During my working life, which
included stints as a low-level academic administrator and therefore of
self-pity, I used to keep a facetious list of jobs in comparison to which mine
was a breeze. Director of Admissions was
high on the list, just below the Parking Czarina. Right at the moment I am particularly glad
not to be the president of, say, Washington and Lee University.
My own alma mater, the University of the South (Sewanee), was founded in
1857. Its cornerstone was laid in 1860,
more or less in time for the Yankees to blow it up a few years later. There’s location, location, location—which
Sewanee certainly had. But there is also
timing, timing, timing—in which it was somewhat wanting. In the context of the Civil War the
demolition of the ceremonial cornerstone of an incipient educational and
religious institution may be regarded as a deed of philistine vandalism or of
potent political righteousness, depending upon point of view. And one must acknowledge that there is a good
deal of point of view on display in the current controversy concerning the
decommissioning of Confederate war memorials.
In my undergraduate years the
chapel at Sewanee was something of a museum of memorials, as many historic
ecclesiastical buildings are. There were
lots of funerary and memorial plaques, many of them cryptic to us, such as “She
hath done what she could”. That turns
out to be Mark 14:8, but the sacrilegious adolescent imagination could run
wild. One read “And they rise to their
feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid.”
Forty years later I discovered it in Kipling, but I still have no idea
what it means or what it was doing there.
High up on the wall along both sides of the nave were some clearer
emblems: old state flags, all of them from Confederate states, and some of them
actual antique battlefield flags in what appeared to be battle-distressed
condition.
All Saints' Chapel (flagless version)
What did these dusty, ragged flags
mean? Neither I nor anybody I ever knew
considered for a moment that they “meant” white nationalism or indeed anything
political. Their symbolic purpose, as I
understood it, was to identify individual dioceses among a multiplicity of
church dioceses, a large number of which had persevered through the frantic
distractions of national crisis, war, defeat, destruction, destitution, and
military occupation to found a liberal arts college. But I am a professional scholar of
iconography. I know how difficult it is
to be sure that the interpreter of an artistic symbol is on the same page as
its creator. On this subject it is quite
possible for even an eminent professor of literature to smear egg all over his
face, especially when he smells a “political” possibility.
How about the statuary monuments to
Confederate generals? What do they mean? Here the semiotics immediately become
murky. In the best-case scenario an
equestrian Lee might conjure up the Romantic visions of honor, courage,
devotion to duty, military genius, dignity in defeat, or steadfastness in a
lost cause that the old aristocrats found in reading Walter Scott. But that is assuming the statue is really about Lee. In the last several days in the Times two knowledgeable historians (Eric Foner and Jon Meacham) have published essays that, despite differing aims and emphases,
agree in the plausible claim that the erection of the Charlottesville statue
was not an homage to the historical Robert E. Lee but a reactionary gesture
meant to offer symbolic life support for the lost cause, just as the whole
racial set-up in the South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
was designed through technically legal mechanisms to preserve as much as
possible of the spirit and effect of the legally abolished institution of
slavery. One somehow doubts that
torch-lit marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “Blood and soil!”
were much into the biographical Lee.
Since iconoclasm is making a bid to
reclaim the status of virtue, might we try agreeing on some guidelines? Could we make a preliminary distinction
between public, civic sites and literally consecrated ground—meaning churches
and cemeteries? Whoever took a hammer to
the bust of Lee in the Duke University chapel is in my opinion a small-time criminal
zealot in a long, self-righteous, puritanical tradition that includes the fanatical
image-smashers of the Scheldt churches in the sixteenth century and the Taliban
bombers of the Bamiyan buddhas in our own.
But that is probably a minority opinion.
Shared public civic spaces, on the other hand—town squares, public
parks, government buildings and grounds—are in a different category. In a democracy such places should so far as
is possible actually belong to the citizenry and, insofar as possible, be
regulated by democratic procedures, always remembering, as the Founders did,
that democracy should not be synonymous with the “tyranny of the majority”.
I am hardly one who is indifferent
to the past. I have spent my life trying
to study aspects of the remote past in their autonomy, integrity, and
irrecoverable subtlety. Life, however,
is for the living. The American Civil
War is, as they say, history. But so is
the history of the American Civil
War. That is why historical monuments
removed from public places should be archived, not destroyed or “disappeared”. Surely our great nation ought long ago to
have faced its spiritual Appomattox
and endured its spiritual
Reconstruction and emerged a few steps closer to that “more perfect union” of
our original national intention. Surely
we can do so yet.
