problems at time Y. Public opinion might shift regarding 156

the intrinsic worthiness of the acts attributed to the honoree. This could explain, for example, contemporary controversy in the twenty-­first century about the propriety of leaving Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill, given our belated repugnance at his well-­known oppression of Native Americans, including, most infamously, the forced removal in the Trail of Tears of Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma. But we could also learn brand new information, typified, in 2018, by the discovery that a number of hitherto admirable men had engaged in previously unknown acts of sexual harassment (or worse) against those vulnerable to their power. Consider the decision of the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 to withdraw honorary degrees from Bill Cosby and the Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn, who had also endowed a building bearing his name (which will now be changed).38 Apparently, as of May 2018 (when Cosby was convicted of sexual assault), an additional fifteen universities had withdrawn their honorary degrees. One wonders if the Fordham Law School will withdraw its own honrary degree awarded in May 2017 to then-­New York Attorney General Eric Schneider-

man, who resigned in disgrace less than a year later for his own apparent episodes of sexual assault. One response to such potentially unpleasant realities is simply to name fewer and fewer buildings after ostensible notables (or to award fewer honorary degrees). Consider the fact that there appear to be somewhat more than twenty-­five high schools named after John F. Kennedy, whereas there are only four named after Ronald Reagan and none honoring Bill Clinton. This may reflect not only the political views of those doing the naming, but also, and more tellingly, perhaps, a more general caution with regard to taking the risks attached to honoring any given person. University of Arkansas Professor Jay Greene and his associates wrote a fascinating study titled “What’s in a Name: The Decline in the Civic Mission of School Names.”39 After studying school namings in seven states, they concluded that fewer were being named “after ‘people worthy of emulation,’” including American presidents. Instead, more schools were being named after less controversial “natural” beings. Surely the most stunning evidence of this point involved Florida, where the sea manatee was giving its name to twice the number of schools as George Washington. Similarly, when Fayetteville, Arkansas, the home of the University of Arkansas, replaced its “aging” Thomas Jefferson Elementary School with a new structure across the road, it received a brand new name as well. One might have thought that former Fayetteville luminaries William J. Fulbright, a former president of the University of Arkansas (who, while serving five terms in the Senate, established the fellowships that bear his name) or former University of Arkansas law professor (and then governor and

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president) Bill Clinton might have been deemed worthy of the honor. Instead, though, the new school was named “Owl Creek,” described as “a small ditch with a trickle of water that runs by the school.” That was presumably viewed as a completely safe choice, whereas Fulbright and Clinton—and practically all other human candidates for the honor—were just too risky, whether at the time of decision or for fear of later disclosures. Greene and his colleagues lament this as a failure of the “mission” of the state, including educational institutions, to create a common civic culture. But perhaps the point is to wonder 158

whether that is possible—or some might even ask desirable. The University of Virginia in Charlottesville is justifiably identified with its founder, Thomas Jefferson (who is always referred to reverentially at the university as “Mr. Jefferson”). Monticello was built, with slave labor, on a lovely hillside not far from the university. Both Jefferson and the university have multilayered relationships with slavery and enslaved persons. In honoring great Virginians like Jefferson, the University necessarily honors slaveowners and the ideology of racialist subordination as well. One response to this history was UVA’s recent decision to name two buildings after enslaved persons. One, Peyton Skipwith, a stonemason, had quite literally helped to build the institution in the early nineteenth century.40 The second building was named after an enslaved couple, Isabella and Williams Gibbons, who had lived within the university in the 1850s.41 The Huffington Post headlined its story on the latter “UVA Names Building for Former Slave Couple, Starts Coming to Terms with Its History.” Perhaps the most important word in the headline is “starts.”

It is not only southern universities or cities that have cause to debate their own role in racist aspects of American history and the implications of choosing particular individuals as local heroes, even if they are most likely to feature Confederate heroes in their public landscapes. As already noted, slavery was truly national—as well as international—in its reach. Many of our leading universities, well outside what we associate with Dixie, turn out to be implicated in its history. Georgetown University was rocked by a New York Times story in 2016 elaborating the 1838 sale by the university or its priests of no fewer than 272 slaves, including a two-­month-­old baby and her mother, in order to bolster the finances of a then-­struggling university. Brown University in many ways took the lead among American universities once it was fully realized that the Brown family earned its fortune in part through the slave trade. Committees were appointed not only to examine the extent of the university’s involvement with slavery, but, just as relevantly with regard to the theme of this book, also to discuss what kinds of new memorials the university should construct on its campus today.42 But Brown, of course, was not unique, even if its benefactor’s name was more problematic than that, say, of John Harvard, who gained immortality simply by donating his library to the nascent college in 1636. Craig Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American’s Universities demonstrated that some early presidents of Harvard owned slaves, a truth memorialized in a recent plaque erected by Harvard. Three Ivy League schools in particular have all been roiled by controversies about what should be written in stone on their re-

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spective campuses. Yale University had in 1931 chosen to name one of its then-­new residential colleges after John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most vigorous defender of what came to be called the “slavocracy” in our history. Its president decided in 2017, following examination by two blue-­chip committees, to rename the college after Grace Murray Hopper, an important pioneer in the development of computers who had received her Ph.D. from Yale in 1934. (She will become the first woman so honored by the formerly all-­male university.) Princeton was charged with exhibiting blindness to the ter160

rible racism that was an important part of the persona of perhaps its most famous son, Woodrow Wilson, who went from being president of Princeton to becoming president of the United States, via service as governor of New Jersey. Princeton is well known for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. After appointing a committee to consider arguments that the name should be changed, the Board of Trustees decided to retain it. Within a month, though, the university announced that West College would be renamed for the well-­known African American professor emerita and Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison, while Dodds Auditorium, described by the Princeton Alumni Weekly as “the most prominent teaching space in the Woodrow Wilson School’s Robertson Hall” will be renamed the Arthur Lewis Auditorium. Lewis, a member of the school’s faculty from 1963 to 1983, won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Economics. But it was certainly relevant as well that he had emigrated to the United States from Saint Lucia, in the British West Indies. And, in November 2017, the university embarked on a project designed to explore further “its fraught

racial history,”43 including the fact that an auction of the property of the university’s fifth president, Samuel Finley, upon his death in 1766, included several slaves. Finally, Harvard’s most vigorous controversy, as of February 2018, involved the crest of the Harvard Law School, designed in 1936 on the occasion of the university’s tercentenary. The crest incorporated sheaves of wheat, taken from the family crest of the Royall family who had been important contributors to the law school in its infancy. The problem is that it is now clear that, as with the Brown family, much of the Royall fortune was derived from slavery in the West Indies. Nor have universities abroad escaped such disputes. For example, in both Great Britain and South Africa objections were registered to the continuing public honor of Cecil Rhodes. Though most people probably immediately identify him with (and commend him for) the Rhodes Scholarships, many others are aware that he was one of the most important imperialists of the late nineteenth century in Africa. After all, one of the British colonies was Southern Rhodesia, whose name was changed to Zimbabwe following its liberation from British rule, just as its capital named after Lord Salisbury was changed to Harare. In April, 2015, the University of Capetown removed its statue of Rhodes as the on-­looking “crowd celebrate[d].” The response by Oriel College at Oxford was decidedly different. Although many students, including the Oxford Union, called for the removal of an imposing statue impressively displayed over the entrance to Oriel, the board of the college chose to keep the statue in place. The Daily Telegraph led its story on the decision by writing that “Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place

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Oriel College, Oxford, celebrates Cecil Rhodes. Used courtesy of Scot M. Peterson, photographer.

after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down.”44 Abstract ideas are not the only issues at the center of debates about the allocation of public honor.

