The South’s Confederate-monument problem is not going away

[struggle4progress]

By Monica Hesse
May 8 at 5:33 PM

It was 1913, and the Civil War had been over for 48 years. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that worked to populate the South with Confederate war memorials, decided such a monument should be erected in Rockville ...

The bronze statue, a soldier standing with folded arms, was constructed by a local granite company for the sum of $3,600. A plaque at the bottom read, “To Our Heroes of Montgomery Co., Maryland, That We Through Life May Not Forget To Love The Thin Gray Line.” It was dedicated in a June ceremony in front of the courthouse, with 3,000 spectators listening to a band play “Dixie” and the “Star-Spangled Banner” ...

Supporters of the statue saw it, and continue to see it, as a historic symbol of heritage that acknowledged a painful past. The statue’s detractors saw it, and continue to see it, as deeply offensive, honoring an institution that had honored slavery ...

How should Rockville .. address the fact that Maryland was a border state in the Civil War — more of its citizens fought for the Union than the Confederacy — and yet there are no Union monuments in front of the courthouse? How should New Orleans address the fact that, the day after it hired a contractor to remove four of its Confederate statues, the man received death threats and his car was torched? ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-souths-confederate-monument-problem-is-not-going-away/2016/05/08/b0258e4a-05af-11e6-a12f-ea5aed7958dc_story.html

[Igel]

1. Put up a Union monument.

That's something that's overlooked. Somebody wanted to collect the money, find a template, commission the memorials, and have them installed. Even now, there are issues over ownership: The monuments commissioned by part of the people sit on government ground, but are often still owned by those people.

If nobody wanted to have a memorial installed, it didn't just happen. It wasn't an act of government. It was an act of citizens. If there are no Union memorials from the Civil War, it's because the descendants and supporters didn't undertake the effort to put one up. Saying that there's unequal representation is like saying that at a protest it's unjust if both pro- and con- protestors aren't equally represented, and either the government must restrict one side to ensure equality or the government must provide protestors for the other side at public expense. They're just not equal because one side cares more than the other. Even now, the demand is often that one set of monuments be taken down and another, at government expense, be put up. Nobody cares enough to collect the money, design the memorial, commission them, and have them installed. Nobody wants to meet speech with speech. Instead, it's demanded that others memorialize our fallen when we're too cheap or unorganized or impotent to do so, and offensive speech be hidden because it's offensive. The Daughters of the Confederacy, I guess it was, cared more about their fallen or their cause than the "Daughters of the Union" did. The implication is that the other side didn't care enough, and, to be honest, just wants it to happen now because they want it and they think it unfair that nobody engaged in free speech at public expense on their behalf.

There are Union memorials to the fallen. But they're at battlegrounds, for the most part. They were actually funded, designed, commissioned, and installed by the groups that wanted the memorials there. Some of them are gaudy and over the top, to be honest, from what I remember.

This doesn't defend the intent of the memorials that exist. Some glory over having killed other people. Some exalt people who are pro-slavery or who fought for the South (some exalt people who were pro-slavery and who fought for the North, for that matter, but nobody cares about that problem). But it does go to why there are precious few Union memorials. They don't exist because nobody willed them into existence, nobody was willing to put out time, effort, and expense for them. Of course, it's not too late. But for the most part, we're still too cheap or unorganized or impotent to do so, and want others to handle the little task of our free speech and representation.