The modern-day American Left isn’t as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. President Trump was mocked for suggesting that if we tear down statues of Lee then activists would demand the removal of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. The current debate over taking down Confederate monuments gives me a … Because they honor individuals — and because many observers just see a statue of some guy without knowing the details — the monuments are not as clearly inappropriate as, say, statehouses flying a traitorous, pro-slavery flag. The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.” White women were instrumental in raising funds to build these Confederate monuments. Between the start of the Civil War in 1861 and the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896,17 only 101 Confederate monuments … Controversial statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville, Virginia. You can adjust your cookie choices in those tools at any time. Nevertheless, a common objection to these statues today is that because they occupy public spaces, they serve to venerate their subjects, who were of course racists and fought to preserve slavery. Monuments to the failed Confederacy were mostly erected many decades after the US Civil War. A writer at Vice News called for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. Confederate monuments on public land make black people feel unequal in the eyes of the state, that they are second-class citizens. Those in favor of keeping the statues say they reflect history and are a part of the city. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. ... My strongest argument against keeping these monuments in public would be that we should follow what Germany did after World War 2. That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight—and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off. But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Florida. NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. Rather, Confederate monuments were intended “to celebrate … the re-subjugation of the formerly enslaved and their progeny into the economic peonage and racial caste system of Jim Crow.” Follow him on, Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Right Where They Are, the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. That would be fine advice if it were true that this is really just about local authorities making democratic decisions about statues. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation? GAZETTE: What about the slippery slope argument? Here’s where.. On Tuesday night, protesters in Richmond tore down the third Confederate statue in recent weeks. Arguments for why Confederate statues should not be removed include pointing out the dark sides of other celebrated American heroes, like Washington and Jefferson, as well as the politicization of the statues when there are more important problems. Kevin Williamson at NRO urges conservatives to do nothing. ... have called for Confederate monuments to be removed from ... applied this argument… But if we know the history, why can’t we see them in a different light? 1. Those in favor of keeping … Monuments to the failed Confederacy were mostly erected many decades after the US Civil War. You can use the matrix format we learned about in last week’s assignment or some other outline format.3. White supremacists, neo-Nazis and others have protested the removal of Confederate monuments. Utilizing Confederate monuments in my classes offered students a window into the history of the war, but more importantly, it introduced them to … A crowd gathers at the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis after it was pulled down off of its pedestal on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA., on June 10, 2020. Others, advocating for the monuments’ removal, call them an offensive reminder of … See details. He said, “the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. In an op-ed published an op-ed in The Atlantic titled “Take the Confederate Names Off Our Army Bases,” General David Petraeus wrote, “As I have watched Confederate monuments being removed by state and local governments, and sometimes by the forceful will of the American people, the fact that 10 U.S. Army installations are named for Confederate officers has weighed on me.” If you click “Agree and Continue” below, you acknowledge that your cookie choices in those tools will be respected and that you otherwise agree to the use of cookies on NPR’s sites. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. But the Confederate general Robert E. Lee himself never wanted such monuments built. A monument to fallen Confederate soldiers in downtown Gainesville was brought down on August 14, and carried away by workers hired by … There's no statues of Hitler in plain sight. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation’s troubled past.