Universities (and New York City) Articulate Their Rationales Regarding Monuments

This section concentrates on the reports of the New York Mayoral Commission and of relevant committees at the University of Texas, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton concerning controversies at their respective universities. These are certainly not the only statements worth reading and analyzing. But they do pre­

sent valuable insights into the ways that such arguments are structured in the first place, independent of the conclusions they reach. Moreover, one can be confident that the importance of New York City and the prestige of the universities involved will make them essential sources for any future discussions. The commission was tasked with offering a general approach to the literally thousands of relevant pieces of public art, monuments, and civic markers, such as those identifying everyone who had received a ticker-­tape parade down the “Canyon of Heroes” in lower Manhattan, which included French General Philipe Petain for his heroism during World War I prior to his becoming the head of the Vichy Regime that collaborated with the victorious Germans during World War II. But the Mayor also specified three honorees of statues, in addition to the Petain marker, for the commission’s consideration: Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. Marion Sims. No doubt Sims is the least well known. He was a leading gynecologist of the nineteenth century, often credited with extremely important breakthroughs with regard to treating the truly awful condition of vaginal fistulas. But, as an article in Harper’s emphasized, in an article tellingly titled “Monumental Error,” some of his basic research, and experimental operations, were carried out “in experimental surgeries, without the use of anesthesia, on a number of young slave women between 1845 and 1849.”45 A monument to Sims occupied a pedestal in front of the New York Academy of Medicine. Should it retain that place of honor? The commission defined its charge as developing “non-­ binding recommendations” as to the city’s approach to monuments on public property, “particularly those that are subject to

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sustained negative public reaction or may be viewed as inconsistent with the values of New York City, by which we mean a just city that prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion.”46 As the commission recognized, these monuments “tell the world who we are when we build them [which might have been many decades ago,] and what our society aspires to.”47 Obviously, aspirations shift over time, which is precisely the problem. The commission offered five “guiding principles.” The first is simply the recognition of the social and ideological power attached to “represent[ing] history in public.” Viet Thanh Nguyen 164

would surely agree: “Until those whose memories are left out not only speak up for themselves but also seize control of the means of memory making, there will be no transformation in memory. Without such control, those who speak up for themselves and others will realize they do not determine the volume of their voice.”48 In case one missed it the first time, the double use of the term “control” underscores the inevitable political battles attached to “memory making” and then, even more so, the “transformation” of public memory. The second principle calls for “historical understanding,” which in this case means “in-­depth and nuanced histories” that acknowledge “multiple perspectives,” especially those that have been excluded from the particular kind of public view instantiated in monuments. This is linked to the third principle, “Inclusion,” which works toward making “all New Yorkers” feel equally welcome in their own city. But the commission recognizes as its fourth principle the “complexity” involved in scrutinizing public monuments. After all, “Monuments and markers have multiple meanings that are difficult to unravel, and it is often im-

possible to agree on a single meaning.” Finally, there is the urge to achieve “justice,” which in this context requires “addressing histories of dispossession, enslavement, and discrimination not adequately represented in the current public landscapes; and actualizing equity.”49 So how do these abstractions play out with regard to the particular examples considered by the commission? Suffice it to say that the only monument recommended for removal from a current place of honor is that of Sims. The commission describes the current statue, especially in its current location, as “clearly laudatory in itself, and the monument pre­sents Sims on a high pedestal in a heroic pose.”50 The recommendation of an “overwhelming majority” of the commission is to move the statue, “without its pedestal, to another publicly accessible site,” where it should be accompanied by a “explanatory plaque” honoring the women, including the slaves, on whom Sims conducted his medical experiments. In addition, a new work should be commissioned for the now-­vacant pedestal in front of the Academy of Medicine, ideally commemorating “prominent women of color in science,” which will enable “young people in the community . . . to see the accomplishments of their ancestors reflected in their public space.51 No such agreement was reached with regard to the other targets of investigation, save that the reference to the “Canyon of Heroes” should be removed for all 206 markers, including that of Petain, identifying recipients of parades. The commission achieved no consensus with regard to the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the New York Museum of Natural History, which has been criticized not only because of the

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semiotics of the statute that place Roosevelt in a decidedly superior position to that of the nonwhite figures included, but also because of Roosevelt’s apparent support of eugenics, both of which are viewed as out of keeping with the the modern self-­ conception of the museum. Although half the commission supported relocation, the others did not. (One might well wonder if any theory justifying removal of the statue would apply as well to Mount Rushmore, where Roosevelt joins Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln as our canonical presidents worthy of special honor.) 166

It is not surprising that the most vigorous, and interesting, debate, concerned the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands high over Columbus Circle. For some New Yorkers, “Columbus serves as a reminder of genocide of Native peoples across the Americas and the onset of the transatlantic slave trade.” But the commission takes notice as well of the extent to which he served “as an important source of ethnic pride during a time of great discrimination against Italian Americans in New York City and across the United States.”52 Mention is made as well of the obvious fact that Columbus is the source of “numerous place and institutional names,” beginning with the District of Columbia and Columbia University, whose name prior to the American Revolution, was King’s College, and including as well the state capitol of Ohio. The majority ultimately recommended that the statue remain in place, though it described an “urgency to address past pain, contemporary issues represented by Columbus, and the monument’s importance as a symbol of pride for Italian Americans and others.”53 Once again, the commission expresses its hope that “collective reconciliation can

only be achieved with collective truth, based on a shared understanding of historical facts.” There were, though, a minority who advocated removal of the statute, which generated what may be the most interesting single passage in the entire report: The statue’s prominent location confirms the notion that those who control space have power, and the only way to adequately reckon with that power is to remove or relocate the statue. In order to move toward justice, these Commission members recognize that equity means that the same people do not always experience distress, but that this is instead a shared state. Justice means that distress is redistributed. While very cognizant of the Italian American history that includes an attachment to the monument in compelling ways, these Commission members cannot envision keeping the monument without honoring a historical figure whose actions in relation to Native peoples represent the beginnings of dispossession, enslavement, and genocide.54 One should think long and hard about the distribution (and redistribution) of “distress” as perhaps the most fundamental reality underlying all controversies about public monuments. As we move now to the decisions made by a number of universities, I begin with my home university, the University of Texas, which moved statues of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson while leaving other controversial statues—and a certainly incendiary message carved in stone—in situ. One of the first actions of incoming University of Texas President Gregory L. Fenves in June 2015 was the appointment of the Task Force on

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Historical Representation of Statuary at UT Austin.55 The statuary in question involved a complex endowed by George Littlefield, a former officer in the Confederate army and the largest single donor to the University of Texas in its early years. In 1916, Littlefield had commissioned Pompeo Coppini to design a memorial that would, in Littlefield’s words, remember Confederate “patriots who gave up their lives for the cause of liberty and self-­government.” Littlefield’s rather grandiose vision was not realized, but Coppini did create the Littlefield Fountain. He also carved statues of a variety of public figures, including 168

Confederate generals and Texas leaders particularly admired by Littlefield; they were placed on the Main Campus that goes uphill from the fountain toward the main building of the UT campus, which towers over the campus. As the task force wrote, “the memorial was a celebration of a new Southern patriotism in which a neo-­Confederate or Southern nationalist approach was posited as the basis of . . . national unity through principles of white supremacy.” Woodrow Wilson’s statue became part of the set of six statues largely, according to the task force, both because he was the first post–­Civil War president to be born in the South and, just as important, because he was widely and accurately viewed as a friend of white supremacy. He did whatever he could, for example, to bar African Americans from positions in the national civil service, and he arranged for the White House showing of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which lauded the Ku Klux Klan’s resistance to Reconstruction. Lest one miss the point, a specific inscription set out Littlefield’s intended narrative to the west of Littlefield Fountain: “For the men and women of the

The Littlefield Fountain at the University of Texas. Photograph by author.

