A Statuary Shakedown
About a month ago, after a discussion of the controversy surrounding Davy Crockett’s death, I asked my students a question related the past in the public present. At the University of Texas at Austin, there are a few statues of Confederate leaders. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are the most notable figures, but most folks would need to read the weathered inscriptions on the statues of Albert Johnson and John Reagan to discover any connection to the controversy of having Confederates (and some alleged sympathizers) on campus. Since every few years at UT there are movements to have the statues removed, I asked my freshmen (a group, admittedly, composed mostly of whites and Hispanics) whether they thought the statues should be removed. The response was mostly in the negative. Students seemed to know that these figures’ legacies were complicated, but thought that the statues should remain.
So I was primed for a little essay when I saw this headline from the Austin-American Statesman. Ralph Haurwitz wrote an interesting article titled “Confederate tributes linger,” that discussed the statuary situation on campus as well as the name of Simkins Residence Hall. Simkins is a dormitory named after a UT law professor who served for thirty years and who, incidentally, happened to be a founding member of Florida’s Ku Klux Klan. President Bill Powers recently established a committee to review the racial legacy of the physical elements on campus, and the committee’s report is to be presented at the end of June. While the main goal is a proposal on what to do with the dormitory’s title, Gregory Vincent, the vice president for diversity, suggested some discussion regarding the statuary would take place.
As you can imagine, most people are divided on the subject. Many people are against the use of Simkins’ name for the residence hall, but students like Kristen Thompson, president of the Black Student Alliance, prefer that the statues remain. Others, like Janet Staiger, a professor of communications, said “The university has to be a leader in defusing racial tensions and repairing the past,” and argued that the statues are “unwelcoming gestures to the citizens of the State of Texas.”
While Mr. Haurwitz’s article was not intended as an op-ed, I did think there could have been more nuance in the selection of interviewees. Why not, for instance, ask one of UT’s fantastic history professors about the issue? Because the issue is also a historical issue, and who better to ask (if you HAVE to ask an academic) about the perception of the past than a history professor in the first place?
Dr. Staiger’s statement that we should be busy “repairing the past” makes this need even more clear. The idea that one can repair the past, from all the ways I’ve tried to understand the concept, seems to be a nonsense statement, however charming it might sound. [She might still have the finale of LOST in mind, so I’m being as charitable as I can]. What she probably meant was that we might be able to repair the future if we remove these reminders of the past. I’m not so sure that’s a good precedent to set, however, because it depends on assumptions which, aside from being faulty in the first place, make for bad precedents in dealing with the historical elements of public life.
As a few of my students noted, one of the more interesting things about the Confederate statues on campus is that they’re near a number of twentieth-century heroes. If you walk northward on campus, towards the Littlefield house, you’ll pass a statue of César Chávez on your left and come face-to-face with Barbara Jordan. If you head east from the Main Building, you’ll find yourself in a courtyard dominated by the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The roster of statues on campus is a confusing, even contradictory roster, but those contradictions had a lot of value for my freshman history students, who seemed to prefer a messy history to an erased one.
With those thoughts in mind, I also thought that Haurwitz’s choice of title for the print article was thought-provoking (“Confederate tributes linger”). According to the title, the statues don’t remind us of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis as dead men, with a historical beginning and ending, but as Confederate men. It would then be improper that the years on the statue mark their births and deaths. Instead, they should read something like, “Robert E. Lee, 1861-1865, General.” To restrict the meaning of these individuals to four years worth of actions, actions these figures took after a great deal of reflection, is a superficial reduction. These actions were a part of their lives, but not the sole markers of their lives.
A possible rebuttal to that point is that Lee is not dressed in civilian clothes, but rather his Confederate uniform. The argument acknowledged, I believe it’s an error to see the uniform alone and not the man. We might think about it with a more contemporary example. A person, and definitely someone receiving an undergraduate education at UT, should be able to look at a photograph of Eisenhower in uniform and think, “Dwight Eisenhower is wearing his general’s uniform” and understand that man to be a president-in-the-making who gave us the idea, “military-industrial complex.”
But perhaps the best point I can make in favor of keeping these kinds of statues, aside from the delightful, visual, and valuable mess they create, is the story of how they got there. George W. Littlefield, a former officer in the Civil War, served as a regent for UT and donated $3 million to the university (in today’s money, sum of over $31 million in 2009 dollars). At that time, his contributions to the university together were the largest financial gift its short history. Littlefield wanted statues of Davis and Lee erected on campus, and also built the fountain at the southern end of the Six Pack, which honors “the men and women of the Confederacy who fought with valor and suffered with fortitude that states rights be maintained.”* Even if we impute the kind of vision I’ve just critiqued to Littlefield himself, and suggest that he always only saw Lee as a Confederate general, and Davis as a rogue wartime president, his donations make my point for me. If we didn’t care for his evangelistic Confederate pride, there are also important things he did that deserve admiration. And I believe the same goes for Lee, Davis, and the rest.
We’re not getting over the terrors of the past if we hide them in a warehouse. We’re vividly demonstrating the opposite. That fact alone makes me think we should keep the statuary there.
* Whatever your thoughts on the statement might be, at least it’s not sexist. Last month I wrote a piece on the cause of the Civil War, and I didn’t make an important point on purpose. The discussion there was strictly causality. The spark that made the United States explode was slavery. But discussing the political cause of warfare isn’t the same as discussing the reasons that individuals fought, which could be as varied as the reasons themselves. Some figures did fight for states’ rights, and not merely states’ rights to have slaves.
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