The government of Virginia just removed the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, erected in Richmond during the Jim Crow era. Contrary to today’s ruling intelligentsia and government, their precursors were not perfect.
But let’s be serious: Jim Crow governments were certainly despicable. So was the federal government, which long promoted policies that favored discrimination. So would be a pure woke government who would simply discriminate against new hated groups, discrimination being the central business of the unconstrained Leviathan. (See also my post “Jim Crow: More Racist than the Railroads,” Econlog, December 18, 2020.)
This being said, one should not applaud governments removing monuments that happen to go against current ideological fads. The removal of a statue, even by the same government who set it up or maintained it, looks a bit too much like burning books, which the Enlightenment and classical liberalism fought. (On this general point, see “Left-wing Activists Are Using Old Tactics in a Mew Assault on Liberalism,” in last week’s issue of The Economist.)
Battles over statues erected or maintained by governments remind us that most of what the state does is not the production of public goods in the standard economic sense—even if we could perhaps consider the general remembrance of history as a public good.
History is what it has been and we cannot change it. We should endeavor to learn from it, not to hide it as if the current rulers were finally the noble savages that past utopians dreamed of. If the maintenance (or, for that matter, the removal) of a historical statue costs too much, perhaps the government could simply auction it off. Woke billionaires and foundations who want to hide it could also bid, thereby learning something about free markets.
READER COMMENTS
Scott Sumner
Sep 10 2021 at 1:15pm
I would distinguish between statues of flawed people who are honored for doing good things (Jefferson, etc.) and statues of flawed people who are honored for doing bad things (Lee, etc.). Even in the latter case, I’m not keen on destroying statues, but perhaps they could be moved to a more obscure location, rather than a place of prominence. Conservatives sometimes treat this as harmless Southern nostalgia, but some of these were set up by the KKK in the early 1900s to intimidate blacks.
There’s also the libertarian argument that statues should be erected and maintained by private parties.
Daniel
Sep 10 2021 at 1:26pm
+1!
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 10 2021 at 2:18pm
Scott: The last part of my last paragraph was a (perhaps clumsy) attempt to answer in advance the argument in your last paragraph.
Warren Platts
Sep 10 2021 at 3:09pm
The Lee monument was erected by private parties, namely Lee Monument Commission that raised $52,000 in private donations. The monument was originally set up on private land in the middle of a tobacco field. It was then annexed by the City of Richmond under a contract whereby the City promised to take care of it in perpetuity. Somehow the statue evidently became state property, and now the court has ruled that the original covenants are unenforceable because the statue is against the public interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_Monument_(Richmond%2C_Virginia)#cite_note-27
I’m going to remember that one the next time I’m involved in a contract and come to believe it is no longer in my personal interest!
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2021 at 1:06am
Warren: In response to your first comment, note that this is why I wrote “erected and maintained.”
Warren Platts
Sep 11 2021 at 11:41am
Yes, I know. But my larger point was that when a government enters a contract with the private party whereby the private party agrees to donate the property in exchange for the government to maintain said property in perpetuity, it appears governments are not bound by contracts in the same way private parties are. That’s more than a little hypocritical imho. ymmv.
Warren Platts
Sep 10 2021 at 3:14pm
That’s only because the South happened to lose the war. If the Americans had lost the Revolutionary War — and the only reason they didn’t was the pure luck the British had their hands full in a lot of places and the French Fleet were able to come to the rescue at just the right time — then we’d all be part of Canada, and Washington & Jefferson and their ilk would now be regarded as treasonous enslavers.
Craig
Sep 10 2021 at 3:25pm
At the end of the day, I can understand why African-Americans aren’t too keen on honoring the Confederacy. Personally I would suggest that the answer is to put up more statues to Frederick Douglass, or in New Orleans, maybe put up a statue to Banks who took the city for the Union?
After the war, General Sherman passed on and one of his pall bearers was Joe Johnston. Its reported that Johnston wound up catching pneumonia in the bad weather and died from doing it! Further there were post-war galvanized Yankees who fought for the US, one example is Joe Wheeler who is reported to have extolled his troops to charge Spanish positions in Cuba by telling his soldiers to charge the ‘Yankees’! Apparently forgetting that the Civil War had been over. Indeed Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee was also in Cuba and of course Lighthorse Harry fought in the Revolution. Lee and Grant were also in Mexico and Grant remembered Lee, but Lee didn’t remember Grant because Lee was more senior at the time.
Ultimately Lee was offered command of the Army of the Potomac by Lincoln and he turned down the offer because he felt that he needed to ‘side with his state’ — perhaps in hindsight he would’ve sabotaged the Union effort in command?
