Stars and Bars

We live in a bubble up here in Chicago. All the more so for me as I work in the art world, where the vast majority of people I come in contact with on a daily basis are a pretty homogenous group, politically speaking that is.

The last time our family took a road trip out of town was two summers ago, during the 2016 election. Taveling through rural Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, I expected to see scores of bumper stickers and posters supporting Donald Trump for president. Even though the people in the areas we passed through voted overwhelmingly for the current president, much to my surprise during the hundreds of miles we covered on that trip, I could have counted on one hand the number of folks who publicly displayed their pro-Trump sentiments, and still had a finger or two to spare.

This past weekend we took a short trip downstate, to visit a college with our son. The city, Galesburg, IL. and the school, Knox College were founded concurrently by the same man, George Washington Gale, a Presbyterian abolitionist. The first anti-slavery society in Illinois was founded in Galesburg and the city was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Galesburg wears its Lincoln heritage on its sleeve. It was there in front of the building known as Old Main on the Knox campus, where the fifth of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and Steven Douglas took place on October 7, 1858. (More on that in a subsequent post). Throughout the town and especially on campus, there are likenesses of the 16th president practically everywhere you turn, so much so that I asked our student tour-guide if she ever became a little weary of all the Lincoln hagiography. She diplomatically kept her cards close to her vest.

If that weren't enough, Galesburg was also the birthplace of the poet and author Carl Sandburg who wrote the most exhaustive biography of Lincoln ever: two volumes alone devoted to "The Prairie Years", and four, count 'em, four to "The War Years."

Clearly Galesburg has serious historical street-cred when it comes to the cause of American progressive politics.

Despite that, I wasn't surprised to find Trump posters and bumper stickers scattered here and there around town. I get it, Galesburg, like just about every other municipality in this part of the country has seen better days. The Maytag refrigerator plant moved out of town in 2004, about a decade after the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, and took with it about 5,000 well paying jobs, representing one sixth of the population of the city. The company re-located its plant just across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo, Texas to the city of Reynosa, in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. There, factory workers who now build Maytag refrigerators earn on average, $1.50 per hour, about one tenth of what their counterparts made in Galesburg.

Donald Trump campaigned hard on the issue of NAFTA and the disastrous effects it had on American blue collar jobs, while Hillary Clinton all but ignored the struggling blue collar workers of this country. It's not hard to see how Trump's slogan "make America great again", played in a city that could be the poster child for all that is wrong with free trade. And it's not at all difficult to understand why Donald Trump won more votes than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election in countless places like Galesburg.

What is a little hard to understand is why, underneath the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole in front of a business platestered with Trump posters, as well as a few other locations around town, a Confederate flag flapped in the breeze.

The flag, specifically the Confederate battle flag, has been a point of contention for a long time, but the issue came to a head after a white supremacist slaughtered nine members of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC. in 2015 after the victims warmly welcomed the killer into their church. After his arrest, authorities gained access to his website which included photographs of the murderer posing with symbols of white supremacy, including a Confederate battle flag. That incident sparked the movement to remove that flag from display from all government property in the south. It was time many people felt, to put the hurtful symbol of oppression for so many people, to rest.

Not surprisingly, that movement ignited a controversy among those who believe that flag is an enduring symbol of Southern pride and culture, both the good and the bad of it. Again, I get, well sort of, why white Southerners feel strongly about that symbol of their complicated history. My question is this: what does it mean when Northerners, especially deep in the heart of Lincoln country fly that flag, especially in tandem with a Trump sign?

