Following Up: A Pathway Out of the History Wars

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African Americans, American Museum of Natural History, Andrew Jackson, Christopher Columbus, Confederate monuments, Following Up, imperialism, Lafayette Park, Matthias Baldwin, Native-Americans, racism, slavery, The New York Times, Theodore Roosevelt

I wasn’t originally planning on returning to the Confederate monuments/history wars issue so soon, but it’s the gift that keeps on giving for a blogger, and the last day or so has been filled with new developments.

Oddly, I’m going to tack positive today – despite the continuation of attempts at vandalism and mob violence (as took place in Lafayette Park, right across from the White House, last night); despite the recent example of both vandalism and rank stupidity in Philadelphia; despite the ongoing pigheadedness and possibly worse of the stand-patters, who seem to believe that removing memorials on public grounds even to the vilest racists always amounts to an “erasure of history”; and despite the virtual certainty of more of all of the above to come.

I’m feeling optimistic today because my beloved native New York City, and an institution that gave me some of my most terrific childhood memories, has just pointed the way toward a genuinely adult way to handle these contoversies.

As you might have read, the City’s American Museum of Natural History has just decided to take down the statue of Theodore Roosevelt that’s stood in front of its Fifth Avenue entrance since 1940. The rationale – flanking the mounted T.R. are statues of a native American and an African warrior whose depiction on foot supposedly symbolizes white supremacy and imperialism.

During all my years living in and around Manhattan, I never regarded the statue as a symbol of anything except the 26^th President’s well known egotism and conspicuous lionization of “the strenuous life,” as well as of the central role played by his family in establishing the museum and turning it into a world-class institution to begin with. And I certainly never looked at the native American and African warrior figures as T.R.’s inferiors. In fact, they each struck me as being handsome and dignified.

At the same time, the more I’ve thought about it, the more dubious and specifically paternalistic the whole tableau has appeared (and I am a huge Theodore Roosevelt fan). So I can understand how others, especially non-whites, could be deeply dissatisfied and downright offended.

So I’m far from condemning the museum’s decision as yet another monument to stupidity or political correctness run riot, or what have you. But the more I read about these moves, the more encouraged I was. First, the museum (which is privately run, but receives some funding from the City and New York State, and therefore is partly accountable to the public), didn’t simply resolve to haul the statue away. In order to honor Roosevelt’s justified reputation as a conservationist by adding an entire exhibit hall to the parts of the museum already named for the former President In other words, the museum recognized that T.R., like many of the relatively easy History War cases I’ve written about, was more than an imperious explorer and white hunter.

An even more promising strategy for honoring such figures has been suggested by Roosevelt’s descendants. As reported in The New York Times story linked above, one of his great-grandsons, a museum trustee, issued this statement on behalf of the entire family:

“The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice. The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy. It is time to move the statue and move forward.”

Other than striking an unusually wise and magnanimous tone, the statement suggests the following exciting possibility (and one I also hinted at in my discussion of the Pierre Beauregard statue in New Orleans): Why not replace the current statue with one that’s not a “relic of another age” and “move forward: with one that reflects the dimensions of Roosevelt’s legacy (in this case, his devotion to naturalism) that no patriotic American could possibly question?

Moreover, why not use the same approach to the Abraham Lincoln statues in Boston and in Washington, D.C., which have been criticized because they include a kneeling newly emancipated slave? Wouldn’t such monuments better honor Lincoln if they portrayed the freeman figure standing up and, perhaps, shaking the former President’s hand?  

As for statues of more legitimately controversial figures, they should be seen as candidates for more somber modifications that would nonetheless both accomplish needed educational aims without overlooking the case for singling them out for public display.

For example, it’s true that Christopher Columbus literally expanded humanity’s horizons and helped set in motion the long sequence of events that led to the United States’ founding. But he and his brother also mistreated the peoples they found in the Caribbean brutally, and (inadvertantly to be sure) opened the door to centuries of mass death, oppression, enslavement, and other forms of misery for the Western Hemisphere’s entire indigenous population. Maybe representations of these crimes and tragedies, which sadly are baked into U.S. history as well, could be erected besides Columbus statues? 

And why shouldn’t the various monuments to Andrew Jackson (like the statue that attracted the Lafayette Square vandals’ ire) similarly be replaced with a representation acknowledging that he was not only a national military hero and savior of the union (during the 1832 nullification crisis), with some legitimate claim as an advocate of working class Americans, but also, as critics charge, a slave-owner and active supporter of such servitude – not to mention an almost inhuman scourge of native Americans. 

When it comes to public art, for the sake of the nation’s spirit and self-respect, there’s nothing wrong with and indeed considerable value in a little romanticizing or glorification of individuals meriting much credit for creating an American national story that’s unmistakably a success story from every possible standpoint. But where the legacies are less overwhelmingly positive, it would be equally worthwhile to develop ways of displaying major virtues alongside important warts in statues, monuments, and plaques.

The challenges to be met are preserving the symbolic power of displays commemorating figures as genuinely heroic as inherently flawed human beings can possibly be, courageously facing facts about more ambiguous legacies, and calling and weeding out genuine villains such as traitors.

