Watching TV images of crowds pulling down a statue of a Civil War
soldier in North Carolina, I found myself thinking of a 16th-century pope named
Paul IV.
He was so loathed by Romans, Jews and Christians alike, that when
he died, the people pulled down his statue on the Capitoline Hill, cut off its
head, dragged it through the city streets and dumped it in the Tiber River.
That historical anecdote communicates in shorthand the feelings
of the people for this severe and cruel pontiff. Paul IV was a leader of the
Inquisition, the creator of the Index of Forbidden Books and the first pope to
lock the Jews into a ghetto each night, while forcing them to wear yellow caps
when they went about their business during the day.
Personally austere and deeply religious — unlike a few of his
predecessors — he was also rigid and unyielding. In his five-year pontificate,
he alienated allies, waged an unsuccessful war, promoted corrupt family members
and resisted warnings to deal with their corruption until it was too late.
While Rome's citizens could not threaten him during his life,
they were able to take out their frustrations on his statues in death.
The story reminds me of scenes of Eastern Europeans toppling the
statues of Lenin or Iraqis pulling down statues of Saddam Hussein. There is
something about such outpourings of rage by men and women recently freed from
their tyranny that is completely understandable.
Today's controversies surrounding the various Civil War statues
seem something else entirely.
Some people worry that there is a purging of history taking
place, but I think the controversies have less to do with the Civil War than
with current political issues. For one thing, Americans are abysmal when it
comes to history.
Regarding the Civil War, only half of Americans can say when it
took place. A third of us don't know that Abraham Lincoln was head of the Union
Army. Fewer than one in five know what the Emancipation Proclamation did.
That the battle over the statues is not really about the Civil
War they represent is consistent with the fact that the installation of many of
these statues was often tied to more contemporary events. They were intended to
send a message — affirming Jim Crow laws, the rise of segregation during one
period in history and rejecting the civil rights movement later on.
The statue battle today is more about immigration and a sense of
victimhood in our multicultural land than about old warriors who were willing
to sacrifice 600,000 blue and gray dead for the right to determine for
themselves which human beings could own other human beings.
I think all of this controversy could be a good thing if
Americans decided to learn a bit more about their past to better understand
their present. Perhaps they could start with Ken Burns' epic documentary on the
Civil War, with its haunting images and its first-person accounts of the
brutality of slavery and the brutality of the war to end it.
We don't have to purge General Lee, General Jackson or Jefferson
Davis from our memories. Indeed, we would be the worse off if we forgot them.
As a country, however, we do need to empathize more strongly with
our brothers and sisters who see the stars and bars, the tributes to old
racists and the defense of new ones as a message that they are still not fully
equal, still not fully accepted, still not fully free.
Tearing down statues is the easy part. Tearing down prejudice?
That takes centuries.
Erlandson is director and editor-in-chief of Catholic
News Service.