I can hear all my liberal friends answer that question with a resounding "well duh." It is in fact quite hard for me to come up with any explanation other than the obvious one: it's because they're racists.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt however, I'll throw out a few other possibilities:

• Could be the people flying the flags are transplanted Southerners, homesick for the feel of soft southern winds in the live oak trees, good ol' boys like Thomas Wolfe and those Williams boys, Hank and Tennessee. (With sincerest apologies to the memory of the great Don Williams) 
• Perhaps the Confederate flag flyers are staunch anti-Federalists, who buy into the myth that the Civil War was not about slavery at all, but about denfending states' rights to determine their own destiny against the tyranny of the federal government. 
• Or it could be simply this: flying the Confederate battle flag is nothing more than one big "fuck you" to us left wing snowflakes who refuse to accept the fact that Donald Trump is our president. Personally I think this is the most credible explanation outside of the obvious one. 

The problem with these explanatonns is that no matter how hard you try, you simply can't explain away the underlying scourges to humanity that flag represents, namely intolerance, oppression, racism, and of course, human bondage. Hillary Clinton made a huge gaffe when she declared a large swath of Trump supporters to be "deplorables." That move backfired as a great many Trumpers picked up that devisive term as a badge of honor for themselves, much as religious groups adopted names like Quaker, Methodist and Lutheran, which were originally unflattering pejorative terms used against them by critics. The difference is that the Trump supporters Clinton was describing, namely KKK members, Neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists, by any reasonable standard, are truly deplorable. By proudly referring to themselves as "the deplorables" Trump supporters are unwittingly or not, either equating themselves with these groups or expressing solidarity with them.

One of the big lies that the Trump camp keeps propagating in an attempt to refute the idea that they may be racist, is to equate themselves with the Republican Party of the past, the party of Lincoln the Great Emancipator. Conversely the Deomcrats are the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Gullible people who have absolutly no understanding of US history over the past 150 years, fall for that nonsense, hook, line and sinker. While the roles of the two American political parties had shifted 180 degrees a century after the Civil War, the coup de grace came on July 2, 1964, when a Democratic President from Texas,  Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law what he hoped would be his enduring legacy, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which put an end, at least on paper, to discrimination in this country on the basis of race, religion, sex or nation of origin. That evening, a somber Johnson confided to his then staffer,  journalist Bill Moyers:

I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come,

Never have words coming out of a president's mouth been so prophetic.

Then there are the words coming out of the current president's mouth. Time and again during his presidency he has had the opportunity to bring people of different races and nationalities together, and time and again he has chosen to do exactly the opposite.

His latest episode was an imbecilic tweet reacting to a TV interview of basketball star LeBron James, conducted by CNN journalist, Don Lemon. In the interview about James's charitable work in opening up a school for underprivileged kids, both men who happen to be African American, expressed exasperation with Trump, to which the President of the United States responded:

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do.

Add Lemon and James to a long and growing list of African American individuals whose intelligence has been publicly questioned by this president. In a measured response, Lemon said this:

Referring to African Americans as dumb is one of the oldest canards of America's racist past.

A long time ago, President Johnson, again speaking with Bill Moyers, de-constructed America racism in a slightly more colorful way:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

As far as Galesburg is concerned, no, the town didn't shrivel up and die as some predicted it would after Maytag moved out. Businesses that benefited from free trade, such as the railroads which were always a major player in town, and distribution centers, began to fill the void left by the loss of the manufacturing jobs. That's not to say that things have returned to where they were before Maytag pulled the plug, not by a long shot, but things are looking up. Barack Obama visited Galesburg several times before and during his presidency. Looking toward the future, he advocated for the expansion and development of industries with a future such as solar and wind based energy. On our drive to Galesburg, we passed several flat bed trucks, each carrying a single enormous wind turbine blade, supplying the numerous wind farms we passed along the way.

Meanwhile President Obama's successor is advocating for the revival of moribund industries like coal, and instituting tariffs that are little more than a detriment to many up and coming new industries. He has also, time and again, aligned himself with the same types of individuals who sold out the city of Galesburg by putting the wants of stockholders ahead of the needs of their fellow Americans, people whose labor made them rich in the first place. Free trade may have created a conduit for greedy individuals and corporations looking for the big payday, to easily pull up stakes and leave communities high and dry, but it certainly did not necessitate the move as the current president would suggest.