Confederacy who fought with valor and suffered with fortitude that states’ rights be maintained and who, not dismayed by defeat nor discouraged by misrule, builded [sic] from the ruins of a devastating war a greater south. And to the men and women of the nation who gave of their possessions and of their lives that free government be made secure to the peoples of the earth this memorial is dedicated.” One might, of course, compare this both to the statue of the Confederate dead in front of the Texas Capitol and to the statue in New Orleans honoring the White League insurgency against 170

the Reconstruction government in Louisiana, both addressed (and photographed) in the original edition above. It did not take until 2015 for persons to express concern about the Littlefield Fountain and complex of statues. At least two earlier presidents of the university had addressed some of the problems they presented, but both had left the complex undisturbed even as new statues of Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Barbara Jordan were added to the campus grounds in order to provide diversity. But the Charleston massacre provoked yet new calls for ridding public space of Confederate memorials. An earlier committee (on which I served) had successfully recommended the renaming of an insignificant university building named after a once-­beloved, but now obscure, University of Texas Law School professor of the early twentieth century who had been a principal officer of the Florida Ku Klux Klan (and who gave annual addresses at the law school commending the Klan’s role in “liberating” the South from those who would truly “reconstruct” it).56 The task force, while feeling quite free to express its distaste for the overall aim of the Little-

field project, carefully avoided making its own specific recommendations. Instead, it set out a variety of options for President Fenves’s consideration. He responded on August 13, 2015, announcing that he was choosing to move only the statues of Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson, while leaving the other statues, including Robert E. Lee, in place. The inscription, however, would a year later be erased from the Littlefield Fountain, when Fenves declared that its message remained “in the back of my mind” and decided, “it is inappropriate with our goal of diversity and inclusion.”57 In 2015, Fenves offered little by way of a systematic argument, saying only, “Jefferson Davis is in a separate category, and that it is not in the university’s best interest to continue commemorating him on our Main Mall.” Davis is described as having “few ties to Texas,” and his “unique role in the history of the American South . . . is best explained and understood through an educational exhibit” at a new site, the University’s Briscoe Center for American History.” Three of the remaining personages honored with statues, including Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston and former Confederate Postmaster General John R. Reagan, are described as having “had deep ties to Texas.” But then there is Robert E. Lee, who is described as having a “complicated legacy to Texas and the nation [that] should not be reduced to his role in the Civil War.” Keeping Lee and the others in their place of honor on the Main Campus will ostensibly be “both respectful of the heritage that is important to many and serve[] as a poignant display of our nation’s and university’s history.” Why, then, was Woodrow Wilson removed to a less visible place of honor

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Robert E. Lee’s former place of honor at the University of Texas, Main Campus. Photograph by author.

on the campus? The proffered reason is that the relocation was necessary “to preserve the symmetry of the Main Mall.” One might be forgiven for finding Fenves’s response inadequate, even if one rejects, as I do, the possibility of any satisfying grand theory of monumentalization. If a successful solution is defined as something that leaves contending sides equally dissatisfied, then he might have succeeded. But no good reason is genuinely presented as to why in the twenty-­first century the University of Texas should honor the Virginian Robert E. Lee or preserve Littlefield’s encomia, even if only for a year longer, to those he considered as unequivocal heroes because they fought against what he believed was an overbearing antislavery national government. Perhaps the most interesting article defending statutes of Robert E. Lee published in the immediate aftermath of the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, was that written by George Rasley, an editor of ConservativeHQ.com many of whose family, he notes, fought for the Union during the Civil War. For Rasley, Lee’s greatness consists in his efforts to seek a genuine “reunion” after the brutal divisions of the war.58 One can imagine a counterhistory of American memorials in which that would be the central meaning of honoring Robert E. Lee. But that is simply not the case. He is honored because of the nature of his loyalty to his home state of Virginia, and the Confederate States of America that it chose to join, which took precedence over his loyalty to the United States. It was one thing to reject the offer to command Union troops that would necessarily have fired on his fellow Virginians; it was something altogether different to accept command of the Confederate forces to kill loyal Unionists. That Lee himself might have had reser-

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vations is also secondary to the fact that he surely knew that preservation of chattel slavery was the central cause (in both senses of that word) of the conflagration. Lee was a slaveholder himself; perhaps as much to the point is that he was a dedicated defender of white supremacy after the Civil War. Reconciliation with his white former enemies was one thing; accepting a genuinely reconstructed society that included full recognition of African Americans as fellow citizens was another. As Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville, “The battles over Confed174

erate monuments, in Charlottesville and elsewhere, reflect our difficulty in acknowledging that these memorials are less historical markers than political statements. Many were erected explicitly in support of Jim Crow and implicitly to deny the truth that the Southern cause in the Civil War was built around a defense of slavery. Taking them down is an acknowledgment of what history teaches, not an eradication of the past.”59 Let me be perfectly clear: It is not that Rasley and Dionne are not both making reasonable arguments. Rather, one must choose to accept one and, necessarily, to reject the other. I stand with Dionne. If historical monuments are in effect self-­justifying and should always be preserved, then it should be difficult to displace Davis, whose pre–­War career was certainly as distinguished as that of Lee. It is telling that Rasley focuses his own argument on Lee, who may be a more complex figure. But Davis was a West Point graduate, a representative and senator from Mississippi, as well as Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war. For the year following Fenves’s displacement of Davis and Wilson, any-

one traversing the University of Texas campus could walk by the Littlefield Fountain and its inscription while walking north toward the towering Main Building and passing the statue of Robert E. Lee. To be sure, Davis and Wilson were no longer present, and down the hill to the east one could find a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. But, as already noted, the 2015 decision was not the last word. The inscription went in 2016 and then in August 2017, following Charlottesville, Fenves ordered the literally overnight removal of the remaining Confederate statues.60 He wrote a letter to the university community explaining that the events in Charlottesville had caused him to realize “that Confederate monuments have become symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-­Nazism.” Whatever historical or cultural significance they might have was fatally compromised by the fact that they stood for “the subjugation of African-­Americans.” If one agrees with Fenves, then one should recognize that the argument is even stronger with regard to the monuments that continue to occupy the state capitol grounds. A state that went to the Supreme Court to avoid having to place the Confederate battle flag on its license plates should surely ask why it continues so visibly to endorse the Confederacy on its capitol grounds. But now one moves north, to New Jersey. The Princeton Board of Trustees had to confront in April 2016 the university’s veneration of one of its most distinguished alumni—and former president, governor of New Jersey, and then president of the United States—Woodrow Wilson. One of its residential colleges is named after him; probably more important for most participants in the debate is the Woodrow Wilson School of

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176 Robert E. Lee’s statue is removed from its place of honor at the University of Texas. Used by permission of The Dallas Morning News, Inc. © 2017 Stephen Spillman, photographer.

Public and International Affairs. The very first paragraph of the Princeton report acknowledges what is problematic about Wilson: “Of particular concern are the position he took as Princeton’s president to prevent the enrollment of black students and the policies he instituted as U.S. president that resulted in the re-­segregation of the federal civil service.”61 Even without mentioning his support for The Birth of a Nation movie and his general sympathy for the Southern view of the Civil War, the report conceded that Wilson “held racist views and took or permitted racist actions.” But it emphasized as well other, more admirable, parts of his legacy. The various scholars and biographers consulted by the committee “made it clear that Wilson had a transformative impact on the university, the country, and the world.” He did, after all, receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.

