By Gary Topping–
It hasn’t happened since I’ve been the diocesan archivist, but it happened to my predecessor, Bernice Maher Mooney: some guy would become disgruntled with the Catholic Church and call her up to ask to have his baptismal record destroyed. Her answer was exactly what mine will be if it happens on my watch: I can’t do that. It’s a record of a historical event. Destroying the record won’t reverse the event, and will be instead an attempt to falsify history.
When an institution like the Catholic Church has been around for two millennia, it inevitably accumulates a very rich and complex history, some of which we regret and would like to take back. But we can’t. The Inquisition, the Index of Prohibited Books, the silencing of Galileo, the mistreatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the child-abusing priests—we could all add to the list. They’re with us forever. The best we can do is apologize and make amends where we can, learn our lessons, and try to do better in the future.
This seems to me to be relevant to the current issue of removal of Confederate monuments, and I’m afraid that what I’m going to suggest isn’t going to please some of my friends.
From the early seventeenth century to the end of the Civil War, slavery was a fundamental element in American life. It’s even enshrined in the Constitution, right at the beginning—Article 1 Section 2, the infamous 3/5 Compromise. As late as the early nineteenth century, getting rid of slavery seemed politically possible, but with the increasing entrenchment of cotton in the southern economy, slavery was perceived as necessary, and the South dug in its heels. We fought the bloodiest war in our history to get rid of it.
After the war, slavery was gone, but the racism that underlay the institution persisted, manifesting itself in lynching, segregation, voting restrictions and other civil rights violations. It also manifested itself in the erection of monuments to the racists who had fought to perpetuate slavery. Many of us dislike those monuments as much as we hate slavery and racism. I dislike them as much as I hate the Inquisition, the silencing of Galileo, and child-abusing priests. But they are records of an ugly element in our history, and tearing them down will not change that history. Let’s not try to falsify history. Let’s let them stand as a reminder of the racism that pervades our history and persists even today. The remains of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz are still available for us to visit and reflect on the depths of depravity to which humans can descend. Like Auschwitz, maybe the Confederate monuments will remind us that we need to do better in the future.
On the other hand, just letting them stand might be taken as collusion with the hero worship of those who installed them in the first place. In order to effect the kind of education I’m calling for, municipalities need to install interpretive plaques or something to explain that the statues represent a set of values that we are trying to transcend. We can’t rewrite history, but we can reinterpret it, and maybe that way lies healing.
I take your point Gary. History can’t be changed and any effort to do so is at best intellectually dishonest. Remember those photos of Soviet leadership successively promulgated by the Communist Party? Photos would later lose prominent subjects that were included in earlier versions of the same photo. Poof, Trotsky would be gone. Poof, Beria would disappear. Only the images of Lenin and Stalin seemed truly indelible.
We saw that practice as a critical commentary on a flawed political system. And now, for us, the practice of tearing down Confederate monuments might be seen in the same unflattering light.
However, I choose to see the issue a bit differently. The Confederate cause was at its core about the perpetuation of slavery, and was therefore truly and unredeemably evil. But somehow in the aftermath of the war we made a deal with the devil. Yes, the North prevailed and slavery was eradicated, but we offered as a sop to Southern sensibilities a fiction – the fiction that their cause was noble, their leaders were honorable, and perhaps the conflict itself was never about slavery at all, but about states rights.
So all these monuments went up, mostly many decades after the war was over, as a kind of enshrinement of that detestable fiction. So I don’t see our tearing them down now as an effort to rewrite history, I see it as an effort to finally set the historical record right.