Revisionist History

In Chicago's Grant Park there is a statue that was commissioned in 1933 by the Italian community of this city, devoted in the words inscribed on the front of its pedestal: "To Christopher Columbus, Discoverer of America"

In Humboldt Park about five miles to the northwest, there is another sculpture, this one commissioned by the Norwegian community of Chicago, devoted, in the words inscribed on its roughly-hewn granite base, to  "Leif Erikson, Discoverer of America."

This city also has a significant Native American community, most of whom would more than likely dispute either claim, as their ancestors lived in the Americas tens of thousands of years before either European explorer set foot upon these shores.

Depending upon your definition of the word "discovery", any one of these claims could have merit. Such is the challenge of history, the narrative depends upon who is telling the story.

In 1893, Chicago hosted a tremendous World's Fair, held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first journey across the Atlantic. (Actually the 401st anniversary as the city couldn't quite pull off the event in time). Ninety nine years later on the 500th anniversary of the event, there was barely any mention of the milestone. And today, nearly thirty years after that, while Columbus Day is still an official holiday, mostly I think out of deference to the Italian-American community, there are plans afoot to keep the holiday but swap the recognition of it from Columbus to Indigenous Americans.

"It's about time", says one segment of society, while another segment indignantly shouts: "revisionist history."

I found a wonderful quote about that old bugaboo "revisionist history" from a noted historian. James McPherson, the author of several books on the American Civil War such as The Battle Cry of Freedom writes that far from something to be avoided, revisionism:

...is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past.

I didn't find the quote in a story about the Civil War or the "discovery" of America, but in a recent Chicago Sun Times article about the founder of the Chicago White Sox. The article titled Pop History Gave a Bad Shake to 1919 ‘Black Sox’ owner Charles A. Comiskey, written by Richard Lindberg, tells the story of how Comiskey's bad reputation comes from the characterization of him in the novel Eight Men Out by Eliot Azinov, the story of the notorious Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The book was made into a popular movie in the eighties.

Quoting myself from a piece I wrote about this very subject four years ago:

The book and especially the film depict Comiskey as a real bastard; imagine a pre-redemtion Ebeneezer Scrooge mixed with old man Potter and Simon Legree without the good side, and you get the picture.

Without understanding (or caring) that Eight Men Out is essentially a work of fiction with a few historical facts thrown in for good measure, popular historians such as Ken Burns have taken the book to be the definitive source on the scandal that rocked baseball in the second decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, they have perpetuated the myth that Comiskey was a notoriously greedy tightwad who all but forced his players to take money from gangsters to throw the 1919 World Series. Research in the past decade has shown this to be pure rubbish, as is another popular myth also perpetuated by Burns and others about the character of one of baseball's greatest players, Ty Cobb.

Yet despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, many people still hold on to their strong biases against the two men, claiming the serious research that went into discovering irrefutable facts that ended up clearing both their names, is not to be trusted as it is merely "revisionist history". In my piece about Ty Cobb, I quoted the estimable baseball writer and statistician Bill James who speaks eloquently not only about the ballplayer, but also about the general public's attitude about history:

If one were to take the time to document a thousand times in which Ty Cobb went out of his way to be kind to other people, including black people, would this change his image? I fear it would not.

Why is it so hard to let go of our historical biases, especially when confronted with compelling facts to the contrary? In his book Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Author Charles Leerhsen's theory is that we all need people like the mythical bad guys Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb because they make us feel better about our own inadequacies. We say to ourselves, I may be bad, but hey, at least I'm not as bad as those two. In other words, if we like the story, it becomes a part of us and we stick with it, come hell or high water.

In the past couple of years, the interpretation of history has been at the center of a controversy involving the removal of century old monuments to Confederate leaders in the American South. The argument against the removal of the statues is that by doing so, communities are practicing their own brand of revisionism by "whitewashing history." In a sense the critics are right, but the history being removed is the history of the statues themselves, NOT the history of the event they were intended to commemorate. Decades after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA., marking the end of the Civil War, a movement that would become known as the "Cult of the Lost Cause" took it upon themselves to revise history by portraying the Confederacy in a kinder, gentler light. According to members of this group, which included historians responsible for much of the understanding of the Civil War for many subsequent decades, the Confederate States fought not to preserve slavery, but to defend states' rights over what they viewed as a tyrannical federal government, to preserve the noble "southern way of life", and to defend their land from the onslaught of Northern aggression.  Union leaders were portrayed, not always wrongly, as drunken, incompetent fools, and the institution of slavery was quite wrongly explained away as one of benevolence, not oppression. Capping it off. the leaders of the Confederacy were portrayed as heroic defenders of the lost cause and tributes and monuments to them went up all over, some even in the north.

No matter how fair-minded the observer, debunking the revisionist history Cult of the Lost Cause is not difficult. All one has to do is read the Articles of Confederation of the states who seceded from the Union (you can find them all online) and right there in black and white, usually near the top of  the documents, is the mention of slavery and its importance to that particular state. The truth, at least as best as we know it today, is that the Civil War did not begin as so many assume, with the Union demanding that slavery be abolished in the South. The issue was the expansion of slavery into the western territories which President Lincoln vehemently objected. Had the Southern states not pressed the issue of expansion, the Civil War may have been delayed or avoided altogether and slavery may have continued for a while until it one way or other, it would have most certainly faded away.


Unlike the popular misconceptions of the causes of the Civil War and the legacies of Ty Cobb and Charles Comiskey, the history of Columbus's voyages to the Americas were not clouded in false assumptions, diversions and outright lies. There was never any question that the results of the European invasion, or expeditions depending upon your point of view, of the Americas initiated unwittingly by Columbus (he never realized that he didn't actually accomplish his goal of reaching Asia), greatly benefited the conquerors, and all but destroyed the conquered, the indigenous people of the so called "New World." What we once viewed as a magnificent accomplishment that ushered in the dawn of the modern age and one of the great triumphs of the human spirit, is now generally viewed as a dark point in history that triggered unconscionable suffering, genocide and the destruction of ancient civilizations. The difference between the way we view the legacy of Columbus today and they way we viewed it in the past is a matter of changing values. Today we are telling the same story but from a different point of view. The truth is that both views of Columbus's legacy are essentially correct.

The most vilified term in academic circles today, next to racism, is colonialism. It's almost impossible to get into any deep conversation about politics, current events, history or just about anything that concerns how we live our lives these days, without the issue of the evils of colonialism coming up. Merely implying that anything good may have come out of colonialism is grounds for at the very least a stern lecture from the rarified world of the cognoscenti. Having just said that, lest you think I am a defender, apologist, or someone who is trying to make a case for colonialism in any form, let me assure you I am not.

The following is my litmus test for judging the merits of anything, asking myself to argue the pros and cons of a particular topic and comparing their merits. Here is my most compelling argument against colonialism:

How would I feel if my country were invaded by another country which enforced its system of rules and government upon us, subjected my people to second class citizenship or worse, and denied us our basic rights? 

You're right I wouldn't like it, not one bit. So why on earth would I advocate subjecting someone else to colonization? On the other hand, here's my best argument in favor of colonialism:

-  -  - 

That's right I don't have any argument supporting colonialism. In my head, the Golden Rule (or whatever you prefer to call the universal gold standard for distinguishing right from wrong), trumps all the fringe benefits that may occur as a result. Wrong is wrong and extenuating circumstances cannot make a wrong a right.

Proponents of a return of colonialism in our time point to liberal democracy, the advancement of science, liberation theology, racial, ethnic and sexual equality, freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and a slew of other ideas and values that have spread throughout the world as a direct result of western colonialism.  Are they wrong? Well those things are all good in my opinion anyway, and whether you like it or not, have all come to us part and parcel as a result of European colonialism.  Yet as far as using those values and attributes as excuses for the continued violation of human rights, then, no, I have to draw the line there.

