Sensitivity and Reasonableness

I’ve been watching with interest the national debate about the ideal fate of statues in prominent places that serve to glorify as heroes the Confederate military and political leaders who fought both for the right of states to secede from the union and for their citizenry to own slaves.

Clearly, it was the Charlottesville march in August—which was formally organized in the first place to protest that city’s decision to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee—that gave the whole effort to deal with these statues one way or the other its feel of urgency. And, although the eventual fate of that specific statue remains unresolved, the fracas in Virginia prompted decisions in many municipalities and in several states, including New York, to remove similar kinds of statues and memorials. And further decisions are pending in many other jurisdictions, primarily but not at all exclusively in the South.  Nor does this national disinclination to fill our public places with monuments to the memory of individuals deemed unworthy of the honor just have to do with Confederate generals or officers in the Confederate government any longer—there are movements afoot now to remove statutes honoring Christopher Columbus, venerated in my childhood as the “discoverer” of the Americas but now recalled in many circles chiefly as an imperialist and colonialist who brought chiefly misery to the native peoples he “discovered” in the course of his travels.  Just this morning, in fact, I became aware of the effort underway to remove a bust currently on display on Fifth Avenue that honors Dr. J. Marion Sims, the physician revered by many as the father of modern gynecology and a brilliant innovator in women’s health issues but condemned by others for his use of female slaves as the subjects in his experiments. (For more about the Sims controversy, click here to see a very interesting essay published in the Journal of Medical Ethics on the topic.) Still, it is with respect to personalities connected with the Confederate States of America that the issue is at its most volatile, and by far.

Writing as a Jewish American, it’s interesting—and more than a bit validating—to see people caring about an issue like this at all.  

In our community, after all, we have always been expected not to care when we walk past churches that glorify the name of Martin Luther, a rabid anti-Semite whose solution to the Jewish problem, as he saw it, was to advocate that synagogues be burnt to the ground, that Jewish prayerbooks be incinerated, that rabbis be forbidden to preach in public, that Jewish property and wealth be seized, that Jewish homes be razed, and, ultimately, that the Jews of Germany be murdered if they decline to convert to Christianity. So how do I feel when I walk past a church that untroubledly self-defines as “Lutheran” as though that were just a reference to some abstruse version of Protestant theology promulgated by the church’s founder centuries ago? About the same way, I’m guessing, the Jews of Kiev feel walking daily past the great monument in St. Sofia Square to the memory of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, remembered by Jewish Ukrainians as the leader of the seventeenth-century uprising that resulted in the destruction of about 300 Jewish communities and the massacre of something like 100,000 Jewish souls—a calamity so shocking in its day that contemporary authors likened the devastation to the destruction of Jerusalem in ancient times.  Or how English Jews feel when they walk past the statue in Burgh-le-Marsh honoring the memory of King Edward I, who expelled the Jews of England from their homes and their homeland in 1290—ancient history to most Britons, perhaps, but just yesterday for students of Jewish history. Or when Jews living in or visiting Spain walk past statues, like the one in Cordoba, honoring the memory of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—whose horrific decree of expulsion brought such unimaginable misery to uncountable Spanish Jews in 1492. Or how the Jews of Rivne would respond, had they only not all been murdered, when walking past the bust of Simon Petliura erected in their own home town that blithely overlooks his role in the 1919 pogroms that took the lives of somewhere between 30 and 50 thousand Jews in Ukraine…including in Rivne itself. Or how the Jews of Vinnytsia, also in Ukraine, would have responded—had they too not all been killed by the Nazis in 1942—when a new statue honoring Petliura was unveiled in that town just last Monday.

You see where I’m going with this. We’ve gotten used to walking past these horrors—not to mention walking past Ford dealerships without recalling Henry Ford’s deeply-felt anti-Semitism or past the mural honoring Charles Lindbergh that featured prominently at the San Diego International Airport without pausing to be offended the man’s unapologetic anti-Semitism…or, for that matter, past the bust of Ezra Pound, an open Nazi sympathizer and vocal anti-Semite, in—of all places—the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C  All of this has become so natural for us, that it sounds—even to me—slightly childish even to bring any of this up for discussion. Do we really expect the Lutheran Church to change its name merely because it is named after a rabid Jew-hater? Clearly, we do not. (Speaking honestly and taking into account the Lutheran Church’s unapologetic anti-Israelism, why would we?) But maybe this would be a good moment to rethink that kind of timid acquiescence to the celebration of wicked individuals merely because they also did some praiseworthy things.

I’ve seen the point made in a dozen essays in these last week that there are no Hitler memorials in Germany today for two simple reasons: because such monuments would be illegal under German law (click here for a very interesting Politico essay by Joshua Zeitz comparing the way Germans deal with the heritage of Nazism and the way our Southern states do or could deal with the heritage of the Confederacy), but also because a huge and decisive percentage of today’s Germans are interested in profoundly distancing themselves from their Nazi past, not in embracing it. That is surely true, and for both those reasons, but the model doesn’t quite fit the controversy regarding the Confederate monuments in our country, and for the simple reason that the American relationship to the Civil War is, I believe, infinitely more complex than the contemporary German attitude towards the Second World War.

It is widely believed today that the Civil War was “about” slavery more than any other issue. But I can remember clearly being taught in eleventh grade that slavery itself was just a side issue and that the real issue being adjudicated on the nation’s battlefields was whether the nation was going to be a union of independent states able to come and go at will or a unified country willing to fight for its national integrity and from which no state had the right to secede. That view has obviously been seriously modified over the years, but I think I understand where it was coming from: we were taught to look past the slavery issue precisely so that we would find the war—and thus war itself—truly tragic. (I was, after all, learning about the Civil War precisely as the Vietnam War was unfolding day by day on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and night by night on its television screens. And that, as people my age will recall, dominated everything…most definitely including the way history was taught to us in high school.) Nor did the point itself feel all that exaggerated: wasn’t our own country, after all, founded on the self-arrogated right claimed by the thirteen colonies to secede from Britain merely because the citizenry felt that it had become necessary “for one people to dissolve the political bands which…connected them to another and to assume…the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”?  It’s a challenging question to ponder, and so much so that the long-standing debate whether slave-owning Virginians like Washington and Jefferson would have supported or opposed the right of the southern states to secede never seems to end too conclusively. Clearly, the goal—the educational goal, I mean—of the history curriculum in high school was to make us feel more uncertain about the argument that the Civil War was justified than proud that the “right” side won.

Today, of course, it is commonplace to understand that the whole issue of secession, and thus the Civil War itself, was ultimately about the right to own slaves. (Click here for a very reasonable exposition of that argument prepared by the National Parks Service.) But people my age, taught that the Civil War was really about states’ rights, tend to think ambivalently about personalities like Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. It seems to me that we need to move past that ambivalence as we consider the fate of these statues. The ones mourning the horrific loss of life—and there were almost 300,000 dead on the Confederate side, almost all of them young men—should be maintained as parallel memorials to those dedicated to the dead on the Union side. But those celebrating individuals who led the Confederacy to fight for the right to dismember the union and thus to preserve their right to own slaves should be moved to museums where they can be viewed contemplatively in a context that recalls the past clearly without honoring the individuals themselves. In the end, the debate about these statues will serve a very positive role if it challenges us to renew our commitment to racial equality, to the eradication of race-based discrimination, and to a celebration of national unity. And also to a clearer understanding of what led to the bloodiest of all American conflicts, one that ultimately cost the lives of almost a million of our co-citizens, and how it could possibly have been averted had cooler heads prevailed.