Thursday, September 14, 2017

Lee Statue Removal Happens in Dallas


By the time you read this, Dallas will have one less statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee on public display.

Currently, the city owns two Lee statues; one towers over a small park downtown near city hall and the convention center, and another commands - or, commanded - a prominent knoll overlooking a swanky boulevard known as Turtle Creek, near some of the priciest neighborhoods in the entire state of Texas.

Even Lee's detractors can't deny that the statue in his honor along Turtle Creek, in a public park named after the general, is a fine piece of art.  At least, in terms of its workmanship and aesthetics.  But with America's current fixation on commemorations of Civil War leaders - at least, leaders from the losing side - Dallas city councilmembers have voted to remove the two Lee statues from city property.  And the first one they chose to have removed from public viewing wasn't the one downtown, within blocks of the city's historically black-majority neighborhoods.

It was the one along Turtle Creek, named after a real creek that winds its way through some of the whitest districts in Dallas' northern neighborhoods.

This particular piece of artwork is actually composed of two elements; an over-sized depiction of a caped General Lee on his horse, and then another horse of a slightly smaller stature with a young, anonymous man (ostensibly one of Lee's soldiers) riding it.  Some folks defending this statue say the young man supposedly represents an African-American teenager, but its anglicized facial features in no way convey such an interpretation, at least in the obvious sense.

One person has already died in Dallas's push to remove Turtle Creek's Lee statue.  Last Wednesday was the council's vote to remove it, and work began immediately, which surprised many Dallasites, used to a far less efficient city hall.  A small crowd hurriedly gathered in Lee Park to either protest or celebrate the historic occasion.  But then the city's more commonplace tendency for lousing things up kicked back into gear.  The first crane hired for the job proved unable to handle the 6-ton bronze piece, which is - sorry, "was" - affixed to a handsome granite base.  The second crane brought to town for the job was hit by a red-light-running tractor-trailer truck this past weekend, and the 18-wheeler's driver was killed.  Even as late as last night, city leaders were guessing - at least to the media - as to when the statue could be removed.  A non-profit group sympathetic to keeping the statue intact had booked a protest at Lee Park for this coming Saturday, and it looked inevitable that the general would indeed be present during the protest to serve as a backdrop to the group's rallying cry.

Initially, Dallas budgeted over $400,000 for removing the Lee Park statue, and currently, it's unknown how much extra these delays have added to that budget.

Then, this afternoon, Dallasites were again caught by surprise at the sight of a new crane heading for Lee Park under a police escort.  And all during the statue's removal, police officers in body armor, with rifles in hand, stood guard around the perimeter of the work site.  The six-lane Turtle Creek Boulevard was closed to vehicular traffic, allowing bystanders a relatively unobstructed view of the proceedings.  And sure enough, by seven o'clock, the statue was down, without incident.

Of course, to some folks, the entire removal of Lee's statue is more than an incident - it's a travesty of justice and a refutation of history.  By now, we're all familiar with the arguments against removing statues such as this one in Lee Park  - a park that will likely soon revert to its original name, Oak Lawn Park, which it held before the Lee statue was erected in 1936.  Incidentally, it was then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, who dedicated the statue, which kinda flies in the face of a more modern narrative that only right-wing conservatives value the historicity of figures like General Lee.

In fact, history can be a complicated thing, as our bickering over America's Civil War proves.  Even Abraham Lincoln, long heralded as a hero for African Americans, did not consider blacks equal with whites.  It is now known that although Lincoln lead the Union in its quest to abolish the institution of slavery, at the same time, he was quietly negotiating to expel freed blacks from the continental United States after the war, to islands in the Caribbean.*  That inconvenient reality hardly fits seamlessly into the historical narrative most people want to believe about our national heroes, so it is not widely taught, or discussed.  I also knew a black woman whose family - in Mississippi, if I remember correctly - actually owned slaves as well, although it was a factoid of which she wasn't proud.  Still, she told me it was part of the reality of Southern economics at the time - if you owned a lot of farmland, it was cheaper to purchase workers to help with the crops rather than employ them, whether the landowner was black or white.

So is there really much of the Old South that's worth venerating, as many Southerners nostalgically claim there is?  Southern gentility is a concept that may have a romantic component, both now in the imaginations of people who never actually lived it, and back then, if you were wealthy enough to benefit from it.  But since it was largely based on an economic system sustained by slave labor, the gentility factor is corrupt in its practice, if not in its theory.  The plantation system was mostly a hold-over of the baronial British aristocratic system, which kept poorly-paid workers in perpetual servitude, subject to the whims of feudal honor, which itself is mostly derided in modern Britain today.

Then there's the question of modern America honoring a traitor to the republic such as Lee was, if you want to consider the literal definition of the term and its application to military justice.  Granted, none of the Confederacy's generals were ever tried for treason, mostly because Union lawmakers were afraid about how the public, deeply wounded and raw after such a bloody war, would react to a verdict one way or the other.  The overarching sentiment at the time was a desire to move forward as best as possible for the cause of national healing, but even that noble goal was eventually thwarted by unresolved issues over how freed blacks should be treated on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

You see, racism was never defeated.  The Civil War didn't so much end because right had might; it ended because the South ran out of soldiers first.