Which brings to mind this chilling scene from the classic film from 1948, The Third Man, where the character of Harry Lime, as played by Orson Welles, tries to rationalize his evil deeds to his boyhood friend played by Joseph Cotten. Make sure you watch the entire clip as the payoff is at the very end:





Here is a link to an article that chastises as dishonest, a historian favorable to the re-birth of colonialism who happily lists all the glad tidings it has brought to the world, yet failed to note any of the horrors and atrocities of which there were countless.

I get it, but isn't it equally dishonest to only point out the injustices of something we don't like while avoiding any mention of the positive? It is an inescapable fact that our world would be a very different place today, for the worse AND the better, were it not for colonialism. The inconvenient truth historians must accept is this: civilizations of all stripes, both good and evil from time immemorial have been built upon the backs of unfortunate people who suffered greatly in one way or other. This is something we needn't celebrate, nor model our own civilization upon, but need to accept just the same.

I'll give you a personal example of a very inconvenient truth regarding my own life. Had it not been for the events surrounding World War II, a time that witnessed some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known, and the subsequent Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe that was the direct result of that war, my father would not have left his home of Czechoslovakia, come to Chicago, and met my mother. In other words, I owe my very existence, and by extension my children's and God willing that of their children, to World War II.

Do I wake up every morning thanking my lucky stars for the suffering of tens of millions of people in the thirties and forties and advocate for a return of the conditions that led to that terrible time? Of course not. And while I am never unaware of this terrible truth, I do not dwell upon it because it would drive me insane.

Nonetheless it is still a very real fact.

My point is that we should avoid the telling of history simply to fit our own needs, ideologies and belief systems. There is an old adage that says those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But it is essential that we not just know history, but continually question our understanding of it, reject verifiable falsehoods no matter how appealing they may be, and understand the point of view in which that history was told or written. Finally, hard as it may seem, we must learn to appreciate that different tellings of the same history need not be mutually exclusive, but serve to paint a fuller picture of the past, how it relates to the present, and how we can use it to shape the future.

Like everything else in life, context is essential.

Here We Go Again...

Another chapter in the let's remove art for the public good saga is taking shape, this time in San Francisco. This op-ed article by Bari Weiss in the New York Times describes a plan to not only remove a work by an important 20th Century artist, but to destroy it.

The work in question is a thirteen panel mural inside George Washington High School by the Russian-American artist, Victor Arnautoff, depicting the school's namesake in rather unconventional ways. In the panel illustrated in the op-ed piece, Washington is standing at a desk with other "Founding Fathers", his right hand pointing to a map resting on a table while his left points off into the distance where a group of American settlers impassively walk past the body of a dead Native American man. Other panels in the work depict African American slaves toiling away on Washington's plantation.

A detail of Victor Arnautoff's mural "City Life"
in the lobby of Coit Tower, San Francisco.
The conspicuous absence of the conservative
San Francisco Chronicle
on the newsstand is a clear indication of the artist's
political convictions, 

In her piece, Weiss quotes Arnautoff stating his no-holds-barred philosophy of art:

Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me... The artist is a critic of society.

Arnautoff, an avowed Communist who assisted the like-minded Diego Rivera in Mexico, was according to Weiss, one of the Bay Area's most prominent Depression era artists.

Clearly the panels in the school, as is the case for all his work as well as that of his mentor Rivera are radical, provocative and subversive. From this piece I wrote back in 2013, you can read about the controversey sparked by Rivera's "Detroit Industry" which right wing groups demanded be removed during the anti-communist McCarthy era of the fifties, and the response from the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the institution that houses the murals.

An Arnautoff work I am intimately familiar with, "City Life", painted in the Social Realist style popular in the day, graces the interior of Coit Tower which stands on the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. Created during a time of upheaval in the labor movement of the city, "City Life" and other murals inside the tower were themselves considered subversive and protests against them forced the delay of the opening of the Tower, a monument to local firefighters, for several months.

Given today's highly charged political climate, you might assume that the controverey around Arnautoff's high school piece was triggered by conservative groups who are offended by the less than flattering portrayal of the "Father of our Country." But in fact, the move to remove and destroy the artwork comes from the San Francisco School Board. Schools they feel, need to be safe spaces for students and believe that the depiction of dead Indians and black slaves in the school halls, no matter the context, historical accuracy and significance of the art, is a clear violation of what it means to be a safe space.

Weiss in her piece claims that the Board has been swayed by a group called "Reflection and Action Working Group", in her words, "a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district." According to the group, Arnautoff 's work:

glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, (and) oppression... The art does not reflect social justice... (and it) is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

Wow.

Clearly the point of Arnautoff 's work is completely lost on this group. The only ratioinale I can see in this statement is summed up by that last phrase which implies that the "legacy" of the artist, (who happens to be a dead white guy), and in fact, history itself, is not as valid as the "experience"of the students, who presumably are racially and ethnically diverse. Never mind that the vast majority of the school's students are themselves opposed to the removal of the artwork.

What's even more disturbing is the insistence of the board that the work be painted over and effectively destroyed rather than being merely covered up, lest someone in the future decide to uncover them, in defiance of the infinite wisdom of the Board's decree which, if I'm reading it correctly, should be law for the ages, so shall it be written, so shall it be done.

Even beyond that nonsense is the fact that the people objecting to the destruction of these murals, are being labeled as racists by the would-be whitewashers of art and history.

This stuff of course is not new. Thirty years ago a WPA mural was removed from a school that neighbored my elementary school in Oak Park, Illinois. In the lobby of that school was a mural depicting a map of the world containing images of people who inhabited each of the continents. The people depicted in much of the painting were wearing contemporary (for the time) clothing, while in the Africa portion, the people were depicted wearing loin cloths and other accessories many felt enforced stereotypes of the "savage native". Then just this year, two more WPA paintings were removed from schools in the same community because detractors felt they did not reflect the current diversity of the schools.

While I'm not in agreement with the all-out removal of these works, I do get it. However I believe that dated as they are, these works of art, when put into their the proper context, (just like the Confederate monuments that have been in the news recently), serve as useful windows to the past. Simply taking down and mothballing them to obfuscate the less admirable features of our history in order to avoid offending people, serves no worthwhile purpose at all, in my opinion.

But the Arnautoff work is different. That artist clearly had a "progressive" agenda and the idea that his work glorified slavery, genocide, colonization, and everything else that is bad in the world, simply could not be more wrong. A school's job is first and foremost to educate its students. It is important that students know, not only history and the evils of the past, but that even during a bygone era such as the1930s, there were many people including artists, who went against the grain and did not buy into slavery, genocide, colonialism and other evils that were very much alive in their day and continue into our own.

Erasing a work of art because we don't agree with the message it conveys is bad enough, but erasing a work of art because we don't bother to understand the message is beyond explanation. It is misguided, stupid and above all an affront to education, knowledge, and understanding.

I just wrote about the importance of learning from history and the trouble that arises when we are ignorant of it. It seems at least in this case, the San Francisco School Board is fast becoming the champion of ignorance.

This one simply boggles the mind.

Should They Stay or Should They Go?

I have a running bet with a friend who claims we'll have hell to pay now that they've started removing statues of Confederate heroes in the South. He believes that before you know it, we'll be removing likenesses up here of presidents who owned slaves, explorers who abused the people they "discovered" and just about every statue in town that offends somebody, which when you come to think of it, is probably every statue in town.

We didn't set terms but I've already offered to pay the dollar I owe him as after we made the bet, before you could say Jack Robinson, activists made demands that the Daniel Chester French equestrian statue of George Washington in Chicago, which has stood in front of his namesake park for over one hundred years, be removed from view. George Washington owned slaves of course, as did several presidents including U.S .Grant who owned one slave while he lived at his wife's family plantation in St. Louis. The man's name was William Jones, and Grant freed him shortly before the Civil War. I have yet to hear any demand to remove Chicago's monument to Ulysses S. Grant, but that day may be coming.

To my knowledge we don't have statues of other slave holding presidents in Chicago but plenty of things named after them, and other problematic historical figures. We have Washington Park and Jackson Park on the South side, and Douglas Park on the West, named after Steven Douglas, the Illinois senator and proponent of slavery, who lost the 1860 presidential election to Abraham Lincoln.

