At a recent press conference that was supposed to be about his federal infrastructure plans, President Trump dove back into the Charlottesville controversy. Among other things, Trump said this about the movement to remove Confederate monuments.
"So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you all -- you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"
Indeed . . . where does it stop—that is, where does the display of blatantly anti-American symbolism end? Trump also referred to the removal of the statues of the two Confederate generals as “changing history.” It is no such thing.
The New Jersey Star-Ledger weighed in well in its editorial Trump's warped sense of history emboldens white nationalists.
Washington and Jefferson, while slave owners, are also among our country's founders and former presidents. They were complicated men, but in no way comparable to the leaders of an army whose primary purpose was to defend slavery.
This statement is absolutely true. Thank you for that observation. Trump’s equation of Lee and Jackson with Washington and Jefferson is a moral abomination.
Washington’s and Jefferson’s primary purpose was to fight to create a country based on the principles of political equality that rips the “justifications” for slavery to shreds. It is they who gave the philosophic firepower for freedom fighters throughout U.S. history, from the Abolitionist Movement led by Frederick Douglass, to the Women’s Suffrage Movement, to Abe Lincoln, to Martin Luther King, to Harvey Milk, all of whom explicitly drew on the U.S. Constitution and/or the Declaration of Independence in the fight to extend the equal rights promised by America's Founders to slaves, blacks, women, and gays. President Coolidge’s signing of the Act to grant citizenship to all native-born American Indians is also rooted in our principles. The Founding of America was a key turning point in the long battle for freedom, because it defined freedom as individual equality of rights.
Lee and Jackson, on the other hand, led a military campaign to protect a breakaway confederacy that explicitly rejected the proposition that all men are equal in unalienable rights. The Confederates had to reject those principles and turn its back on America: slavery cannot indefinitely coexist with the Declaration of Independence. One or the other had to go. The Confederates dumped the Declaration of Independence.
Context is crucial. You don’t have to excuse their ownership of slaves to recognize the great achievements of Washington and Jefferson. America inherited slavery, and thanks to visionary leaders like Washington and Jefferson, America became part of the solution. They were on the right side of the struggle for a fully free country for all people, and on balance we have a much better country and world for it. The Confederacy was part of the problem. It was willing to reject America’s Founding principles and tear the United States apart to protect a racist slave dictatorship.
We should always remember history in its full context. But that principle does not forbid moral evaluations or require moral agnosticism. To build monuments to Confederate leaders like Lee is as un-American as building monuments to Hitler’s or Stalin’s generals. The Confederacy was just as un-American as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia—and so was the group protesting the removal of Lee’s monument. While I don’t endorse everything said in its editorial, I think the Star-Ledger gets the gist of it right: In equating Lee to Washington, Trump exhibits a warped sense of history. So do many others.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker has introduced a bill to remove Confederate statues from Capitol Hill. I think this is long overdue, although I cannot unequivocally endorse Bookers whole bill without knowing exactly what it says. But Booker told CNN:
"They are, unequivocally, not only statues of treasonous Americans, but are symbolic to some who seek to revise history and advance hate and division," the lawmaker added. "To millions of Americans, they are painful, injurious symbols of bigotry and hate, celebrating individuals who sought to break our nation asunder and preserve the vile institution of slavery and white supremacy.”
I don’t know exactly what he means when he say the statues “revise history and advance hate and division.” But he’s spot on that the statues of individual heroes of the Confederacy represent “treasonous Americans.” The whole history of America, including the Confederacy and its supporters, should always be taught to new generations.
But that doesn’t mean glorifying anti-Americans alongside the Washington Memorial. The Confederacy did not represent America. It represents the repudiation of America—a reactionary breakaway from America based on the rejection of the very principles that Americanism stands on. I stand with the anti-Confederate movement to remove pro-Confederate monuments.
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2 comments:
We should indeed have honest discussions about what conservatives such as Condoleezza Rice have called America’s birth defect. We should be troubled that, as the fight for American liberty went on, over forty slaves managed to achieve their own freedom only by escaping the plantations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
But you are correct in rejecting moral equivalence. Fellow slaveholders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee went much farther. They tried to establish, then sent their brethren to fight and die for, a new nation primarily dedicated to keeping human beings in chains.
Washington and the founders were what would be today called white nationalists. the immigration act of 1780 limited immigration to "free whites of good character."
There is really nothing implicit or excplicit in the founding that is contrary to the legality of slavery. While Jefferson had his qualms, he supported repatriating the blacks to Africa. Even abraham lincoln believed that, at least at times.
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