Ghosting the Confederacy
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What should happen to Confederate monuments after they leave their pedestals? This week, the Jefferson School, an African American heritage organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, proposed one definitive answer: melt them down.
This idea began to take shape even before the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the city’s bronze monument to General Robert E. Lee on June 7, 2021. Back in June, the councilors listened to hours of testimony from members of the public who called in to the Zoom hearing. One man insisted that Lee was a “great Virginian” who fought in the Civil War to “preserve [his] homeland from Northern invaders.” The councilors greeted this comment, as they did every other remark, with a stony-faced “thank you” before unmuting the next caller, Don Gathers, the cofounder of Charlottesville Black Lives Matter.
“Oh, for the love of God,” Gathers sighed. He had chaired the 2016 commission appointed to advise the city council after Zyahna Bryant, a high school freshman, petitioned to remove Lee from a park in the city’s historic center. “I am offended every time I pass it,” she had written. “I am reminded over and over again of the pain of my ancestors.”
When the city council voted to relocate the monument, white supremacist groups organized a large rally for August 2017, dubbing it Unite the Right. The Lee monument, as one of the rally’s leaders explained, was “the focal point of everything,” because removing it would be “white genocide. It’s about the replacement of our people, culturally and ethnically.”
Clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters meant that Virginia’s governor declared a state of emergency before the rally even began. As the crowds slowly dispersed, a white nationalist drove his car through a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, an anti-racist activist, and injuring dozens of others.
At the June meeting, held after the conclusion of years of litigation that had blocked the city from carrying out its planned removal, Gathers told the councilors that the Lee statue is a “Bat-Signal for white supremacists.” Since it will attract violence wherever it is placed, Gathers suggested melting it down. “Have someone transform it into a rainbow,” he proposed. “And listen to white supremacists’ heads explode immediately afterwards.”
The councilors unanimously voted to remove Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The statues were hoisted off their pedestals on July 10, 2021, and trucked off to storage. They joined the nearly 100 Confederate monuments toppled by protesters or removed by authorities after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. But so far, none of these monuments has been permanently, irreversibly removed from display. Some were relocated to cemeteries, battlefields, or museums; others remain in storage while local officials debate their fate.
Protesters gathered around Confederate monuments in 2020 to show their anger at the continued honoring of histories of racism and oppression. Authorities making decisions about these statues in 2021 have mostly opposed that anger—or have sought to tidy it up into politely worded plaques to be added to explain “alternate points of view.” But Charlottesville’s citizens are not going to let their disgust be so easily forgotten.
Gathers was far from the only one asking for the total destruction of the monuments. “How many have melted down their idols of war and turned them into symbols of justice?” another caller asked during the June Zoom meeting. “This country doesn’t need more bronze generals on horses—it needs monuments forged from their remains.” Another speaker pleaded with the council not to let the monuments become “someone’s perverse trophies of not only our city’s trauma, but of the trauma of generations of people of color.” An activist who was stabbed in the stomach by a flagpole during the Unite the Right rally suggested that the metal from the statues be recast into commemorative coins, as souvenirs for everyone who helped take them down.
These proposals to melt down monuments and turn them into something better fit for the country we hope to have might seem radical, but in fact, Americans melted down the very first metal monument to arrive in the colonies. New York City’s lead statue of George III was turned into bullets in 1776 to fight the king’s own troops during the Revolutionary War.
Throughout history, public monuments fell when regimes changed or when people decided they no longer wanted to honor the ideologies enshrined in statues. Triumphal 1945 newsreel footage shows the Allies blowing up a giant swastika that had loomed over a Nuremberg stadium. Rejecting a cruel history by attacking its monumental remains is so important that after Koreans removed public statues of a disgraced former president, they put one back up so that citizens could break it again.
Often, such monuments are simply smashed for scrap, but sometimes they are transformed. Some Soviet monuments were recast as sculptures of Olympians or poets. One Ukrainian Lenin got a cloak and became Darth Vader, beaming out free Wi-Fi from his helmet.
Despite this long history, we seem to have forgotten that destruction and transformation are options for America’s controversial monuments. Instead, many insist that there’s no reason at all to be “crying about bronze,” as one defender of Charlottesville’s monuments told the councilors. The young man insisted that the activists who want to melt them down are confusing all white people with the “very small group of actual neo-Nazis” who marched in 2017. “That sounds a bit–what’s the word?—racist. That sounds a little racist,” he said. “Good Lord, my head’s about to explode.”
