From Lee To Landrieu . . . The Changing Face Of The South

By PETER MAURICE

(Editor’s Note: Peter Maurice has written for Gilbert magazine.)

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“No one should ever drive by the statehouse and feel pain.” Given the reaction to Gov. Nikki Haley’s remark, it may appear in a future edition of Bartlett’s. Her lament and the consequent removal of the Confederate flag have garnered praise from quarters high and low. Bloggers and twitterers have lauded Haley for purging the Palmetto State of “the American swastika.”
Nia-Malika Henderson of CNN Politics calls the governor “the face of the new South,” the face that “stared down hate and history.” Packer Gage, Romney’s former deputy campaign manager, espies in the rising star “a strong vice-presidential candidate…maybe she should run for president.”
Most of the Republican contenders, still jostling for elbow room at the first debate, did not go that far; they were, however, quick to lisp her praise. Following this shower of accolades, other statespersons, predictably, have found their voices: not only the detested flag, but all mementos of the Confederacy — street names, squares, monuments, and statuary, even works of art — must go.
By now voices sufficient to perform a Handel oratorio have joined the condemnation chorus. But I’ll limit my attention to that of Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans — for two reasons. First, His Honor presides over the city where I grew up, and I am therefore alert to whatever threatens its destruction, be it a hurricane, an oil spill, or the verbal crude exuded by the political class. Second, the mayor’s remarks, in a very competitive field, stand out for their pandering and vacuity.
For readers who are ignorant of his accomplishments, Landrieu is the scion of a famous political dynasty in Louisiana. Mitch is the brother of Mary and son of “Moon,” suggesting that lunar madness may be hereditary. Mayor Landrieu’s name graces the “Freedom to Marry” website. He champions diversity and a woman’s right to choose. He is a Democrat.
In the same month that the Big Easy surpassed its record for murders —100 since January — the mayor diverted the city’s attention to what he apparently considered a more urgent crisis: the purging of Confederate monuments from public view. “How can we expect to inspire a nation,” the mayor wondered, “with those who fought for bondage and supremacy of our fellow Americans” dividing us?
The divisive statues are those of Jefferson Davis on Jefferson Davis Parkway; the equestrian statue of General P.G.T .Beauregard at the entrance to City Park; and the most controversial of the triumvirate, General Robert E. Lee’s atop his 60-foot Doric column at “Lee Circle.” If Landrieu has his way, these public squares will soon be denuded and renamed.
Jason Berry of the Times Picayune, who supports Landrieu’s proposal, favors a depersonalized rechristening — “City Circle” or “New Orleans Circle” — “something to suggest an emerging urban identity.”
Just think of the awe this emerged identity will inspire in young souls as the St. Charles Avenue streetcar conductor calls out: “All off for City Circle.”
The mayor is not a Soviet commissar who could simply remove nonpersons from the yearbooks and pedestals. Does he have the right to banish these monuments? With the approval of a like-minded Democrat City Council, it seems he does. Landrieu has unearthed a “Nuisance Ordinance” that allows the city to remove symbols and monuments “at odds with equal rights,” or “may become [emphasis mine] the site of violent demonstrations.”
At the time of the mayor’s announcement, there had been no violent demonstrations, but since his consciousness-raising ceremony, the Lee statue has been the site of Confederate flag burnings and demonstrations (not yet violent); and Beauregard’s monument has been sprayed with “Black Lives Matter” by an artist of the genre graffiti.
After the mayor’s self-fulfilling prophecy, these symbols of the Old South may soon provoke violent demonstrations. The population of New Orleans is diverse all right, but not always as placid or forbearing as those saintly Christians of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Remember Katrina and the Astrodome?
Before replacing the offending images, the mayor might first rethink what is so uniquely inflammatory about Davis, Beauregard, and Lee. Were they more prone to the blindness and vices of their age than Mitch Landrieu is to his own deplorable epoch? A public figure needs fortitude to oppose currently fashionable evils — only a political reflex to deplore those of a vanished age.
If Lee is to be removed for his conflicted feelings and actions regarding slavery, what will a future age make of enablers of “gay marriage,” abortion, the persecution of Christians, the destruction of constitutional government, the plague of pornography, and so on?