The South Side pastor who suggested that George Washington and his horse come down, also suggested that streets and parks named after these problematic figures be re-named. To ease the pain, he gave a simple solution to the problem. Instead of changing the names of the parks and roads, all we'd have to do is re-dedicate these places to more appropriate people who happen to share last names. So for example, Washington Park could become Harold Washington Park, (after the city's first African American mayor), Jackson Park cold become Jesse or Michael Jackson Park (after the civil rights activist or the King of Pop). and Douglas Park could become Frederick Douglass Park, and all they'd have to do is add one "s" to the common name.  So far I haven't heard mention of the community of Jefferson Park being re-dedicated in honor of the blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson but that may be in our future as well.

I make light of this knowing full well that there are people who are quite sincere about reconsidering tributes to people who owned slaves. Why shouldn't they be? Slavery was a blight upon this nation and its history.

But while I truly believe there are legitimate arguments for considering the future of monuments of people who did things in their lives we don't like, I do see clear distinctions between the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders, and other monuments. For me, the most compelling difference is this: we celebrate people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of their significance in the founding of our nation, despite their shortcomings, including owning slaves. By contrast, people such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee are celebrated precisely because of the cause they took up. That cause was directly tied to the perpetuation of the institution of slavery, As public monuments represent the ideals of a community, I am in complete agreement with the idea that communities that continue to honor Confederate leaders with monuments in public places, are also implicitly condoning slavery, and other civil rights abuses.

I realize that to some, this distinction may be purely academic. A valid argument could be made that everyone who participated in the institution of slavery is implicit, and therefore, equally deserving of moral condemnation. Following that argument, that would include paradoxically, the man who second only to Abraham.Lincoln, was most directly responsible for the end of slavery in this country, Ulysses S. Grant.

For the record, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel discounted that argument, saying the issue of removing George Washington from his place of honor in Chicago is a "non starter." My guess is that this is not the end of the story. Regardless, the voices of people who would remove statues of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and others, deserve to be heard, and I strongly believe  this is a conversation worth having, regardless of my opposition to removing those monuments.

Thanks to the mayor, George Washington is safe for now, but there are two other controversial Chicago monuments that might have a date with destiny.

Until a few weeks ago, few Chicagoans knew their city had not only a monument to Fascism, but also a bona fide Confederate Monument.

Perhaps the most momentous event that took place during the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, was the culmination of a trans-Atlantic flight of a squadron of 24 seaplanes, under the command of Italo Balbo. A staunch anti-communist, Balbo became one of the early supporters of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF, the Italian Fascist Party. As one of the leaders of the 1922 March on Rome which resulted in a bloodless coup, Balbo was instrumental in bringing the PNF to power in Italy, and Benito Mussolini, the prime ministership of that country. By the 1930s Balbo, who trained as an aviator during WW I, was the Minister of the Italian Air Force and had already one trans-Atlantic crossing under his belt.

The 1933 trip was an eight leg journey originating in Rome, with stops in Europe and Canada before landing in Lake Michigan beside the fair grounds, the present site of Northerly Island. Balbo and his flight were received with a great deal of fanfare including a massive parade and a street named in his honor. So appreciative of all the fuss, the following year Mussolini, who at the time, by every measure of the term, was the dictator of a totalitarian Italy, sent Chicago a present in the form of a monument consisting of a 2,000 year old column  that was removed from the port city of Ostia on the outskirts of Rome. Upon its arrival, the column sitting atop a pedestal, was placed in front of the Italian Pavilion at the Fair. There, the  ancient column stood in stark contrast to the pavilion, a stunning work of Modernism designed by Alexander Capraro. Well Modernism be damned, the pavilion and the rest of the fair buildings disappeared shortly after the Century of Progress closed late in 1934, but the column atop its pedestal remained as the only surviving remnant of the exposition.

Chicago's (in)famous Balbo Monument along the Lakefront Bike Path

And there it remains, long after Italy and its Fascist government joined forces with the Axis powers in the late thirties: Japan who invaded Pearl Harbor, and Adolph Hitler's Germany. Despite being at war with Italy and the government who gave us the monument, no one ever thought to take it down during World War II. Despite the post-war Italian government's strong suggestion the city take down the monument to the regime that brought its country to ruin, it kept standing. And despite the occasional request from concerned citizens for 72 years since the end of World War II, Chicago's Fascist monument still stands today, ironically just a few steps away from a stadium dedicated to the men and women of the U.S. armed services, Soldier Field.

Today if you look really hard, you can still read these words inscribed on the pedestal:

The inscription worn by years of exposure to the elements,
extolling the glories of Balbo, Mussolini and Fascism.

Fascist Italy, by command of Benito Mussolini
presents to Chicago
exaltation symbol memorial
of the Atlantic Squadron led by Balbo
that with Roman daring, flew across the ocean
in the 11th year
of the Fascist era

In the current placement of the monument, there does seem to be one concession to its controversial nature. The object is turned ninety degrees so that the Italian inscription on the base does not face the lakefront bike path upon which the monument resides. An English translation, which is now barely legible from erosion due to the elements, is on the side directly opposite the path.

Today in light of the removal of the Southern statues, a new movement has emerged to remove the Balbo monument. Spearheaded by Chicago aldermen Ed Burke, and Gilbert Villegas, who himself just learned of the monument's existence a few weeks ago, the Balbo monument is once again in the news, if just barely.

So should it stay or should it go? Well on purely philosophical terms, I'd say there is no question that if we're going to remove statues of Confederate leaders who were themselves, enemies of the United States, then a monument to a foreign enemy, with direct ties to Hitler no less, really has no place in a public park in Chicago. For consistency's sake alone, I can't think of any good reason not to move it to a museum or other venue where it can be placed into a more appropriate context.

To get to the Italian inscription on the base
you have to walk around the black fence.
The English interpretation is on the left,
 hidden from the view of casual passersby. 

On the other hand, unlike the vast outpouring of emotion and rightful indignation over the Confederate monuments, especially after the disgusting white supremacist rally around a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville last month, public emotion in Chicago over the Balbo monument is barely a trickle if that. To my knowledge it has never been a rallying point for black shirted neo-Fascists proclaiming the glories of Il Duce. Despite it being located in Chicago's front yard near one of the city's premier sports venues, it is quite off the beaten path, seen mostly by cyclists and runners who manage only a quick glace as they zip on by. If you're intent on seeing it, you really have to seek it out.

The monument is an anomaly, a side-show story in the history of this city, an interesting, if strange and somewhat macabre attraction. If it were removed from the park, probably few people would miss it. My guess is that like dozens of times before, there will be a little fuss made over the appropriateness of the Balbo Monument, then something more pressing will come up, and it will be forgotten again. It's kind of like the old radio gag, Fibber McGee's Closet, where every time the hall closet door is opened at 79 Wistful Vista, all the contents comes spilling out onto the floor. Likewise, every time the subject of the Balbo Monument comes up, Chicago's response is just like McGee's: "I gotta clean out that closet one of these days." Of course, he never does.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I expect my grandchildren to be around to see the Balbo monument standing in precisely the same spot where it stands today.

-

As strange as a Fascist monument in Chicago's front yard may sound, the thought of a Confederate monument in the predominantly African American community of Grand Crossing, in a cemetery that bears the earthly remains of African American icons including Harold Washington, Jesse Owens, Thomas Dorsey and Ida B. Wells, may seem truly bizarre.

But Confederate Mound's existence in Oak Woods Cemetery is anything but bizarre. During the Civil War, Camp Douglas, on property belonging to the aforementioned Steven A. Douglas, served as a prison camp for Confederate soldiers. Conditions at the camp were wretched and thousands of prisoners died while in confinement due to starvation, exposure, scurvy, cholera, smallpox, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and numerous other maladies. Bodies of soldiers were mercilessly dumped in the lake, only to have them wash up on the shore, or buried in shallow ground without coffins. Others were sold off for medical experiments. In all, the official death toll at Camp Douglas was listed at  4,454, but the number is certainly higher.. It is estimated that the death rate at the camp was approximately 17 percent of all prisoners confined there.

