A statue had been erected in memory of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, considered by most to be one of the greatest Spanish authors. Yes, it also was vandalized, by someone who must not have cared about Cervantes’ history, for he actually was held as a slave himself by the Barbary pirates. So the wise, intelligent, and sincere person who vandalized the statue actually vandalized the statue of a slave. A statue of Matthias Baldwin, Philadelphia industrialist, life-long opponent of slavery and a champion of human rights for all, also was vandalized by the same type of genius who destroyed the others we have mentioned, no doubt by someone who leaped to the assumption that a wealthy industrialist had to be the bad guy; that is, if he knew anything about him at all, which he obviously did not.
In a previous column we mentioned that a statue to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a Black unit that distinguished itself at the second battle of Fort Wagner in the Civil War, was damaged by vandals, as was the World War II memorial in Washington DC. Overseas, statues of Winston Churchill, who perhaps more than anyone else should be given credit for defeating Nazism and Fascism, have been vandalized, as have statues to Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, the greatest fighting Admiral in the history of the Royal Navy. Nelson crushed the Napoleonic fleet at Trafalgar, which had the side effect of damaging the slave trade. A statue to James Cook, probably the most accomplished navigator/scientist of all, also was damaged.
Here are some more words that once were studied and understood: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. . .” That comes from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, given on March 5, 1865, when it was clear that the Union had won the Civil War. General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox on April 9, and on April 12 Lincoln was assassinated. Yes, memorials to him have been vandalized too. But a few days earlier, at a Victory ball, Lincoln asked that the band play the tune “Dixie,” to recognize that the defeated side was to be reincorporated into the Union. We wonder how it is that the men who actually fired their weapons at one another could for the most part quite quickly come to terms with the war and forgive and let live and reconcile, yet people 155 years later cannot. Who are the tolerant ones?
Once the statues all come down, what is next? Art galleries, museums, cemeteries, libraries, movies, collections of music, coins, stamps? How much less history will we be taught than is taught today? We can attempt to erase the past, to take some smug satisfaction in bringing George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Father Serra or Francis Scott Key or Christopher Columbus to their knees, but have we not lost much more than we have gained? We as Americans enjoyed what one Colonial historian referred to as a “usable past,” but when all that is done is to tear down, expunge, vandalize and destroy, have we not exploded that legacy, and discarded it as if it were trash?
And that’s not counting the hundreds of millions of dollars in damage caused by fires, looting, riots, destroyed police and fire vehicles and buildings and other public property, nor the small, medium and large businesses that have been destroyed – which disproportionately affected minorities. The rioters and looters claimed they were seeking justice, but they have torn down much more than they have built up.
Harold Louis “Skip” Gates, social critic and historian, an African-American, well-known for his role in the Beer Summit with President Obama, has calculated that from 1525 to 1866, 12.5 million African slaves were exported forcibly to the New World. He believes that about 10.7 million of them survived the voyage. Guess how many of them were imported to North America? Mr. Gates says 388,000, including Colonial days. The vast majority of slaves ended up in Brazil, or the Spanish possessions, or the French, Dutch, and British sugar islands and other possessions. And yet, to hear the world tell it, slavery was a uniquely American phenomenon.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ordered that four portraits of her predecessors be taken down because they had served the Confederacy. Three of the men served as Speaker prior to the Civil War. Robert Hunter was Speaker from 1839 to 1841. He was expelled from the US Senate in 1861 and served in the Confederate Congress. He was Virginia state Treasurer from 1874 until 1880. Howell Cobb was Speaker from 1849 to 1851. He was Secretary of the Treasury under James Buchanan. He was a Confederate General.
James Orr was Speaker from 1857 to 1859, served in the Confederate senate and the Confederate army, and actually was elected as Governor of South Carolina as a Republican in 1866. He later served as Grant’s Minister to Russia from 1872 to 1873, where he died. The fourth, Charles Crisp, was a Confederate Soldier from 1861 until he was captured in 1864 and was held as a POW until the end of the war. He was not even elected to Congress until 1883 and served as speaker from 1891 to 1895. This from Speaker Pelosi’s statement on the removal: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.” Odd that she can see the “spark of humanity” in MS-13 gang members but can’t find any compassion at all for men who served our nation in many capacities both before and after the Civil War.
Of course, Nancy Pelosi has served in Congress since 1987 and those photographs didn’t seem to be much of an issue before this year. Also not much of an issue was the statute of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson that her father, Baltimore Mayor Tom D’Alesandro, dedicated In 1948. Here is what Mayor D’Alesandro said at the time: “Today with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions. We must remain steadfast in our determination to preserve freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other liberty-loving nations who are striving to preserve their national unity as free nations.” Wise words. We wish his daughter had taken them to heart.
Mere membership in the incorrect ethnic, racial, economic or political group is enough to allow the self-righteous modern arbiters of justice to marginalize everyone in that group, even if they were just sitting quietly along the road and keeping their mouths shut. Anyone who can be crammed into a category declared incorrect by the vandals and caretakers of our culture can be destroyed, even if they are innocent.
We should judge people by the standards of their times, not with present-mindedness. Why, you may ask? For one thing, it is the only fair way to do so. The current group of rioters and social justice warriors are sure they are superior to the rest of us, but what if future generations see them as the intolerant bigots they really are? For another reason, there are millions of Antifa who wouldn’t know what a Fascist is if he saw one in the mirror, and almost as many intellectuals and politicians who prove by their actions and words that they fall far short of the moral standards, the intellectual accomplishment, and the basic human decency that flourished in our not very distant past. Internet outrage and hashtags are no substitute for a solid foundation in history and respect for legal institutions, and don’t you find it ironic that the people who object so vigorously to those poor benighted people of the past are actually more disrespectful and ill-mannered and ignorant than those people ever were?