Of Monuments
- Jeremy Strick
- Jun 22, 2021
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
On 9 April 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, in the first month of the invasion of Iraq, a crowd assembled in Baghdad’s Firdos square and tore down a statue of Saddam Hussein. The event was publicized widely, celebrated by many as an authentic expression of popular revolt against tyranny. Soon, however, it became embroiled in controversy as evidence emerged that the event (ultimately accomplished by American soldiers and equipment) was stage-managed by the American military. In all the ensuing debate, to my knowledge, no voices were raised to complain of the destruction of cultural heritage, nor of the erasure of history.
In 2017, following a vote of the city council, a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee was removed from Lee Park in Dallas, Texas (the park’s name was also changed). The removal was preceded—and followed—by vigorous debate, part of a broader dispute in the United States over monuments to the Confederacy, as well as those who owned or profited from slavery, or those who, following Emancipation, perpetrated or profited from racial violence. This ongoing conflict parallels similar arguments taking place currently in Britain and other European countries.
The debate over Confederate monuments pits those who frame their complaints over what they claim is the destruction of heritage and the erasure of history against those who note the historical inauthenticity of the monuments, which were for the most part created not as memorials immediately after the Civil War, but a generation or more later, following the defeat of Reconstruction. They served as ideological and emotional buttresses to the institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement, and the ruthless exploitation then being enforced against Black Americans (the Lee monument dates from 1936). In any case, opponents of the monuments note that these objects portray individuals who fought to maintain an institution that can only be considered one of history’s great crimes—they do not deserve a place of public veneration.
As the debate proceeded in Dallas, one voice spoke in defence of the Lee monument, but from a somewhat different perspective. The art critic for the Dallas Morning News, also an eminent scholar of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, argued not in support of Confederate monuments in general, but rather in defence of the Lee monument in particular and of the artist who created it. That artist, Alexander Phimister Proctor, the critic noted, was a sculptor of public monuments of some significance, and his autobiography and other works demonstrate that he was not a racist. His reputation and his intentions for the Lee monument, the critic argued, merited serious consideration.