AT WHAT COST?
The building that has been my place of work for more than 35 years now, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, has a pantheon of sorts, the names of five great composers etched into the façade facing Michigan Avenue. One of these is Richard Wagner, whose human qualities were every bit as appalling as was his music sublime. He wrote vile anti-Semitic tracts, and attacked Jewish composers such as Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer in a contemptibly ugly manner. Furthermore, he was an equal opportunity bigot; at the end of his life he left unfinished a rant against miscegenation that would have been right at home in a speech by a Mississippi senator ca. 1960. To what extent his bigotry influenced his music or inspired the Nazi ideology of the next century is debated by scholars. But it is indisputable that he was among Hitler’s favorite composers.
I am the not-so-distant relative of many who were slaughtered by the Nazis. It never occurred to me to protest the fact that I walked into work under an etching of Wagner’s name, but I realize that my situation is not remotely analogous to an African American confronting a Confederate statue. Anti-Semitism has never marred my life in any meaningful way. Furthermore, there was no anti-Semitic intent in honoring Wagner at Orchestra Hall; he just happens to be a great composer. It is not at all comparable to the statues of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson that emerged as a pointed political statement just as Reconstruction was giving way to Jim Crow. So I understand that the Confederate statues are an obscenity that must be removed from our public spaces.
Now, however, we are having a national debate about pretty much every figure from the past we might choose to honor. There are those who argue that every slaveholder — including such august figures as Washington and Jefferson — is culpable and unworthy of being honored, even if their statues were put up with no racist intent. Theodore Roosevelt is being subjected to increasing scrutiny (some of his observations on race, while unexceptional when he was alive, are hard to read now without cringing), and even Lincoln is not exempt; his policy towards the Native Americans is being attacked, apparently with some justification.
Sometimes I subject myself to a thought experiment. If I had been a young man starting his career and a family in Nazi Germany, and I were not Jewish, how nobly would I have behaved? In a way it is a nonsensical exercise: If I were a gentile German born a half-century earlier, I wouldn’t be me in any meaningful way. But still…can I say with certainty that I would not have joined the Nazi Party if it meant I could advance and have opportunities I had worked and yearned for? If it meant my children would have had a better education and better access to health care? What if my kid was sick, and I wanted access to better hospitals? I would very much like to believe that I would have spurned the Nazis, that I would have heroically risked my life resisting them. But I must recognize that I simply have no way of knowing how I would have behaved; I have had the good fortune never to be tested in this manner, at least not yet.
Similarly, if I had been born into a slaveholding family in the Antebellum South, would I have given up my source of wealth? Would I have recognized slavery as the horror that it is, and gone against the grain of my whole culture? I would love to think so, but I can’t help but note that my own life, like the lives of so many of those around me, is marked by compromise and a hesitation to go head-to-head with injustice in a way that might work at cross purposes with self interest. I patronize, and my retirement accounts probably have investments in, companies that are appalling corporate citizens. My orchestra pays my salary in part from the generosity of people whom I might not regard as paragons of morality. I don’t always speak up when I see injustice around me.
Furthermore, do we really know with any certainty how future centuries will judge our actions, if indeed there is a society to judge us? I can imagine they will all be pretty horrified at what will seem to have been our complicity in the degradation of the planet. I have my room air conditioner going right now; I could certainly put up with the discomfort of another ten or so degrees of Fahrenheit if I had to. I have become familiar with the work of the brilliant Israeli historian/philosopher Yuval Harari. He is Buddhist, a fervent vegetarian, and he believes that needless animal suffering is an evil more or less equivalent to needless human suffering. I’m not sure I buy it. Indeed, if I were subjected to the persecution that people of color experience in our society, I might find such concern for the comfort of livestock frankly offensive. But we cannot know how they are going to see things centuries hence. It is not inconceivable that in evaluating people from our era, our descendants will be horrified by our meat consumption. Or perhaps we are unwittingly engaged in some other pattern of thought or action that will be regarded as inexcusably evil centuries hence.
So I am hesitant to judge Washington, Jefferson, et al with complete confidence. I love the Declaration of Independence and I often marvel at Washington’s decision to step down willingly from the Presidency when his second term concluded; I believe that it is insufficiently understood how unprecedented this gesture was, and what a crucial precedent it created for the survival of our democracy. So I recognize that the best parts of their legacy warrant honor. And while I wish I could say with certainty that if I had been Washington or Jefferson I would have freed my slaves — or at least have treated them more humanely — I cannot know that I would have done so. And you can’t either.
There is another reason why I am troubled by the debate going on at the moment. Our country currently seems utterly incapable of seeing itself as a community. We can’t unify to deal with existential environmental issues, to construct a civilized health care system, or even to wear masks during the pandemic so as to stop killing each other. We on the left see the Confederate flags and the heartbreakingly cruel, racist and stupid things that more than a few Trump supporters spew on videos that go viral, and often conclude that they are beyond redemption. No doubt some are. Yet there are areas all over America such as Erie County, PA, blue-collar white enclaves that twice gave the majority of their votes for Barack Obama and then swung for Trump in 2016. I find it hard to regard a bunch of economically struggling white people who twice voted for a black guy with the middle name of Hussein as irredeemable.
In any case, we are doomed if a critical mass of people cannot be brought on board for the transformations our society needs to survive. Our only hope is to build a coalition with a number of people who are not presently in our camp. And I cannot imagine that this project, which is literally of life and death importance, is going to be well served by arguments over whether or not the presidents on Mt. Rushmore were good guys. We will alienate potential allies we desperately need with these debates.
So by all means, let’s get rid of the Confederate statues. And Columbus, for that matter — he seems to have flunked my thought experiment. Not only was he awful by our standards, he was regarded as a monster by his contemporaries. It is hard to justify honoring him in a society we share with Native Americans when he so cruelly and gratuitously tortured and slaughtered their forebears. I realize that he has become a significant source of Italian pride, a symbol of the Italian-American community’s achievement of a secure place in our national fabric. May I modestly propose that replace his statues with monuments to Fiorello LaGuardia, an altogether more admirable native son?
And maybe we should more or less leave it at that.
