RUTHFULLY YOURS

My first job, in 1972, was with a small weekly in Richmond, Virginia. Like my fellow writer/editors, I was a proud veteran of the sixties campus wars, and our left-of-center politics were strongly represented throughout the paper; which is to say, we were far from a neat ideological fit with the deeply conservative town Richmond still was back then. I joked with my friends up north that, the morning after Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in November, I could actually see my McGovern vote in the paper. The politics weren’t all that I disliked about Richmond. It was sleepy, ghastly hot in the summer, and in general far from what I then thought of as “the action.”

But there was one thing that I loved about the place: it was steeped in history. On Clay Street, just a few blocks from our office on Broad, was the Confederate White House. Not far off loomed the magnificent, Jefferson-designed state capitol. Over on Franklin, the Jefferson Hotel boasted the staircase said to be the model for the one in Gone With the Wind. But above all there was Monument Avenue, with its imposing statues of the generals whose prowess had sustained hope in this capital of a doomed nation a century earlier: Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E. Lee.

As a Northerner and a lefty, I’d grown up thinking of the South as the bad guys. Nonetheless, there was an undeniable grandeur to these stone figures, and I felt it every day driving past them on my way home. They were men of surpassing courage and nobility, rightly enshrined in national myth: “There stands Jackson like a Stone Wall.” And the image of Lee, wearily arriving at Appomattox aboard Traveller, having resisted calls from diehards that he continue the fight, saving the nation from yet more bloodshed. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. One of my colleagues, Richmond-born and recently graduated from Harvard (and now a left-wing commentator of some note), would tear up every time he heard “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

As a Red Diaper baby, I came from a different tradition. My parents never saw Gone With the Wind—they were outside the theater, picketing. But I, too, felt the pull of that history, in all its messiness and grandeur. It was our history, as Americans.

Maybe that’s all over now. Maybe, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz once observed, for kids today American history runs from the oppression of the Indians to the oppression of blacks to the oppression of women, with nothing ennobling in between. Not long ago, talking with several people in their twenties, I was startled to learn that, until the movie came out, none of them had heard of Dunkirk. How, then, could we expect them to know about figures like Richard Kirkland, “the Angel of Marye’s Heights,” the Confederate soldier who, during the abattoir that was Fredericksburg, emerged from the safety of the commanding Southern lines to tend to dying Union soldiers on the killing field below?

Our history is rife with moral complexity. My wife and children exist only as a result of two near-misses. One ancestor, on her mother’s side, whose descendants would include several prominent abolitionists, nearly drowned after falling overboard on The Mayflower, while her great-grandfather on her father’s side, at 12, was nearly shot down from a rooftop in Fort Smith, Arkansas, by an occupying Union soldier after shouting “Long live Jeff Davis!”

All of which is a preamble to saying that, in his exchange with the churlish and ignorant press corps in the aftermath of Charlottesville, Donald Trump got it right when he said: “This week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” He may not have been the ideal messenger—with his combative style, manic egotism, and casual relationship with facts, he never is—but he laid out a case that for months has cried out to be made, and he did it so clearly that the refusal of the media and the elites of both parties, not just to credit it, but even to acknowledge it, speaks volumes. Though Trump has never quite defined what his notion of making America great again actually means, preserving that which needs no fixing—including the history that is our common legacy—is a key part of it.

After the clashes in Charlottesville, a mania against Confederate monuments has swept the country. Local leaders in various states have decided to remove statues and monuments, while at least one black pastor in Chicago has called for excising even George Washington’s name from public parks, and Anonymous has planned to remove 11 statues on Friday.

One plausible response is to defend the statues. Another would be to encourage the movement to go further.

Activists who cry for the removal of Confederate statues do so on the grounds that these leaders were racist, that they hurt people based on the color of their skin or their national origin. If those are the criteria, however, why stop with the Confederacy?

Racism has a long and varied history, and certainly these social justice warriors wouldn’t want to defend racists, even if they were important inventors, politicians, or scientists, right?

Here are 10 people whose statues should be removed, if the Left insists on that sort of thing.
1. Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).
Woodrow Wilson statue in Rapid City, South Dakota. Photo courtesy of Presidents USA. http://www.presidentsusa.net/wilsonrapidcity.html

Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, wasn’t just a racist. As president of Princeton University, he discouraged blacks from applying for admission. His book series History of the American People defended Ku Klux Klan lynchings in the late 1860s.

When Wilson was president, his war department drafted black soldiers, and while it paid them the same as whites, it kept them in all-black units with white officers. When black soldiers protested, Wilson told them “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

The pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation became the first film screened in the White House under Wilson’s presidency. Under Wilson, racial segregation was implemented in the federal government, at the Post Office, and in the military.

In 2015, the University of Texas removed a statue of Wilson, along with one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, from campus. Statues of Wilson remain, however. Many stand across Europe, a prominent one stands in Rapid City, S.D., and his presidential library and museum gives prominence to his birthplace in Staunton, Va.

2. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).
Bell Statue in front of the Brantford Bell Telephone Building. Photo credit: the city of Brantford, Ontario.

Alexander Graham Bell deserves recognition for inventing the telephone, but he was also a horrible racist. Bell served as honorary president of the Second International Eugenics Conference in New York in 1921, and led the eugenics movement during that period.

Based on the naturalistic worldview of Charles Darwin, many scientists in the early 20th century adopted the idea that human beings needed to continue to evolve — that natural selection involved choosing the strong over the weak, and that therefore human society should promote the existence of strong people at the expense of the “less fit.”

Eugenics leaders saw evolutionary fitness in explicitly racial terms.

Bell made a hobby out of breeding livestock, and this gained him an appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan’s Committee on Eugenics, which extended the principles of breeding to humans. From 1912 to 1918, Bell was the chairman of the board of scientific advisers to the Eugenics Record Office. Such organizations advocated for laws to establish compulsory sterilization for people who, in Bell’s words, were a “defective variety of the human race.”

To make matters worse, California’s compulsory sterilization law (one of the results of Bell’s advocacy) was used as a model for that of Nazi Germany.

The most famous and impressive monuments to Bell are in Canada. A statue depicting Bell in the style of the Lincoln memorial stands by the Bell Telephone Building in Brantford, Ontario. The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site rests in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Alexander Graham Bell Memorial Park has a monument to telecommunications.

In the U.S., the Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory stands in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Georgetown. The laboratory was created by Bell himself for the research and development of telecommunications technology.

Jim Talent was the Republican Senator from Missouri (2002-2007) He lost the next election to Democrat Claire McCaskill. He is a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Andy McCarthy has written an estimable column outlining the legal aspects of federal “domestic terrorism” laws. One of Andy’s points is that acts of violence in the context of protests are overwhelmingly state rather than federal crimes; another is that state officials’ response to the violence so far has been largely rhetorical. What’s worse, for the most part, is that the rhetoric has merely made use of the violence to make political points.

He’s right. I’ll go further and say that words, no matter how strong, are no longer enough, if they ever were, to stop this growing trend. What is needed is action, both legislative and executive, from state authorities.

I wrote about this several months ago in the context of violence on campus. Now the problem is spreading to city parks and neighborhoods. What needs to happen, broadly, is this:

First, state laws must single out violence and disorderly conduct in the context of mass expression for special and certain punishment, and the punishment must be meaningful to the kind of people who do this sort of thing. That means jail time. If existing laws are not strong enough to do the job, state legislatures should make them stronger, and everyone should know that the laws have been strengthened.

The problem has grown so great that nothing less than incarceration will be sufficient to stop it. The message must be that if you are involved in a protest and you break the law, you will go to jail, and not just overnight. You will cool your heels in the county jail for a minimum of a month or two until you learn to respect the rights of other people.

That principle must apply to any kind of violence or disorder. Even crimes that in other contexts would appear minor, such as blocking access to a street or building, must result in real jail time. The whole point is to nip unlawful conduct in the bud before it blossoms into violence against people or destruction of property.

It doesn’t matter where the offenders are on the political spectrum or what they are protesting. It’s not up to them to decide whether their ends justify violent or criminal means. It’s up to the rest of us, through the responsible public officials, to insist they keep their conduct lawful and peaceful.

Second, the laws must be strictly enforced. This is where governors must be strong leaders.

Too many mayors have been lenient for fear that they will suffer political consequences if they enforce the law against members of politically favored groups. Given what I’ve seen from our current crop of mayors, I don’t expect that to change.

Governors represent a larger constituency, the vast majority of which is weary of people who deliberately stir up violence and disorder. Further, cities are political subdivisions of the states; states are ultimately responsible for how the cities are governed, and as far as I know, all the state constitutions give their governors full authority to preserve civil order when local officials won’t.

So governors must thoroughly prepare their responses before the crises come and must act decisively when the crises happen. I wrote about the steps that should be taken in the context of violence on campus, but the same principles apply here:

[Governors] should make it a personal priority to: ensure that state law enforcement personnel are properly trained and equipped; prepare a bipartisan list of competent and fair special prosecutors who can be swiftly appointed should the need arise; establish close connections with their college administrators and local authorities; and — when they see trouble brewing at one of their universities — publicly warn that speech will be protected and violence will be punished.

I’ll add only that states should spend whatever is necessary to make sure they have large numbers of well-trained and -equipped personnel ready, whether from the state police or their National Guards.

One advantage of this approach is that it will identify and neutralize the loose bands of anarchists and other troublemakers who are roving around the country causing this violence. McCarthy is right that we should be concerned, from a constitutional standpoint, about excessive federal involvement in monitoring or infiltrating these groups. But that isn’t necessary. Once state authorities arrest and incarcerate these individuals, their names, faces, and fingerprints will be on the books, and subsequent violations can and should be punished more harshly, including with felony imprisonment when warranted.