Perhaps it only underscores the remarkable complexity of concrete individuals to realize that it was Wilson, the undoubted racist, who hired Princeton’s first Jewish and Catholic faculty. His appointees to the Supreme Court included James McReynolds, probably the most deeply racist (and anti-­Semitic) justice in our history, and Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jew to ascend to the Court. (It is a measure of McReynolds’s bigotry that he refused to participate in the traditional collective photograph of the Court because he would have to sit next to Brandeis.) And I believe there is good reason to believe that Wilson in at least one important way is the most important political figure of the twentieth century. His insistence during World War I on the rights of “national self-­determination” continues, for both good and ill, to fundamentally shape the world in which we live. Many different ethnic groups, all of them self-­described as oppressed in one way or another, have asserted their political autonomy whatever the wishes of those in power. Leninism is basically dead as a generative force in world politics, but one cannot understand the modern world without recognizing the importance of what can truly be called “Wilsonianism” and its own contribution to a worldwide “politics of identity.” The bottom line is that the trustees chose, albeit nonunanimously, not to rename either Wilson College or the Woodrow Wilson School, even as it agreed that more care should be taken to pre­sent Wilson warts and all. Along these lines, the university chose to remove what its president, Christopher Eisgruber, described as an “unduly celebratory” wall-­sized photograph of Wilson from a university dining hall.62 Both students at and visitors to Princeton will presumably have more opportunities to learn the details of Wilson’s life and thought, including those

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that the university in no way wishes to be viewed as endorsing. The report is relatively lacking in systematic argument. What it does is to establish “a presumption that names adopted by the trustees after full and thoughtful deliberation . . . will remain in place, especially when the original reasons for adopting the names remain valid.” It is worth noting that Princeton had in 1986 indicated its reservations about naming a building after Ivan Boesky after he was convicted of insider trading; in turn, Boesky withdrew his gift of $1.5 million. The committee points to a “considerable consensus that Wil178

son was a transformative and visionary figure in the area of public and international affairs, that he did press for the kinds of living and learning arrangements that are represented today in Princeton’s residential colleges; and that as a strong proponent of education for use, he believed Princeton should prepare its students for lives in the nation’s service.” Perhaps most to the point is the committee’s assertion that “[c]ontextualization is imperative.” Woodrow Wilson “leaves behind a complex legacy with both positive and negative repercussions.” The university should not pretend to a simpler legacy and should acknowledge what is negative. But, at the end of the day, the names remain, as would presumably be the case with a highly visible statue. Yale was also presented with a similar problem of naming. When Yale adopted its college system in 1931, organized around separate architectural units, one of its honorees was John C. Calhoun, by any account a major figure in the politics of the American republic in the first half of the nineteenth century. He attended Yale College for two years, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received his degree in 1804. In relatively short order, he became a senator from South Carolina, secretary of war

under James Monroe, vice president under both John Adams and Andrew Jackson, though he resigned the latter position, and then, once again, senator from South Carolina during the volatile debate that ultimately led to the Compromise of 1850, having earlier been secretary of state under President Tyler. Even by 1822, his achievements led Yale to award him an honorary degree, an interesting example of how universities bestow honor and consequent prestige. But an important part of his enduring significance for American historians (and many others) is that Calhoun was also undoubtedly the most important public political thinker with regard to making the American constitutional order safe for slavery, which he argued was a “positive good” for the presumptively inferior blacks subjected to benevolent control by white masters. He led the forces of “nullification” in 1828 and propounded the basic theory that would ultimately justify secession. Yale, unlike Harvard, long ago chose to honor all alumni who had lost their lives between 1861–1865. Both Unionists and Confederates were treated equally, as it were. Harvard’s Memorial Hall and Memorial Church, like the original Memorial Day holiday within the American ritual calendar, honor only Unionists. In any event, Calhoun’s name was assigned to one of the colleges, apparently without significant objection within the university community. The Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, appointed on August 1, 2016, by Yale President Peter Salovey, noted, however, that the editors of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading African American newspapers at the time, had identified Calhoun as “the Negro’s arch enemy and the premier defender of human slavery.” W. E. B. Du Bois agreed, describing Calhoun as a person “whose names must ever be

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besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon Democracy and Freedom.” Yet, as the committee noted, “[s]uch concerns did not begin to gain traction at Yale until the 1960s, when, very slowly, Yale began admitting African-­American students.” In 1931 there was only “one self-­identified African-­American enrolled” at the university; presumably, the decisionmakers assumed that only such students might be perturbed by the name of the college, while white students would be glad to embrace it or, at worst, simply indifferent. However, Calhoun College later became a 180

repeated focus of controversy. President Kingman Brewster in 1973 appointed an African American to become “master” of the college. The appointee, Charles Davis, a founder of the African American Studies Program at Yale, rebuffed an offer to become master at Trumbull College and “insisted that he would only serve as master of Calhoun.” An African American also served as master from 2005 to 2014. Following the Charleston shootings, more than 1,400 student and recent alumni signed a petition declaring that “[1]ike the official display of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, Calhoun College represents an indifference to centuries of pain and suffering,” “conveys disrespect toward black perspectives,” and constructs “a barrier toward racial inclusiveness.” Again, one notes the assumption that whites might necessarily have a different perspective from their African American classmates. In any event, though, something had to be done, and, as is often the case at universities, the response was the appointment of a distinguished committee headed by Yale Law School legal historian John Fabian Witt.63

Quite tellingly, the committee report refers to the “creative destruction of buildings and names” throughout the development of Yale University. Hewitt Quadrangle, established in 1927 following a bequest from Frederick Hewitt, is now “more commonly known as Beinecke Plaza.” Berkeley College displaced Gibbs Hall. Vanderbilt Square was renamed Silliman College, and so on. So what should be the fate of Calhoun College eighty-­ five years later? Although the committee agreed with their Princeton counterparts that there should be a “presumption” in favor of preserving the status quo, it went on, perhaps inevitably, to emphasize that “[n]o single factor is sufficient, and no single factor is determinative.” Every lawyer knows that presumptions, so long as they are not “conclusive,” can be overridden should there be sufficient reason—what the Supreme Court has called a “compelling interest”—to do so. One must weigh competing factors, and principles, which means to achieve some kind of balance even where the precise weights are unclear. Perhaps understandably, “the presumption against renaming is at its strongest when a building has been named for someone who made major contributions to the University.” This would easily justify keeping everything named for Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. One could make the same argument for Washington and Lee, which honors the defeated Confederate general who became president of what was then simply Washington College. And, where “major contributions” is reduced simply to lots of money, it also justifies the refusal by Duke University to consider whether it should continue to bear the name—or honor with an impressive statue on the Main

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Campus—of one of the major creators of the scourge of tobacco in American life. The committee easily demonstrates, though, that Calhoun made no contribution to the university. After all, what justified Princeton’s refusal to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School was not only his remarkable public career—which Calhoun surely had as well—but also, and just as important in context, his equally remarkable career, albeit mixed, as president of Princeton itself. The committee carefully asks what arguments were made in 1931 for the original naming and what arguments are made 182

today for renaming. The central inquiry, though, is whether there is an unbridgeable tension between the values of contemporary Yale University and the “legacy” attached to John C. Calhoun. “Names communicate historical information, but they often confer honor as well.” In the case of naming colleges or schools, it is difficult to believe they have much to do with conveying “historical information,” save for those relatively few individuals who are stimulated to find out more about the individuals so named. The main point of renaming Washington National Airport the Ronald Reagan National Airport is to engage in what philosophers of language would call a “performative utterance” that Ronald Reagan is a figure worth honoring in such a public space. Perhaps the presumption against changing names should be counterbalanced by the equal presumption that most people have that anyone whose name graces a building at Yale—or in Washington, D.C.—is a person of genuine stature who deserves commemoration. Again, all lawyers know that it is the person challenging any such presumption who has the burden of proof.