After the war, the bodies interred in Camp Douglas were moved to the old City Cemetery, the present site of Lincoln Park. The constant flooding of that site necessitated the closing of that cemetery and the remains were moved again, this time to the new Oak Woods Cemetery on the Chicago's south side. There, roughly six thousand bodies were re-interred in concentric rows within a two-acre plot, purchased by the Federal Government in 1867. Along with the Confederate soldiers, the bodies of twelve unidentified Union prison guards are buried in what is said to be the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere.

In the 1890s a monument was proposed for the grave site and contributions were solicited from all over the country. The completed monument consists of a likeness of a Confederate Army soldier standing atop a forty foot tower. The base of the tower holds plaques with the names of 4,275 men known to have perished at Fort Douglas. Five gravestones in front of the tower commemorate the roughly 1,500 unidentified soldiers buried at the site. Four cannons, one pyramid made of cannonballs, and a pole flying the American Flag. stand around the perimeter of the site.

The monument to the roughly 6,000 men who perished in Fort Douglas from 1861 to 1865 was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1895. Present at the dedication were President Grover Cleveland, his entire cabinet, and about 100,000 spectators.

Confederate Mound has been brought up sporadically in light of the recent controversy surrounding the removal of the Confederate monuments. Daily Southtown reporter Ted Slowik questioned in a op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune why there hasn't been more controversy surrounding Confederate Mound. In his piece, Slowik examines both sides over why Chicago's Confederate monument should or should not be controversial. He points out that the monument over the gravesite, the work of General John C. Underwood, head of the United Confederate Veterans division west of the Alleghenies, was built at a time when nostalgia, rather than a critical examination of the past was the rule of the day, at least regarding the Civil War. He takes it one step further with this sinister tidbit:

Many Confederate monuments were put up during the Jim Crow era to intimidate blacks, 

That was certainly true in the south where there was growing resentment by whites of black people whom they felt "didn't know their place." I'm not so sure that sentiment would apply to Confederate Mound as the African American population of Chicago in the 1890s was relatively low and the few black people who did live here at the time, were integrated into the rest of the population. Of course that all changed during the Great Migration of the 1910s when the tens of thousands of African Americans looking for better opportunities up north, came to Chicago and found themselves forced into over-crowded, restricted ghettos on the south side. Virulent racism, at least the kind that would inspire the building of a monument to Confederate soldiers just to prove who's boss, wouldn't have been much of an issue in Chicago, at least not in the 1890s.

Slowik then comes upon another, more logical reason to build the monument in Chicago:

But Confederate Mound represents something different: an effort by Congress to encourage reconciliation.

The need to reconcile, to heal the old wounds of the Civl War was not a new idea in the 1890s. It goes all the way back to just before the end of the war, March 4, 1865 to be exact, when Abraham Lincoln stood before the east portico of the U.S. Capitol Building and ended his second inaugural address with these words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Those words were put into action just one month later at the courthouse at Appomattox, Virginia after Ulysses S. Grant accepted Robert E. Lee's unconditional surrender. Rather than having the Confederate general led away in chains to be prosecuted as a traitor, Grant gave Lee and his generals their freedom, allowing them to walk away from the courthouse with their dignity intact, their swords still in their scabbards.

For his part, Lee, who also recognized the need for reconciliation, would go to his grave insisting that the people of the South NOT erect monuments to the leaders of the lost cause and go on fighting the Civil War, but rather live their lives as devoted Americans. Sadly, he never got his wish.

I think it is fitting that Confederate Mound exists here in Chicago. It is not a war monument, nor is it a monument to the Confederacy, not by a long shot. Rather it is an elegy to wasted lives. We may hate the cause they fought and died for, but it makes no sense to hate the men of the South who are buried at Oak Woods Cemetery. They were I have no doubt, to a man, caught up in a struggle that was far beyond their control. Some of them may have supported slavery, others may have not, fighting the battle because they felt it was their duty. It's very likely that since they are buried up in Chicago and not down home, few if any of them owned slaves. Regardless, who are we to judge them?

We can go on all we like about the South bearing responsibility for their soldiers' fate, refusing prisoner exchanges because they did not consider captured black Union soldiers as soldiers, or about the fact that back in the day, African American people were not permitted to be buried in Oak Woods Cemetery. Those are both injustices. But as the gravestones note, the men buried here, roughly 6000 Confederate and 12 Union soldiers, were all American soldiers. They lie underneath the American flag. They died horrific deaths in our city, on American soil, in the alleged care of other Americans. The least we can do for these men is give them the dignity in death that they did not receive in life. Removing the monument above their final resting place would also be an injustice, that in no way would alleviate the other injustices.

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Yes the removal of the Confederate monuments in the South is indeed a slippery slope. It has the potential of opening up a Pandora's box of issues regarding other monuments around the country. Well so be it. Every monument in this country has its own history, and its own meaning. We shouldn't make decrees saying that all statues that commemorate X must be taken down while all those commemorating Y must stay. Nor should we demand that every statue must remain precisely where it stands for perpetuity.  We must not dismiss wholesale the feelings of our fellow citizens for whom some monuments represent the oppression of their people. Yet we are doing ourselves a disservice to insist that every statue that offends somebody must be removed.

Fortunately we have the tools at our disposal in the form of an active local citizenry, a free press, and locally elected representative governments to address the issues of monuments that no longer represent the values of a community. For the time being anyway, we live in an open society that tolerates the expression of different views. We have ears, as long as we are willing to use them, to listen to different points of view. Hopefully we have compassion to be open to, even if we don't necessarily agree with, the views of others. No public monument should be off limits to at the very least, discussion about its role in the community.

Most important we have brains that, when they are not corrupted by prejudice, intolerance and obsessive ideology, are more than capable of figuring out which statues should stay, and which ones should go.

Maybe it's time to start using them.

Moving Statues Around

It's hard to give up long held ideas and beliefs. My father, God rest his soul, went to his grave, eighty two years of age, still believing things he learned in the second grade. Neither logic nor empirical observation could sway him from the basic facts and ideas he learned in school as a child. 

Unless scientific findings challenge one's deeply held existential beliefs, I think it's safe to say that most people, unlike my father, accept the premise that scientific facts are facts, only until someone proves them otherwise. However I think many of us are more like my father when it comes to history. To them, the definition of history is the following: something happened, someone wrote about it, we read it, and that's that. Attempts to correct misconceptions about the past are usually met with suspicion, or even contempt. Any time someone tries to re-shape our concept of history, we call it "revisionist" or in our current Trump era parlance, "fake" history. 

This was made crystal clear to me a couple years ago when Charles Leerhsen wrote a biography of the great ball player, Ty Cobb. Now it was "common knowledge" that despite his prowess on the field, Cobb was a racist and all 'round nogoodnick. Leerhsen was prepared to write a book exploiting Cobb's misdeeds, and found several, (as the man had quite the temper). But he was surprised to discover that much of what we think we know about Ty Cobb, including his relationship with and his feelings toward black people, were never mentioned (at all, anywhere), until a biography of him was published shortly after his death. Through scrupulous research, Leerhsen could not find one shred of evidence that Cobb had racist tendencies, at least for a man of his time. On the contrary, Cobb, the descendant of Southern abolitionists, was a vocal supporter of the integration of the game of baseball, and a generous benefactor of charities that supported African American people in his home state of Georgia. After very serious consideration, Leerhsen came to the conclusion that the author of Cobb's biography, Al Stump, was an unscrupulous man who looking to create sensation where there wasn't any, made up most of the stuff that destroyed Ty Cobb's good name. Unfortunately it was Stump's work that would become the story of record on the life of Cobb.

