Confederate monuments and the problem of forgetting

Ways of forgetting

Erecting Confederate monuments in the late-19th and early-20th centuries reinforced the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ myth of the Civil War promoted by former Confederates and sympathizers. ³ This mythic history views slavery as a benevolent system and argues that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. It presents Confederate leaders and soldiers as emblems of traditional codes of honor, chivalry, and religiosity in their defensive struggle against northern aggression.

The kind of historical amnesia that shapes the Lost Cause myth is not unique to the Confederate case. ⁴ As we discuss in our class, although memory studies both inside and outside geography aver that any act of memory requires an act of forgetting, this is often noted in passing and without identifying what exactly it means to forget. For this reason, we assign an essay by memory scholar Paul Connerton on the nature of forgetting. Furthermore, we encourage our students to think more explicitly about what exactly is being forgotten, and why, when we make choices about historical representations in public space.

Connerton distinguishes seven types of forgetting, including what he terms ‘repressive erasure’ and ‘prescriptive forgetting’. ⁵ We found this distinction especially useful in eliciting more complex discussion from students. Repressive erasure, according to Connerton, is the Orwellian re-writing of history, exemplified by the Soviet practice of airbrushing figures out of photographs when they fell from the Party’s favor. It is a top-down, imposed forgetting that serves the interests of the state or a narrow group. This type of forgetting can never be acknowledged – it relies on and enforces silence and conformity. Students tended to view many Soviet-era monuments as objectionable on the grounds that they embodied such repressive erasure, while not making this connection with Confederate monuments. Yet, framing the Lost Cause myth as a parallel example of repressive erasure (White southern US elites eliminating central elements of the pre–Civil War South, and the Civil War itself, from historical accounts and the symbolic landscape) reveals how Confederate monuments are problematic not simply because they support White supremacy but also because they represent an oppressive form of forgetting.

The importance of the distinction between the content of a monument per se and the kind of memory/forgetting it embodies became especially evident when our class compared Confederate and Soviet monuments explicitly. While students appreciated the diverse strategies adopted by post-communist societies for Soviet monuments, they found it more difficult to respond to Confederate monument defenders who charged that removal would be ‘erasing history’. In his condemnation of Confederate monument removal, for example, conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson employs the same referent as Connerton does when speaking of repressive erasure: the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae (‘damnation of memory’). ⁶ Defenders thus make a moral argument that the historical record must not be altered to fit contemporary sensibilities. In this interpretation, the symbolic landscape is a kind of historical archive from which items should never be removed. Of course, the ‘archive’ of the Lost Cause landscape is anything but neutral, and this interpretation ignores the power relations embedded in its original construction. Yet, in the absence of an alternative theory of forgetting, opponents’ focus on monument removal (e.g. the ‘take ’em down!’ movement) leaves open the charge of seeking to erase the past. ⁷

Two events we addressed in class illustrated how superficially similar removals of Confederate symbols actually invoked different principles of forgetting. We first discussed protestors’ impromptu demolition of a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina, as a normatively satisfying but problematic model for decisions over the symbolic landscape. ⁸ Such spontaneous removals effectively grant any group or individual the right to erase lieux de memoire from public space without democratic discussion or deliberation. We contrasted such monument destruction – an act that cannot easily be undone – with Bree Newsome taking down the Confederate flag from outside the South Carolina statehouse in June 2015. The flag removal was a temporary, calculated act of protest intended to draw attention to the fraught history of the state’s decision to fly the flag on the capitol site. In that sense, the removal was an act of remembering rather than forgetting.

Following Newsome’s protest and its public resonance, the South Carolina assembly voted to remove the flag permanently and brought it down in a public ceremony in July 2015. Similarly, the municipal governments of Charlottesville and New Orleans decided after public deliberation to remove Confederate statues in 2017. Connerton’s work would characterize such deliberate actions by elected representatives as prescriptive forgetting rather than as repressive erasure. Unlike the silence surrounding repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting is openly acknowledged and used in post-conflict societies to stop cycles of injury and revenge. Talking about removal as prescriptive forgetting provides a way for supporters to both acknowledge removal as a form of forgetting and defend its moral legitimacy. While both forms of forgetting – prescriptive and repressive – may involve the physical removal of monuments, prescriptive forgetting requires identifiable elected officials to make this choice on behalf of the public following open discussion and deliberation. Thus, the removal decisions in Charlottesville and New Orleans can be seen as deliberative choices necessary for post-conflict reconciliation.

Exile and counter-monuments

Although removal can mean moving a monument to a different public location, physically destroying it, or placing the monument in a museum or in storage, Confederate monument opponents have focused on the latter two options. ⁹ Our course’s exploration of memory politics in the post-communist world showed students that elected leaders there employed a much wider variety of strategies to deal with their problematic Soviet-era monuments. Two strategies of note involve exile and erecting dialogic counter-monuments.

Exile acknowledges that place matters. For example, Soviet-era monuments in Moscow, Budapest, and Lithuania were moved from public prominence in city centers to so-called statue parks. The Moscow park de-politicizes Soviet-era monuments by treating them as objects of art, Budapest’s Memento Park satirizes them, and Lithuania’s park uses the statues to speak directly to Soviet-era repression. ¹⁰ In all cases, however, the monuments’ exile represents a physical acknowledgment of their problematic nature, one arguably all the more powerful because exile does not render the past ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Instead, the moved monuments are constant reminders of a painful history, albeit less centrally placed.

Transferring Soviet-era memorials to cemeteries represents another kind of exile. For example, in Tallinn, Estonia, the government moved a Soviet World War Two memorial revered by the local Russian population and reviled by ethnic Estonians to a nearby Soviet military cemetery. While sparking international controversy and local demonstrations, this move preserved the statue as a lieu de memoire for the Russian community while sending the clear message that its legitimacy lay as a memorial to the dead rather than a monument to the war. Although the statue park approach has not received much attention in the Confederate monument debate, jurisdictions including Lexington (Kentucky) and Portsmouth and Norfolk (Virginia) have moved or proposed moving Confederate statues from central public locations to local cemeteries to reconcile conflicting community demands.

A second post-communist strategy has been the construction of dialogic counter-monuments – new monuments whose content and placement expressly intend to alter or challenge the meaning of existing ones. ¹¹ For example, the Hungarian government placed a statue of Imre Nagy (Hungary’s leader during the 1956 uprising) with his back turned to the Soviet Red Army Monument in Budapest, while a Russian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) installed a memorial to victims of political repression steps from the statue of Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinksii in central Moscow. ¹²

These strategies are more difficult to characterize as ‘erasing history’ because elements are added to rather than removed from the symbolic landscape. At the same time, they clearly alter the original monuments’ intended meaning. One could imagine, for example, a powerful and physically imposing anti-slavery memorial facing off with prominent Confederate monuments. ¹³ Although some Confederate monuments have had informational plaques installed to provide historical context, our students observed that this practice represents a much more minimalist, even unobtrusive response. ¹⁴ Reflecting on the bolder and broader range of post-communist strategies with our class, we realized that advocates for removal should defend this choice not just in contrast to retention but with other potentially meaningful and effective options.

Concluding thoughts

Talking about Confederate symbolism with students who both are deeply aware of structural racism and often define their own national identity in opposition to the United States risks ‘playing to the crowd’. In this context, the removal of Confederate statues seems so self-evidently correct that we had to remind ourselves that whatever the justification, any act of removal can be seen as an act of forgetting. Making an explicit comparison between the fates of Confederate and Soviet-era symbols provided students (and ourselves) with a productive way to open up and enrich our discussions on how to deal with such ‘monumental’ problems.