Iconoclastic Richmond

For John, BLUF:  Richmond, Virginia used to have a stretch of road with many statues, mostly of Confederate States of America Civil War leaders, but also of Tennis Great Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native.  Now much has been torn down.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Richmond’s Rage of the Woke

Here is the sub-headline:

The city’s iconoclastic frenzy, supported by local leaders, has left a historic avenue with stumps and graffiti.

From City Journal, by Writer Catesby Leigh, 11 April 2021.

Here is the lede plus four:

Beautifully landscaped with ample medians and harmoniously lined with gracious houses in various historic styles, Richmond, Virginia’s block-paved Monument Avenue and its several statuary tributes to Confederate leaders were once recognized as a triumph of American urban design.  The residential frontages served admirably as a variegated frame for the monuments, creating a superb urban tableau that it made no sense to eradicate—especially as the monuments lost ideological currency with the passage of time, as monuments often do.  But after the mayhem triggered by George Floyd’s fatal arrest in Minneapolis in May 2020, the 14 blocks of the avenue comprising a National Historic Landmark District present a sorry spectacle. Bare pedestals, with the vandals’ graffiti not entirely washed away, stand on the avenue’s median. Statues of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the cavalry commander J. E. B. Stuart, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the world-renowned oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who played an inconspicuous role in the Confederate war effort, are gone—victims of fanaticism fueled by Twitter slogans drawing, in turn, on national-guilt and systemic-racism narratives in which Americans have been increasingly indoctrinated.

The magnificent bronze equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee still stands at the center of a turfed circle 200 feet wide that is Monument Avenue’s principal node and was the point of departure for its creation at the end of the nineteenth century.  But the monument’s majestically rusticated, 40-foot-tall granite pedestal has been hideously defaced by Black Lives Matter agitators’ spray-painting.  The circle, previously enclosed within a ring of heavily graffitied jersey barriers, and, since January, within an additional ring of chain-link fencing eight feet tall, degenerated into an anarchists’ playground last year.  The New York Times Style Magazine has perversely hailed the monument’s nihilistic “transformation” as the most influential work of “protest art” since World War II.

Located in the Confederacy’s capital, Monument Avenue was the South’s most important venue for commemoration of the Lost Cause.  The quality of its statuary was of a distinctly higher order than the many undistinguished, often cheaply mass-produced “Silent Sentinel” statues of lone Confederate soldiers, standing at parade rest in front of many a courthouse portico—not to mention Stone Mountain, Georgia’s huge, kitschy relief of Lee, Jackson, and Davis on horseback.

While Americans overwhelmingly deplore the vandalization or destruction of statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass and other abolition advocates, as well as figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, Confederate monuments have a far more precarious hold on public affections.  In recent years—and particularly during Donald Trump’s presidency—they have become increasingly controversial in the South itself.  Since the BLM protests erupted, dozens of these monuments have been banished from courthouse squares, parks, and other public spaces, from the Carolinas to Texas—in small towns as well as big cities.

In Virginia, which has seen the most dramatic outburst of defacement and officially sanctioned removal of monuments of any state, opinion has been split on the fate of the Confederate landmarks.  A September 2020 Associated Press poll found 46 percent of Virginians in favor of removal and 42 percent opposed, with a margin of error of 4 percent.  While the South leans red on the whole, Virginia is blue.  And despite years of mass-media vilification of all things Confederate, and Virginia Republicans generally treating the monuments issue like kryptonite, the state has seen nothing like a solid consensus supporting removal.  That hasn’t prevented politicians like Virginia governor Ralph Northam and Richmond mayor Levar Stoney from getting with the iconoclastic program.  The legality of their efforts is dubious in Richmond’s case.  But while the damage will almost certainly not be reversed where most of the city’s Confederate statues are concerned, Northam’s June 2020 order for the removal of the Lee equestrian is another matter.

We are talking rage here.  Rage is not, over the long haul, an attractive trait.  The other side of this coin is that it is not balancing out history, but rather throwing a cloak over it, so we can't see it.  If we can't see it we can't learn from it.  Do many think that ignoring history is better than learning from it?  I am sure, well, relatively sure, they didn't pull the Statue of Mr Arthur Ashe.

Better than tearing down statues is (1) learning history and (2) seeing if we can see any good, any growth, in misguided men, and reform ourselves.

In the short term this may be helpful to some, but in the long term this slows reconciliation.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff