Counterpoint: This Memorial Day, Up With the Cross

Every year, Fredericksburg National Battlefield lights over 20,000 candles for the annual luminaria.  The sight is astounding if you have never witnessed it yourself.  One marches up Marye’s Heights in the dusk, and as the sun sets the image is all at once beautiful and repelling in the humid May evening.  Tourists mingle with longtime Fredericksburg residents, local historians mingle with the professional, and all around the victims — men who breathed and talked as we do today — sleep.

Today there is a great deal of controversy over symbols, statues, and relics of the past that “offend” sensibilities, deeply held sensibilities that individuals so often resort to in moments where the national consciousness seems uprooted, drifting, and listless — one must find identity somewhere amidst temporarily irreconcilable differences.

Memorial Day, as Brian Schoeneman argues in his essay, was indeed formed as a means of honoring those Americans who lost their lives while serving in the military — and specifically when established in 1917, was done so to embrace both sides of the “recent unpleasantness” — North and South.  Over 600,000 lives were sacrificed in that struggle, and what was abolished in the South was much more than a system of enslavement: mills were burnt out, Sherman’s “March To The Sea” — a comparative act of genocide — lingered in the memories of Georgians and South Carolinians, the aftermath of sharecropping inflicted on the poor (white and black), the introduction of manufacturing and mining and industrialization and smokestacks and banking and finance… all these things wrecked an agrarian Southern culture distinct from the tradition of New Englanders and New Yorkers who reviled the idea of owning a man for life, so long as they could own him by the hour.

This conflict of cultures mattered a great deal as the South recovered from Reconstruction (an enterprise that was more colonial than restorative) and embarked on the “New South” — which not only saw the fortunes of Southern states revived largely be their own means, but brought along other evils as the Southern Democrats imposed their will: segregation, Jim Crow, and that old sclerosis that muses upon ruins rather than advances the Jeffersonian virtues long comprising what America had been before 1861.  The retreat to Jeffersonian vices?  Simply proved too alluring…

This is no apologia for the Southern cause.  Longtime readers of my work know that I have no great love for the Confederate flag or its public display.  As a Virginian, my heritage is intrinsically bound to deeper roots and better traditions.

What I do revile against, what offends me the most, is the mass scouring of history.  Or rather, that hiding the past rather than exposing it to the sunlight and reconciling it to a future understanding of who we are as Americans is preferable, even virtuous.

It’s easy to understand the motivations of the New South, just as it is to understand the motivations of those who believe Confederate flags should stay up or come down.  Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born philosopher who migrated to France during the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, where not one but three internal identities fought while two state actors and two superpowers fueled the conflict.  Malouf writes:

People often see themselves in terms of whichever one of their allegiances is most under attack.  And sometimes, when a person doesn’t have the strength to defend that allegiance, he hides it.  Then it remains buried deep down in the dark, awaiting its revenge.  But whether he accepts or conceals it, proclaims it discreetly or flaunts it, it is with that allegiance that the person concerned identifies.  And then, whether it relates to color, religion, language or class, it invades the person’s whole identity.  Other people who share the same allegiance sympathize, they all gather together, join forces, encourage one another, challenge “the other side.”  For them, “asserting their identity” inevitably becomes an act of courage, of liberation.  (emphasis added)

As one can easily see, this insight applies to both sides of the debate.  No one escapes the observation.  Maalouf continues:

In the midst of any community that has been wounded, agitators naturally arise.  Whether they are hot-heads or cool schemers, their intransigent speeches act as balm to their audience’s wounds.  They say one shouldn’t beg others for respect: respect is a due and must be forced from those who would withhold it.  They promise victory or vengeance, they inflame men’s minds, sometimes they use extreme methods that some of their brothers may merely have dreamed of in secret.  The scene is now set and the war can begin.  Whatever happens “the others” will have deserved it.  “We” can remember quite clearly “all they have made us suffer” since time immemorial: all the crimes, all the extortion, all the humiliations and fears, complete with names and dates and statistics.  (emphasis added)

Put yourself in the condition of either side regarding Confederate symbols and memorials.  Put yourself on either side of the Lebanese Civil War.  Patriots and redcoats.  Virginia settlers and the Powhatan nation.  Cavaliers vs. Roundheads.  Holy League vs. the Ottomans.  Irishmen vs. Englishmen…

The question is not whether history can be adjudicated by the enforced correction of memory.  Such a path only leads to the very trap that Maalouf defines.

