In 1997, on my first parent’s night at Harpeth Hall, I concluded my remarks to a roomful of attentive mothers and fathers by opening up for questions. This was a rookie mistake, as any experienced teacher will tell you. You should never allow time for questions—it can only lead to trouble. Before I had learned that lesson, however, I had a confrontational father ask me if I was a “revisionist” historian. He practically spit the term out as he spoke it, having learned from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to disparage all practitioners of such blasphemy. “Revisionist History” was a term that surfaced in the culture wars of the 1990s, created by those who longed for the good ol’ days when history classes consisted solely of stories about the Great White Men who, with God guiding their hands, founded this nation, forged a heroic path to the West, won numerous wars, and made the US the greatest country in the world. Those on the right didn’t want to hear about the role played by women, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, immigrants, or workers in that glorious story.
I responded with rhetorical questions: “Would you go to a doctor who had ignored the latest literature of his profession and continued to practice medicine the way it had been practiced fifty years ago? Or, if you were audited by the IRS, would you enlist the aid of a lawyer who was completely ignorant of the changes in tax codes over the previous half-century? Of course you wouldn’t, and, of course I am a revisionist. I would hope you want your daughter to have the benefit of the most current research in all of her classes, for that’s what ‘revisionism’ means.”
History, after all, is not a science; it is an interpretive art and therefore is subject to constant revision. Each generation, a new group of historians, with new sources, technologies, and viewpoints, takes a fresh look at our past and reaches new conclusions about the people and events that comprise our history. It has been that way since the days of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and will continue to be so in the future. To believe that history is a static “truth” that is carved in stone somewhere is simply wrong.
Since the 1960s, the interpretation and teaching of history has changed dramatically. When I was a kid, women, minorities, and working people were largely absent from the textbooks and lectures to which I was exposed. Sure, they might have thrown in a mention of Betsy Ross, Pocahontas, or Susan B. Anthony, but only in a cursory way. Most minority groups were characterized as a passive, collective group (such as “slaves” or “immigrants”) who were acted upon by those white men, but did little to help themselves. Because of the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and other social movements of the ‘Sixties, however, historians suddenly discovered the presence of those other people. They began to explore history “from the bottom up,” and discovered that those neglected individuals and groups had rich histories that were, in fact, often more interesting than those of the wealthy, Great White Men. They found that those other people did not simply sit there passively and accept their fate; they had agency, and they fought back against their oppressors in creative ways. They shaped their own histories and made enormous contributions to the story of America, despite the fact that the deck was stacked against them.
As this new information slowly found its way into the textbooks and classrooms of America, conservative forces pushed back. The main battles started in Texas, where a couple named Mel and Norma Gabler led the attack from a Christian Right position. Similar to the efforts of fundamentalists of the 1920s to keep Evolution and new scientific ideas out of textbooks, the Gablers spearheaded a national battle against what they perceived to be “Godless, atheistic, and un-American” history books. Since Texas purchases more textbooks than any other state, publishers began to cater to people like the Gablers and similar-minded interest groups. Textbooks began to roll back changes implemented by revisionists, downplay the role of slavery in causing the Civil War, ignore the near-extermination of Native Americans as part of Westward expansion, sugarcoat the violent importation of shackled African slaves as just another wave of immigration, and return to the notion that US history in general was part of God’s divine plan. Liberals, of course, returned fire, and, for the past 30 years, the conflict has raged in courtrooms, school-board meetings, newspaper editorials, and other battlefields across the country with the pendulum swinging first in one direction, then the other. The end result, though, is that we will never turn back the clock completely and return to a time where those formerly invisible groups disappear again. As Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I say all of this to put the current battles over statues and monuments into context. This is, in many ways, another phase of that same culture war. For many decades, people in various minority groups have fostered simmering resentment toward monuments that glorified people who had oppressed their particular group at some time. The recent protests have brought those resentments to the surface. As in the battle over textbooks, we can see extreme arguments on both sides. The “Down-With-All-Statues” group often go too far in their demands, while other groups can look ridiculous in trying to defend the indefensible.
As usual, I sit on the fence in this debate and try to look at both sides. The no-brainer concerns symbols of the old Confederacy. First, remember what those people did—in order to preserve the institution of slavery, they fought a bloody, military rebellion to destroy the nation as it then existed. You don’t need a legal interpretation of the word “Treason” to know that their actions met the standard. Second, in any other nation, at any other time in history, the leaders of a failed insurrection of this nature were rounded up and executed. We didn’t do that. Instead, in the South, we erected statues to those men. The historical period of monument-building actually occurred between 1890 and 1910, a period in which the South was trying to re-write history and paint the Civil War in terms of a “Lost Cause” in which they were fighting for high ideals such as states’ rights, rather than to defend slavery. It is no coincidence that that same twenty-year period was the era in which the South created the segregation system. Each state and local community in the former Confederacy tried erase the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and deny Blacks civil rights by means of voter repression (sound familiar?) and new “Jim Crow” laws. Moreover, they built statues honoring their former generals and leaders, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, a cavalry general who also started the KKK in Tennessee after the war. (See the grotesque statue from Nashville, above) These statues must come down. Celebrating the men who tried to perpetuate the ownership of one person by another because of their skin color should have no place in a land in which “all men are created equal.” Similarly, the Confederate Flag was not a common symbol in the South until the 1950s, when it came into popular use as an emblem representing white supremacy and resistance to integration. It needs to go.
On the other hand, the tearing down of all statues because the people depicted were not perfect is wrong. We go too far when we try to hold all historical figures to a modern standard of perfection in terms of race relations. Yes, political expediency had a lot to do with motivating Lincoln to end slavery. But he grew in office, and he did, in fact, end the odious institution. Yes, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others owned slaves. They definitely lose points for that, and Jefferson loses more for having a lengthy, sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, with whom he had six children (This was after his wife, Martha, had died; Hemings was a mixed-race, half-sister to Martha Jefferson by way of Martha’s father. This situation illustrates the omnipresence of miscegenation on plantations, as well as the complexity of Southern society racially). But being “slave owners” was not the sum total of who those men were. They were also incredible intellects who inspired Americans to break away from their colonial masters and establish a new government based on democracy and republican principles, rather than monarchy and hereditary privilege. Yes, they were flawed, but they knew it. They even acknowledged the fact that the nation they were creating was a work in progress in the preamble of the Constitution. The phrase, “in order to form a more perfect union” indicates that the US was unfinished, that it was not perfect or complete as yet, and it needed improvement. That could also be said for these men as individuals. They were imperfect men who strove to be better than they were and regarded their slave-owning status as somewhat embarrassing.
I’m not trying to apologize for them, or minimize their flaws, but we have to also recognize their contributions. Washington provided a sterling example of presidential dignity, and, just as important, he relinquished power after two terms in office—the first time that had ever happened, anywhere in the world. In the way he carried himself while president, and in not trying to put himself above the law or rule as a dictator, he set an example that has been followed by every other president except Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Jefferson, like Washington and Madison, struggled with the obvious contradiction between his written words and the ownership of slaves. Yet, he wrote or co-wrote two of the most powerful statements of liberty in history (the Declaration of Independence and Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution). People and nations have been inspired by those statements ever since and the world is a better place because of it. James Madison is known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his many contributions, including the Bill of Rights, and for co-writing The Federalist Papers that helped persuade the wavering states to ratify the new Constitution. In his biography of Madison, historian Garry Wills writes, “Madison’s claim on our admiration does not rest on a perfect consistency. He has other virtues … As a framer and defender of the Constitution he had no peer … The finest part of Madison’s performance as president was his concern for the preserving of the Constitution …That was quite enough.”
The founding fathers were not infallible deities we should worship unconditionally; nor were they monstrous humans deserving of scorn and derision. They were just people, with the faults and imperfections that we all have. In fact, I would argue that it was the inconsistency, the flaws, and the contradictions of these men, along with their aspirations to improve, that makes them interesting and worthy of study. I guess what I’m trying to say, to use a hackneyed phrase, is “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.” We’re at an exciting time in our history, and we have to be careful not to go too far. The demolition of symbols and images that represent hatred or oppression is long overdue. Many other monuments, however, need to be preserved. If nothing else, they serve as reminders of our own imperfections as individuals and as a nation. And, like Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison, we should constantly aspire to improve and make our country a “more perfect union.”
