Confederate Statues and Public Gentility

Despite all the media anger over Confederate monuments and the parade of Republicans calling for their removal, the people are not all on board. The latest polling:

• A strong majority (62 percent) of Americans favor leaving the Confederate statues standing as historical markers
• Overwhelming numbers of Republicans (86 percent) favor this, as do 61 percent of Independents
• The only group with a majority favoring removal (57 percent) are “Strong Democrats” — as opposed to “Soft Democrats,” who slightly favor keeping them (52 percent)
• Unsurprisingly, the Northeast is the region of the country most in favor of removing the statues — but even there, a majority (53 percent) backs leaving the statues standing
• Here’s a stunner: 44 percent of African-Americans polled believe in keeping the statues standing. Of Latinos, 65 percent believe the statues should remain
• Comfortable majorities — no less than 60 percent — in each age cohort support the statues

Now maybe you think that 62 percent of Americans are racists, including 44 percent of black Americans, but I don't. Nor do I think this has much to do with memorializing the Confederacy – I doubt 62 percent of Americans could tell you the first thing about the Civil War – or states' rights or anything else that smacks of politics.

I think millions of Americans want the statues to remain because they are pretty, and because they represent a vaguely traditional, genteel, orderly sort of beauty that is under assault from the forces of monstrous concrete architecture, truck traffic, spray paint, reality television, and everything else bad about the 21st century. I once read a great account of female Civil War reenactors, who follow the men to the camps and dress in hoop skirts; so far as I could tell they mainly liked play-acting in a world where officers in dress uniforms tipped their hats to them and called them ma'am.

The response of many people to things like grand plantation houses, the historic districts of Charleston and Savannah, and courthouse squares with old oak trees and statues of Confederate heroes is, "too bad about slavery and Antietam, but weren't things pretty back then?" As the polls show, black Americans are not immune to this, and neither are recent immigrants.

Here's a question for you: if we take down all the Confederate monuments, what are we going to replace them with? Balloon animals by Jeff Koons or giant mirrored kidney beans by Anish Kapoor? Chain coffee shops?

All of the pictures in this post are of Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Monument Avenue was planned at the height of Jim Crow and celebrates the victory of the all-white Democratic Party over Reconstruction, but it is also beautiful. The political ideologies of the people who built the Pantheon in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens, and the Pyramids in Egypt were all quite terrible by our standards. I very much doubt that modern liberals would see eye to eye with the people who built Stonehenge. Should we tear them all down?

I do understand that we have a problem with the legacy of the Confederacy that we do not have with the legacy of Assyria. But I regard the way we build cities in our era – superhighways leading to strip malls and blocks of hideous concrete or glass office towers – as despicable. So do millions of other Americans. And that is really why they want to keep the statues: to preserve something old, stately and nice from the assaults of our great era of uglification. Even some people who hate what they represent would still rather have these statues than more concrete and neon.