Regardless of how you feel about the current president, if to you, the sentiment of making America great means a country where anyone can earn a living wage without necessarily going into years and years of college debt, as well as a country where there is truly liberty and justice for all, then I'm with you one hundred percent.

If on the other hand that slogan to you means taking America back to a time when women and people of color knew their place, say, back before the stars and bars flew over Dixie, well that's where we part company. You sir are a part of the problem, not the solution.

If you truly feel that way then you could not care less what I have to say, but it may behoove you to heed those words of President Johnson's.

Above all, don't forget to check your pockets.

The Bottom Line

All America is abuzz over monuments these days. That's exciting to me because I have a big interest in public sculpture and the artists who create it. In fact I just wrote a piece celebrating the anniversary of the introduction to Chicago of its famous, some might say infamous, Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza. The irksome thing about many of the articles I read about the Picasso (as the untitled piece is referred to in Chicago) is the assertion that the fifty foot icon was Chicago's first foray into public art. True, according to the articles, there were already dozens of sculptures in public places in Chicago, but those were merely "effigies of famous men and women... (that) somehow spoke of history rather than art".*

That came as news to me as I have a great appreciation for the work of important nineteenth and early twentieth century American artists such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, Lorado Taft, Edward Kemys and a host of others whose work is widely represented in Chicago's parks and other public places, as well as The Art Institute of Chicago and its sister museums throughout the country.

It is true that the public works of these sculptors go beyond being "art for art's sake." They are monuments that represent the passions, the ideals and the values of the people who constructed them and the communities who embraced them. That is why in a place like Chicago you will not find public monuments to King George III, Kaiser Wilhelm, Vince Lombardi, or Robert E. Lee. Strangely enough however, Chicago does have an honest to goodness Confederate monument as well as a monument to Benito Mussolini, but more on them later.

Earlier this year I wrote no less than three posts on the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments in the south. You can find the posts here, here and here.

In case you've been living in a cave for the past few months, in a nutshell, the controversy stems over whether these statues which many people view as a glorification of slavery, should remain in the public places of honor where they have stood in some cases for over a century, or should be moved to museums or other institutions where they can be viewed as historical artifacts, rather than monuments to an institution most people find repugnant.

In all three posts I punted, suggesting the decision to keep or remove the monuments should be left entirely in the hands of the communities where they reside, as those are the people who have to live with and answer for the statues. I still believe that, however an event has subsequently occurred that has been a major game changer.

After the city of Charlottesville, VA announced its plans to remove an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from its place of honor in the center of town, two weeks ago, groups of white supremacists from all over the country gathered in Charlottesville to ostensibly protest the community's choice to take down the statue. In reality, the "Unite the Right" rally as its organizers called it was, in the words of the online news magazine Vox, "a belated coming-out party for an emboldened white nationalist movement in the United States." They were all there, the alt-right, the Nazis, various insundry right wing militias, the Klan, you name it, all bent on spreading their venomous hatred.

As with a planned neo-Nazi rally in Skokie, Illinois in the 1970s, the ACLU defended the rights of the hate groups to march on the basis of supporting the groups' freedom of speech. Unlike Skokie where the Nazis, satisfied with their court victory and the attention it gave them, cancelled the march in the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb, this time there was strength in numbers, and the hate groups staged a torch-lit evening march where they chanted Nazi slogans and other racial epithets, while marching through town, ending up at the quadrangle of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia campus. The next day the collection of deplorables encountered resistance from thousands of counter-protesters, culminating with a Nazi-sympathizing Ohio man ramming his car into a group of people, killing one woman, and injuring nineteen.

The response was swift and immediate from the Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe. His unequivocal message to the hate groups who gathered in Charlotteville from far and wide was this: "Go home. ... You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you."

President Trump also quickly decried the violence: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred (and) bigotry... " But he wasn't willing to place blame adding: "...and violence on many sides." Then as he often does, he broke from script to emphasize the point in case we missed it, repeating once again,  "on many sides."