As a result of his hard work, Leerhsen's book, Ty Cobb, A Terrible Beauty, was met with incredulity by many who refused to accept that their assumptions and prejudices about Cobb could be wrong. Its critics called the book, revisionist history. After all, it was none other than the de facto authority on American history, Ken Burns, who told us on public TV no less, that Cobb was "the great black mark on the history of baseball." If he said it, it had to be true, right? Well it turns out that Burns's description of Ty Cobb, as well as just about everybody else's, came straight out of Stump's work, virtually word for word.

I bring him up because Ty Cobb's name has been mentioned along with those of other notable Americans, whose monuments, some people believe should be removed from places of honor because those individuals had flawed characters of one kind or another. 

This all comes on the heels of the movement to remove Confederate monuments from public places across America. Taking advantage of the moment, some folks going well above and beyond the motives of the movement's original intent, are demanding the removal of likenesses of presidents who owned slaves, and any other historical figure who may have at some point in his or her life, displayed bigotry of one kind or another. As if on cue, the right wing "don't remove any monument anywhere, anytime" crowd, are in ecstasy over their disgust of the "liberal snowflakes" who would dare remove monuments to cherished Americans, simply because they are "offended" by them. 

The right wing sentiments could be summed up by a Donald Trump tweet he posted after the tragedy in Charlottesville two weeks ago: 

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....

...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson... So foolish! 

As I've said time and again, there are good arguments to be made for both sides of the Confederate monument debate, but changing history is not one of them. Other than being an injustice (if you buy into Charles Leerhsen's premise as I do), taking down the likeness of Ty Cobb in Comerica Park in Detroit would not erase Ty Cobb from baseball history. No one is talking about expunging his stats from the record books, removing him from baseball's Hall of Fame, or burning the millions of copies of the dozens of books about him. No one is suggesting wiping clean the memories of Cobb from millions of baseball fans or members of his family. 

The same can be said of the Confederate monuments. Taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee won't make people forget who he was, what he did, and what he fought for. It certainly wouldn't change the outcome of the Civil War, or everything that has happened since. Besides, no one is suggesting melting down the bronze likeness of General Lee and recasting it as Al Sharpton, (although I'd love to see the reaction of the rightist snowflakes if that were ever suggested). The plan is for these statues to be moved to institutions such as museums or cemeteries, where they can be viewed as historical artifacts, rather than as icons of devotion, which many have become in their current settings. 

As promised at the end of my last post, I'd like to point out some examples of local monuments which I am very familiar with, that illustrate what happens when monuments and the values of the community in which they stand, are no longer in sync.

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Chicago could at one time boast more Polish people than any other city in the world with the exception of Warsaw. By the 1890s the city boasted dozens of churches and countless institutions and organizations serving the community and preserving Polish culture. One of those organizations, the Kosciuszko Society endeavored to erect a monument in then heavily Polish Humboldt Park, to their namesake hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a military engineer who served with distinction in both the American Continental Army during the US Revolutionary War, and with the combined forces of Poland and Lithuania during their conflict against Russia. 

Polish Constitution Day rally at the foot of the Kosciuszko Monument in Humboldt Park
photographer unknown

For eight years, the society collected funds for the $30.000 necessary to construct the monument. Everything from pennys donated by laborers, to a $500 gift from the great Polish pianist turned politician and advocate of Polish independence, Ignacy Paderewski, went into the coffers. The resulting equestrian statue of Kosciuszko in the role of brigadier general, is the work of Kasmir Chodzinski, who was selected out of many Polish artists in a competition held by the Society. Standing in the northeast corner of Humboldt Park's great lawn, it is said that 100,000 people showed up for its unveiling in 1904 and that President Theodore Roosevelt sent a wire of congratulations. From then until the late 1960s, the statue served as the terminus for Chicago's Polish Constitution Day parade, held at the beginning of May each year, as politicians and performers of all ethnicities gathered in its shadow to address and entertain Chicago's Polonia. On a personal note, at one of those gatherings, while sitting atop my father's shoulders, I caught my one and only glimpse of Robert F. Kennedy who before his assassination in 1968, made a regular pilgrimage to the parade.

The Kosciuszko monument was a great source of pride in that community until the neighborhood began to change. By the end of the sixties, the parade moved Downtown and the equestrian statue, no longer relevant to the people who now lived in the neighborhood, became the target of graffiti and other vandalism. The great lawn designed for public gatherings, became the site of baseball fields and the Kosciuszko monument became controversial for one reason only, it was in the way.


By the mid-seventies, the monument was removed for the construction of another ball field. Few Poles were still around the neighborhood to mourn its loss. The statue found new life, restored to good as new, and relocated to Burnham Park on the peninsula between the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium. It is now in an arguably more prominent site downtown, yet it has lost its context as the focal point of Humboldt Park, literally the crossroads of Chicago's Polonia. Today it is part of a pan-Slavic ensemble, forced to share its glory on the street now called Solidarity Drive, with a monument to the Czech man of letters Karel Havlicek, also moved from its original location, and the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus.

Kosciuszko, his glory just a little faded, as today he stands watch over Burnham Park

Despite that bit of a comedown for the statue, the legacy of Tadeusz Kosciuszko the man, lives on, along with the society named after him. 

As I said, there wasn't much controversy over the Kosciuszko monument, it was moved for practical reasons. The same can't be said for two monuments that depict tragic episodes in Chicago history.

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No statue in Chicago has suffered more indignities than the wobegone policeman atop the original Haymarket Riot Monument. It's been kicked at, spit upon, covered with graffiti, hit by a streetcar, moved at least six times, and blown up, twice. The riot which the monument commemorates, and the events that followed, are famous the world over as one of the pivotal moments in the international movement for workers' rights. Here is my account of the Haymarket Affair from a 2011 post.

After the May 4, 1886 riot which began after police moved in to break up an otherwise peaceful workers rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, most of public sentiment favored the police, who lost eight of their own (many of whom died from indiscriminate shots fired from other policemen), over the demonstrators,  (who lost several of their own), the majority of whom were immigrants from Central Europe. In fact anti-immigrant hostility in this city was so high at the time that the man commissioned to create the monument, Danish artist John Gelert, was asked to re-work the face of the police officer, because it looked "too Irish." Gelert refused. The pro-police sentiment of the time explains why the loss of the policemen, not the workers, was commemorated by a statue, while the injustice of the execution of several of the organizers of the rally who had nothing to do with the violence, was overlooked. It would take over a century for the city to rectify that.

The original Haymarket Memorial in its second location in front of Union Park
photographer unknown

The police statue originally stood at the site of the riot on Desplaines Avenue between Lake and Randolph Streets, but it proved to be a nuisance as streetcar tracks had to be re-routed to avoid it. After it had been vandalized on numerous occasions, the statue was moved west to the edge of Union Park in 1900. Then on May 4, 1927, the forty first anniversary of the riot it commemorates, irony struck in the form of a streetcar going full speed which jumped its tracks and rammed into the statue, knocking it from its pedestal. After that, the statue was moved inside the park where it enjoyed thirty one years of relative peace and obscurity. In 1958 it was moved back to the Haymarket area which is where I first encountered it as a child. 

Then came the Days of Rage in the late sixties when battles with the police again became part and parcel of life in Chicago. On October 6, 1969, the statue was blown up by members of the Students for a Democratic Society, (the S.D.S.).

As Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok would have said on "Farm Film Report" during the late seventies SCTV comedy program: "Whoo boy they sure blowed that statue up real good." The legs of the policeman ended up on the Kennedy Expressway twenty feet below while hundreds of windows in the neighborhood were blown out. The Chicago Police were none too amused. The act prompted this bit of hyperbole from a police department spokesperson:

The blowing up of the only police monument in the United Sates by the anarchists ... is an obvious declaration of war between the police and the S.D.S. and other anarchist groups. We feel it is kill or be killed regardless of the Jay Millers, (director of the Illinois ACLU), Daniel Walkers (who investigated the clashes between the police and rioters during the 1968 Democratic convention and later became Illinois governor), and the so-called civil rights acts.

The statue was duly restored and returned to its perch above the expressway where it stood exactly one year to the day of the first explosion, when it was again, blowed up real good. After that, it received round-the-clock police protection until it was removed into police custody where it has remained ever since. Currently it resides in the courtyard of the Chicago Police Department Headquarters at 35th and Michigan, where you can see it but only if you look real hard from the street.

