Tearing Down Statues

Mark Graber

The following piece just appeared in the Baltimore Daily Examiner. Hope the essay is of some interest.

A good case can be made for tearing down the bust of Roger Brooke Taney that stands in front of the city hall in Frederick. When Chief Justice of the United States, Taney wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856).

The case held that persons of color could not be American citizens and that slavery could not be prohibited in American territories. Taney also wrote opinions striking down free-state laws providing protections for persons of color alleged to be fugitive slaves and declaring unconstitutional crucial Civil War policies. Not exactly the values we hope inspire citizens and children at the turn of the 21st century.

While the bulldozers are rented, we might get our money’s worth and tear down all statues honoring Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln insisted he “never complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen.”

From a contemporary perspective, the differences between Lincoln and Taney seem almost trivial. The sixteenth president opposed making persons of color citizens of Illinois, advocated federal fugitive slave laws, endorsed slaveholding in the nation’s capital, and insisted that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery in any state in which human bondage was legal. Their only serious dispute was over whether slaveholders could take their human property to North Dakota, a place few if any slaveholders had expressed interest in settling.

Forgiving famous antebellum politicians for their racism will not immunize memorials in their honor. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and many other influential lawyers let religious bigotry influence their interpretation of the First Amendment. “The real object” of the Establishment Clause, Story wrote, “was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects.” Few 19th-century political leaders demonstrated any enlightenment on women’s issues. A particularly infamous Supreme Court opinion, when maintaining that states could constitutionally prohibit women from becoming lawyers, declared that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”

Many 19th-century Americans who pass with flying colors one test for preserving their statues, dismally fail others. Frederick Douglas, the justly celebrated abolitionist, in his later years made numerous sexist assertions. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a pioneer for the rights of women, often defended gender equality by appealing to racial prejudices.

Limiting monuments to contemporaries provides only a temporary respite from the bulldozers. We are no better able to predict the future than Taney, Lincoln, Douglas or Stanton. Americans at the turn of the 22nd century may equate abortion with murder and think only bigots would regulate the sexual activities of consenting adults. Eating meat may be a crime in all 56 states. If these values or similar are what the future brings, then almost every bust we forge will have to be removed. In consideration for our descendant’s sensibilities, only lightweight materials should be used.

Tearing down statues is appropriate when we realize that the factual basis for the honor was mistaken. Leaving the monument to the war hero who, on further investigation, never spent a day in combat serves no purpose. Tearing down statues when we no longer accept the values underlying the decision to memorialize raises more difficulties. Controversial and largely ad hoc lines will have to be drawn between persons whose values are now considered beyond the pale and those whose mistaken values are excused as a product of their times. All new monuments become subject to a future judgment likely to be as harsh as ours.

Monuments to Taney, Lincoln and others are expressions of what Americans in the past believed were honorable lives. Americans in the present express what we believe are honorable lives by our decisions about whom to memorialize, not by erasing from national memory those persons previous generations believed merited honor.

Tearing down all monuments to Roger Taney encourages the historically false belief that slavery existed in the United States largely because Taney and a few other leaders made evil decisions. The monuments to Taney and other champions of slavery that exist in Frederick, in Maryland, and throughout the United States better serve as important reminders that human bondage existed in this state and country because Americans in the early 19th century believed in memorializing those political leaders who preferred slavery to liberty.
Posted 1:25 PM by Mark Graber [link]