Aug. 31, 2017
Statues expose American hypocrisy
Donald Trump was combative at his
news conference on Aug. 15. “This week it’s Robert E. Lee,” he said. “I noticed
that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next
week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have
to ask yourself where does it stop?”
Destroying statues and monuments has
been going on forever. “Instances were recorded in the Bible. Medieval
Christians smashed sculptures of Ancient Rome. Spanish conquerors destroyed
temples of the Aztecs and the Incas,” says a recent article in the New York
Times. More recent is the sensational destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan
(Afghanistan) in 2001 and the iconoclasm systematically exercised by Daesh
(ISIS) in Syria and Iraq.
But getting rid of statues and other
relics connected with slavery or the Confederacy in the United States is an
extremely difficult, if not impossible, undertaking.
To begin with, their sheer number
and widespread distribution over the country is foreboding. According to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 1,500 symbols of the
Confederacy in public spaces, 109 public schools named after prominent
Confederates, many with large African-American student populations, and more
than 700 Confederate monuments and statues on public property throughout the
country.
One Confederate monument, the
largest section of exposed granite on Earth, presents special difficulties. It
is the State of Georgia-sponsored figure of three horsemen, representing
Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, in addition to the
Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Will it be dynamited in the same way as
the Buddhas of Bamiyan?
But there is something more
disturbing in what Trump said; something that Americans have desperately tried
to ignore in their history. Until late in the past century, most American
history books gave a polished picture of the founding fathers and the democracy
they created. It took a new generation of American revisionist historians, led
by Howard Zinn and his “People’s History of the United States,” to bring the
naked truth out. It was followed by a slate of books with titles like “Lies My
Teacher Told Me” and “Why American History is Not What They Say.” Thus Trump’s
question opened a wound that most Americans prefer to keep under rap.
Of the first 12 presidents of the
United States, 10 owned slaves while in office. The four largest slave owners
among them (by approximate number of slaves) were; Thomas Jefferson, the
principle drafter of the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created
equal” – at 600, George Washington – to Americans “the father of our country” –
at 317 (practically all acquired by his own toil since he inherited only 10
from his father), Andrew Jackson – who was also accused of being a slave trader
– at 200 and James Madison – the principal writer of the U.S. Bill of Rights
and the first Ten Amendments of the Constitution – at 100.
Andrew Jackson, the father of the
populist “Jacksonian democracy,” was also the most ferocious fighter against
the native Indians. He burned and razed scores of Indian villages, often with
their inhabitants in them, to force the Indians away from their land in the
south east, to west of the Mississippi River. In 1832, Supreme Court Justice
John Marshall issued a court decision against the removal of the Cherokee
Indians. Jackson refused to implement it retorting: “John Marshall has made a
decision, now let him enforce it.” In 1830, Jackson signed the “Indian removal
act,” which forced what remained of the Cherokee Indians in the east to start a
long march westward, which they called the “Trail of Tears.” Four thousand of
the 15,000 who took the journey died of hunger, disease or exhaustion.
Arthur Schlesinger, as most who
wrote about Jackson prior to the 1990s, ignored this crucial aspect of
Jackson’s life in his classic book “the Age of Jackson” (1945), but admitted
his “mistake” years later when working in the Kennedy White House.
Thomas Jefferson’s main real estate,
Monticello, was the home of both agricultural production and industrial
undertakings. One of the latter was a nail factory, which apparently was
extremely profitable. This factory depended largely on slave children ages 10
to 12 years. These little children were often whipped to increase their
productivity. This was discovered by the historian Edwin Betts in the 1950s
when doing research on the plantation. Betts decided to hide this fact,
apparently because of the implicit taboo placed on such revelations at the
time.
“Betts’s omission,” wrote Henry
Wiencek in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2012, was important in shaping the
scholarly consensus that Jefferson managed his plantations with a lenient
hand.” In his autobiography Jefferson wrote: “Nothing is more certainly written
in the book of fate than that these people [the black slaves] are to be free.
Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the
same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of
distinction between them.” This part of his statement was deleted from the
quotation embedded in Jefferson’s monument.
Abraham Lincoln was, as we all know,
“the Great Emancipator.” His Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1862 was
actually a threat to the slave states fighting against the Union, that their
slaves will be declared free if they continued their war. Slave states that did
not go to war could keep their slaves. As a result, 10 states were declared
slave free while five were permitted to keep their slaves. Zinn quotes the
London Spectator: “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own
another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”
Lincoln spent all his political life with doubts about the equality between the
races. During his presidential campaign in southern Illinois, he once
proclaimed: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any
way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am
not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” He was
thus echoing the position of Jefferson above, and of practically all other
founding fathers.
So why should the statue of
Jefferson Davis be downed, while that of Andrew Jackson remain? Is a slave
owner and slave trader who killed Indians savagely and indiscriminately like
Jackson more worthy of having iconic statues of him on public property than a
General like Lee who fought on the side of maintaining slavery? Did anyone ask
the Native Americans? If judged, as they should be, on the totality of their
lives, they all have made major contributions to their country. Everyone knows
the contributions made by George Washington in the war of independence, Jackson
in the decisive battle of New Orleans and Jefferson’s contribution to
democratic principles; but few know, for example, that Jefferson Davis had
served as a congressman and a senator, and that he was widely acclaimed as a
war hero of the American Mexican War.
The New York Times argues that the
Confederate leaders did not work to promote the Union but attempted to divide
it and, therefore, their statues and icons should go. This is true, for in the
end, it is the winner of the war who determines who is good and who is evil,
and whose statues represent the former and whose represent the latter.
Riad Tabbarah is the author of the
book “America and Freedoms: an Historical View” (in Arabic) from which some of
the information for this article is taken.
A version of this article appeared
in the print edition of The Daily Star on August 31, 2017, on page 7.