This is the public view of original Haymarket Monument today
 as seen from 35th Street in front of Chicago Police Headquarters

More irony about the monument can be found in the words on the pedestal:

I had to sweet talk an officer into allowing me access to photograph the statue up close. As you can probably guess, the base of the monument is not original. it's the work of local artist Mike Baur and
made its debut as the pedestal for the 1889 sculpture in 2007 when the monument made its latest move to CPDHQ.

Fro 32 years, visitors coming to Chicago from all over the world were shocked to find that the site of of one of the most important moments in the history of the labor movement, stood without any reminder of the significance of the place, not even a commemorative plaque. According to Chicago's official historian Tim Samuelson,

I can remember that in my own lifetime, not long ago, bringing up the idea of commemorating Haymarket was impossible because it revived emotions that were too strong. It took a long time to get historical perspective, to be able to look back at Haymarket and see that it was everyone's tragedy.

Mary Brogger's Haymarket Memorial, unveiled in 2004

In 2004, a new monument by Chicago artist Mary Brogger was unveiled at the Haymarket site, precisely where the speakers' platform, a wagon, stood on that fateful evening. Bragger's work features a disassembled wagon upon which several semi abstract figures are engaged in various activities related to either constructing or dismantling the wagon. The author of a New York Times piece described the work as "ambiguous." Brogger wanted it that way. She told the Times reporter:

I was pretty adamant in my own mind that it would not be useful to depict violence... The violence didn't seem important, because this event was made up of much bigger ideas than one particular incident. I didn't want to make the imagery conclusive. I want to suggest the complexity of truth, but also people's responsibility for their actions and for the effect of their actions.

Whether or not she was successful is up to the mind's eye of the beholder. Perhaps for a memorial commemorating an event as tragic and complicated as the Haymarket Affair, neutrality is exactly what the doctor ordered. After all, the facts are all out there, it's up to us to process them, not for a statue to decide for us.

Troubled as its history was, the original Haymarket Memorial was not the most controversial monument in Chicago history, not by a long shot.

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In 1812 the United States was at war with Great Britain. The Brits found a useful ally in Native Americans whose lands and ways of life were quickly being usurped by the ever expanding settlement of white Americans. In that year, Chicago was a small settlement with homes scatted along the main branch of the Chicago River, all of them a stone’s throw from Fort Dearborn. 

Before the war there was a relatively peaceful coexistence between the white settlers in Chicago and the Indians, mostly members of the Potawatomi and Miami peoples who freely traded and even intermarried with the settlers. But as news of the new allegiance spread, there was discord between members of the tribes, mostly along generational lines. The elders perhaps realizing the hopelessness of their situation, looked to maintain peace with the settlers while the young “turks” were eager to cut their teeth in battle and join forces with the British. 

Fort Dearborn, built nine years earlier, was the United States’ westernmost Great Lakes encampment, built at the strategic point near the mouth of the Chicago River. In July of that year, a similar fort along the Straights of Mackinac, connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron, was captured by the British with the help of their Native American allies. With that garrison gone, the Commandant of Fort Dearborn, Captain Nathan Heald received word from his superiors that the defense and re-enforcement of Fort Dearborn was no longer tenable and to prepare for evacuation. 

Joined by Captain William Wells who volunteered to assist in the effort, Captain Heald and a group of 55 soldiers, 12 civilian militiamen, 9 women and 18 children began the perilous journey from Chicago to Fort Wayne, Indiana. 

As the group marched along the lake shore, unbeknownst to them, obscured by sand dunes to the west, a group of perhaps 500 Potawatomi warriors were waiting for them. When the warriors were spotted, Captain Heald made the fateful decision to attack, thereby separating the civilians and soldiers. As the vastly outnumbered soldiers approached, the Indians fell back, allowing the hapless Americans into their flanks, where they didn't have a chance. After the soldiers were neutralized, the Indians went after the wagons containing the civilians. They made quick work of the militiamen and then proceeded to slaughter many of their wives and children. Wells by all accounts, fought valiantly to the death. So impressed by his efforts, some the warriors cut out the heart of the fallen captain and consumed it, so as to absorb some of his courage. Wounded but still alive, Heald surrendered after receiving promises that the few remaining survivors would be spared. The following day Fort Dearborn was burned to the ground and the captive survivors were eventually ransomed. 

Much of what we know of that event comes to us through the writings of Juliette Kinzie, whose memoirs of frontier life called Wau-bun, contains a chapter devoted to what would become known as the “Fort Dearborn Massacre.” But Mrs. Kinzie was a generation removed from the events of that day; her accounts based upon the testimony of some of the survivors. As one can imagine, Kinzie’s story is told from the viewpoint of the settlers. Despite numerous inaccuracies and dramatic flourishes, Kinzie’s account would be the story of record of the dreadful event for most of the nineteenth century. 

Another version of the story that would emerge some eighty years later, was told by Simon Pokagon, the son of a Potawatomie Chief who was present at the attack. Where Kinzie spoke of Indian treachery preceding the attack, Pokagon spoke of white treachery. Pokagon places the blame directly on the shoulders of Captain Heald for being foolish enough to go through with the march knowing full well of its dangers, However, few of the details regarding the actual battle differ in the two stories. 

Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument
on its original site at 18th and Calumet

The site of the attack at present day 18th Street and Calumet Avenue, would become the property of industrialist George Pullman who commissioned another Danish sculptor, Carl Rohl-Smith to create a monument commemorating the horrific event. The subject of the sculpture is based directly upon a story taken from Mrs. Kinzie’s account. In the tableau, one of the women in the group, Margaret Helm, grabs for a knife of an Indian while he holds a tomahawk aimed at the woman’s head, about to strike. Meanwhile another Indian, Black Partridge, a chief who had opposed the attack, intervenes to save the woman's life. At the feet of the three principal characters in the scene are the bodies of victims either killed or mortally wounded in the massacre.

Pullman willed the monument of the grizzly event to the Chicago Historical Society where it stood in that institution's lobby for many years. But the statue proved even too problematic for the museum after Native American groups protested its simplistic depiction of their people and the event. The statue briefly returned to it original site at 18th Street in the 1990s until it was removed by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, ostensibly for conservation. Since then is has sat in a Chicago Park District warehouse where it will likely remain for a long time, perhaps even perpetuity.

The story of the event and fate of the Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument is a good example of the way history can been hijacked by special interest groups bent on promoting their ideology. In 2009, a new park opened at the site of the attack. Pondering over what to name the park, Park District officials harkened back to the words of Simon Pokagon, who over one hundred years earlier said:  “When whites are killed, it is a massacre, but when Indians are killed, it is a fight.” It was decided that the park would be given the somewhat awkward name, "The Battle of Fort Dearborn Park." That appellation has now become the default label for the tragic event. Here is an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune written on the 200th anniversary of the attack, that tries to explain why what happened on that scorching hot day 205 years ago was not a massacre. The article's author Patrick T. Reardon has this to say:

Calling the battle a "massacre" cast the engagement in stark black-and-white terms and demonized the Indians. Good guys and bad guys. Heroes and villains. Indeed, at the dedication of the Fort Dearborn Massacre sculpture in 1893, the director of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) described the attackers as "invaders" and "barbarians."

The truth, however, is that, at that moment 200 years ago, the Americans were the invaders, and ....Chicago was "a symbol of an imposed colonial presence." 

OK I get it. It is without a doubt that Native Americans were subjugated by and suffered greatly at the hands of white settlers who stole their land and their livelihoods. It's not hard to understand why Native Americans sided with the British against the Americans, and we can grasp that an attack of a military unit is part of war. I think everyone today understands the loaded meaning of the word "massacre", and it is safe to say that the insistence of using that word to describe the events that unfolded on August 15, 1812, went a long way to seal the fate of the Native American people who once called this area home.

