Life is messy. People are complex, and it’s always been that way.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and was an untiring champion of religious freedom, but he was also a slave holder and made a slave who was a half sister to his deceased wife his mistress.
Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the United States and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, but never believed blacks to be the equal of whites.
Martin Luther King fought valiantly and effectively for equal rights, but was an incorrigible womanizer.
Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly the Atlantic solo and an aviation pioneer, who risked his life in WWII to improve combat flight operations; he was also an America-first isolationist, closet Nazi supporter, and a bigamist.
Richard Wagner was a great composer, but also an avowed anti-Semite who seduced the wife of his greatest financial supporter.
Almost invariably, people want to believe that people of great achievements were better individuals than they actually were, and now, when history and scholarship reveal the full scope of their lives, there’s a growing movement to destroy statues and monuments and to denigrate important historical figures because they weren’t perfect.
Some of this backlash is understandable and justifiable. I can see why the descendants of slaves, in particular, would want monuments glorifying figures of the Confederacy destroyed, but trying to erase or change the view of history only makes it more likely that the evils will reoccur. In a sense, that’s exactly what happened in much of the American south, when in the post-Reconstruction period, southern whites papered over the evils of slavery and erected monuments to the “valiant” soldiers of the Confederacy, so effectively that for generations to follow the southern “story” was of lost glory, the destruction of states’ rights, and Yankee carpetbaggers, rather than the real story, which was the destruction of a socio-economic system based on dehumanization and oppression.
But there’s a difference between removing “propaganda” statues and monuments and removing those who made a difference in history. Removing statues of Lincoln or Jefferson because they weren’t “pure” ignores the basic fact that none of us are. Like it or not, the military ability of Robert E. Lee made an awful difference in prolonging the Civil War, but those abilities are part of history.
The preservation of some of the Nazi death camps helps keep alive a reminder of just how evil governments can become if people allow it. When the history of evil is buried – or white-washed – it becomes so much easier for subsequent generations to repeat those evils, as it was in the American south, if on a lesser scale.
As always, balance is vital.
