"Defacing" Monuments?

“The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.” Lew Wallace

 

Some protestors against police brutality have turned their attention to public monuments honoring Confederate generals and other controversial historical figures.  In Birmingham, Alabama, and Jacksonville, Florida, statues of slaveowners have come down, and in Ashville, North Carolina, pressure builds to remove a huge sculpture of Civil War governor Zebulon Baird Vance.  Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, have demanded that statues of General Robert E. Lee be moved to less prominent locations. Blaming vandals, Fox News has claimed that monuments in the nation’s capital have been “defaced” with graffiti.  Overseas, protestors have railed against a statue honoring imperialist King Leopold II, responsible for atrocities in the Congo that resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths.  In Bristol, England a sculpture commemorating slave trader Edward Colston was toppled. The pro-Trump Western Journal claimed that Londoners had defaced monuments honoring Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, in the case of the British Prime Minister writing that he was a racist and adorning America’s “Great Emancipator” with disrespectful signs. In the past when statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Communist leaders in Eastern Europe were destroyed, there was jubilation, not hand-wringing, by conservative news outlets.

 

As a historian, I believe public monuments to be an important factor in studying what values a society hold in esteem. While I hate to see any destroyed, I favor removing controversial ones from public squares or statehouse property.  I do not regard the edifices as particularly sacred. For example, at the entrance to Marquette Park in Gary is a statue of French Jesuit missionary Pere Jacques Marquette, who in the seventeenth century may have stopped in Northwest Indiana during one of his explorations of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River. At various times the statue has been painted black and adorned with Christmas apparel and other decorations.  My view - no harm done.  Last year on Columbus Day, protestors in Providence, Rhode Island, splattered the fifteenth-century explorer and enslaver of Native Americans with blood-red paint.  Again, no harm done.

 

Dean Bottorff wrote about the statue of Confederate general John Hunt Morgan astride a horse:

Morgan was famous for riding a mare, but sculptor Pompeo Coppini thought a stallion was more appropriate. Coppini said, “No hero should bestride a mare!” Therefore, Coppini added the necessary testicles. Undergraduates from nearby University of Kentucky have been known to paint the testicles of the horse in the school colors of blue and white ever since. So, no matter how you feel about Civil War generals, you gotta love a mare with balls.

 

The two statues representing each state located in the Capitol Rotunda are especially telling.  Mississippi still is represented by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Georgia by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens (not Martin Luther King) and Louisiana by demagogic Populist Huey Long.  Hawaii’s bronzes are of Father Damien, who ministered to lepers, and King Kamehameha, who united the islands but at much human cost.  Indiana is ably represented by General Lew Wallace (author of “The Robe”) and Civil war Governor Oliver P. Morton.  States have replaced some statues with others.  Until recently none had chosen to honor an African American; now educator Mary McLeod Bethune represents Florida and civil rights activist Daisy Bates Arkansas.

 

Trump is accusing protestors of being anti-police, failing to distinguish between those striving to serve and protect and those abusing their power.  Demonstrators calling for the de-funding of police forces are, in my opinion, playing into the president’s hands since no responsible public official or citizen would countenance abolishing law enforcement.  What must cease is a police culture of tolerating “bad cops.” During Barack Obama’s presidency significant progress was made in proper training of officers and rooting out so-called rogue cops, something grievously lacking since 2017. In my lifetime I have virtually never been hassled by police, but I am not so naïve to think that people of color have been similarly treated.

 

In Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” I came across Bishop Hugh Latimer, whom I wrote a gad school paper about that was later published by the Journal of Church and State.  In Oxford, England for an oral history conference I came up the Martyrs’ Monument, erected during the 1840s to honor Latimer, Bishop Thomas Ridley, and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, all burned at the stake during the reign of “Bloody” Queen Mary. Writing about the reversal of fortunes that resulted in Sir Thomas More’s execution, Mantel wrote: “Death is a japester (jester); call him and he will not come.  He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.”