That's all well and good, but despite going into great deal about the events of the attack, what Reardon fails to mention anywhere in his article is the inconvenient truth that innocent women and children were brutally killed that day. The same is true for the plaque that currently marks Battle of Fort Dearborn Park.

Simon Pokegon did not ignore the victims. Describing the atrocity he said: “the Angel of Mercy seem(ed) to have been asleep” as a lone warrior entered their wagon and bludgeoned them all to death. For those actions that warrior "was hated by the tribe ever after" according to Pokegon.

The Battle of Fort Dearborn Park
I suspect few of the hundreds of residents of Chicago's new South Side walking their dogs everyday in this 1/2 acre park
understand the full magnitude of what took place here 205 years ago.
The plaque at the opposite end of the park only tells part of the story. 

It does not serve history to leave out or minimize that critical part of the story.  Whether we like it or not, whether or not it it fits into our world view or not, by any definition of the word, what happened on August 15, 1812 on the shore of Lake Michigan was a massacre. Rebranding the incident as a "battle" is not going to change that fact.

On the other side of the ideological divide, here is an article from a right wing publication that advocates the return of "Chicago's Forgotten Masterpiece" to the site of the attack.

By 1970, a new generation of Chicagoans turned to forgetting and rewriting history. The American settlers and soldiers who died at the Fort Dearborn Massacre in 1812 were transformed into "white invaders." Carl Rohl-Smith's masterpiece was removed from the Chicago History Museum and hidden from view.

In researching this piece I came across a wonderful quote from John N. Low, visiting assistant professor in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois and a a member of the Michigan-based Pokagon Potawatomi. Regarding the change of terms from massacre to battle, Mr. Low said this: 

History is not truth; it’s memory, And a part of remembering is considering what we forgot. 

What some of us forgot is that the white people really were invaders. History wasn't re-written to make that so. Others forgot about the innocent victims of the "Battle of Fort Dearborn." Those same people may have forgotten that white settlers paid dearly for the right to call this land theirs, but the other side forgets that white people were here by choice, knowing the risks of taking over land that for centuries was occupied by someone else.

Tim Samuelson's argument about the Haymarket Affair being too painful for many years to come to grips with it, is even more compelling regarding the events that took place on August 15, 1812 on the shore of Lake Michigan. With the Haymarket Affair, eventually the police came to the realization they they too were part of the labor movement that protesters fought and died for at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact everyone of us who lives off a paycheck must be thankful for the actions and sacrifices of those people.

However the history of the relationship between Native American people and the European settlers who supplanted them in this country remains complicated and painful. It's true that the murder of the innocents during the "Battle of Fort Dearborn" was an atrocity. There were also many atrocities against Indians committed by the hands of white people.

Unfortunately the story of post-Columbian Native American history continues to be told from at least two sides. While the Fort Dearborn Monument attempts to tell two sides of the story by showing Black Partridge saving Margaret Helm while another Native American tries to murder her, it nevertheless falls short. Perhaps it is impossible for a work of art to put everything into its proper historical context. On the other hand, the plaque at Battle of Fort Dearborn Park, while also attempting to tell more than one side of the story, still leaves out a very critical component. Neither does a very good job of putting the story into proper context.

As we've seen, history is not served without the proper context.

Perhaps it is fitting that Carl Rohl-Smith's Monument to the Fort Dearborn Massacre will not see the light of day until we are able to reconcile all sides of the story, and give up our tenaciously held beliefs, assumptions and prejudices about the past.

Until the day comes if ever, history will not suffer its loss. 

Nest up, two Chicago monuments that may be soon headed for the chopping block, stay tuned...

The Likes of these Folks Part II: Honest Abe

But everybody likes Abe Lincoln don't they?

Bust of Abraham Lincoln in front of his tomb,Springfield, Illinois
Bronze reproduction of original marble bust
in Washington DC, by Gutzon Borglum
Photograph by Theo Iska

In preparing for this post, I conducted a survey, consulting the internet by Googling this question: "what do Southerners think of Abraham Lincoln?" From my very unscientific query of three or four internet forums, I concluded that the consensus opinion is the following: "a great majority of Southerners could (not) care less about Lincoln, while a small minority care deeply about him, and those people hate him." Many Southerners voiced the opinion that our northern myths about the South are all wrong, that indeed, save for a handful of lunatics, they are not still fighting the Civil War down there. Lincoln, contrary to what most Northerners think, is admired, albeit with reservations in Dixie. Heck, you'll even find a few statues of Honest Abe, if you look really hard. "Contrary to what you Yankees may believe..." one commenter noted, "...we don't spend a lot of time thinking about Abraham Lincoln down here, but then again, neither do you."

Clearly that last person hasn't spent much time up North. Here in the Chicago area alone there are at least seven public artworks dedicated to Lincoln, one of which is considered the finest portrayal of the man to be found anywhere. Lincoln's portrait can be found in schools, libraries, courthouses,  public buildings and private homes. Here in Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln" his likeness in even on our license plates. Our largest park and one of our longest streets are named for him. So are countless institutions and business including a notorious company that tows cars occupying private parking spaces. Here is a mock tribute to Lincoln Towing from Chicago's poet laureate, Steve Goodman:

Try as we might up here, it is impossible not to be confronted with Abraham Lincoln in one way or other on a daily basis. 

The Seated Lincoln, Grant Park, Chicago
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1908

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the consensus opinion of our sixteenth president in the Northern states is extremely positive, in some cases, bordering on veneration. As I mentioned in my original post on Confederate memorials, public monuments reflect a community's deeply held values. That goes for small objects of devotion as well as for great works of public art. In the United States, north of the Mason-Dixon Line that is, with the exception of Jesus, there is probably no human being who is more represented in images, monuments, or objects named in honor of him, than Abraham Lincoln.

It goes without saying that the relative lack of representations of Lincoln in the South, is a good indication of how they feel about him. In the North, most of us view Lincoln as the great Emancipator, the defender of the Union, and our greatest president. In the South, Lincoln is viewed (by some), as a racist, a tyrant, and a war criminal. Lincoln in some measure, depending upon your point of view,all of those things. Like all great historical figures, Abraham Lincoln's legacy is complicated. 

The linchpin of all the issues that led to the American Civil War was slavery. Defenders of the Confederacy as well as conservative critics of Lincoln, take great pains to minimize the issue, holding that the main reason for the southern states to secede from the Union, was not slavery, but the alleged violation by President Lincoln and his administration, of the principles laid forth by the founding fathers, that discouraged a strong central government, over the rights of the individual states. 

It's true that you will find in some of the Articles of Secession of the states of the Confederacy, mentions of unfair tariffs, taxes and other perceived over-reaches of the federal government. But he issue of slavery is mentioned in each and every Confederate state's declaration of independence from the United States. Some expressed concern about the expansion of slavery in the West, others, the violence brought upon by abolitionists, others, their economy's dependence on slaves, while others still expressed their concern about the refusal of northern states to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act by returning escaped slaves apprehended in their jurisdiction, to their southern owners.

While he considered the institution of slavery abhorrent, Abraham Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He understood that the agrarian economy of the South depended upon its slaves, and that the constitution (rightly or wrongly) protected the institution. In a letter to a Kentucky newspaperman,
Albert C. Hodges, dated April 4, 1864, Lincoln wrote this:

The Young Lincoln, Senn Park, Chicago
Charles Keck, c. 1945

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgement and feeling. It was the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.  

But Lincoln also believed that while the Constitution provided for the maintenance of slavery as it existed at the time of its writing, it did not provide for the expansion of the institution into new territories soon to become states. There is good evidence to back up the idea that the Civil War could have been prevented if the southern states had not "gone ape shit" (as a responder to one of the internet forums I read so delicately put it), over the expansion of slavery into the new territories. The general theory of the writer is that slavery in the South would have eventually died a natural death, just as it had in the northern states in the four score plus years since the founding of this nation. Had the southern states gone along with restricting slavery to the South, Lincoln, so the theory goes, would have been happy with the status quo and be willing to wait for slavery do die out on its own.

