OH, HOW CONSERVATIVE AMERICANS cheered when the US Marine Corps toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. It’s even possible that one or two old Cold Warriors shed a tear as they watched the statues of Lenin being hauled away to the scrapyard. (Being much too big to fit in Trotsky’s “dustbin of history”!) These symbols of tyranny deserved to be toppled. Seeing them come down, conservatives the world over felt proud to have witnessed, finally, the triumph of liberty.
It has always been thus. Statues are erected to celebrate victories – not defeats. In the years immediately following the American Civil War, the centres of Northern towns and cities were soon filled with statuary celebrating the triumphant Union cause. In the states of the defeated Confederacy, however, the erection of statues had to wait: first, for the occupying Union troops to leave; and second, for the Ku Klux Klan to disenfranchise through terror their “uppity” African-American neighbours. But as soon as the de facto slavery of “Jim Crow” had been firmly set in place; and the federally-imposed state constitutions suitably amended; all were in agreement that the time for statues had arrived.
Don’t let all those carefully crafted Southern tales about “The Lost Cause” fool you. By the turn of the nineteenth century the old soldiers of the Confederacy had plenty of victories to celebrate.
The re-subjugation of the Negro was only the start. The vast pool of convict labour created by the imposition of the Jim Crow system was enticing some of America’s largest industrial corporations south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Cotton may still have been king, but now he had some very powerful courtiers.
Beyond the establishment of Jim Crow there was plenty more to celebrate. Christianity (at least as practiced in the North) had been the slave-owning South’s most deadly ideological foe. The Abolitionists argument: that if God was mankind’s father, then all men must be brothers; was difficult to gainsay. One has only to consider the words of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic to appreciate the all-conquering power of the abolitionists’ faith:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
As he died to make men holy, let us die to set men free
Our God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on!
By the turn of the century, however, so-called “scientific racism” had cleared away a great many of the religious obstacles to racial segregation and exploitation. According to the scientific racists, those whom evolution had positioned on the lower rungs of the human ladder were condemned by their impoverished genetic inheritance to remain forever inferior to those more generously endowed with genetic wealth.
This pernicious outgrowth of the Social-Darwinist ideology of the day was important to the South because of its geographic indifference. From North to South, East to West, racism had been rendered respectable. Jim Crow, far from being objectionable to America’s ruling white elites, offered a powerful historical confirmation of “the survival of the fittest”.
Such potent racial alchemy had a powerful unifying effect. Suddenly, the Civil War could be presented as something other than Julia Ward Howe’s fierce moral struggle to purify the soul of the American Republic. Retrospectively, it could be transmuted into nothing more than a tragic misunderstanding between American brothers.
Overnight, the great Confederate traitors: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson; could be transformed into great American heroes. The bravery and fortitude displayed on the battlefield, by Blue and Grey alike, could be represented as the triumph of an undivided American spirit. What better way to celebrate this national reconciliation than by allowing the citizens of the southern states to memorialise their heroes in stone and bronze?
Only a handful of white Americans allowed themselves to wonder how former slaves and their offspring might interpret these developments. How such a reconciliation could only be effected by emptying the terrible struggle of 1861-65 of all its revolutionary purpose. How African-Americans might construe statues of Lee and Jackson as tombstones: guessing correctly that their hard-won rights and freedoms would be buried deep beneath these symbols of the slave-owners’ outrageous vindication.
Those same American conservatives who cheered the fall of Saddam’s and Lenin’s statues, must surely recognise something of themselves in the crowds of African-Americans joyfully celebrating the removal of the white-supremacist South’s hated emblems of racism rehabilitated and re-enthroned. When the Day of Jubilee finally arrives – be it in Baghdad, Moscow, or Richmond, Virginia – who would not thank God that they had lived to see it?
I have dwelt at some length on the American experience because I know that New Zealanders find it much easier to identify and understand racism when they see it occurring in an offshore context. I have done so, also, because the statues being toppled all around the world are being brought down by people inspired by the events currently unfolding across the United States.
It is my hope that, with those events in mind, we descendants of the Europeans who settled these islands over the course of the last 150 years will greet the rising clamour for a similar reckoning with local statuary sympathetically. To insist that the statues of our colonial and imperial forebears must remain unmolested is to ignore the triumphal spirit in which they were commissioned and erected. For every victory celebrated, there has to have been a corresponding defeat. For every rugged individualist acknowledged in stone and bronze, minimal investigation is generally required to ascertain on whose backs he ascended to glory.
As is always the case with invasions and conquests – even those aided and abetted by solemn treaties and dignified promises – the responses of the invaded and the conquered are muddied by all manner of confused, desperate, and often unworthy impulses. When the smoke of battle has long since blown away, however, and the grim engines of the victor’s laws have ground down such resistance as remained, the “before” and “after” pictures of European colonialism are always the same. Before, it was someone else’s country: afterwards, it was ours. Statues are simply the solidified after-images of our success.
Before we die in a ditch for those after-images, would it not be wiser to contemplate a new way of representing our success as a nation? One that celebrates the fact that our original triumph was not so complete that the vanquished cannot now challenge the victors to come up with a more just way of commemorating the nation’s histories. Commissioning new statuary: works of art which pay tribute to the fact there is more than one story to tell; would be a good start – but only after decommissioning the old.