The concerted opposition in the past year to relocating or even adding contextualizing signage to Confederate monuments indicates that many other Americans would also resist any proposal to destroy them. If we are not melting down these monuments as enthusiastically as we blew up swastikas and Stalins, it is because the Civil War is not yet over. The dispute at its heart–about the proper relationships between Americans of different heritages–still rages on.
Ironically, the transformative possibilities of molten metal were part of the original plan for Charlottesville’s Lee statue. After making his fortune as a stockbroker, Paul Goodloe McIntire gave many gifts to his hometown, including the Lee and Jackson monuments. In 1917, McIntire commissioned the Lee statue from a New York sculptor who proposed casting the general from melted-down Confederate cannons.
That part of the plan didn’t happen. The sculptor died and the project was taken over by another artist, whose finished work has been regarded as awkward and unrealistic. (As early as 1923, when Virginia newspapers ran photographs of the final model for the statue, an indignant letter to the editor from a Confederate veteran complained that the sculptor not only “signally failed to reproduce General Lee as he actually was,” but that the monument’s restless horse bore no resemblance to Lee’s famed mount, Traveller, who “was not a horse to put on airs.”)
“To me, and I think for a lot of older white Southerners, these monuments aren’t racist,” one caller told the city council. He argued that Lee should be kept in place “if you want to be inclusive” of everyone in Charlottesville (including, apparently, its older white men). Many people similarly worry that taking down Confederate monuments will erase history. Then president Donald Trump, for example, tweeted a few days after Unite the Right that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart” by the removal of monuments, calling it “foolish” to lose the chance to learn from history.
But what history did Charlottesville’s Lee statue teach? And what history did it hide?
One summer day in 1923, John Powell stood on a street corner in Richmond, Virginia, his pale eyes alert in his long, narrow face. In the essay he later published, “Is White America to Become a Negroid Nation?,” Powell recalled counting “among the passers-by over 200 Negroes, of whom only five were black.” He also recorded “over thirty individuals of whom I could not with any degree of certainty state whether they were white or colored.” In a manner echoed by contemporary panics about trans and gender-nonconforming people going undetected in the “wrong” bathrooms or sports teams, many white Virginians in the early 1920s were convinced that the “color line” was eroding. How could they enforce segregation if some Black people could pass for white? Powell and his allies, eager to find justifications for the continued denial of political participation, economic opportunity, and quality health care and schooling to Black Virginians, seized on the theory of eugenics.
The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, was a leading center for this racist pseudoscience. Professor Paul Barringer published one of eugenics’ leading treatises, “The American Negro: His Past and Future.” According to Barringer, Black Americans reached their highest developmental potential under slavery, when benevolent white masters imposed selective breeding to improve their “savage nature.” Barringer argued that after Emancipation, Black Americans’ “return to barbarism is as natural as the return of the sow that is washed to her wallowing in the mire.” (He did have to admit that at least some Black Americans had “exceptional character,” since one of his half-brothers, Warren Clay Coleman, born into slavery, founded a successful textile mill and became probably the wealthiest Black man in North Carolina by 1900, the year Barringer published his screed.)
Barringer believed Black people were genetically more susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, and thought the whole race would go extinct fairly rapidly. In the meanwhile, though, they posed a public health threat to white Americans. For example, tubercular Black cooks and washerwomen might contaminate the food and clothing of their employers. In the eugenicists’ irrational system, white Americans, although superior, were surprisingly fragile. Like Confederate monuments today, their superiority needed to be carefully protected.
“It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters; it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the [voting] franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population,” Powell wrote in his widely read essay. But he had a proposal to fix this “Negro problem”: Virginia should issue its citizens racial certificates, punishing misrepresentation as a felony. Then, local clerks could scrutinize these certificates before issuing marriage licenses, so that no one with any “trace whatsoever of any blood other than the Caucasian” could marry a white person.
In early 1924, three months before the long-awaited Lee statue was unveiled, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, making only a few changes to Powell’s proposal (notably by introducing the “Pocahontas Exception,” which increased the amount of Native American heritage a white Virginian could have, allowing for the maintenance of family myths about noble Indian ancestors).
Walter Plecker, the son of a Confederate veteran and director of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, was so enthusiastic about his new powers under the act that he even, according to historian Elizabeth Catte, sought to exhume the bodies of people now deemed “colored” from white cemeteries. Plecker’s only disappointment was that he did not have the same resources as the Nazis to enforce eugenic policy. Scholar Gregory Dorr uncovered a 1935 fan letter from Plecker to a Nazi official, praising him for tracking down and sterilizing children fathered by Black French troops stationed in Germany after World War I.