” but some of these were set up by the KKK in the early 1900s to intimidate blacks.”
Likely true particularly if the statute is of Nathan Bedford Forrest, leader of the original incarnation of the KKK and perpetrator of the massacre at Ft. Pillow. The Civil War generation littered the landscape with monuments and those monuments were built well after the conflict primarily because they cost a fair amount of money and it took time to raise the money. Virtually every town existing in 1865 has a Civil War monument of some sort. Maybe some war surplus as well. Growing up in Pequannock, NJ I found it interesting there was no such monument until I found it in Boonton. A monument erected post war for the veterans from ‘Old Pequannock’ was erected well after the war complete with a brass plate emblazoned with the GAR and a number representing the draft quota. By the time the monument was erected Pequannock had splintered into various communities.
The NY memorial at Point Park I think does it best. The peace memorial features Billy Yank and Johnny Reb atop a pillar carrying one banner and of course that banner is the US flag.
“perhaps they could be moved to a more obscure location”
Indeed, not a bad suggestion. Perhaps move it to Appomatox and juxtapose it with Grant
“I would distinguish between statues of flawed people who are honored for doing good things (Jefferson, etc.) and statues of flawed people who are honored for doing bad things (Lee, etc.). ”
Great distinction that the left doesn’t recognize. This isn’t stopping at the Confederacy, Lincoln statues are coming down in Boston, Roosevelt is gone from the Museum of Natural History. There’s no limit here. Jackson on the 20 and Stone Mountain are next and beyond that, make no mistake about it, they’re coming for Washington, Jefferson and Madison too.
Warren Platts
Sep 10 2021 at 4:19pm
Good point, Craig! General Lee was in a no-win situation. He’d be a “traitor” no matter what he did. I think I also would have a very hard time following orders to invade and destroy my family, home community and home state. However, I do not believe Lee would have sabotaged a Union effort he was in charge of. He was too honorable for that.
I’ll add that while the CSA is reviled because of the enslavement there, few people remember that the Union had 5 or 6 enslaver states as well. There were the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. (The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to them.) Then after West Virginia seceded from Virginia, they were granted an exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation and the enslavers there were allowed to keep their enslaved people. Even New Jersey had a few grandfathered in. Slavery was legal in D.C. at the start of the war, but they freed the enslaved persons there in the middle of the war. The last state to free the enslaved was not Texas — it was Delaware a full six months after Juneteenth.
Craig
Sep 10 2021 at 4:38pm
George Thomas, a Union general from VA, was reviled as a traitor to the South of course. Indeed, Lee’s personal interest actually was with the Union, his estate in Arlington, now Arlington National Cemetery, was seized and obviously would have been better for Lee and his family had he simply remained with the Union.
“Even New Jersey had a few grandfathered in.”
An aside on slavery in NJ. NJ had enacted gradual emancipation relativly early in the 19th century. Part of the reason they did that was to prevent slave owners from emancipating elderly unfit slaves and by the Civil War I think there were single digits left and that was actually more about binding the slave owner to the slave in a sense. The last slave in Pequannock took care of her slave owner’s children and when she was old and the children were older, they took care of their former nanny in old age and she’d spend some time with one of the slave owner’s children and then she’d go to another. But I guess legally she was technically still a slave.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2021 at 11:21am
Craig: Re: the important point in your last paragraph. Adam Smith and Voltaire too.
robc
Sep 10 2021 at 4:53pm
I doubt he could have done any worse than most of the Generals put in charge.
Jose Pablo
Sep 10 2021 at 6:26pm
” [..] people who are honored for doing good things (Jefferson, etc.) and statues of flawed people who are honored for doing bad things”
This reminds me of Huemer’s “In Praise of Passivity”:
“There is no generally accepted theory–either among ordinary people or among experts–for any of the central evaluative categories of moral or political philosophy. There is no generally accepted theory of the good, the right, justice, authority, human rights, equality, or liberty”
The removal of the statue seems to vindicate that it was, indeed, the case in 1890. Which should make us aware that this is, very likely, also the case today.
BC
Sep 11 2021 at 1:15am
“statues of flawed people who are honored for doing bad things (Lee, etc.)….some of these were set up by the KKK in the early 1900s to intimidate blacks.”
I learned Civil War history in a public school in the North (Michigan, 1970s and 80s). My recollection was that Lee was generally portrayed favorably, an honorable soldier who chose to fight for the Confederacy mainly because his home state was Virginia. Wikipedia, which of course is the internet’s arbiter of truth, characterizes Lee as “an exceptional officer” in the US Army (pre-Civil War, of course), distinguishing himself during the Mexican-American War and having served as Superintendent of West Point. Wikipedia also describes Lee’s views on slavery as “paradoxical”. Lee viewed slavery as evil, assisted some slaves to freedom in Liberia, provided for their emancipation in his will, but opposed immediate general emancipation. Is this generally favorable view of Lee historically inaccurate?