That is, all involved in creating America’s public art – which should be all Americans and their elected representatives – should avoid the temptation to champion the kinds of caricature bound to fuel considerable disillusionment and even contempt. And by meeting this challenge, today’s Americans would leave an invaluable legacy of their own for future generations.

Im-Politic: Why Journalists Should Tweet Even More – & More Recklessly

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Covington Catholic, Farhad Manjoo, Frank Bruni, Im-Politic, Jill Abramson, journalism, Lincoln Memorial, MAGA teens, Mainstream Media, March for Life, media bias, Nathan Phillips, National Mall, Native-Americans, racism, social media, The New York Times, Twitter

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has a pretty self-serving explanation for why so many Mainstream Media journalists so prematurely joined the Outrage Mob that was so eager to condemn a group of Kentucky Catholic high school students for an alleged display of smirking racism on the National Mall on Friday: Twitter made them do it.

Sorry, but I ain’t buying it, and neither should you. And as I’ll see, Manjoo’s concluding recommendation – that these reporters and editors (and possibly pundits?) should abandon Twitter – is also completely wrong.

In case you’ve been ignoring the news for a while, these high school students, who were in Washington, D.C. for the “March for Life” last Friday were widely accused of treating a Native-American also in the capital for a (separate) protest with shockingly disgraceful disrespect and displays of outright bigotry. But this initial conclusion – which was based on a short video clip taken at the Lincoln Memorial scene of the confrontation – was quickly debunked by much longer videos that both absolved the students of all the serious allegations, and raised big questions about the role and background of Native-American protester Nathan Phillips and other groups on the scene.

Manjoo is absolutely right in lamenting how many journalists – including news reporters and editors, who are supposed to shunt aside their personal opinions on the job, go the extra mile to describe events as accurately as possible, and weigh information carefully – rushed to judgment about the students’ guilt. But he’s absolutely wrong to blame a social media platform – and in the process, spread the laughable idea that journalists who have been accomplished enough to secure employment at the nation’s most prominent news organizations are as incapable of resisting the temptations created by a new technology as a child is incapable of resisting gorging on candy.

According to the author:

“Instead of curious, intellectually honest chroniclers of human affairs, Twitter regularly turns many in the news — myself included — into knee-jerk outrage-bots reflexively set off by this or that hash-tagged cause, misspelled presidential missive or targeted-influence campaign.”

He adds:

“Twitter isn’t just ruining the media’s image. It’s also skewing our journalism. Everything about Twitter’s interface encourages a mind-set antithetical to journalistic inquiry: It prizes image over substance and cheap dunks over reasoned debate, all the while severely abridging the temporal scope of the press.”

Yet these arguments completely ignore what has to be the real explanation for this behavior: The journalists in question were all fully formed adults by the time they began tweeting recklessly, and have never prioritized telling their stories intellectually honestly. The only possible alternative? These folks weren’t fully formed adults by the time they began such tweeting, and/or by extension when they were hired. That sure doesn’t reflect well on the individuals and news organizations that gave them their weighty responsibilities.

Moreover, two prominent New York Times-related journalists themselves seem to disagree with Manjoo that the news business’ irresponsible tweeters should be let off the hook. Here’s Times columnist Frank Bruni, assessing how (and why) opinion journalists have dealt with the Mall confrontation story, and many other events recently:

“With everything from Twitter followers to television bookings, we’re rewarded for fierce conviction, for utter certainty, for emphatically taking sides and staying unconditionally faithful to what we’ve pushed for and against in the past. We each have our brand, and the narrower and more unyielding it is, the more currency it has and the more loyal our consumers. Instead of bucking the political tribalism in America, we ride it.

“We react to news by trying to fit it into the argument that we routinely make, the grievance that we usually raise, the fury or angst or sorrow that we typically peddle. We have our narrative, and we’re on the lookout for comments and developments that back it up. The response to the initial footage of the Covington boys — and, in particular, to the one who wore a red MAGA cap as he stood before and stared at the drumming veteran — adhered to this dynamic.

“Was that a smirk on the teenager’s face? A sneer? His expression was just indefinite enough to become a symbol of entitlement for the pundits who favor that locution, of the white patriarchy for another group, of the wages of Trumpism, of the fraudulence of Catholicism.”

But Bruni also wrote (correctly) that “the rest of the media didn’t behave all that differently” on and off Twitter. (A superb description of The Times own overall record in this incident – and the incident itself – can be found in this article in The Atlantic.)

His views also have been supported by no less than Jill Abramson, the recent (and fired) Times news chief. In a forthcoming book (as reported by Fox News‘ Howard Kurtz, and not denied by Abramson or anyone else at The Times), Abramson

“describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. ‘The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,’ she writes.”

And as is clear to anyone following them, most of the most aggressive and biased tweeters from the news profession are well short of middle age.

All of which is why I so strongly disagree with Manjoo’s belief that journalists, and especially straight news reporters, should tweet much less – and try to steer clear of controversy. Nothing would make it easier for them to keep hidden the biases that surely have been shaping their reporting and editing. In fact, I hope they tweet even more – and more candidly.

After all, the great early 20^th century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis rightly observed that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Twitter is proving to be a great source of the kind of light that unmistakably needs to be shined on journalism these days.