The Statue of Limitations

According to the news, another Confederate statue has come down.  These monuments have been coming down fast and furious for the last couple of years.  There are not many of them left.

Even here in New Mexico, someone finally remembered that a stretch of Interstate 10 was once named the “Jefferson Davis Highway”and unnamed it.  Well, it wasn’t really official, the State Highway Department had never really renamed it, but about 60 years ago, an Army band from a nearby military base came and played a little background music while a few old crackers dedicated a granite slab to Jeff Davis, who had never been anywhere near New Mexico.

While Jeff never came to the desert, he did send us a few camels in 1855.  Davis was the Secretary of the Army at the time, and he believed that camels might replace cavalry horses.  The experiment was successful, but the start of the Civil War ended the experiment.

Sadly, the markers along the highway never mentioned the camels (which is a shame).  Over the decades, the markers were pretty much forgotten, as they became covered in weeds.  About twenty years ago, on a road trip over to Arizona, I stopped the car and pointed them out to The Doc and my sons, What’s-His-Name and The-Other-One.  They gave me that stare that is usually reserved for when I drag them to museums, the look that says, “Who cares?”

Well, nobody cared until suddenly someone remembered they were there.  Immediately, people were outraged, and the monuments removed.  I’m pretty sure that some people remained outraged, anyway, since outraged is their natural state.

There are still hundreds of monuments out there, and eventually, I would be willing to bet that all of them will be removed, stored away some place, and once again, forgotten.  Well, a few of the monuments will be safe.  There is a tree in Brooklyn that Robert E. Lee planted, but the authorities just removed the plaque and they are hoping that no one will remember the tree is evil.

Removing statues is not new:  people have been doing it for thousands of years.  Every revolution means the statues of the previous regime have to be destroyed.  On July 9, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was read to George Washington and his troops, the excited crowd immediately stormed into Bowling Green—a park in Manhattan—and pulled down a lead statue of King George III. 

The statue was new, having been erected only a few years earlier to commemorate the repeal of the Stamp Act, but in the frenzied excitement of declaring a new country, the lead statue of George, wearing a Roman toga and riding a horse, was pulled down.  Eventually, the statue was returned to the British, but in the form of 42,088 newly cast lead musket balls.  (Seriously, some idiot actually counted them.)

Statues of Lenin were torn down all over the former Soviet Union back in the early 90’s; some of these were melted down, some were scrapped, and one even made its way to Seattle.  An American was teaching English in Slovakia when he discovered a sixteen foot statue of Lenin at the local dump.  The statue wasn’t exactly abandoned since a homeless man was living in it, but he was willing to be relocated at a bargain price.  The American brought the statue home, and though no one knows exactly what he intended to do with it, the statue is still standing in Seattle.  (Presumably, without a homeless person living in it).

Los Angeles recently permanently removed a statue of Christopher Columbus from a park where it had been ignored for almost fifty years.  A native tribe felt that Chris was “a symbol of oppression”.  Columbus, who never set foot on North America, nor knew of any of the people who lived there, would be puzzled by all of this.

A change in religion has frequently been the cause of the destruction of statues.  The Taliban blew up the 1,700 year old Buddhas of Bamyan.  The Spanish destroyed much of the native art of Central America, and a thousand years ago, a Chinese emperor destroyed the statues in over 3,300 Buddhist temples just to get enough copper to mint coins.

Even in Western Europe, as Christianity replaced the pagan religion of Rome, bronze statues were torn down, melted, and recast with likenesses of Christians.  So many early statues were destroyed that the photo at left

shows the oldest equestrian statue in Europe.  Obviously, this sophisticated bronze statue was far from the first such work of art, but it is just the oldest one left.  Historians can document the destruction of at least twenty other such works, including one that was destroyed in Paris during the French Revolution.

Why did this one survive?  Though the man on the horse is Emperor Marcus Aurelius, for centuries it was incorrectly labeled as Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of Rome.  If his true identity had been known, this statue would have been melted down centuries ago.

Study the picture carefully, because it will soon have to be taken down and put out of sight in storage.  Obviously, it can no longer remain in public view, since Marcus Aurelius owned slaves.  (Actually, 30% of the citizens of the Roman Empire were slaves, so a whole lot of historic markers, statues, and assorted architectural pieces will have to be removed).

After all, aren’t we supposed to look at the past with the values of today?