The Witt Committee carefully offered only a complex template for decisionmaking; it did not offer its own preferred solution. That was left to President Salovey, who had in April 2015 (prior to the Charleston shootings) decided not to change the name. However, after consultation with yet a second committee,64 he overrode that earlier decision and changed the name from Calhoun College to Hopper College.65 He praised the Witt Committee for establishing “an enduring set of principles that . . . establish a strong presumption against renaming buildings, ensure respect for our past, and enable thoughtful review of any future requests for change.” The key paragraph in Salovey’s statement was as follows: The Witt Committee outlines four principles that should guide any consideration of renaming: (1) whether the namesake’s principal legacy fundamentally conflicts with the university’s mission; (2) whether that principal legacy was contested during the namesake’s lifetime; (3) the reasons the university honored that person; and (4) whether the building so named plays a substantial role in forming community at Yale. In considering these principles, it became clear that Calhoun College pre­sents an exceptionally strong case—perhaps uniquely strong—that allows it to overcome the powerful presumption against renaming articulated in the report. Perhaps the key word is “uniquely.” It is clear that the relevant decisionmakers almost desperately wish to limit any destruction, “creative” or otherwise, of the existing landscape. We complete our tour of the Ivy League with the contempla-

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tion by the Harvard Law School of its official crest, including the sheaves of wheat borrowed, as it were, from the family crest of the Royall family.66 Isaac Royall’s bequest to Harvard in 1781 became the basis of the first endowed professorship at the Harvard Law School in 1815. At least since 2000, however, because of materials uncovered by an historian writing a comprehensive history of the law school, it became clear that “Royall derived his wealth from the labor of enslaved persons on a plantation he owned on the island of Antigua and on farms he owned in Massachusetts.” 184

A student protest in November 2015, against the continued use of the shield as the official symbol of the law school, adopted the slogan “Royall Must Fall.” For whatever reason, objections were apparently not registered to the fact that one of Harvard’s oldest and most distinguished professorships is named after Royall; its current occupant is Janet Halley, important, among other reasons, for her contributions to feminist theory. Her inaugural lecture as the Royall Professor in 2007 was devoted to consideration of the Royall legacy, and it concluded with the naming of many of the enslaved persons who had contributed to the Royall fortune. In any event, then-­Dean Martha Minow appointed a distinguished committee, chaired by legal historian Bruce Mann, to offer its recommendation to the Harvard’s president as to the retention of the shield. Its charge was therefore quite different from that issued to the committees appointed at the University of Texas, Yale, or Princeton. As one would expect, there was a thorough analysis of the actualities of the Royall family, its fortune, and its specific relationship to the history of the Harvard Law School. Equally illu-

minating is a discussion of the shield, designed in 1936 by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, an expert in heraldry “who designed the arms for the university, the College, the eleven graduate schools, and seven houses that were used on the tercentenary banners for the closing ceremonies” of Harvard’s three hundredth anniversary. The law school’s shield was adopted from a bookplate used by Isaac Royall Sr., when living in Antigua, which included three sheaves of wheat. As a matter of fact, it took quite a while for the crest to become widely used by the law school. The manager of Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library apparently “believes that the la Rose shield came into wider use in the mid-­1990s as part of an apparent effort to give Law School publications a more consistent ‘brand,’ part of which was a more liberal use of crimson-­colored covers, as well as use of the shield.” At the very least, then, the shield is certainly not comparable to Woodrow Wilson, John C. Calhoun, or the particular heroes of Colonel Littlefield with regard to the history or identity of their respective universities. And prior to 2000, at the earliest, members of the Harvard Law School community almost literally had no reason to identify sheaves of wheat on the school shield with slavery (or, for that matter, unless they were unusually well-­educated about the history of the shield, with the Royall family). As the committee notes, it is not that the Royall family was unique in its use of the wheat sheaves. “Sheaves of wheat have long been a common element of heraldic devices—signifying such agricultural virtues as abundance, fertility, and a good harvest—and are by no means unique to the Royalls.” The sheaves play the role of what students of rhetoric call a metonymy, in

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which a figure of speech or picture replaces the name of a thing with something else with which the thing is closely associated. However, for many people within the Harvard Law School community at the present time, the sheaves of wheat in effect generate association with the Royall family in the way that a picture of a Good Humor ice cream truck almost necessarily evokes summer. That was surely not the case before and, save for those fully aware with the Harvard controversy, of most tourists looking at the shield today. This is, of course, totally unlike the feelings likely to be generated by walking by Calhoun College or ob186

serving a statue of Jefferson Davis in a place of public honor. What ultimately led to the committee’s decision to recommend that the shield be changed was the altogether plausible argument that the Royall family itself was not sufficiently deserving even of indirect public honor. As the committee rather bluntly noted, “we are asking whether an institution in the twenty-­first century should be represented by a man of the eighteenth century whose only legacy was his money.” Perhaps it is worth asking if the amount of money is relevant. After all, one might make the same observation about James B. Duke or Leland Stanford (who named “his” university after his son). And even Andrew Carnegie’s legacy as a philanthropist is clouded for many by his indirect involvement in the Homestead Massacre of 1892, in which nine strikers against Carnegie Steel, among other producers, were killed by a de facto private military hired by corporate officials dedicated to breaking the strike (and the union), which they did. Ironically or not, the head of the Carnegie Steel Corporation at the time was Henry Clay Frick, whose name now graces the Frick Mansion in New York, which houses his personal collection of fine art.

Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that uniquely among the various university committees and their reports, the Harvard report (which was accepted by the president) drew a formal dissent from another distinguished historian, Annette Gordon-­ Reed.67 She had deservedly won multiple prizes for her book The Hemings Family of Monticello, which examined in an extraordinarily nuanced manner the tangled relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the enslaved Sally Hemings who was almost certainly the mother of several of Jefferson’s children. For Gordon-­Reed, the sheaves memorialize not only the Royall family, which may well not deserve the honor, but also, and important, the enslaved persons themselves whose toil can be viewed as a contribution to the building of the Harvard Law School. “Maintaining the current shield, and tying it to a historically sound interpretive narrative about it,” she writes, “would be the most honest and forthright way to ensure that the true story of our origins, and connection to the people whom we should see as our progenitors (the enslaved people at Royall’s plantations, not Isaac Royall) is not lost.” Think of Royall Professor Janet Halley reading off the names of Royall’s slaves. Perhaps one should place Professor Gordon-­Reed’s comment within the context of Nietzsche’s own probing analysis of how we engage in the “use and abuse” of history in forging our own national narratives and, moreover, his notion of the “transvaluation of values.” Even if the sheaves were initially meant as a metonymy for the Royall family, they can as easily be a stand-­ in for the actual persons who were the basis of the Royall family fortune. Neither association is self-­evident. Professor Gordon-­ Reed is obviously correct that “the shield has sent no singular public message.” It is, as she argues, totally different from, say,

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the Confederate battle flag. Though some few people might see it only as a symbol for a particular view of American federalism and the ultimate right of a “sovereign state” to withdraw from the Union upon the belief that the deal struck in the Constitution was not being adhered to, for the overwhelming number of Americans it is metonymy of a secessionist movement provoked overwhelmingly by the desire to maintain racialized chattel slavery and, thereafter, has been “a symbol of opposition to racial equality.” No one today can look at the swastika and not identify it with 188

Nazism. That is simply not the case with “an image of wheat.” Nor is the shield like a statue of a presumably eminent person; it would be entirely different if it contained a representation of Royall himself (as with, say, Andrew Jackson’s picture on the twenty-­dollar bill). Gordon-­Reed readily distinguished, on the same basis, the opposition to the shield from that at Oriel College, Oxford, with regard to the statue of Cecil Rhodes. No one need honor—or even think of—Isaac Royall. Instead, one can teach the shield as being “primarily about the enslaved men, woman [sic], and children whose forced labor enriched people like the Royalls and helped fuel the wealth of Western nations.” Indeed, anyone now visiting the grounds of the Harvard Law School will see, in the plaza a brand new monument, an almost demure piece of granite containing a plaque with the following message: “IN HONOR OF THE ENSLAVED WHOSE LABOR CREATED WEALTH THAT MADE POSSIBLE THE FOUNDING OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL,” a bit below appears “MAY WE PURSUE THE HIGHEST IDEALS OF LAW AND JUSTICE IN THEIR MEMORY.” The monument scarcely draws attention to itself, and it

Harvard Law School honors the enslaved who contributed to its founding. Photograph by author.

would be interesting to know how many passersby actually notice it and then read the plaque. It may also be worth noting that the word “enslaved” is used to make the point that those being honored were full human beings who, because of a wicked legal system, were enslaved; the use of the word “slave,” it is now argued, serves to suggest that that term captures the “essence,” as it were, of those who were enslaved, which is clearly false. There is no aspect of “monumentalization” that is necessarily free from raising important questions and controversies. (Assuming we wish to continue 190

honoring Columbus, for example, should a statue today describe him as having “discovered America”?)

Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, and the Burden of History

I conclude by leaving the groves of academe, with all of their strengths and weaknesses, and turning to what I personally con‑ sider one of the truly great speeches of my lifetime, delivered on May 19, 2017, by then-mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu by way of explaining his decision to support the removal of a number of prominent statues, including that of Robert E. Lee, from the public space of the city. Readers might well listen to the speech, perhaps while reading its complete text.68 Rejecting the altogether false description of homogeneity set out by Publius in Federalist 2 and reflected in at least some threads of contemporary American politics, including those underlying the white nationalism of the Charlottesville protesters, Landrieu instead is almost Whitmanian in his embrace of the multitudes of “diverse people” who constitute the “soul of our beloved City”

of New Orleans. He begins with Native Americans—the “Choctaw, Houma Nation, and the Chitimacha,” moving on to the French, “the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians,” as well as a potpourri of European groups including not only “the empires of France and Spain,” but also, “the Germans . . . , Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.” New Orleans, like the United States itself, contains multitudes of diverse people, all of whom must be made to feel true members of the larger society. But one should not overlook other aspects of New Orleans’s unique history. It “was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture.” Lynching was, to be sure, a general American problem, but 540 persons were lynched in Louisiana alone. Nor can one forget that Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case enshrining “separate but equal” as part of our constitutional law, arose in Louisiana. Sixty-­five years later, when Freedom Riders took buses throughout the South, they “were beaten to a bloody pulp” in New Orleans. Landrieu immediately pre­sents an awful question: Why are there “no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame . . . all of its happening on the soil of New Orleans”? Perhaps the most pointed comment is wondering why “those self-­appointed defenders of history and the monuments” remain “eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.” Landrieu, a Democrat, pointedly

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quotes George W. Bush’s speech at the dedication in 2016 of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington. “A great nation,” said Bush, “does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” If that test is taken seriously, one can wonder if the United States is a truly “great nation.” There are obviously hordes of historians who have devoted their lives to make the realities of the American past more transparent. But these historians can scarcely look around public spaces, including in many cases those of the universities in which they teach, and, like Christopher Wren in 192

London, see tangible evidence of their work. Why, then, did New Orleans choose to honor a number of Confederate “heroes,” the most important of whom was Robert E. Lee? The answer, Landrieu says, is that the statues were “not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement—which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause . . .” to “rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.” Lee and his fellow honorees, Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, and the collective members of the White League memorialized in the statue considered at length in the original edition, were “not patriots.” How could they be, inasmuch as they fought to secede from the United States or, in the case of the White Leaguers, to overthrow the lawfully established Reconstruction government? Indeed, it is this last monument that puts in harsh relief the attempt to valorize Robert E. Lee as the apostle of reunion and reconciliation. The great question posed by the Civil War and its aftermath was the place of African Americans as part of America. As David Blight demonstrated in his great book Race and Reunion, reconciliation turned out to be a decidedly white

affair. “Charity to all and malice toward none,” as promised by Lincoln in his Second Inaugural, as a practical matter described the relations that would develop between whites in both the North and South. Woodrow Wilson as our first post–­War Southern president gladly presided in 1913 over a joint fiftieth reunion of those who had fought one another at Gettysburg in 1863. As one might imagine, given Wilson’s own views, the idea of the “new birth of freedom” enunciated by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address and its implications for African Americans were left unarticulated. For Wilson, reconciliation meant renewed strengthening of white hegemony. Landrieu warns us against considering the statues as “just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” And Landrieu left no doubt that “these statues were part” of a regime of “terrorism” as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn. Their purpose was “to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.” “To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.” As much to the point, one simply cannot, “in the second decade of the 21st century, ask African Americans—or anyone else—to drive by property that they own” as full citizens of New Orleans. It is obvious that I am overwhelmed by the eloquence and insight of Mayor Landrieu’s speech. But it, too, illustrates a basic problem—and tension—of life in contemporary America. As

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he moves to his conclusion, he reiterates “a self-­evident truth that out of many we are one. . . . [W]e are one nation, not two.” Perhaps he illustrates the difficulty of escaping from the lure of Federalist 2 or the national motto inscribed on the dollar bill. Either we already are a homogeneous people, which is false, or it is our collective aspiration to become a singular people united around “our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But, of course, the reality of contemporary American culture, is that we are not really “one,” and there is, 194

alas, no good reason to believe that we are likely to rally around a single collective vision of our national identity, including the values that are purportedly instantiated within that identity. Landrieu spoke of the absence of any apt memorialization of those literally thousands of victims of lynchings in America. That absence was alleviated with the opening on April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama, of a remarkable monument, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which, among other things, includes the specific names of every known person who was lynched. An overview in the New York Times was appropriately subtitled “The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.”69 Another appreciation in The Times noted that when it rained, the water coming off the monument became the color of blood.70 It will, of course, be interesting to see over the years exactly who chooses to visit the memorial and what lessons are taken from it. Will descendants of the victimizers join in some kind of pilgrimage made by those who identify with the victims and begin the dialogue so eloquently envisioned by Landrieu? We might all declare a commitment to the vague aspiration declared in the Preamble of the Constitution to “establish jus-

tice,” but we clearly do not agree on what that entails. As Upton spells out at length in What Can and Can’t Be Said, there has been repeated conflict over the depiction particularly of Martin Luther King Jr. in the various monuments across the country and in Washington, D.C. Is he the “drum major” for a thoroughly abstract notion of “justice,” or, instead, a militant and radical proponent of civil disobedience on behalf of change, including the rejection of structural racism and American militarism, whose time had come? At the very least, one might suggest that the answer to such questions, and the resulting image in a public monument, might depend on the balance of power among relevant contending groups. So long as whites in effect have a veto on the message attached to King, one can be confident that his radicalism will be underplayed. On the other hand, in at least some localities within the United States, one might expect a far more radical depiction of King, not to mention the possibility that one might see statues of Malcolm X or of Stokely Carmichael calling for “Black Power.” The attempt to dissolve the Union in 1861, and the consequent war, were evidence of the fragile state of the country created first by seceding from the British Empire in 1776 and then creating a new national government in 1787. The arguments for secession were not stupid, even as we should all agree that the particular cause triggering the later secession—the maintenance of chattel slavery—was thoroughly evil. There are certainly days—particularly in the aftermath of Charlottesville— when one can wonder if our Union will (or even should) hold together. Approximately thirty percent of polled Californians in 2017 professed to find secession attractive. And Texas boys attending “Boys State,” sponsored by the American Legion, prob-

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ably shocked their patrons by enthusiastically endorsing in June 2017 the withdrawal of Texas from the United States. Saying that “boys will be boys” seems to be too blithe a response. In any event, there is certainly good reason to believe that our future, whether together or apart, will feature ever more conflicts about whom we will find worthy of collective public honor— and that, for better or worse, the United States will not be exceptional with regard to the political difficulty presented by such conflicts. 196