That was back in 1865, but as we all know, the Civil War ain't over.  When my family moved to Texas in 1978, we were called "Yankees" by many native Texans, and kids in our neighborhood played "North against the South" - something my brother and I had never heard of up in rural Cleveland, New York.  Cops and Robbers?  Yes.  Cowboys and Indians?  Yes.  But I didn't even know what the Mason-Dixon line was until we moved to Texas.

Even today, the rebel flag - the "Stars and Bars" - is deeply revered by many as a symbol of not just the Confederacy, but the whole idealized notion of whatever the antebellum South was supposed to be.  "The South's gonna rise again" is a phrase that isn't entirely obsolete in the Southern lexicon.  And opposition to the removal of statues honoring Confederacy heroes such as Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just to name two, is potent here.

With all this in mind, if Dallas leaders wanted to make a statement against the Confederacy and its connotation with racism, why remove the Lee statue in Turtle Creek first?  Remember that other memorial here in Dallas?  It doesn't have only General Lee in it.  Lee is just one of four Confederacy heroes celebrated by this far more imposing structure, which consists of a main 60-foot pillar surrounded by four shorter ones, made of granite and marble.  It's called the Confederate War Memorial, it was dedicated in 1896, and it's considered the oldest public artwork in the city.

And the inscriptions on it? 
  • “The brazen lips of Southern cannon thundered an unanswered anthem to the God of Battle.” 
  • “It was given the genius and valor of Confederate seamen to revolutionize naval warfare over the earth.” 
  • "This stone shall crumble into dust ere the deathless devotion of Southern women be forgotten.” 
  • “The Confederate sabreur kissed his blade homeward riding on into the mouth of hell.” 
  • “Confederate infantry drove bayonets through columns that never before reeled to the shock of battle.”

I guess such romanticized notions as these are part of that Southern gentility thing.  But don't their contrived notions of valor - at the unmentioned expense of slavery - make the Confederacy memorial downtown worthy of more attention than what Dallas' city council paid to the Lee statue?

Meanwhile, this is what President Roosevelt had to say when he dedicated Lee's newer statue along Turtle Creek:

"I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.  All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general.  But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that.  We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

Hmm.

At the end of the day, much of our perception of the past depends on the rhetoric that tends to fit our worldview, doesn't it?  In other words, if you really want to believe Lee was as hateful a Southerner as his detractors claim him to have been, you will support the narrative that memorials to him must be obliterated from our country.  On the other hand, however, if you really want to cling to the notion that being a "great American gentleman" (whatever that means) should lead us to venerate people like Lee, you probably will be angry that Dallas removed a statue of him today.

So what do I think?  Personally, I neither believe Lee was personally as hateful towards blacks as he's been portrayed as being.  I suspect he was a flawed product of his time who couldn't see past the Southern economic model of slavery.  Does that make him a racist?  Yes, but then again, many folks today are racists; they're just not defined as one the way Lee has been.

Nobody can argue that we don't still have a problem with race relations in our country.  And it's past time for us to admit that we need to work harder at overcoming the prejudices that have sabotaged racial harmony since before were were a nation.  So to that end, I think the magnanimous thing to do would be to remove from public land icons to the Confederacy that likely are misinterpreted and misrepresented today by people with various motives.  If there are historical organizations that want to house these icons on private land, then they should be allowed to do so, but the best memorials will be those that portray a broader and more wholistic representation of the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the Union, warts and all.

I can understand why taxpayers who aren't white don't want their tax dollars used to maintain statues that could be used to celebrate a way of life that mistreated people.  But more than that, since Lee is - to put the best possible spin on it - associated with a culture that sought to perpetuate the ownership of human beings, is that really something for us to so conspicuously celebrate?  After all, do we celebrate the owners of brothels?  Do we celebrate Aaron Burr, who was the third person to be vice-president of our fledgling United States, but was put on trial for treason?

What's the harm in removing statues to Lee and other Confederate legends?  Who's going to forget about those men?  Certainly not all of the Southerners who insist that "the South shall rise again"!  And the Civil War isn't going to fade away from our national consciousness anytime soon.  So what's the big deal?

Part of me wonders if the agitation so many people feel at the removal of Confederacy statuary reflects not simply frustration at the changing political and social landscape of America, but also a shadow of some latent racial issues that folks don't want to admit exists inside of them.

If I touched a nerve with that, then maybe I've got a point?

And if you agree with me, don't gloat.  No matter how you look at it, this should be a somber time for America, since we all have things to learn from it.
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* What preserves Lincoln's reputation is the fact that he was assassinated before ever being able to implement any part of any plan to deport newly-freed slaves.  Educators and historians like to assume that by the war's gruesome end, Lincoln's mindset had changed enough so that he would not have pursued the re-colonization idea. 
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Update - June 7, 2019:  A Dallas lawyer purchased the Lee statue at auction for $1.43 million.  A condition of the sale is that the statue can no longer be displayed within view of any public property.




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