The USA, and the internet, has split over a statue. This isn't new. In recent years, public monuments have caused enormous and passionate controversy across the world. Statues that were put up to celebrate the achievements of people in the past are now being contested, due to shifts in attitudes and changes in values that have taken place in the intervening years.
I have kept my peace on this. Up until very recently, I wasn't entirely sure what my position was. But now the argument has strayed onto turf I know a fair bit about. Specifically, the teaching and learning of history.
Here is Trump's views on the matter, the views that have added fuel to the fire (Ignore the fact you have to read it backwards, because for a man who uses Twitter a lot, Trump is still very poor at how to get it to actually work).
Trump's argument is that removing the statues and memorials is preventing people from learning about the past.
Let's get one thing straight. No one has ever learnt about the past from a statue. I spend the bulk of my waking hours getting people to learn about the past, and about history. Not once have I ever relied on them solely looking at a statue. There is a good reason we don't get GCSE or A-Level students to make sculptures as part of their course. My head of department would be down on me like a tonne of bricks (although we'd be able to double enter students for technology...). As a purely pedagogical technique, looking at a lump of metal on a piece of rock is rubbish. At most, you can learn about some specific art history things, but what statues have to tell you in and of themselves is nothing. Unlike in Night at the Museum, Robert E Lee is not going to come to life and tell us about the Civil War, or lead us on adventure.
However, as historical sources, the statues are useful, incredibly so. We teach students to judge the usefulness of an historical source using a technique called NOP- Nature, Origin, Purpose. So, how do these statues stand up?
Nature- Statue; art form. Seems obvious, doesn't it? And yet, this opens up a series of problems. These monuments are pieces of art. They are not designed to necessarily convey the truth, but to celebrate the subject. They will promote an idealised image of the subject, and are potentially open to some serious biases on the part of the artist or those who commissioned it.
Origin- Now things get even more interesting. Many of these statues are *not* from the Confederate era, when the Southern US states rebelled against the federal government in an attempt to maintain slavery and uphold their rights to largely govern themselves. Instead, the monuments tend to be from after Reconstruction. After the American Civil War, the federal government deployed the US Army to the South to uphold the law and protect black Americans. But in 1871, the army was withdrawn. The politicians who came to power in the Southern states drove through measures to deprive black Americans of their new-found rights, and introduced a series of measures to segregate them from white Americans, known as the Jim Crow laws. The other major period of Confederate monument building in the South was in the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court, and federal legislation were starting to smash down many of the barriers that Jim Crow had imposed. So the statues are not from the time they represent. They were mainly commissioned by those with an interest in imposing or maintaining segregation.
Purpose- The purpose of monuments such as these is generally to celebrate the life, achievements or contributions of the subject. However, in these cases, the origin gives the purpose an extra, hidden element. These statues were put up to celebrate the individuals depicted, yes. But they were also put up to reinforce the doctrine of segregation, either when it was in the ascendancy or when it was under attack. Their mission is to remind a white audience that things were better when they were the masters, and to remind a black audience that their proper place is on their knees.
Overall, I think my students would conclude that these statues are only partially useful for a historian studying American history, because of the late nature of the sources, the highly subjective view that they take of the past, and because without all this contextual knowledge they are very difficult to interpret, and very easy to misappropriate.
So there you have it. As a technique for teaching the American public about their past, statues of Confederate icons in public places has been found severely lacking. Their role is dubious at best, and downright dangerous at worst.
But these statues do have a place in the analysis of history. They belong in museums, with proper contextual explanation and analysis, much like I have done above. But to allow them to fulfil their original purpose, of celebrating slavery and reinforcing the ideals of Jim Crow, is not history. It is politics.
I can't best the point I've seen bandied about on the internet as a summary. There are no statues of Osama Bin Laden or Mohamed Atta at the 9/11 memorial in New York. Holocaust memorials haven't got statues of Hitler and other senior Nazis at them. They are incredibly important to the story of those events. But their place is not on display, with an equal standing to those who suffered and perished at their hands. It is in a museum, set alongside some proper context and analysis, that these belong.
This has been very long and heavy, and so to round off, here is something else that "belongs in a museum"