Trump was roundly criticized for his refusal to call out the white supremacist groups by name as being responsible for the violence that day. White supremacists on the other hand, danced a jig in Trump's honor, celebrating his waffling. Shortly after Trump's remarks, a neo-Nazi publication had this to say:

Trump's comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate … on both sides!
So he implied the antifa (short for anti fascists) are haters.
There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all.
He said he loves us all.

To emphasize what many Americans were feeling after Trump's measured response, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, had some chilling, pointed words at the president: “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,”

Two days later as the criticism against him reached a fever pitch, Trump read a statement naming the KKK,, the Nazis, and other hate groups as the perpetrators of the terrible events of Charlottesburg. Many Americans, myself included, breathed a sigh of relief at the hint that the President of the United States might indeed have a backbone.

The very next day Trump had yet another change of heart. During a press conference that was intended to focus on another subject, reporters quickly got around to the subject of Charlottesville. Why they asked, did the president take so long to get around to making the statement against hate groups. Trump gave a rambling response saying that he wanted

to make sure, when I make a statement that the statement is correct, and there was no way — there was no way of making a correct statement that early. I had to see the facts,

Now the ability to make measured responses to events without immediately jumping to conclusions is a good thing; equanimity such as this is normally a positive quality of a president, But given Trump's disposition for jumping to conclusions, especially when it comes to groups of people he has no time for, these words were problematic. Trump, a man of little or no reflection, given to making grand, unequivocal pronouncements, was now equivocating about Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, two groups that everyone by now has a definitive opinion about, one way or the other.

In the press conference Trump, contradicting what he said just the day before, went back to his original argument that blame for the violence in Charlottesville can be attributed to both sides. When pressed on the issue, Trump insisted that many of the protesters were in Charlottesville, not to commit acts of violence, but simply to protest the removal of the statue of General Lee:

You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

Many criticized Trump's comments as setting up a "moral equivalence" between hate groups and the people who would confront them. Much has been written on that topic so I'll pass on that issue for now.

But Trump also had some interesting things to say that day about the removal of the Confederate statues. When asked if the statues should be removed, President Trump said this:

I would say that's up to a local town, community, or the federal government, depending on where it is located."

That comes remarkably close to what I've been saying for the past several posts.

Then Trump addressed the slippery slope of the precedent of removing statues that are offensive to certain groups of people:

George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? ...are we going to take down statues to George Washington?

 How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? ...he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue?

Again, in my posts I expressed concern that once you begin removing statues that are offensive to people, where do you stop? Simply put, a case could be made that every public monument could be offensive in one way or other to some group. As could be predicted, the last few weeks have seen calls to remove statues all over the country, including George Washington (because he owned slaves), in Chicago, Peter Stuyvesant (because he was anti-Semetic), in New York City, and even the ball player Ty Cobb (who is wrongly assumed to have been a virulent racist), in Detroit.

At least from his comments at that press conference, Trump and I were on the same page, well sort of, regarding Confederate monuments; he sees a problem with the precedent of removing them, yet accepts that it should be left up to the individual community or jurisdiction to decide what to do with them, as do I.

But later on August 17, he doubled down and took what seemed to be un unequivocal stance on the issue of the monuments when he tweeted this:

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 - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also...

...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!

So much for being on the same page with Donald Trump. This is a complicated issue and both sides raise valid points. The problem with the president's remarks it that he fails to even mention the other side which states what frankly is the bottom line of this issue, that these statues, however beautiful or well executed they may be, represent in no uncertain terms for a significant portion of the population that has to live with them, the enslavement, terror and degrading circumstances under which their ancestors lived for many generations.

Despite all that, those statues have remained in place with few people seriously suggesting they be removed until one fateful day in 2015, when a white supremacist walked into a historic African American church in Charleston, SC. and murdered nine people, simply because they were black. The movement to remove the Confederate flag from public sites began shortly thereafter as the murderer used the flag as the backdrop of his portrait on social media. The Confederate monuments soon followed in the sites of activists.