Notes

I have already expressed my gratitude to Miriam Angress and the Duke University Press in my preface to this new edition. With regard to this extensive afterword, I want to add my deepest thanks to several people who read it or listened to me pre­sent earlier versions. As to the latter, my colleagues at the University of Texas Law School, especially Karen Engle, offered valuable responses at a faculty colloquium. I am also grateful to John Fabian Witt and Bruce Mann for their careful readings of an earlier version and reassurances as to my presentation of their respective reports at Yale and Harvard concerning controversies treated below. My deepest thanks, however, go to my wife Cynthia, who persuaded me that the earlier version, though interesting as a set of free associations, desperately needed reorganization, not to mention the elimination of certain writing tics. She was completely correct! 1 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 74. 2 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/sports/tennis/margaret-­court -­gay-­marriage-­australia.html?_  r=0. Billy Jean King weighed in on this controversy in January 2018, noting that her views had changed from her initial support in 2003, when the arena was given Court’s name, to the present. She described Court’s comments about gays and lesbians as “really [going] deep in my heart and soul. I was fine until lately

when she said so many derogatory things about my community; I’m a gay woman.” See Ben Rothenberg, “Bille Jean King Says Margaret Court Arena’s Name Should Change,” available at https://www.nytimes .com/2018/01/12/sports/tennis/billie-­jean-­king-­margaret-­court-­arena .html. One doubts that King really means to suggest that one must be a member of the gay or lesbian community in order to be perturbed by continuing to honor Court. 3 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/world/australia/margaret -­court-­same-­sex-­marriage.html. 4 See Sanford Levinson, “Political Change and the ‘Creative Destruction’ of Public Space,” in Franceso Francioni and Martin Scheinin, Cultural Human Rights (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), p. 341–351. 5 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 6 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/can-­democracy-­sur vive-­tribalism.html. 7 See Sanford Levinson, An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century 13 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 8 Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, p. 12, available at http://www1.nyc.gov/site/monuments/report/com mission-­report.page. 9 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 9. 10 Dell Upton, What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 11 See Alan Blinder, “What It May Take to Strike a Segregationist’s Name From a Georgia Bridge: Hundreds of Girl Scouts,” New York Times, February 4, 2018, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/us /savannah-­talmadge-­bridge-­girl-­scouts.html. 12 Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans 576 U.S. (2015). 13 See David Goodman, “Boos and Rain Greet de Blasio at Columbus Day Parade,” New York Times, October 9, 2017, available at https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/nyregion/mayor-­de-­blasio-­columbus -­parade.html?_  r=0.

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14 Sabrina Tavernise, “When History’s Losers Write the Story,” New York Times, September 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/sun day-­review/civil-­war-­statues-­losers.html?_  r=0. 15 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1905)(dissenting). 16 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/08/15 /rebel-­base-­names-­statues-­disgrace-­u-­s-­military-­facilities-­and-­con gress/?utm _ term=.7fb5afc6175d. 17 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-­rally-­protest -­statue.html?smprod=nytcore-­iphone&smid=nytcore-­iphone-­share. 18 http://www.slate.com/articles/news _ and _ politics/history/2017/06 /how_ charlottesville _ s _ confederate _ statues _ helped _ decimate _ the

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_ city_ s _ historically.html. 19 http://deadline.com/2017/08/donald-­trump-­charlottesville-­confeder ate-­statues-­twitter-­1202150976/. 20 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/confederate-­statue-­ken tucky.html; https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/08/15/us/ap-­us -­confederate-­statues.html. 21 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/south-­slavery-­confed erate-­states.html. 22 Julie Bosman, “From City Squares to the Quiet of Cemeteries: War Over Confederate Monuments Shifts to a New Battleground,” New York Times, September 22, 2017, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21 /us/confederate-­monuments-­cemeteries.html?_  r=0. 23 https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/10/15/defense-­confeder ate-­dead/syt3A11FXkAaOk2ZTkR8NL/story.html. 24 https://www.memphisflyer.com/NewsBlog/archives/2017/05/22 /mayor-­memphis-­situation-­different-­from-­new-­orleans-­on-­confeder ate-­statues. 25 Daniel Connolly and Vivian Wang, “Confederate Statues in Memphis Are Removed After City Council Vote,” available at https://www.ny times.com/2017/12/20/us/statue-­memphis-­removed.html; Alex Hor‑ ton, “Tennessee Lawmakers Punish Memphis for Removing Statue of Confederate and KKK Leader,” available at https://www.washington post.com/news/post-­nation/wp/2018/04/18/tennessee-­lawmakers

-­p unish-­m emphis-­f or-­r emoving-­s tatue-­o f-­c onfederate-­a nd-­k kk -­leader/?noredirect=on&utm  _ term=.fa1b0f9ee37a 26 http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2017/05/gov _  kay _ ivey_ signs _ bill _ protec.html. 27 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-­md-­ci-­frederick -­statues-­20170318-­story.html. 28 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-­politics/hogan-­calls-­for -­removing-­the-­statue-­of-­roger-­b-­taney-­calling-­it-­the-­right-­thing-­to -­do/2017/08/15/3a84dec0–81eb-­11e7-­ab27–1a21a8e006ab_ story.html ?hpid=hp _ hp-­top-­t able-­m ain  _ m dstatue-­345pm%3Ahomepage%2 Fstory&utm _ term=.1d470cc0d3dc. 29 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/protesters-­in-­durham-­top ple-­a-­confederate-­monument.html?action=click&contentCollection =U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype= article. 30 https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-­d esk/is-­america-­h eaded -­for-­a-­new-­kind-­of-­civil-­war/amp. 31 https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-­d esk/is-­america-­h eaded -­for-­a-­new-­kind-­of-­civil-­war/amp. 32 http://thehill.com/homenews/state-­watch/335283-­alabama-­moves -­to-­protect-­confederate-­monuments. 33 https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/13 /mean-­remove-­memorials-­white-­supremacists-­includes-­lincoln. 34 Stephanie Saul, “Old Miss Edges Out of Its Confederate Shaadow, Gingerly,” New York Times, August 9, 2017, available at https://www.nytimes .com/2017/08/09/us/ole-­miss-­confederacy.html. 35 https://web.archive.org/web/20120320165033/http://www.pbs.org/wg bh/americanexperience/features/biography/flood-­vardaman/. 36 See generally Sanford Levinson, “Thomas Ruffin and the Politics of Public Honor: Political Change and the ‘Creative Destruction’ of Public Space,” 87 University of North Carolina Law Review 673 (2009). 37 See Paul Finkelman, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 38 See Rebecca Tan and Sarah Fortinsky, “Penn Will Remove ‘Wynn Com-

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mons’ Name and Rescind Honorary Degrees from Steve Wynn and Bill Cosby,” Daily Pennsylvanian, February 1, 2018, available at http://www .thedp.com/article/2018/02/wynn-­cosby-­steve-­gutmann-­david-­cohen -­upenn-­ivy-­philadelphia-­honorary-­degree-­sexual-­assault-­misconduct. 39 Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida, and Jonathan Butcher, Manhattan Institute, What’s in a Name? The Decline in the Civic Missino of School Names, avail‑ able at https://www.manhattan-­institute.org/html/whats-­name-­decli ne-­civic-­mission-­school-­names-­5832.html. 40 http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/u-­va-­building-­named-­for -­former-­slave-­stonemason/article  _ 1f9f04d6–82cb-­5b96-­a0c7-­b215e576 165a.html.

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41 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/19/uva-­gibbons-­house_ n _ 7615314.html. 42 See “Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Committee on Slavery and Justice,” available at https://www.brown.edu/Research/Sl avery_   Justice/documents/SlaveryAndJustice.pdf. 43 Jennifer Schuessler, “Princeton Digs Deep Into Its Fraught Racial History,” New York Times, November 6, 2017, available at https://www.nyti mes.com/2017/11/06/arts/princeton-­digs-­deep-­into-­its-­fraught-­racial -­history.html?_  r=0. 44 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12128151 /Cecil-­Rhodes-­statue-­to-­remain-­at-­Oxford-­University-­after-­alumni-­th reatens-­to-­withdraw-­millions.html 45 J. C. Hallman, “Monumental Error: Will New York City Finally Tear Down a Statue?” Harper’s, November 2017, p. 27. 46 Mayoral Advisory Commission 4. 47 Mayoral Advisory Commission 6. 48 Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, p. 108. 49 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 10. 50 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 20. 51 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 22. 52 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 28. 53 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 29. 54 Mayoral Advisory Commission, p. 30 (emphasis added).