Does the objection to Lee’s statues arise from objections about Lee himself (“doing bad things”) or the original motivations of the statues’ constructions (“set up by the KKK in the early 1900s to intimidate blacks”)? If the latter, would that mean that statues of Lee that were motivated by good-faith historical analysis would be ok? Apparently, Lee was one of first 29 individuals selected for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans on the Bronx campus of NYU (now part of Bronx Community College). However, the honorable Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered Lee’s bust removed in 2017. New York, of course, was a Union state.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2021 at 11:17am
BC: You wrote of Lee that he was:
This is a risky statement which, at the very least, requires caveats. It makes me think of Kim Yong-un, whom Trump pretended to justify by saying that “he loves his country very much.” Loving one’s country or one’s home state is not an argument. I am pretty sure Lieutenant William Calley did too.
Warren Platts
Sep 11 2021 at 12:45pm
Pierre, to include General Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant William Calley in the same sentence as if they were remotely comparable is very unfair. Lee never committed any war crimes in his career, unlike, say, General Sherman of the Union. Indeed, Lee instructed his soldiers to pay for any items they requisitioned from local populations. Sherman ordered his soldiers to just take whatever they wanted and to burn whatever was leftover.
BC
Sep 11 2021 at 2:55pm
To be clear, I’m just trying relay, to the best of my recollection, how Lee was portrayed in the curriculum of a Northern government-run school in the post-Civil Rights 1980s. I am no history expert myself. I am just wondering whether new historical information about Lee has been revealed in the ensuing decades or whether it’s primarily the political environment that has changed.
Daniel
Sep 10 2021 at 1:25pm
“This being said, one should not applaud governments removing monuments that happen to go against current ideological fads.”
That’s definitely a principle of conservative government. Removing statues because the individual is “problematic” in one dimension while highly admirable on others does seem like a fad. But removing statues because the individual is slightly admirable in one dimension while highly condemnable on others seems like…appropriate management of the public square, the sort of management that leads to erecting statues in the first place. That makes it a judgment call – one that should not be taken lightly or through facile reasoning – but a judgment call nonetheless.
“The removal of a statue, even by the same government who set it up or maintained it, looks a bit too much like burning books.”
These are quite different! Whereas in one case, the government is deciding whom *it* wants to venerate, in the other, the government is making decisions about how private citizens conduct *their* lives.
“If the maintenance (or, for that matter, the removal) of a historical statue costs too much, perhaps the government could simply auction it off.”
Back to the judgment call – I agree that cost/benefit analysis could support decision-making here. If a government decides to erect and maintain statues up to the point where their stream of marginal costs of doing so equals their stream of marginal benefits of doing so, but the stream of benefits has eroded substantially (say, Jim Crow governments really valued the statue but other governments since and forthcoming do not), then it makes sense for the government to replace or remove the statue to get the cost/benefit balancing in line. Auctioning off the statue is probably preferable to destroying it, but, depending on the government’s calculus, perhaps not preferable to rehousing them in museums or “contextualized” spaces (or throwing them in storage until deciding their fate). As you believe “we should endeavor to learn from it, not to hide it,” maybe auctioning is not the best way to achieve your goals, and maybe state governments aren’t doing SO badly in this department after all.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2021 at 11:06am
Daniel: You wrote:
Banning books and removing statues is different but not that different. In both cases, the government decides what“it” wants its subjects to believe. Remember that the government’s main (if not only) business is to take sides for some and against others, that is, to discriminate among its subjects. That is still true if “it” represents a majority; or, at least, a precise or acrobatic argument has to be made to the contrary.
Daniel
Sep 11 2021 at 2:12pm
Although such a level of abstraction is interesting and possibly unimpeachable theoretically, practically it allows conflating anything and everything and is more a compelling tagline than appropriate framework. Banning books and Social Security are not that different. Unemployment insurance and executions are not that different. After all, they both involve discriminating among subjects.
Henri Hein
Sep 10 2021 at 1:49pm
I have mixed feelings about it. In general, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with taking down statues of people that are no longer palatable to the population. I’m far more concerned with books than statues. History can be preserved better in the former than the latter. I do like your idea of the auction.
I’d rather they take down statues of past leaders than erect new ones of the current leaders.
Jose Pablo
Sep 10 2021 at 3:38pm
Books are being cancelled too. As part of the same “current”.
I will not erect any statue of any politician anywhere anytime. Period.