The number of marriage licenses denied under the Racial Integrity Act went unrecorded. We cannot know how many hearts were broken or how many longed-for children went unborn. We do know that the act was still disrupting lives in the early morning of July 11, 1958, when Virginian police burst into the bedroom of Mildred and Richard Loving, and arrested them for evading the law by getting married in another state. It was not until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, that the Supreme Court overturned the Act and the other state prohibitions on interracial marriage it had inspired.
Lee was a crucial talking point for the eugenicists, both as they lobbied for the act and afterward, when they educated Virginians about their new responsibilities. Not everyone was happy about the possibility that Plecker might declare them “colored” after scrutinizing long-forgotten branches of their family trees. Eugenicists pressed Lee into service as an example of what they wanted to achieve.
The president of Washington and Lee College praised the general as “an embodiment” of the “great stock” of Virginia when he dedicated Charlottesville’s Lee monument in 1924. This “stock” was an imaginary “American race,” supposedly descended from the founders of the first colonies. Eugenicists regarded these Americans as even better than white Europeans, since they were brave enough to cross the ocean and hardy enough to survive. The Lees were one of these “First Families,” tracing their decent to Virginia’s earliest settlement. The family’s long history of political power and military command could thus be used as evidence that qualities like intelligence and leadership were genetic.
As a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Lee claimed, “It took five generations of clean living and wise mating to produce such a man.” This author insisted that there were “not more than two or three instances” when one of Lee’s ancestors married someone “not equal in blood.” The lack of “misalliance” made Lee’s career “eugenically… a lesson in the cumulative effect of generations of wise marriages.”
Lee himself had been obsessed with heredity, although probably not in the way you expect. His father had followed an early heroic career as one of Washington’s Revolutionary War cavalry officers with a descent into speculation and fraud, eventually abandoning his family and fleeing the country. Lee’s private writings show that he considered his life an unceasing fight to resist what he saw as his tainted heritage.
But Charlottesville’s Lee statue inspired white viewers to breed wisely—and to fear what would happen if they did not. Lee’s role in Virginia’s eugenics laws has mostly been forgotten, but it remains a latent toxicity, capable of flaring up into pain, just like the diseases the eugenicist thought they could prevent.
Today’s white supremacists would nod along to a lecture by Powell, Barringer, or Plecker. Their talk of “white genocide” and fears of being replaced are direct echoes of the eugenicists’ paranoia about “white America” becoming a “Negroid nation.” Their attachment to the Lee monument as a symbol that they are willing to use violence to defend is the same too.
The Charlottesville City Council is still considering what to do with the removed monuments. They have received a number of proposals, ranging from a Texan who offered to “give them a place of honor to be viewed by all patriots who wish to keep our heritage strong” to a nonprofit Los Angeles arts space whose director, Hamza Walker, explained that he plans to offer artists complete creative freedom to transform them. And the Jefferson School has raised over $500,000 to disassemble the statue, melt it down in a foundry, and commission an artist to reuse the bronze for a new piece of public art after consultation with the community. Dr. Andrea Douglas, the Jefferson School’s Executive Director, explained that she wants the project, dubbed “Swords Into Plowshares,” to be a “road map” for the many other communities deciding what to do about their controversial monuments.
The Houston Museum of African American Culture, which in the summer of 2020 became the first Black cultural institution to house a removed Confederate statue, has shown what can happen when artists are given free rein to transform a monument. The monument, Spirit of the Confederacy, is a 12-foot statue of a winged, muscular man clutching a palm frond and sword over his body. It was erected in downtown Houston on Lee’s 101st birthday, celebrating the 1902 amendment of Texas’s constitution to disenfranchise Black and Mexican American voters.
The museum surrounded Spirit with watchful, eye-shaped sculptures by local artist Bert Long Jr. They held a symposium about the statue’s history and future, where some community members suggested renaming it Karen. And instead of carefully preserving the monument, the museum hasn’t even wiped off the cobwebs Spirit came with from storage, much less restored its deteriorating patina.
In the first of what the museum plans to be many instances of artists treating the monument however they wish, Willow Curry addressed Spirit directly in a video work. “Your hatred, like your body, is naked and unashamed,” she told it. She explained that she understands its sword as a threat to Houston’s Black citizens, warning them that they would be killed if they dared to speak as freely as Curry now can.
Many Confederate monuments were put in America’s public spaces in times and places when citizens of color had no voice in such decisions. Now, as we decide what to do with them, it is not the country’s past, but its future, at stake. Whose love, whose pain, and whose America will we honor? The Charlottesville City Council has given itself a January deadline to decide on the fate of its Lee. America might no longer be a melting pot, but it might help us if some of our monuments end up in one.
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