I appreciate Jim Sacia's concern for the historical record (August 19, 2017) and hope that his appreciation will translate into active support for history education in Illinois. I love history and read it constantly. I think his support for President Trump's comments on monuments is wrong, however.
Monuments serve several purposes: to memorialize, to celebrate, and sometimes to intimidate. Intimidation was the purpose of the statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, and many of the monuments celebrating Confederate heroes along with the economic culture that was supported and rooted in slave labor. They provide an interesting exception to a general reluctance to celebrate traitors. There are no monuments (except for the infamous "Boot Monument near Saratoga) to celebrate Benedict Arnold even though he was an important general fighting for the Revolution. But he committed treason. So did Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, all of whom had sworn allegiance to the United States at West Point and in Congress and to not take up arms against the United States, yet then they did just that. We have executed people for less. And do we really want to celebrate Roger Taney, author of the infamous Dred Scott decision that declared slaves to be property and not persons? He will certainly always be taught in any class on the Civil War as part of the War's justification but a monument to him?
Mr. Sacia said Lee was against slavery. Why did he never speak out against it? Why did he never free those owned by his wife? While he wrote to his wife that "slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country," he also added "the painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction." According to eminent Civil War historian Eric Foner, Lee never supported voting rights for black citizens and was silent about the terrorism perpetrated against freed blacks by groups such as the KKK. (He did object to raising monuments writing in 1869, that "it would be wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife.")
I lived in Germany for several years (I speak German,) and I have visited most of Germany's former Soviet sector and what used to be Czechoslovakia. Sacia is right to bring up the concentration camp example, but he completely missed their point. I have never been to Auschwitz so I can't speak for the example of Poland, but he has misconstrued how concentration camp and other memorials, e.g. Track 17 at the Berlin- Grunewald Station (very much in the spirit of the Vietnam Memorial) are used in Germany and the former Soviet Block. After WW II all the monuments to Hitler were torn down and the flag representing his culture and anti-semitism were made illegal (unlike the display of the Confederate battle flag in the United States, which represents to many support for a similarly odious culture.) Following the dismantling of the notorious Wall, statues of Lenin and Stalin were torn down. The monuments that I have seen all over Germany, but especially in Berlin and Dresden, celebrate the victims not the perpetrators. (No swastikas or Hitler statues at concentration camp memorials.) How many monuments do we have in this country in the South to the victims of lynching or the decades of slavery? A strong lesson: In Germany they celebrate those who died under the hand of those who would enslave; here southern monuments celebrate the enslavers.
Monuments teach very little about history; they do represent a culture and attitude. The tearing down of statues can be just as important for what that action represents. This is not snuffing out history, it's history in the making, a rejection of a culture and value system that subjugated a people and those who fought against the tyranny of that system.
To quote Adam Serwer in the Atlantic. "Lee is a pivotal figure in American history worthy of study. Neither the man who really existed, nor the fictionalized tragic hero of the Lost Cause, are heroes worthy of a statue in a place of honor. As one Union veteran angrily put it in 1903 when Pennsylvania was considering placing a statute to Lee at Gettysburg, “If you want historical accuracy as your excuse, then place upon this field a statue of Lee holding in his hand the banner under which he fought, bearing the legend: ‘We wage this war against a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to humanity.’” The most fitting monument to Lee is the national military cemetery the federal government placed on the grounds of his former home in Arlington.
To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated. It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform."
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