What's in a statue?

What’s in a statue?
by David Benjamin

“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis

MADISON, Wis. — One of my favorite photo subjects is the sometimes awesome, often graceful statuary of great cities, especially in Paris. Within this genre of public art, I’m particularly fond of the lions who populate Paris in stone and bronze in a thousand moods. My favorite is the sleepy and ironic cat who lounges over the doorway of an elementary school near the Sully-Morland Métro station. Although the building once housed the city arsenal, its lazy watchlion shows no concern whatsoever for the ammo in his keeping.

Although I take pictures of them, I don’t normally think about statues in general, even lions. Then, last week, I got notes from two of my dearest correspondents, Judy in Florida and Mo (my daughter) in Knoxville. Both expressed dismay at the apparent zeal of liberal Northerners (like me) for tearing down statues of secessionist lions like Robert E. Lee. If we do so, quoth Judy and Mo, we are “destroying history.” Judy even attached testimony from a black Southerner named Edward C. Smith, praising Gen. Lee for his honor, loyalty, intellect and an uncanny similarity to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This onset of effigy panic started, of course, when a statue of Gen. Lee in Virginia drew to its defense the troops of the rejuvenated Ku Klux Klan, various neo-Nazis and a raging host of blood-and-soil bigots, none of whom were prone to compare their Confederate hero to Dr. King. Ever since, I’ve been saying to myself, “All this over a statue?”

The first statues I can remember were in St. Mary’s Church. Every day at Mass, I knelt before the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph, looming above me on opposite sides of the altar. They were hardly works of art. Molded from either plaster or, perhaps, painted tin, they were pastel in tone and catatonic in demeanor. There was a blankness in the Virgin’s eyes that bespoke the indifference of the factory that had manufactured her.

The Mary at St. Mary’s was a poor introduction to sculpture. She had not, for example, the serenity of the Venus de Milo, nor the haunting intensity of the Virgin at Lourdes. She pales even further compared to my all-time favorite stone babe (probably not a virgin), carved by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in a sculpture called The Dance, which adorns the facade of the Paris Opera. Had my local Virgin conveyed the same joie de vivre as that limestone nude who frolics through rain and shine on the steps of the Opera, I might’ve stayed a Catholic all my life (or at least through high school).

By the same token, if the champions of Jim Crow — who erected most of America’s 700-odd Confederate memorials fifty years after the end of the Civil War — had applied the same life and liveliness to their statues as did Carpeaux to The Dance, well, there might truly be an artistic, rather than pseudo-historic justification for preserving these plaza-turds.

It’s hard to make an apolitical case for a monument whose intent was to trumpet white power and intimidate black people. History might be somewhat served if the Lee statue in Charlottesville included a plaque on which Edward C. Smith’s 863 words of “context” were written.

But that’s not enough history. Alongside, we need a second plaque, with 860 words that characterize Robert E. Lee as a traitor to the nation that gave him a free education at West Point and a commission in the United States Army, and as an insurrectionist whose cool, capable leadership resulted in the economic collapse of the eleven Confederate states and the death of 620,000 Americans — killed by one another.

One answer to all the granite-carved racial nostalgia rampant in the parks and plazas of the unrepentant South might be “equal time.” Why not pair each statue of Lee, Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest or Jeff Davis with a statue of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Medger Evers, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, or those three young men — Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner — murdered by the Klan in Mississippi?

Not likely, huh? A little too much history there, right, Bubba?

Nonetheless, Justice Louis Brandeis’ “more speech” antidote to falsehood and fallacy remains our best hope for reconciliation. There’s an example in Paris, although not so grand as a statue. As you stroll the streets and quays near the Seine, you inevitably come across small marble plaques, etched with the title, “Mort Pour la France”. Each commemorates a Resistance fighter, usually young, who died in the liberation of Paris in August, 1944.

Typical is a plaque, near the Assemblée Nationale, that honors Henri Jean Pilot, a student, age 23, who fell on 20 August 1944, “pour la liberation de Paris.” You stand awhile regarding this almost invisible tribute. You find yourself picturing this kid, not finished with school and barely old enough to shave, killed by a fleeing Wehrmacht rabble whose hope of victory was gone but who still — needlessly — kept shooting.

In the American South, from the birth of the Klan through the dark age of Jim Crow, white supremacists held sway through terrorism. Their favorite device was lynching. There are no statues, obelisks or honor rolls to mark the demise of the 4,000 human beings lynched in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma since 1868.

But it’s never too late for history. Let’s get started engraving little marble squares that tell us who died at this spot — hung from this tree, tortured, castrated, disemboweled, set on fire and danced around by a festive throng of church-picnic white folks. On each plaque, the name (if we know it), age and occupation of each soul, with the day he (or she) died for…

What for?

Justice Brandeis, were he still around, would likely suggest that melting the monuments to the Great White South would little advance the public discourse. It would impose an “enforced silence” on all who hold these memorials dear, without changing anyone’s mind. So let them stand.

But if history is really what this fuss is all about, let’s also commemorate — etched in quiet stone and strewn through every city, town and county in the crushed Confederacy — the ghastly revenge meted out against innocent Americans whose only trespass was their people’s liberation from bondage.