Eminently Reasonable

Eugene Robinson lays out a good, clear argument for the removal of Confederate statuary from public places.

He notes - properly, I think - that there is a fundamental difference between slave owners like Washington, Jefferson and Madison and those who committed treason in defense of the institution of slavery like Davis, Jackson and Lee.

We should temper our adulation of a man like Washington who struggled to reconcile his commitment to republican principles with the wealth his slaves created for him. While he freed them in his will, they obviously couldn't profit him from the grave.  Jefferson is even more complicated - as he is almost all things. Jefferson believed ardently in a politics of white male supremacy, with a possible allowance for Native Americans to join if they properly changed themselves into white people through adopting agriculture. His party disenfranchised women in New Jersey who had briefly been given the vote after the Revolution. And yet it was precisely the soaring ideals he expressed that gave urgency to the later causes for African American and female citizenship.

There is no such complexity with Jefferson Davis, a middling Secretary of War and Senator, whose only claim to "fame" was his disastrous presidency of a failed secession movement. I have seen the arguments that if - for instance - Washington had been wiped out at the Battle of White Plains in 1776, he would have been branded a traitor.  Yes.  He would have, by the British.  Assuming a later, successful movement for American independence, he would have been rehabilitated as a pioneer patriot.  If you want to be cynical, history is written by the winners, and the Confederates were losers.

Except the point of the statues is that they weren't. These statues arose as Jim Crow and lynch law returned African Americans to a state of virtual slavery. They were monuments as much to reimposition of white supremacy as they were to the failures of the Confederacy. The "Lost Cause" didn't lose...not by 1890.  It was only in the 1950s and '60s that the Lost Cause was defeated.  And not coincidentally, that era marked the return of the Stars and Bars to public display.

I had an interesting Twitter exchange on the subject of Ulysses Grant. Grant was a subject of scorn from a period roughly synchronous with the Progressive Era until very recently.  The corruption that typified the Gilded Age was ascribed to Grant's poor managerial skills and he was considered something of a dunce.  Some of that was simply an effort to tear down Grant in order to rehabilitate Lee, again to appease white supremacists in the South and North. Recently, a statue of Grant was defaced during protests.

Grant is properly being rehabilitated by modern historians. He was one of the most gifted military leaders the country has known, he was one of the finest writers to hold the office of the presidency, and his memoirs are considered the finest of their type. Grant was also - more or less alone - the only president from Lincoln to at least Harry Truman who exerted political capital on behalf of African Americans. Grant was committed to crushing the Klan, and largely did suppress them in areas where military Reconstruction was allowed to continue. As soon as he left office, the Klan came roaring back.

Grant assumed office wanting a "policy of peace" with Native Americans, and for his first term largely held to it. As someone who had served in the West, he was greatly sympathetic to Native claims to land. However in 1873 a crushing depression hit the US, and at roughly the same time, gold was discovered in the Black Hills.  Grant was faced with a dilemma: hold to his Policy of Peace or take the Black Hills and inject badly needed gold into the US economy (effectively an inflationary monetary policy in the days before fiat currency). He chose the economy and dispossessed the Lakota of the Black Hills by force. (This was the war that cost Custer his life.)

So, how do you reconcile Grant, perhaps the most vigorous defender of African American rights from 1865-1945 with Grant the hypocritical violator of his own Policy of Peace? How do you look at Grant's sincere belief that Native Americans should be citizens with the man who jettisoned his commitment to the Lakota?

By doing just that. You acknowledge that Grant was complicated.  You also acknowledge that leadership has its limits. Grant's plan to give Native Americans citizenship fought incredible headwinds and had few if any powerful supporters.  His decision to seize the Black Hills was a calculation to help millions of Americans struggling under a Depression rather than tens of thousands of Lakota who wanted to retain a place that had been sacred to them for hundreds of years.

There is not a single person who occupied the White House who did not find his ideals compromised by the realities of the job.  You must have ideals to lead, but those ideals will always be eroded by the hard choices of governing.  I don't think some on the Left realize this. Their politics tends to be absolute. The same goes for the Right, who has abandoned the necessities of governing in favor of electoral politics.

Compromises between various stakeholders in a society, a community or a business is not acceptable to people who hold the most fervent beliefs.  That goes for self-styled Socialists as well as Neo-Confederates. Yet, without some form of compromise a society cannot exist.