◼POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek August 3, 2020
AbrahamLincoln
GeorgeWashington
ChristopherColumbus
BenjaminFranklin
RobertE.Lee
ThomasJefferson
TheodoreRoosevelt
StonewallJackson
FrederickDouglass
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and rushed to the defense of America’s silent
minority: its statues.
The executive order is at the heart of the cri-
sis in Portland, Ore., where unidentified federal
law enforcement agents scooped up protesters.
Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives, led
by Democrats, voted on July 22 to remove sculp-
tures of Confederate figures from the Capitol. All
of which raises the question: When did statues
become such a big deal?
Perhaps it was inevitable that the Black Lives
Matter protests would turn their attention to local
monuments. According to the Southern Poverty
Law Center, there are about 1,700 memorials to
the Confederacy across the U.S., including schools,
streets, and military bases named for its leaders.
Many of the 700 or so physical Confederate memo-
rials (equestrian statues, busts, plaques, and other
monuments) occupy pride of place in the parks
and plazas where protesters nationwide are stag-
ing actions. The rise of Jim Crow coincided with
theCityBeautifulmovementinurbandesign,land-
ingConfederatestatuaryatthecenterofurban-
planningeffortsacrossthe South—Monument
AvenueinRichmond,Va.,beingtheprimeexam-
ple.Takentogether, these memorials form a
national infrastructure of Lost Cause ideology. By
design, they’re hard to miss.
The movement to uproot these sculptures,
a longgamefor the civil rights community,
tookonnewurgencyafterthe 2015 massacreof
ninechurchgoers at an historic Black church in
Charleston, S.C. (The killer, Dylann Roof, sported
a Confederate flag in photographs.) In the year
that followed the Charleston attack, local and
state authorities around the country removed or
rededicated some 114 Confederate symbols, by the
SPLC’s count. The movement has accelerated dra-
matically over the past two months: According to
BeenVerified, a public records search engine, at
least 104 Confederate symbols have been removed
since Floyd’s death on May 25, almost as many as
have come down in the past five years.
A frequent objection to removing Confederate
monuments is that it erases history. But “most peo-
ple don’t get their history from monuments,” says
Patricia Davis, a cultural studies scholar and associ-
ate professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
“What they get from them is a lesson in who has
the power. The only reason we’re hearing about
these monuments and talking about these things
is because they’re being removed.”
The statue uprising has met resistance in state
capitols, district courts, and above all, the White
House. One administration strategy to combat statue
violence is to build more of them. On July 3, Trump
signed another executive order, this one authoriz-
ing a National Garden of American Heroes to cele-
bratethenation’s250thanniversaryin2026.Likea
SocialStudiesHallofFame,thegardenwillfeature
dozensofstatuesofincontrovertible icons (Betsy
Ross, Jackie Robinson), as well as some question-
able inductees and omissions (the late Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia is named, but Thurgood
Marshall is not). Certainly the order includes some
oddities: It forbids any modernist design and imag-
ines leadership roles for the chairs of the National
Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, agen-
cies the administration has repeatedly tried to
e Over
Statues
▼ Outdoor statues
in the Smithsonian’s
inventory of American
sculpture
213
159
139
52
37
36
27
21
7
6
4
KHUE BUI. DATA: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
◀ Artist Dustin Klein
projected an image of
Representative John
Lewis—the legendary
civil rights leader who
died on July 17—onto
the Robert E. Lee
Monument in Richmond
on July 24
