Virginia is for Statues
There’s a law in Virginia that permits localities to authorize the erection of monuments or memorials to basically any American-fought war you can think of. The law goes on to clarify that, once erected, it would be illegal for those same local authorities, or anybody else, to take them down or otherwise disturb or interfere with them. So according to Virginia law, once you’ve built a war monument or memorial, you’re stuck with it forever.
This is pretty obviously a very stupid law, and one that will inevitably lead to every square inch of Virginia being covered in war monuments that no one will have the legal recourse to take down. We will eventually all be forced out, living in the clearly inferior states of North Carolina and West Virginia or, God-forbid, Tennessee or Maryland, peering into a commonwealth populated only by dead men on horses and the weirdos who like to stare at them. State closes at dusk! No sleeping on that bench!
Why should all future generations be forced to keep up and maintain monuments authorized by people 100 years ago? If the people and their representatives grow weary of a statue, they should be allowed to take it down. This is the sort of law passed by people who fear the oncoming reality of their total irrelevance, and use the last remnants of their power to assure themselves of their immortality. This is the past desperately trying to lecture the future about how wrong the future is, not with argument or reason, but with a petulant because-I-said-so.
A Charlottesville circuit judge has ruled that the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues that have been at the center of much controversy for the last couple of years are, in fact, war monuments or memorials, and are therefore protected from removal by that dumb law.
“I find this conclusion inescapable,” he wrote. “It is the very reason the statues have been complained about from the beginning. It does no good pretending they are something other than what they actually are.”
(…)
“While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time (much like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, or even Oliver Cromwell or Dietrich Bonhoeffer), and do not think of white supremacy at all and certainly do not believe in, accept, or agree with such,” Moore wrote. “In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the Civil War.”
The matter is so clear, Moore wrote, that he also wrote that if a jury were to find the statues not to be monuments or memorials to Civil War veterans, he would find the verdict “unreasonable” and contrary to the law.
I think the judge is right—the statues are clearly war memorials. They are monuments to two men who fought to break up the Union in order to maintain their autonomy to treat actual human beings as property, and they lost. Building monuments to them makes about as much sense as building a monument to Erich von Manstein or Heinrich Himmler, but they are certainly war monuments.
It is equally clear that the parks and statues were funded by a dude with some questionable motivations, including an apparent desire that Charlottesville not fall further behind Richmond in a race for the most statues of men on horses. And whether or not he personally harbored racial animus or a particular fondness for the Confederacy, he did hand over hype duties to some gross Lost Cause-ers.
But McIntire chose the local chapters of three ardent defenders of the Confederacy – the Confederate Veterans, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy – to plan and manage the unveiling ceremony of the Lee statue.
Those groups scheduled the dedication ceremony to take place at a gala Confederate reunion in Charlottesville on May 21, 1924. They made the ceremony into a tribute to the "lost cause" interpretation of the Civil War – the view that describes the Confederate cause as a heroic struggle against northern threats to the Southern way of life and that minimizes and denies or minimizes the central role of slavery.
Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute paraded through the center of the city, which was decorated with Confederate colors. The sculpture was presented to the City on behalf of McIntire by Dr. Henry L. Smith, President of Washington and Lee University, where Lee had served as president from 1865 to his death in 1870 and where he was buried in Lee Chapel. Three-year-old Mary Walker Lee, Robert E. Lee's great-grand-daughter, then pulled the Confederate flag draped over the sculpture away, and the crowd cheered loudly. University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman accepted the statue for the city of Charlottesville.
The Commander of the Virginia Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans, C.B. Linney, gave the main dedication speech. He passionately extolled the valor of the Confederate cause. "I thank God that we have lost nothing of our love for the Cause by the lapse of time, which has wisely served to intensify our devotion.... My comrades, ours is a rich heritage, oh, how rich!" The statue reminds us of "the glory, honor and immortality of the Confederate soldier." The statue should inspire us to "catch fresh courage for the battle of the morrow and swear eternal allegiance to the Cause and undying devotion to the memory of the one that is gone."
Of course they’re war memorials, monuments to men, revered by people pining for an extinct way of life, people imagining the past can live on, that the past can and should be a permanent feature of the future.
No people can pretend to self-determination while they live under the overdetermined auspices of the idiots of yesteryear who feared the coming demise of their way of life so much that they rigged the game to make future generations sit there and take it while they spit in their eye. If a city wants to take down a statue, the city should be allowed to take down a statue—especially statues dedicated to celebrating the losers in the fight for the soul of this country, 150 years ago.
