Museum pieces

A SLAVE-TRADER before the civil war and a luminary of the Ku Klux Klan after it, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate officer (pictured), reputedly oversaw a massacre of black Union soldiers. Unsurprisingly, many black (and other) Americans resent his veneration in public statues and school names—just one of many rows over the commemoration of Confederate leaders and post-war segregationists roiling American towns and states. Among the monuments that the mayor of New Orleans wants to move, for example, is one to the Battle of Liberty Place, an insurrection by white supremacists nine years after the war ended. The guiding principle in these stand-offs should be that, when public land and resources are used in a way that causes widespread offence, as preserving these state-sponsored tributes does, the authorities should have a good reason for doing so. In this case, they don’t.

After June’s racist massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a gunman who posed with the Confederate colours, the flag was tactfully lowered at the state capitol and elsewhere. Yet for devotees of these relics—as in South Carolina, where a statue of Ben Tillman, a violently racist post-war governor, still stands in the capitol’s grounds, despite efforts to evict it—giving up the flag was a tactical retreat. They make three main arguments for keeping Forrest and his kind on their plinths: each looks powerful but is mistaken.

The first is that whitewashing the past’s regrettable aspects benefits no one. The civil war and segregation, they say, are part of America’s history and must be remembered. Indeed they must. Yet by propagating a sentimental version of the war that glosses over the South’s belligerence and attachment to slavery, too often these monuments misrepresent the history they purport to embody. Tillman’s statue describes him as a friend “of the common people”, omitting his open advocacy of bloodshed. And there is a world of difference between remembering someone and extolling them, as such honours do. Clearly, American children must know about these figures—but that does not mean they should occupy space in town squares and on the walls of capitols. Private memorials are another matter: citizens should always be free to wear Confederate-flag T-shirts or erect whatever shrines they want. But official statues and portraits wrongly suggest that these men should be not just remembered but publicly revered.

Another argument against fiddling with these markers is that Americans, especially black Americans, have bigger things to worry about; some black activists say as much themselves. True enough. But the persistence of inequality and discrimination is intimately connected with how America sees its past. Many of these monuments went up as the Jim Crow system of segregation became entrenched a century or so ago and even more recently, during the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s: Stone Mountain, a vast, hagiographic carving in Georgia, was completed in 1972. They commemorate 20th-century bigotry as much as wartime heroism.

The best defence is that, once you start revising public spaces, it is hard to stop. It is not just that Confederate nomenclature is so prolific; what about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and various other slave-owning Founding Fathers and early presidents? Ditto those titans who persecuted native Americans. This argument, too, is weaker than it looks. It is possible to distinguish between someone whose principal contribution to history was ultimately baleful and someone, such as Washington, whose failings were subordinate to their claim to greatness. Wherever the line is drawn, Confederates and segregationists who once divided their country and now alienate many of its citizens, fall on the wrong side.

The present past

America’s civil war, like most wars, was not a simple story of goodies versus baddies. Ordinary soldiers fought bravely and from noble motives on both sides. For that reason the memorials to its casualties that are features of many small towns should be left alone. But it would be better if state and city authorities chose to retire their state-sponsored likenesses of Confederate leaders and vocal segregationists to museums, where they can be studied but not celebrated.