Governmental displays in public places affect us all in that they are supposed to represent something that we as voters, taxpayers, and citizens value. So art and sculpture on civic property should be subject to review.
This includes objects such as monuments in the South that honor Confederates or the Confederacy. Now appears to be a time for this kind of review.
Those of us who love and ponder material culture--things we surround ourselves with--look at objects from various perspectives, such as material, design and style, all of which have much to say. That's pretty much the nerd side of material culture and decorative arts.
Then we might consider function, intended and actual, and ponder the objects' place in the broader culture. Function changes all the time; a necktie becomes a headband then is part of a quilt, or a postage stamp becomes a collectible, or things break and become something that just won't work.
The "over time" factor complicates everything because the society is constantly evolving, or at least lurching one way and another, with, we hope, an evolutionary thrust. All of this is to emphasize that the function and meaning of objects can change over time.
Confederate memorial statues popped up all over the South around the turn of the 20th century. What was the intended function in this monumental effort? Most of the action came from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Generally representative of a certain class, certainly of a specific race, these women wanted to play a significant role in civic life at a time when they were "second class" citizens, without the vote. They likely had no ability to distinguish what we call white privilege, but they definitely would have recognized male privilege, and were not above pushing the males in their world towards higher standards which they presented in the monuments they were erecting.
They saw bravery and honor as worthy goals, represented by those Confederates in bronze or marble. They were also trying to cement the nobility of the South, given all that bad rap about backwardness and slavery.
Oh yes, slavery. The denial of the centrality of slavery to the war was the grossest of self-delusions--one with tragic consequences accruing all the way to the present. All of these monuments seem to promote this self-delusion.
We can thank friends and family of the Capital Guards plus the Sons of Confederate Veterans for the statue in MacArthur Park. The Capital Guards were a home-grown militia which fought in the Civil War. It appears that civic promotion was the motivation behind this monument, as it was sculpted to be dedicated at the 1911 United Confederate Veterans Reunion in Little Rock.
The gathering proved to be a big deal economically, with 106,000 total visitors to the city for the five-day event. Honoring Capital Guards was appropriate both as a shout-out to local heroes and also for the fact that these soldiers left the remote trans-Mississippi theater to battle in the east. All of the veterans at the reunion would have related to the Guards' record of service. The monument's text makes no mention of slavery.
My wish today is not to second-guess those people in 1911, but to acknowledge that we are living today with a memorial reflecting their values, the values of a century ago, which were trying to capture some meaning from soldiers a half-century before. Function and meaning have changed. In the act of reviewing such objects, shouldn't we strive to venerate the highest societal ideals of the present, and, at the very least, not offend a sizable portion of the citizenry?
So the statue may be gone from MacArthur Park forever, and that would be an understandable decision for the city government to make, not wanting to be responsible for leaving up a monument to supporters of slavery.
I'd like to suggest another option, following the lead of Rex Nelson: Relegate it to a history museum, ideally one specializing in military history. (Oh look, there is the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History right behind it!) We could interpret it as the relic it is, not a statement about Confederate nobility, but one about history.
What if additional signage greeted pedestrians who approached the sculpture to see what it was about, such as:
"The men listed on this monument were traitors to the United States, fighting a war to maintain slavery in the South. There were more than 110,000 enslaved people in Arkansas when the Civil War began in 1861. Fifty years later this monument was dedicated to honor the fighters while neglecting to acknowledge the cause for which they fought, or the people they hoped to continue to subjugate."
This is a monument to choosing what history to remember, and what history to try to forget. By trying to forget slavery, these people in 1911 were trying to avoid responsibility for how the residue of slavery continued to affect society through prejudice, discrimination and lynching. We should learn from our history, not use it to avoid our problems. As many have come to understand, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Would this kind of marker make a difference in the value of the statue to our present day? It's hard to say. It's a lot to ask of an old statue and a public whom the subtleties of the Civil War have not served well. Maybe we could place the American flag in front of the soldier, so he would forever march under the flag he fought against and lost to?
For the sake of transparency, I should disclose that my great-great-grandfather, Gordon Neill Peay, served as the one-time commander of the Capital Guards. I'm sure he was a fine fellow, but I'm eternally thankful that his side lost in the war. My suggestion to keep the statue could be interpreted as simple self-interest to keep an acknowledgment of my ancestor in the public eye.
Really, I'm OK with the city getting rid of it, if that's the way it goes. But I'd like to think that my true self-interest has to do more with the value of history, and the opportunity to refresh our understanding of the past through the interpretation of its relics, such as this one.
The functions and meanings of these things keep changing, and our challenge--our opportunity --is to ensure that our community response to the changes reflect a move toward our higher ideals. Maybe Arkansans a century from now will look back and applaud, in some way, the desire to preserve this statue and renew its usefulness to society by offering it as a window on how we remember.
Bill Worthen of Little Rock is a retired museum director.