Trustees at UNC in May decided to rename the school’s Sanders Hall, named after William Sanders, a Confederate officer and Ku Klux Klan leader.
Well…that’s sure to make everyone feel better about things.
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Here’s a little more about what industrialist and UNC trustee Julian Carr (for whom Carrboro is named) said at the statue’s unveiling on June 2, 1913, celebrating the Civil War’s attempt to protect the “Anglo-Saxon race”: “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomatox[sic], I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because on the streets of this quiet village, she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterward slept with a double-barrel shot gun under my head.”
Here’s the original speech. It’s a doozy! http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ead/id/121638/rec/104
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The civil war is our history, no one is trying to deny that. The idea that we need statues and flags and all of the other paraphernalia to satisfy the defenders of that treason is ridiculous. They lost, they were wrong and America has to recognize that in full or live in this suspended state of denial.
The problem with treason is, it is a label that lasts a lifetime and never gets any better. Diving into supporting treason without considering the consequences is a big step that should be fully understood beforehand not something that is realized after the fact.
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Julian Shakespeare Carr, if you please.
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My belief is that vandalism solves nothing.
What sane person opposes such a belief?
If you’re talking about the Saunders statue and who or what it memorializes, I have no belief—just the fact that it is a memorial to UNC students who lost their lives in the Civil War.
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Trustees at UNC in May decided to rename the school’s Saunders Hall, named after William Saunders, a Confederate officer and Ku Klux Klan leader.
Man, that’s fucked-up! Carolina Hall seems innocuous enough.
The Russians and Iraqis seemed pretty happy to be able to vandalize, by tearing down and destroying, various statues of Stalin and Saddam respectively.
But we’re not talking about them, are we?
Your comment is a logical fallacy—misdirection—and serves no valid purpose.
You claimed that sane people should never support vandalism, I pointed to situations where sane people have no problem with vandalism. It is entirely relevant. It just requires recognizing that there are sane people who feel that traitors who engaged in armed rebellion against the democratically elected government of the United States resulting in the deaths of several hundred thousand United States service members all in the name of protecting the rights of the landed class to own human beings are as unworthy of memorials dedicated to them as Stalin or Saddam.
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They were conscripts. Evasion carried the death penalty. Rarely applied, but that was the penalty.
They’re just fancy tombstones. They’re not magic talismans or totems. They are not occupied by evil spirits. They have no meaning beyond that we choose to ascribe to them and tearing them all down imbues them with meaning and power rather than destroying it.
One white male in five in the South of military age (which was defined very broadly indeed) died in that war, shitting themselves to death with cholera, succumbing to malnutrition, shot or blown to bits. One in five. That leaves a lasting mark of grief that survives the survivors. Go to France and ask people if the similar proportion of France’s men who died in World War I still leave a mark.
The idea that every single memorial that people trying to process grief on that scale put up–however wrong the cause, however wrong-headed the rationalizations, however rose colored the glasses through which the horrors of war were viewed by people who knew nothing of war than that someone they loved died–has to be leveled is Stalinesque. And blowing up these statutes like we’re the fucking Taliban going after “blasphemous” idols or ancient despots trying to erase history by effacing monuments and burning books doesn’t end the false mythology we oppose, just perpetuates that false history, keeps it alive and submerged where it becomes something still more malignant because it tells people we fear that story and it thus has power.
Where does this end? Do we dynamite the 351 foot Jefferson Davis memorial in Kentucky and bulldoze the grounds of the park? Do we remove Lee’s bones from his crypt, grind them to dust, throw them to the air and then blow up his tomb in Danville, Virginia? Do we tear down the Confederate White House and sow the ruins with salt? What do you accomplish by doing that? And then, having done it, do we blow up the White House, the Capitol and every other building in Washington D.C. built with slave labor, then destroy the Jefferson Memorial and Washington Monument because Jefferson and Washington were slave owners?
What’s the goal here? Are we trying to utterly erase the memory that there was every such a thing as Confederate States of America? Are we out to teach people that grief for a person killed fighting for a bad cause is different from grief for one that was right? And then, once we do that, are we going to give a sigh of satisfaction that, having imposed a goodthinkful understanding of “history” on the nation by mass vandalism, we need not contemplate the North’s complicity in slavery because it left no monuments to itself behind?
What we are striving against is a revisionist propagandizing distortion of history that makes it impossible for anyone to have a mature discussion and understanding of our past. I simply reject the idea that right response to a revisionist propagandized reframing of history that makes it impossible for anyone to have a mature discussion about the past is to replace it with a different propagandized distortion of history that makes it impossible for anyone to have a mature discussion of the past.