55 http://diversity.utexas.edu/statues/wp-­content/uploads/2016/01/Task -­Force-­Report-­FINAL-­08  _ 09 _ 15.pdf. 56 For a full description of this episode, see Alfred L. Brophy, “The Law and Morality of Building Renaming,” 52 South Texas Law Review 37 (2010). Brophy supports the University of Texas’s renaming of Simkins Hall, but he is generally opposed to renamings. As he puts it, “removal of a name threatens our memory of the past,” (p. 66). There is an all-­or-­nothing aspect to renamings that is not present with regard to monuments, which can always be moved away from distinctive (or sacred) public space to the more analytic confines of a museum. 57 See Lauren McGaighy, “UT-­Austin Quietly Removes Inscription Praising Confederacy,” Dallas News, available at https://www.dallasnews.com /news/education/2016/08/26/ut-­austin-­quietly-­removes-­inscription -­praising-­confederate-­dead-­report-­says. 58 http://www.conservativehq.com/node/26241. 59 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-­charlottesville-­end -­the-­denial-­about-­trump/2017/08/13/05adbc6e-­804a-­11e7-­b359–15a361 7c767b_ story.html?utm _ term=.b6c075910a2e. 60 See Jonah Engel Bromwich, “University of Texas at Austin Removes Confederate Statues in Overnight Operation,” New York Times, August 21, 2017, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/us/texas-­aus tin-­confederate-­statues.html. 61 Report of the Trustee Committee on Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy at Prince­ton, available at https://www.princeton.edu/vpsec/trustees/Wi lson-­Committee-­Report-­Final.pdf. 62 Mary Hui and Susan Svrluga, “Princeton to Remove Overly Celebratory Mural of Woodrow Wilson,” Washington Post, April 27, 2016, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-­point/wp/2016/04/27 /princeton-­t o-­remove-­o verly-­c elebratory-­m ural-­of-­w oodrow-­w il son/?utm _ term=.98ad7539d298. 63 http://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/CEPR  _ FINAL _ 12 –2–16.pdf. 64 http://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Presidential%20Advi sory%20Group%20-­%20Calhoun%2001  _ 13 _ 17.pdf.

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65 http://president.yale.edu/speeches-­writings/statements/decision-­na me-­calhoun-­college. 66 https://hls.harvard.edu/content/uploads/2016/03/Shield-­Committee -­Report.pdf. 67 https://today.law.harvard.edu/wp-­content/uploads/2016/03/Shield _Committee-­Different   _View.pdf. A student on the committee, Annie Rittgers, joined in the dissent. 68 Landrieu’s speech can be found at https://www.washingtonpost.com /video/national/full-speech-mitch-landrieu-addresses-removal -of-confederate-statues/2017/05/31/cbc3b3a2-4618-11e7-8de1-cec59a 9bf4b1_video.html?utm_term=.959161ac7bd2 and the text at https://

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www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/mitch-landrieus-speech-tran script.html. In May 2018, now-­former mayor Landrieu published his more extended reflections, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History (New York: Viking Press, 2018). 69 Campbell Robertson, A Lynching Memorial Is Opening: The Country Has Never Seen Anyting Like It, available at https://www.nytimes.com /2018/04/25/us/lynching-­memorial-­alabama.html Robertson describes the monument as follows: And it demands a reckoning with one of the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-­long campaign of racist terror. At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings. 70 Jesse Wegman, “At This Memorial, the Monument Bleeds,” New York Times, Aprl 25, 2018, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25 /opinion/alabama-­lynching-­memorial.html.

Acknowledgments

P

erhaps the most unalloyed pleasure of publishing a book is the opportunity to acknowledge publicly those who have contributed to one’s intellectual and personal growth. My primary acknowledgments go to the friends to whom

I have dedicated this book. Each of these extraordinarily accomplished people has also displayed a wonderful capacity for friendship, reflected, among many other ways, in the willingness to join in countless conversations about the issues raised in this book. Although each person deserves at least a full paragraph, I will select only one for specific mention, for this book would not have gotten under way had Robert Post not organized, for the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, an examination of contemporary problems of censorship. Indeed, parts of this book appeared first in two articles (now much revised) prepared for symposia linked with this project. “They Whisper: Reflections on Flags, Monuments, and State Holidays, and the Construction of Social Meaning in a Multicultural Society” was initially written for a conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in December 1994, on “The Constitution and Survivor Stories” and published in

70 Chicago-­Kent Law Review 1079 (1995). The panel at which it was presented included as its other members Akhil Reed Amar, one of the dedicatees, and a former student of his at the Yale Law School, James Forman, whose articles on flying Confederate flags were discussed at length here. I am grateful to Wendy Brown and Robert Meister for both inviting me to participate in that conference and allowing me to address the possibility that descendants of the Confederacy might be viewed as “survivors” with their own distinctive stories. (It was also a special pleasure to make the acquaintance at that conference of Wendy’s 204

and Judith Butler’s newborn son, Isaac Daniel Butler-­Brown.) A second paper, “The Tutelary State, ‘Censorship,’ ‘Silencing,’ and the ‘Practices of Cultural Regulation,’” has recently appeared in Robert Post, ed., Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (1998). Excerpts from this essay appeared as “Silencing the Past: Public Moments and the Tutelary State” in 16 Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 6–11 (Summer/Fall 1996). Parts of the coda to this book also appeared in Allocating Honor and Acting Honorably: Some Reflections Provoked by the Cardozo Conference on Slavery, 17 Cardozo Law Review 1969 (1996). Like all academics, I benefit greatly from the opportunity to present ideas to faculty colloquia. I am grateful for the colloquia at the law schools at the University of Minnesota, Loyola University in New Orleans, Western New England College, Boston College, the University of Chicago, Chicago-­Kent, and the University of Utah. I also benefited from presentations to the legal history colloquium at Ohio State University, political theory colloquia at the universities of Vermont and Wisconsin, and a law and humanities seminar at Stanford University.

Many people provided invaluable help throughout the project (and I know as well that I would inevitably forget someone who deserves to be thanked), but I am happy to mention New Orleansians Jim Viator at Loyola and Judith Kelleher Schafer at Tulane, who were particularly helpful in providing information about the Liberty Monument, and John Paul Jones, at the University of Richmond School of Law, who fed me endless material about the debate over the Arthur Ashe Monument in Richmond. Professor Jones was also kind enough to take the photographs of Monument Avenue that form an essential part of this book. (All other photos are mine.) I owe my knowledge of the history of the Millennium Monument in Budapest, which has become the opening subject of this book, to Kim Lane Scheppele, who sent me the fine chapter by András Gero about the monument. In addition, invaluable research assistance was provided by two students, Travis Vickery and Samy Khalil, and by Marlyn Robinson, a truly expert (and always helpful) navigator of the information highway, of the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law. Finally, I thank Rosa Eberly, at the University of Texas, who told me of Robert Lowell’s wonderful poem, “For the Union Dead,” which has become an indispensable part of this book. Indeed, until dissuaded by friends, I was prepared to title this book “Fishbones in the Throat,” so powerful do I find Lowell’s metaphor. Marc Galanter took me to a Madison, Wisconsin, cemetery to see a special section set aside for the graves honoring Confederate soldiers who had died in Madison while prisoners of war. It wonderfully exemplifies the issues that are at the heart of this book. I must also mention the editors at the Duke University Press, particularly Miriam Angress. This work was originally to be part

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of a collection of essays on multiculturalism. When it became a distinctly disproportionate part of that collection, Miriam enthusiastically responded to my scared suggestion that it be published independently. I was extremely delighted to be offered the chance to publish as part of the Public Planet series, especially as I admire greatly the work of Jane Kramer, who wrote the first book in the series, on public sculpture, and, more recently, has offered insightful reportage on the controversy over how Berlin should memorialize the Holocaust. Two readers for dup offered helpful suggestions that I hope they will see reflected in 206

this final version. As always, I remain grateful for the continued encouragement and support received from my colleagues at the University of Texas School of Law. I must also thank the Boston University Law School, where, as a visitor during spring 1997, I wrote the first draft of this book. Finally, as always, I am happy to acknowledge my continuing gratitude to my wife, Cynthia, and to my daughters, Meira and Rachel, for tolerating my various enthusiasms, which meant, on more than one occasion, being taken out of their way to look at yet another monument. Rachel deserves special thanks for trudging with me through the snow in Boston Common to look at monuments.

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