Missouri Sens. Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley wrong about honors for Confederate traitors
Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt majored in history at Southwest Baptist University. He went on to get a master’s degree in history, too, and for several years taught that subject at Marshfield High.
So when Blunt single-handedly blocked an attempt to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol last week, he should have known what he was doing. Which was acting to preserve the worst legacy of one of the northernmost slave states.
The statues, which have only adorned the Capitol since the Jim Crow era, were installed in that context. They are bronze and marble tributes to racism, and to the ahistorical “Lost Cause” propaganda that a lot of us learned in school.
Yet Blunt used a states’ rights argument, with the whole night train full of baggage that that phrase invokes, as his reason for stopping a Democratic attempt to remove the 11 statues that commemorate Confederate leaders and the pro-slavery Vice President John C. Calhoun.
Blunt, who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, said the motion would violate an agreement, adopted during the Civil War, that gives each state the right to choose two historical figures to be honored in the Capitol.
“This is an agreement with the states,” he said. “It goes back to 1864.” The year history stopped? If anything, that it goes back to 1864 is a reason to think again.
Maybe Blunt just can’t see past the rules he oversees, because he did say he’d be open to renaming the 10 U.S. Army bases named for Confederates. In his mind, that’s different because that’s a change the federal government can make on its own.
But history isn’t whatever we want it to be, and there is a straight line between our gauzy, “Gone with the Wind”-level glorification of antebellum America and the murder of George Floyd. We have to correct the narrative to stop reenacting it.
As it happens, Missouri’s other Republican senator, Josh Hawley, also majored in history, at Stanford University, then taught at an exclusive London boys’ school before attending Yale Law School. Yet somehow, the man only knows one song, the lament of the hated and humiliated from the red-state holler.
In a recent Senate floor speech and a Federalist piece headlined, “The Left wants a civil war,” Hawley said all this talk of “systemic racism” is really an attack on Donald Trump and “the people who elected him. It’s about the red states, like mine. It’s about the people who live there. The elite media, the woke mob, they don’t like these people. And they want the rest of America to dislike them too.” Psssht.
Naturally, he’s dead-set against renaming the military bases, which he sees as an attempt “to erase from history every person and name and event not righteous enough.”
Doing away with tributes to traitors doesn’t erase them from history but does take them off their pedestals.
As the art historian Erin L. Thompson recently said in the New York Times, “a statue is a bid for immortality. It’s a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people. So that is what’s really at issue here. It’s not the statues themselves but the point of view that they represent.” We’ve been replacing statues with other statues and ideas with other ideas throughout human history.
The panic set off by this moment of rectification shows how urgent it is. A memorial to a Black man who was lynched in Kansas City was cut off its pole and thrown off a cliff earlier this month.
Rebel flags are jumping off the shelves at Dixie Outfitters in Branson. “We sold probably the most flags we’ve ever sold last Saturday,” a store manager told The Star. “It’s been pretty great.” Someone lately left fresh carnations on the unmarked graves of the Confederate soldiers buried at Kansas City’s Forest Hill Cemetery.
In Tulsa on Saturday, the president said he sees the fight over which people and ideas to idolize this way: “The unhinged left-wing mob is trying to vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments. Tear down our statues and punish, cancel and persecute anyone who does not conform to their demands for absolute and total control.” Or maybe they just want a safer, fairer future for us all.
Removing tributes to those who were willing to break our country in two won’t obliterate history. But it might keep us from repeating it.
This story was originally published June 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