After all, all of them, no exceptions, represent and unpalatable tendency to coerce and to limiting individual freedom.
That makes a compelling case to bring all their statues down. I am very much on favor of that.
I am in favor of people being allow to write any kind of book, anywhere, anytime. Even politicians. So maybe yes, you are right.
Craig
Sep 10 2021 at 3:44pm
I particularly enjoy history and I do agree actually that its not so much about preservation. The reason why I became a Civil War buff is because its ‘history I could get to’ and yes, I actually do incorporate it into my travels, I had even made a, as it turned out, unpopular app cross referencing the NRHP.
Between FL and TN is Atlanta and I enjoy visiting Atlanta. Last time through my colleague and I visited the location of the Battle of Ezra. Now a mostly forogotten footnote in the Atlanta campaign, the surrounding community has grown into the battlefield. The Westview Cemetary, now mostly a civilian cemetary, does have the Westview Abbey and they do have Confederate memorials there, all of which have been vandalized, and of course Union soldiers are interred at the Lincoln Cemetery nearby.
“I’d rather they take down statues of past leaders than erect new ones of the current leaders.”
Well we can take this discussion over to the Hudson River too. Sitting in Jersey City at the time, I have an interesting picture of a piece of the Tappan Zee truss floating down the Hudson River either going to be recycled or maybe dropped in the ocean to form an artificial reef, not sure what they were doing. Of course the replacement bridge was named ‘Mario Cuomo’ but now Andrew is on the outs so they want to rename that too. We should probably leave that alone too and in the future make some rule that somebody needs to be gone at least 30 years before things like that happen.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Sep 11 2021 at 12:21pm
<sarcasm>Maybe in a few decades time we will have a monument to the Unnamed Mujahid, have bitter fights about whether to remove a statue of Osama bin Laden from a public park and debate the propriety of teaching the Lost Cause of Jihad schools.</sarcasm>
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 11 2021 at 3:01pm
Juan Manuel: The more things are “public” (that is, decided or run by government), the more discontent and confrontation–that is, the exact opposite of what collectivists like to believe. At least starting from where we are.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Sep 14 2021 at 12:29am
Our present is, at the same time, the product of our past and the history of our future.
That’s the reason why people don’t want Confederate monuments or monuments to Cecil Rhodes or Egerton Ryerson. These monuments celebrate a history that produced a present situation that is odious and in urgent need of profound change. These people, that history were never deserving and of commemoration, but deserve to be recognized for what they were and repudiated for what they have saddled us with.
These issues cannot be resolved by simply letting the kind of people who admire such a person as Robert E. Lee well enough alone. The damage and the suffering that such people have caused and still cause (in public and in private) is simply too great to ignore and they are an obstacle to change. They don’t deserve their statues, they don’t deserve to be heard on these matters, and they don’t even deserve to be bribed into acquiescence.
Monte
Sep 14 2021 at 12:12pm
Hello Juan.
Before embarrassing myself with an impassioned response to your comments, could you please expand on specifically what you mean by the following?:
These monuments celebrate a history that produced a present situation that is odious and in urgent need of profound change.
These people, that history were never deserving and of commemoration, but deserve to be recognized for what they were and repudiated for what they have saddled us with.
They don’t deserve their statues, they don’t deserve to be heard on these matters, and they don’t even deserve to be bribed into acquiescence.
Thanks
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Sep 16 2021 at 12:37pm
I think everything you quoted me saying is pretty clear.
Monte
Sep 17 2021 at 12:47am
I think everything you quoted me saying is pretty clear.
Actually, it was more innuendo and open-ended than anything else. And, I’ll add, a bit smug and presumptuous of someone from a country rife with corruption and tarnished with a legacy of slavery of it’s own.
Juan Manuel Perez Porrua Perez
Sep 17 2021 at 5:52pm
That, unfortunately, is a very long list of countries. You’ll have to be more specific for me to know what you’re talking about there. Don’t feel pressured to do so, though.
Monte
Sep 18 2021 at 2:10am
That, unfortunately, is a very long list of countries. You’ll have to be more specific for me to know what you’re talking about there. Don’t feel pressured to do so, though.
If you’re going to be deliberately obtuse and impertinent rather than engage in a reasonable debate, we have nothing further to discuss. Have a nice day!
Monte
Sep 12 2021 at 3:51pm
The majority of statues being defaced, torn down, or removed today are representative of individuals of considerably more honor and character than the virtue signaling, malcontents responsible for their removal and who feign to possess some kind of moral superiority.
As humans, we mature and progress by fault. We should not presume to judge the past, so much as learn from it. Even so, I can’t help but wonder how future generations will judge us.
Comments are closed.