If asked, I'd have said these were quaint products of their time, a bit over-the-top. What I've been missing is what makes the monuments so harmful. I've heard accusations that removing a monument is trying to erase history, but monuments can also cover up history.
While both monuments purport to celebrate freedom and friendship for the races in America, both perpetuate lies that white people in the Americas have told themselves since the time of Columbus:
Lie #1: Black people are built strong, their bodies suitable to hard labor in hot climates; andAll slave owners had to believe these lies to feel good about themselves. The Spanish Queen accepted these lies as good reasons to initiate the African slave trade to her Spanish colonies in the 1500s; confederate states' articles of secession echoed the same "fact" that only black people could do necessary labor in hot summer months. To justify chattel slavery of Christian brothers and sisters, contrary to St. Paul's admonition, English colonial legislatures simply described blacks as less than full human beings.
Lie #2: Black people are like children, dependent on whites to survive the complexities of white society
In both of these statues we see both lies. The men of color sport physiques that are, well, chiseled. Yet they appear like wide-eyed children; the white men, fully-clothed and elevated, are the grown-ups in control. White people see these and feel good about the way history turned out, how our white leaders were so generous to people who could not have helped themselves.
But the man depicted at Lincoln's feet freed himself. The model Archer "Aleck" Alexander, who defiantly agitated for freedom years before the Civil War, aided Union troops during operations, and escaped himself [see photo]. (See reporting by DeNeen L. Brown in the Washington Post.). Black people funded the monument, but were not consulted on its execution. At the time of its unveiling, Frederick Douglass deplored that the black man is depicted "nude [and] couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal" (Letter published in the National Republican four days after Douglass delivered a sober assessment of Lincoln at the statue's dedication, 1876. See the article about tracking down the letter at Atlas Obscura.com.)
The Roosevelt monument's creator James Earle Fraser called the men of color "guides" for Roosevelt in his work (Andrea Kay Scott, New Yorker, 1 July 2020). But equally buff Teddy, high up on the horse, is the one looking ahead, gesturing onward, while the native American and the black man cleave to him with wide-eyed timorous looks. They carry Roosevelt's firearms. While they wear next-to-nothing, Teddy is resplendant in the uniform of his paramilitary group "the Rough Riders" that he organized to win Cuba from the Spanish in the 1898 war. Fraser intended to show Roosevelt's "friendliness to all races" (Scott) . But the composition of the statue embodies "The White Man's Burden," a poem that Rudyard Kipling actually wrote for young President Roosevelt to help urge Americans to get involved in the 1898 war. Kipling's poem urges young white men to go out into the world to "serve" people of color. For Kipling, non-whites are "half devil and half child," incapable of taking care of themselves through their "Sloth and Folly." (See the whole poem at the Kipling Society
I've heard discussions on NPR with black men and women who told how the Emancipation monument was like a punch in the stomach. On Here and Now two men told identical stories from childhood of being bewildered to see a man "who looked like me" naked and in such a submissive pose. Removing an image that gives such offense may be what our President would belittle as "political correctness," but I bet his mother might have called that "common courtesy."
More than hard feelings, these monumental lies motivate violence. A childlike man with the strength of a beast is someone to be feared, someone likely to steal or sponge off of welfare, someone to be controlled by police or prison guards. (See my blog post about law enforcement and racial fear 07/2016, and "The Privilege is Mine," an account of many ways that whiteness has been my super-power 12/2017)
The lies show up in the videos that have brought Americans into the streets these past several weeks. Three white men with a truck and a gun respond to an unarmed jogger as if he's threatening them. A white woman in Central Park, incensed to have a black man be the grown-up who points out to her the leash law, fakes terror in a 911 call, confident that authorities will believe her performance. Four cops team up to strangle the breath out of a man already handcuffed.
The lie about being "like children" has pervaded public policy for a century. Even during this pandemic, unemployment benefits and eviction moratoria have been limited for the express reason that the people who receive handouts won't return to the workforce without a push. At the inception of unemployment benefits, jobs identified with people of color were excluded from benefits.We add work requirements and restrict health benefits, on the theory that "they" will rely on government and vote Democratic if we don't prod "them" to work. Reflecting that assumption, the editors of National Review routinely called the Federal government "the Plantation" when I gave up my decades-long subscription.
I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.Confederate monuments do intentionally erase history, every one a repudiation of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. When Federal troops gave up on enforcing blacks' civil rights after 1875, whites repressed blacks with new laws, systematic discrimination, and pervasive intimidation. Those statues said to blacks and whites alike, "Forget about Reconstruction and civil rights; the good ol' days of white supremacy are back." Placed in town squares and on courthouse steps, they were always intended to be stone walls to blacks. Whether they be torn down, or surrounded by context, let them no longer stand unopposed.
But Norris makes us uncomfortably aware how Washington, champion of independence, kept 300 human beings in abject dependence on him. First, Norris draws our attention to names of some who lived and served most closely to George and Martha: Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge, Paris, Hercules, Joe, Richmond, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee. Did loving parents name these people at birth, or did enslavers tag them? Either way, looking at the names, you've got to sense individual character and personal potential that slavery cutailed.
I've been to Mt. Vernon and toured the spaces where its black population lived and worked. I've read lengthy biographies. But Norris's point is well-taken, that slavery was not just incidental to Washington and his peers, but essential. Their eloquent spokesman Patrick Henry riled up his fellow Virginians for war by casting the British as enslavers: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" They knew that life enslaved wasn't worth living, yet suppressed that knowledge every single day of their lives. I remember reading a note from Henry to a friend, about the irony of his most famous line. Henry wrote that he would free his slaves, if only it weren't so "inconvenient" to do so.
While Washington projected himself as benevolent lord to these people, we can see the shadow of the lies he told himself. When those serving him in Philadelphia came close to earning their freedom under a Pennsylvania law, George and Martha went to extraordinary lengths to swap them for others back at Mt. Vernon. Wanting to believe that their laborers prospered under their care, George and Martha reacted with relentless fury to recapture one who got away, Martha's personal servant Ona Judge. Yes, Washington saved up to free and provide property for those he enslaved, but not those jointly owned by his wife, and not until his death. The creepiest detail in Norris's article is a photograph of Washington's false teeth: Not wood, as schoolchildren are told, but human teeth extracted from nine people of his own plantation. A note in his ledger shows how he got them cheap off his own people, paying them a fraction of what the dentist usually paid to get teeth. The payment must have eased Washington's conscience more than it compensated their pain.
Should statues of Washington come down? The Washington Archives webpage about Washington's teeth acknowledges the probable truth of Norris's story, while reminding us how Washington to set the course for civilian, elected, law-abiding government in the new United States. The hope of this nation and of the world abides in those values: I want Washington's best side to be known. But I'd also like to know more about Austin, Moll, Giles, Ona Judge....
[I reached a different conclusion in an essay "Disarming Confederate Memorials" (08/2017). It begins with the anecdote of a mother, rancorously divorced, who chose to display mementos of her married life rather than deny her son reminders of his own past.]
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