The first major purging of monuments took place in New Orleans a couple months ago. The mayor of the Crescent City, Mitch Landrieu, gave an impassioned speech that articulately spelled out his city's rationale for removing its Confederate monuments. I wrote about his arguments extensively in my first post on the subject. 

Unfortunately, this country has become so divided that people have taken unequivocal stands on one side or the other of the monument issue depending upon their ideology, and rational arguments on both sides are flat out rejected, not on their own merit, but simply on the grounds that they do not support the "correct" side.

But after the events in Charlottesville a few weeks ago. we can throw all the academic arguments about keeping the statues where they are, out the window. Now that the Confederate monuments themselves have become rallying points for white supremacists, no one can legitimately make the claim that these objects are not clear and present symbols of hatred, intolerance, injustice and inhumanity. With that, communities all over the South are making plans to remove their monuments post haste, even those that until two weeks ago, resolved to keep them. Thanks to the homicidal efforts of the white terrorists who descended upon Charlottesville, it's likely that most if not all Confederate monuments in public spaces will soon be a thing of the past.

The bottom line is this: no one wants to be the next Charlottesville. As long as Confederate monuments become rallying points for Klan and Nazi rallies, and yes people on the other side bent on vandalizing them, the practical matter of getting rid of the statues to prevent all that, trumps any argument about preserving history and setting bad precedents. Expect to see middle of the night purges of Confederate monuments all across the south in the coming months.

Despite what the president says, you don't have to look very far for the culprit. So long as these statues attract hate groups like flies to dog poop, towns all over the South will be getting out their shovels. If that upsets you, turn to your friendly neighborhood alt-right Klansman or neo-Nazi and tell him point blank, "you're precisely the reason why we can't have nice things."

In my next post, using some examples from my hometown, I'll explore why these issues are not new and how heaven forbid, we can use a little reason to not only address what to do with these monuments sensibly, but maybe even learn a little something along the way. Stay tuned.


* Franz Schulze, from Chicago's Museum Alfresco, the Introduction to the guidebook, Chicago's Public Sculpture

Excellent teachers

A powerful image emerged last week from a day of protests outside the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia. The protests all centered around the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. On one side of the barriers set up by law enforcement officers, marched an assortment of white supremacist groups including representatives of the KKK and The National Socialist Movement, on the other side an assortment of people protesting the protesters.

A photograph snapped from a smartphone showed an African American state trooper helping an elderly white supremacist protester who was on the verge of collapsing due to heat exhaustion. It turned out the officer was no rank and file trooper, he was Leroy Smith, the director of the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. He put himself in uniform and on duty that day, as is his custom, because he likes to show his employees that he "has their backs."

Smith's attention was directed to the ailing protester by the fire chief of Columbia, who also happens to be black. Smith grabbed the man, (who was wearing a Nazi-style swastika emblazoned on his tee shirt), by the arm and led him up the steps and into the air conditioned statehouse. The two were followed by a woman also wearing a swastika, who kept asking Smith if the man was going to be alright.

I can't speak for Mr. Smith, I can only assume what was going through his head at the time was that he was simply doing his job by helping out a fellow human being who was in trouble. I can say he was amazed at the overwhelming positive response the photograph received worldwide, When asked about what he felt generated that response, his answer was simple: "love."

Like the families of the victims of the Emanuel AME Church massacre who forgave their loved ones' killer, I believe that Mr. Smith's actions, and even more so his response, is not sending out a signal of acceptance, submission or weakness, far from it. His is a powerful message of strength by looking directly into the face of hatred and saying no, you have no power to make me hate you back. 

One look at the photograph of the powerful Smith helping the pathetic marcher, and you cannot help be overwhelmed by the feeling that love wins.

We all have much to learn from these magnificent people.

Here's the photo and story from the New York Times.