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling uninspired by the mayor’s proposal. In fact, I feel something more akin to pain. If only Mayor Landrieu shared it.
As someone who was born and raised in New Orleans, I have (or should I say harbor?) associations with all three of these controversial monuments. My brother and I joined other boys for spontaneous games of football and baseball at Jefferson Davis Parkway. Even allowing for the touch-ups of nostalgia, I believe we were slightly less likely to cheat, overlooked by that gaunt ascetic-looking president of the Confederacy. When the Sacred Heart nuns of our Canal Street school let us out for the annual end-of-school picnic, we always had to pass the statue of P.G.T. Beauregard — astride his prancing mount at the entrance to City Park.
Once a week or so, my brother, sisters, and I would take the St. Charles Avenue streetcar to visit my cousins who lived uptown. To reach our destination, the streetcar rounded the statue of a military leader in the middle of a traffic roundabout known as “Lee Circle.” It was General Robert E. Lee. (Why is it that no one called him “Lee,” as in the fried chicken chain?) We couldn’t see his face clearly; he was too far above us. Sword at his side, arms folded and head erect, he seemed to be scanning the terrain, ready to repulse the next cavalry charge. We never questioned the prominence our city had given him– way up there on his pedestal.
Nuns, teachers, relatives, all who were in a position to know more than we, agreed. They never tried to undermine our admiration with those infusions of snide knowingness that turn children into cynics before they can spell. These adults didn’t pretend to be critics or dialecticians. They simply passed on their reverence for the good and great general, the Christian gentleman, the magnanimous soldier who, even in the heat of battle, observed the civilized code of war.
We were proud that our general fought fair and protected women and children and noncombatants. Not like some other generals who viewed civilians as “collateral damage”; who laid waste farmsteads and whole cities populated only by women and children; nor like Benjamin “Beast” Butler, who ordered his troops to treat the ladies of New Orleans like harlots if they failed to “show respect.”
Notwithstanding efforts to shade a luminous reputation, the general still seems secure in the memories of those who were taught to look up to what is above them— less secure atop his pedestal at Lee Circle. Even a bronze statue is vulnerable to certain corrosive epithets — like “divisive,” “inappropriate,” “elitist.” And, of course, “racist.”
As Mitch Landrieu and others sensitive to historic injustice, with their passion for inclusiveness and reelection, go about ridding public spaces of idols of a bygone era, their iconoclasm is eerily selective. Grant and Lincoln, for example, seem relatively unscathed. Everyone knows that Lincoln waged that bloodiest war in American history in order to free the slaves; that the Great Emancipator was the first president to welcome a black delegation to the White House. Fewer know that he then told them of his final solution to what he regarded as an unbridgeable chasm. He offered the black delegation free steerage back to Africa.
Everyone also knows that General Ulysses S. Grant defeated the slave states; fewer that he was an overseer of a slave-run farm — “plantation” in Southern parlance — in Missouri, and that he claimed that he would have offered his sword to the other side if he had believed for a moment that the war was being fought to end slavery.
Like Lincoln and Grant, Lee too saw the races as separated — by an almost, but not quite, unbridgeable chasm. But he hoped and believed that under the long, educative, and “softening process of Christianity,” they would eventually live together in harmony. In his biography of Lee, the historian Emory Thomas recounts an incident that sheds light on Lee’s putative “racism.” The war just over, Lee attended a church in Richmond. A black man presented himself at the communion rail. The church grew quiet and no one advanced to receive — until General Robert E. Lee walked down the aisle, knelt next to the black man, and so “redeemed the moment.”
Yes, Lee no longer represents, if he ever did, the face of the South. Such men as Lee are always exceptions in a fallen world. In an era still dominated by Christian aspirations, however, men in their better hours hoped to imitate him. Well, times change, and change is always good in the regnant progressive view. Robert E. Lee’s noblesse oblige, along with his statue, must give way to changing times and mores.
The only question concerns who or what should replace him. Is there anyone who better personifies that emerging urban identity — ephemeral, vapid, anxiously wedded to evolving prejudices — than the current mayor of New Orleans? If it is time for a new urban monument in the Crescent City, I propose “Landrieu Circle.”