Statues of Limitation

Why does it suddenly feel like the French Revolution around here? The frenzy of statue-toppling and name-changing brings that event to mind. This modern revolution isn’t exactly new, though. It started way before the killing of George Floyd.

It began several years ago with the effort to de-romanticize the Old South, the campaign to take the Confederate “stars and bars” off state flags and remove tatues of Confederate military and political figures.

After the tragedy in Minneapolis, those statues have really been taking it on the chin, or the pedestal, as it were. I do understand the anger about the battle flags and the renderings of prominent Confederates, like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, or even US President Andrew Jackson, a racist and Indian persecutor. But hey, why be upset with General (and President) Ulysses S. Grant? Didn’t he fight on the right side in the Civil War? Didn’t much of Reconstruction happen on his watch? Yes, but he was wobbly on slavery in his early years. He married into a family of slave-owners and he actually owned one himself, but freed him in 1859. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the Star Spangled Banner under the rockets’ red glare during the War of 1812, owned slaves. His statue came down in San Francisco recently.

So what, exactly did Theodore Roosevelt do wrong? Well, nothing really related to all this, but a statue of him on a horse with a Native American and a black man standing on other side, in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History, is offensive to many.

In the name-change department, Monmouth University in New Jersey plans to remove President Woodrow Wilson’s name from one of its major buildings because of Wilson’s support of segregation in federal offices. Several years ago, at Princeton University, of which Wilson had been president, the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs almost had its name changed for the same reason.

Some think it may even be time to talk about replacing the names of Washington and Jefferson because of their relationships to slavery. I’m almost afraid to mention Christopher Columbus, actually said to have been a slave trader himself. If we start changing these names, it could prove touchy.

Statues come down and names change as heroes morph into villains. I was thinking that one solution might be pedestals with standard detachable brackets to allow sculptures and nameplates to be easily swapped out as attitudes change. Toppling statues when the blood is boiling, however, is clearly more satisfying. But in the end, it’s not about what needs to be torn down. It’s about what needs to be built up -- societal structures that aren’t made of stone and bronze.