Craig Bennett Cautions: Learning from History Is Not Erasing It

by Craig Bennett*

Over the last few years, throughout the Southern Unites States, statues honoring heroes of the Confederacy are being torn down, defaced and vandalized, or quietly removed. African-Americans are jubilant. Men who fought to defend the alleged “right” to buy and sell their ancestors like cattle or horses and work them like mules, with no compensation for their labor except the humblest of accommodations and minimal sustenance, are finally losing their places of honor in town squares, public parks, and in front of court houses and other public buildings. Movements are afoot to remove their names from military bases, various government facilities, schools, and colleges, and much has already been done to implement that. Yet, a certain segment of our population is crying, “But this is history! They’re trying to erase history!” as if this were Soviet Russia attempting to excise from public memory the purges under Stalin, the deadly famine following the initial collectivization of farms and food distribution, or the thousands killed during the October Revolution for no greater crime than being wealthy or born into an aristocratic family.

Not quite. Few would argue that slavery was anything more than a great evil. True enough, it enabled many American plantation owners, Caribbean rum distillers, and English textile mill owners to get very rich as a result of the Triangular Trade across the Atlantic in rum, cotton, and slaves. But at what cost—and to whose shame?

But slavery in America was far from the only great evil visited upon large numbers of innocent human beings in recent history. There was, of course, Nazism in Germany under Adolph Hitler, Fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini, and Soviet socialism in Russia under Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. Unfortunately, these movements and their leaders are all part of the history of those countries every bit as much as the institution of slavery and men like Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and every member of the army of the Confederacy are a part of ours.

But if you were to visit Germany today, where would you look for the statues honoring Adolph Hitler? In which town squares? In front of which court houses? In which public parks? Likewise Mussolini. In Italy’s great cities—Rome, Florence, Venice, and others—there are no statues honoring Il Duce, a fanatical dictator whose body was enthusiastically defiled by Italian citizens after being dumped in a town square after his execution. And although some statues commemorating both Lenin and Stalin remain in some small towns in outlying districts of Russia, larger cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg have either destroyed them or relegated them to “sculpture parks” where they can be viewed along with other examples of three-dimensional art that carry a lighter burden of historical significance.

Am I comparing responsible and courageous men like Davis and Lee to deranged psychopaths like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin? Only with regard to their association with something that history recognizes as a great evil. As praiseworthy as many Confederate officers may have been as strategists and tacticians in battle, admirable as they may have been in their role as husbands and fathers, or astute as they may have been as businessmen in the management of their own plantations, they nevertheless took up arms against the country they had vowed to defend when they graduated from the Military Academy at West Point and accepted their commission in the United States Army. And as admirable as the courage, the dedication, and the adherence to military discipline of many rank-and-file Confederate soldiers might have been, even as defeat was looking more and more inevitable, their cause was not just. They were fighting to preserve the unjust, oppressive, and evil institution of slavery.

People with an unaccountable nostalgia for an antebellum South that never quite existed—the South of Gone with the Wind, for example—have tried to redefine the Confederacy’s cause as defending “states’ rights.” But whenever I’ve found myself in conversation with someone who endorses this interpretation of history, I’ve asked him (or her) what states’ rights besides buying and selling human beings as slaves the South was trying to defend; and that’s the point at which it becomes a very short conversation.

So are we trying to erase history? Rewrite it? Abolish it? No more than Germany is trying to erase the memory of Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. No more than Italy is trying to erase its Fascist era when Mussolini cooperated hand-in-hand with Hitler to bring the rest of Europe and the world under their domain. No more than Russia is presently trying to erase the memory of the bloody October Revolution and the civil war that followed, the virtual elimination of the bourgeois, or the purges under Stalin and his vast expansion of the Gulag. So perhaps we can learn something from these countries who have already confronted and dealt with a modern history that includes much of which their citizens should hardly be proud.

The United States was one of the last Western nations to abolish the institution of slavery. Why, then, would we want to celebrate the values that gave rise to, perpetuated, and inspired a war to preserve the institution itself. Why would we want to honor the defenders of those values with statues in public spaces; their names on public buildings, military bases, schools, and other public facilities; their battle flag flying just below the stars and stripes on flag poles all over the South (and in front of many private homes in the North)?

To cease doing so is no different from Germany’s refusal to honor someone like Adolph Hitler, Herman Goering, or Heinrich Himmler with public statuary, their name attached to government buildings, or other sorts of public memorials; no different from Italy’s refusal to so honor Benito Mussolini; no different from Russia’s refusal to so honor the brutal dictator Josef Stalin. Yes, these men and the ideas they represent are all part of the history of those countries, and those countries have not forgotten that. But it is not a part of their history of which they have reason or desire to feel proud. It is not a part of their history that they have reason or justification to honor and celebrate. It is a part of their history that they choose to remember primarily as a caution, a warning that it could and did happen there. Slavery in America, and the entire regional culture that supported and fought to defend it, is something that fits that slot very comfortably. We would do well to treat it the same way.

* Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly Bookstore in Kutztown, PA

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