Rather, I believe we have to start getting people to understand that the imposition of that revisionist propagandizing distortion of history is itself part of our history, that does not have to be part who we are now. We need to get people to understand that they are themselves responsible for not letting dead people who did bad things, and their grieving apologists, control the way they think. We can’t make people do that by tearing down every last memorial to the Confederate dead or its leaders.
And that’s the difference between flying a Confederate battle flag, or any of the CSA’s flags, over a state capital’s grounds and tearing down old war memorials. Continuing to fly the flag, year after year, is letting dead people tell you how and what to think, the very thing we have to stop.
But the fancy tombstones aren’t symbols of living movements unless we choose to make them so by treating them as such. And if we do that, all we do is give new life to the mythology we’re trying to destroy, submerging it ever deeper into the grievance-based politics that are, and always have been, the real problem in the South, where it becomes something still more poisonous.
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Agreed. And I’m watching all this with sadness. What lots of folks fail to realize too is that a lot of monuments were built and placed decades after the war and were paid for by the federal government.
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When it is on public ground, as I suspect a state university is, then an explicit memorial like this is inappropriate. It can be sold off or removed to a more appropriate setting in a state museum. If you want to preserve history, the best way may not be keeping these memorials on public ground as if the past you think they represent is the only past.
Move them off public land and into a public setting (museum grounds) that is more appropriate. There is nothing wrong with preserving symbols of familial grief. But that grief was not restricted to once all-white institutions. And when these symbols stand alone with no contextual setting–or one that is false–none of us are served.
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Beautifully—and brilliantly—stated.
You said what I’ve tried to say, and much better than I could hope to do.
I’d like this post a million times if I could.
My better half has a deeper understanding of the war than I do based on his many readings over the years of its history including its origin. I’ve listened to his explanations of the death and destruction that followed, and while I have not read the same books, I have paid attention to what is available on media including the history lesson that was the Ken Burns series on PBS. The only conclusion is that it left a profound mark on our country, and young men from both sides were killed and wounded for a Lost Cause with the strong likelihood that more Northerners lost their lives and were wounded. Nor can we overlook that a president was assassinated for his part in bringing the war to an end and ending slavery…
You raise some good points here and in the rest of your post about how these monuments are meant to help the survivors and descendents of those who died fighting for the Confederacy deal with that loss and grief and the need to try and see the matter from their point of view. Yet lets turn that around, because they aren’t the only ones who see these monuments, they are also seen by the descendents of those that the South took up arms to keep enslaved. You make an interesting point of asking us to look at things from the perspective of those honored in these statues grieving survivors, but what of the perspective of the descendents of those whose ancestors the individuals honored/remembered in the monuments took up arms to keep in chains? How does it make them feel to go to their state capitol and see monuments dedicated to men who committed treason against the democratically elected government of this country in order to keep their forefathers as chattel? How welcome can they feel when they go to a public university and see a statue honoring students who died fighting in a war, even if they were conscripts, that was founded in denying their ancestors status as human beings?
From that perspective it becomes easier to see how/why some would want to see these statues torn down/defaced/destroyed and personally I find it rather difficult to judge them harshly for that desire. Still I think you make a good point about not wanting to whitewash, for lack of a better term, our history with regards to the aftermath of the war. Yet it is possible to preserve the history these statues/monuments represent without allowing them to remain in positions of honor on the grounds of state capitols and state universities that require us to ignore the truth of what cause they served. They can be moved to museums where they can be put in their proper context as a response by the grieving relatives/descendents of those who lost loved ones in the service of an ignoble cause.
Edit: Further I would argue that leaving them where they are in positions of honor on state grounds just servers to help feed into the mythologized, romanticized, and idealized depiction of the Lost Cause as something other than an ignoble cause.
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Vandalism is never the right way to go?
You mean like dumping unwanted tea into the harbor?
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Way to make a false analogy, Cupcake.
It’s not false at all. It was vandalism.
The inherent wrongness of a war even when obvious to many from the outset, is not a reason to refuse to honor those who fought the war.
Are there never to be Iraq war memorials?
To honor Rumsfeld,Cheney etc would be offensive in this context, but the soldiers who fought valiantly and the families left behind should expect some recognition.
And yet, just 2 months ago they decided to name a building after a KKK leader. Lots of accoladia there.