What Memorial Day accomplishes specifically is that it brings together two sides in a terrible conflict, not to hide the wounds of war, but to expose them to the sunlight and allow both sides to engage.

Have we finished this task?  Ask anyone in Ferguson and Baltimore whether or not the task is done.  Ask anyone walking through airport security only to be detained based on their appearance.  Ask any Hispanic family harangued by others who believe that all Hispanics are “illegal” or worse, “cockroaches” that need to be sent back home.  Ask any single mother too proud to take public assistance trying to raise four children on a minimum wage.  Ask those who see the Confederate flag knowing that some people — and they are enjoying a renaissance as of late — really do see it as a weapon of subjugation against other races.

There’s work to do — no question.  We have a long ways to go before we build that shining city on a hill.  But that doesn’t mean we allow “the other” to sweep history under a rug, nor do we demand it be done so.  Exposing these questions to the light, holding a national conversation free of judgment, then arriving at individual — not social — consensus about not only the symbols and memorials but what they mean to other individuals (especially with those whom we disagree) — that matters.

In Fredericksburg, there is a very large stone on the corner of Charles and William Street.  It is the old slave auction block, one that gets hacked at by “do gooders” from Mary Washington who have no respect or value for history… but still it remains.  What is notable about the old slave auction block is that several attempts have been made to remove it.

…by the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce.  In 1924.

The reason?  Having such a relic of the slaveholding past would look bad on Fredericksburg.  After all, unlike most Southern cities during the 1920s when offered a statue for their courthouses by Congress, Fredericksburg chose to remember General Hugh Mercer — a Revolutionary War hero — rather than its Confederate past.  Fredericksburg’s Monument Avenue is studded with monuments to Clark, Jefferson, Mercer… but no one from “the War.”  The old slave auction block, it was argued, needed to be whitewashed… moved away, so said the city fathers.  Indeed, a counternarrative was made that the block was really (get this) a stepping stone for ladies to get on their carriages!

Let’s not pretend for a moment that there aren’t voices out there that would love to get rid of history.  Slave quarters at Monticello?  Are only now being rebuilt.  Slave quarters at Montpelier?  Madison’s Potemkin village — the one he showed off to visitors to make slavery appear as a benign institution — is being rebuilt, but not the shacks.  Shockoe Bottom, home of “12 Years A Slave” is an overpass.  Slave graveyards are only now being cataloged.

The point of all of this?  History has been buried before.  Memory is harder to extinguish, and when those memories are suppressed they tend to come back harder and stronger.

Our task is to deny the agitators.  There are always those who would take grievances and use them as a leverage for power rather than understanding.  Sometimes they are right to do so.  Yet when it comes to symbols and reconciliation, understanding and empathy, it is shared insight and conversation that will carry the day — not agitation and conflict.  After all, there is nothing the Stars and Bars didn’t represent as a symbol in 1861 that Old Glory didn’t represent in 1776… and certainly Old Glory standards — whether carried at Gettysburg, Chateau Thierry, Normandy, Iwo Jima, or Baghdad — represent something more noble today (or ought to).

To sideline the symbols of an entire culture is to sideline it all — both virtues and vices.  Memorial Day rightly infuses the traditions of North and South, and perhaps offers a path and an example towards reconciliation on other fronts.  Sectionalism, despite the wishes of some for a homogeneous society, never truly goes away — it is pointless to dwell on it; it is dehumanizing to demand it.  What makes America  stronger (and ourselves individually) is when the sharper edges of sectionalism die off and become replaced with an understanding of the other.

Not letting go of our past, but embracing the past of the other — that’s what ought to be memorialized.