How to Decide Which Statues to Pull Down

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As statues come down everywhere and right-leaning pundits waggle their fingers and say they told us so, it’s important to try to draw distinctions. After all, when you topple George Washington from his pedestal (which many argued would never happen), you’re making a bold claim about who deserves to be dishonored.

I warned five years ago that we’re rushing down this road with only the haziest notion of where we’ll wind up. Now that we have a better idea (Cervantes? Who hates Cervantes?), it’s less clear than ever that the road is worth taking. But if this is to be our journey, we would do better to travel it democratically. Decisions about which historical figures to (literally) deplatform should be taken within, not outside of, the ordinary processes of political debate.

With this caveat in mind, let me suggest two simple rules to guide our conversations.

Rule Number 1: No statue is entitled to continue to exist merely because it exists now. The activists are right about this. Change in our decisions over whom to commemorate is often sensible. 

Everything else is up for grabs.

Rule Number 2: As we’ll see in a moment, this rule matters most.  But it requires a preamble. Much of the social media debate has been over whether a historical figure who took a morally objectionable positions must be understood as “a man of his time.” The response of activists has often been along the lines of “Hitler was a man of his time too.”

Here both sides are mistaken. Hitler wasn’t a man of his time. The most devastating war in human history was fought to prove otherwise. On the other hand, we shouldn’t excuse anyone just because of (to continue the gendered tone of the debate) the times in which he lived. The right question is where he stood with respect to the moral understandings of his time.

In particular, what we should ask is whether the views of the person to whom objection is now being raised were above or below the median position held by people of the era. And if they were below, how far below did they lie?

For a simple example, look at the Washington professional football team’s removal of the statue honoring longtime owner George Preston Marshall. Marshall was the last National Football League owner to integrate. He hired his first Black players, with ill grace, only under severe pressure from the Kennedy administration.

Similarly, the Confederate generals who’ve become objectionable were not just on the wrong side of history. They were willing to kill and die for that wrong side’s victory, at a time when a genuine battle line had been drawn. (And, no, I don’t exempt Robert E. Lee because of his occasional public disapproval of slavery. Quite the contrary.)

Yes, diehards insist that the South was fighting for independence not slavery, but this trope ignores the historical and economic reality. The southern states said they’d leave the Union if Abraham Lincoln, who they considered an abolitionist, was elected; and after he was elected, they left.

True, much of the country also supported the racial hierarchy of the day, and as the historian David Blight reminds us, the determination to bind up the war’s wounds healed only the breaches between Whites.  But there’s a difference between, say, Ulysses Grant (his statue shamefully toppled in San Francisco), who whatever else he did pursued the Union cause with a vengeance, and the men who fought for the actual goal of preserving White supremacy.

As for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the case for leaving their statues in place is strong, because although they held slaves, the views they expressed about the practice tended to be in advance of the position of the nation at the time. (This doesn’t excuse either Washington’s brutal treatment of his captive workers or the viciousness of Jefferson’s comments on Black people in Notes on the State of Virginia.)

But let’s jump forward, into the more recent past. Even before the current protests, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had become the objects of ire. Wilson deserves it more. Not only did he refuse to admit Black applicants while serving as president of Princeton University, but he instituted racial segregation in much of federal employment — and stuck to his decision in the teeth of Black protest against the practice.

As for Teddy, I certainly understand the objections to honoring him.  But his cousin was worse. Liberal hero Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who presided over the Japanese internment program. FDR also refused repeated entreaties from Black leaders during World War II to integrate the armed forces. His White House stated falsely that the NAACP supported the segregation policy.  Let’s recall, too, that he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties from Black newspaper editors and his own wife to integrate the White House press corps. He used the n-word in private conversations, and penned it in the margin of a political speech. And he infamously authored a college paper in which he referred to Black people as “semi-beasts.”

Don’t get me wrong. Although I understand and often share the anguish and pain of the demonstrators, I’m not endorsing the removal of any particular bit of iconography. I’m endorsing serious conversation about which should go. Racial flat-earthers who insist on defending them all don’t have much of a case; but neither do those who think the decision should rest on anything less than proper democratic debate.

Proud personal confession: My father was involved in the decision to bring that particular bit of pressure.

For that matter, the very term “Civil War” arguably deemphasizes the role of slavery in the conflict.

I tell the story in this book.

And don’t get me started on Planned Parenthood’s continuing veneration of Margaret Sanger despite strong evidence of her racism, a topic on which I’ve written before.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” and his latest nonfiction book is “Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster.”

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