Detail of The Chicago Lincoln
Lincoln Square, Chicago
Avard Fairbanks, 1956

Abraham Lincoln did not believe that whites and blacks were equal. He did not advocate for the enfranchisement of African American people until late in the Civil War when he asked that black war veterans be given the right to vote. He thought the idea of people of the two races living together was untenable, and proposed the solution to that problem after abolition, was to send former slaves back to their ancestral home in Africa.

What about his role as the Great Emancipator? Well truth be told, the Emancipation Proclamation was an act brought forth by the War. Simply put, while Lincoln was not by any means a supporter of slavery, the Proclamation was a pragmatic move on the president's part to disrupt the Confederate war effort by inspiring slave rebellions, and recruiting black soldiers in the South to fight against the Confederacy. Slaves in border states supporting the Union, including Maryland resident Philip Reid who cast the Statue of Freedom which sits atop the US Capitol Dome, would not be freed until the end of the war.

Lincoln took executive powers to places it had never been and in some cases, hasn't been since. He famously suspended the writ of habeas corpus, meaning that suspects could be arrested and held without charge for an indefinite length of time, typically the duration of the war. He called up an army of 75,000 men without congressional approval. He shut down newspapers that printed negative editorials about him. He had demonstrators arrested. The list goes on and on. Tyrant was one of the milder terms used to describe Abraham Lincoln by his critics.

Of course the biggest gripe against Lincoln is that he was largely responsible for a war that would take 700,000 lives, the greatest number of Americans killed in any war, and he signed off on horrific tactics that caused tremendous devastation to the civilian population of the South.

Return Visit, Pioneer Court, Chicago
Seward Johnson, 2016

Historical figures are seldom one dimensional, because at the very nature of human existence is the struggle over the rights, needs and desires of disparate peoples. If Abraham Lincoln's motives were not pure, it was because he was a practical man who understood that good will alone could not save the nation. His primary concern, if you believe him, was the preservation of the Union. Despite claims to the contrary from the South, Lincoln firmly believed that secession was not a right guaranteed the states by the constitution. (After the war, that belief was confirmed by the Supreme Court.) Why then did he not seek legal redress to the issue rather than go to war(?) ask his critics. Well the answer to that question is obvious. As the Confederates by seceding from the Union effectively formed their own government, they clearly would not have recognized any decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lincoln the Railsplitter, Garfield Park, Chicago
Charles Mulligan, 1911

That slavery was a secondary issue to Lincoln cannot be denied. Judging by the standards of our day and age, Lincoln's hesitancy to abolish slavery outright, and his general feelings about black people, are lamentable. But then, Abraham Lincoln was a man of his time, not ours. The bottom line is that an abominable institution was lost by the end of the Civil War, but not before nearly three quarters of a million people perished on the battlefield, and an untold number off of it. The union was reunited, but the hatred and division exist to this day. Lincoln admirers in both the North and the South suggest that had he not been assassinated just five days after the end of the Civil War, perhaps he could have helped heal the wounds that linger to this day. We will never know. 

A great symbol of our current division is the issue of what to do with our Civil War monuments. The argument to remove monuments to the Confederacy last month in New Orleans, and just this week in St. Louis, is that these symbols of the lost cause of slavery have no place in the diverse culture of 21st century America. The argument for leaving them where they stand is that while they may be offensive to particular groups of people, they are a part of history, and by removing them, we are denying our past.

As I've written in these last two posts, there are lots of things not to like about the Civil War heroes immortalized by monuments throughout the north. William Sherman and Phillip Sheridan both inflicted indescribable horrors in their campaigns against the people of the south. Their actions were authorised by Abraham Lincoln and Commander-in-Chief of the Union army, Ulysses S. Grant. On top of that, Sheridan waged illegal and unjustified war against Native American people in the West, under the watch of then President Grant. Before the Civil War, and his conversion to a supporter of human rights, John A. Logan sponsored legislation barring African American people from settling in the state of Illinois. And Abraham Lincoln was not altogether the great champion of the rights of black people that he is often portrayed. 

A question worth asking ourselves is this, if we take down all the statues of Confederate heroes in the South because they are offensive to particular groups of people, as many suggest, would it also make sense to remove the statues of Union heroes in the North? 

Bas-relief portrait of Lincoln in terra cotta
Sulzer Library, Chicago
Artist unknown, c. 1922

In light of the current removal of monuments in New Orleans and St. Louis, I expect to see a movement in the near future, petitioning that at least some of the statues up north, especially the ones of the more controversial figures like Phillip Sheridan, be removed from their public perches. Sheridan's Chicago monument has already been obscured by decorative trees planted in front of the sightline of the statue. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before the superb equestrian work, the creation of the same artist who carved the faces of four presidents on Mount Rushmore, will be taken off of public view. If that happens, the best case scenario is that it will end up in a museum, The worst, well, your guess is as good as mine.

It's a difficult and valid question. Some might suggest as a compromise, we could trade one Ulysses S. Grant for a Robert E. Lee, a Phil Sheridan for a Stonewall Jackson, and an Abe Lincoln for a Jeff Davis.

Personally I hope it doesn't come to that. There is no one size fits all solution to the problem of when monuments and the values of the community are no longer in synch. One solution, seen in New Orleans and St. Louis, is simply remove the offending monuments. Another one, suggested by the mayor of Richmond, VA, is to put the monuments in context, perhaps by installing didactic plaques describing the ins and outs of the person being depicted, why he's there, and why some people think he should not be. It may be a cumbersome solution but at the very least, it gets people to think about history.

The best for last, Abraham Lincoln, (Lincoln the Man, or The Standing Lincoln), Lincoln Park, Chicago
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1887

William Tecumseh Sherman famously remarked that "war is hell." The same can be said about history. It is truly disheartening to come to the realization that our heroes are not necessarily all they were cracked up to be, and that our villains weren't necessarily as evil as we made them out to be. They were after all, only human beings, just like the rest of us.

The following is an excerpt from a biography of the architect John Wellborn Root, written by his sister-in-law Harriet Monroe. This marvelous passage describes a fourteen year old's experience of war, and his brush with none other than General Sherman himself, as he marched his troops into the youngster's home of Atlanta. Much to the boy's surprise, the Sherman he viewed with his own eyes was neither the devil incarnate that he expected, nor the Augustus Saint-Gaudens version of him in Central Park:

Broken shells were children's playthings, and the two great armies playing their mighty game throughout that hot July made pretty fireworks on the mountain by night and dim smoky lines by day. The dreadful drama grew so familiar that people forgot it and even boys learned to keep out of range or to tempt danger, as boys will, careless of the present and fearful only of the Yankee monsters who might burn the city soon and massacre its inhabitants. For the negroes filled young minds with imaginary terrors, and pictured General Sherman as the giant of the fairy tale. I have often heard John tell of the entrance into the city of "Old Tecumseh," the ruthless conqueror about whose head the boy, in spite of fourteen years of wisdom, vaguely expected to find traces of this lurid halo of horror. But neither the glory nor the terror of war lodged in this grim, battered warrior, unwashed, unshaven, shabbily clad from soft hat to dusty top boots, who raised the Stars and Stripes over Atlanta and marched on to the sea.

I stand by my original statement that the future of Civil War monuments in both the South and the North must be decided by the communities where they stand, and not by the public at large, because it is the values of the community that are reflected in those monuments; they are the ones that must live with and answer for them. I truly respect what the mayor of New Orleans recently said in defense of removing his city's statues. But having given it a great deal of thought since he made his remarks, my preference at the moment, for what its worth, would be to follow the suggestion of the mayor of Richmond, and leave the statues where they stand, but putting them in proper context. The recent hubbub over these monuments is stirring the pot of history. It's getting us to talk about our past in hopefully a constructive way, which is a good thing. Leaving the statues where they stand, disturbing as they are to some, creates a dialogue about history, about who we are, where we've come from, and hopefully where we're going as a people.

Putting them behind lock and key, out of sight and out of mind, does none of that.

History can be a difficult thing. We should embrace that, not shy away from it.


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