The Anti-American Iconoclasm of the Statue-Topplers

By Richard Brookhiser

Thursday, December 03, 2020

 

Their vandalism rejects the meaning of what they vandalize

 

I   was discussing the months-long rash of statue-topplings with a friend who has been a director of historical sites. He considers the memorials in cemeteries and battlefields to be sacred, but thinks statues elsewhere can be culled and supplanted. “Parks belong to the living.”

 

The living are their customers, certainly: picnickers, baseball players, bird-watchers, lovers, the lonely. But how should the living think about the public art that parks contain?

 

Statues should not be of the living: That would mean turning parks into Instagram, or North Korea; only entertainers and despots need apply. In­stead we memorialize the dead. Which dead, then?

 

I live in Manhattan, which has a rich selection of public statues. A few are true works of art. Augustus St. Gaudens, America’s greatest sculptor, made two masterpieces, of General Sherman march­­ing through Georgia and of Admiral Farragut damning the torpedoes. Neil Estern’s Fiorello LaGuardia is a worthy modern addition, striding, clapping, shouting, capturing LaGuardia’s loud-mouthed ebullience. Some statues are so ugly they offend the eye. Samuel S. Cox, known as the letter-carrier’s friend because he pushed for higher pay and shorter hours during his years in Con­gress, stands in Tompkins Square Park, raising a right arm as stiffly as the flag on a mailbox.

 

Many of New York’s statues have little or nothing to do with New Yorkers. They exist to make us think about the unfamiliar. On Central Park South, Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, each mounted, face each other on opposite sides of a road heading into the park. They direct our thoughts to our neighbors to the south. In the park itself stands a statue of a dog — Balto, the lead sled dog who brought an anti-diphtheria serum from Anchorage to Nome in the teeth of a blizzard in 1925. Balto toured the country after his exploit and was present in New York at the dedication of his statue; he spent the remainder of his life in Cleveland, where he is now, stuffed. But we can still contemplate his image here. Gandhi never came to New York, but he scrambles along in the Union Square farmers’ market in his dhoti; in winter one imagines that he must be cold.

 

If the models for such artifacts are problematic, their problems are not our problems. It is when we come to statues of our own past that difficulties arise. Half a block from my apartment building stands one of Manhattan’s better statues, of Peter Stuyvesant, the last director general of New Netherland — what New York was before England took it. The bottom of Stuyvesant’s right leg is a peg; flesh and bone were crushed by an enemy cannonball during one of Holland’s imperial wars. He looks aggressive, intelligent. and alert — to tasks that need doing, and to critics, who need doing in.

 

The best recent portrait of Stuyvesant is in Russell Shorto’s Island at the Center of the World. Shorto romantically depicts Holland’s 17th-century North American colony as a proto-libertarian paradise, rather like Holland today. In this framework, Stuyvesant figures as an antagonist — a military man, a martinet and a bigot, determined to rule with a stern hand and keep non-Calvinists out. He leaned on Lutherans and Jews until his employers, the Dutch West India Company, told him to stop (they had Lutheran and Jewish directors and investors). He leaned hardest on Quakers, then a brand-new countercultural religion from England with no friends in the company’s ranks. His oppressions drew from 30 of his subjects in the village of Flushing a declaration that they would not turn Quakers away from their doors because they would “doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us, . . . for our Savior sayeth this is the law and the prophets.” The Flushing Remon­strance was a historic appeal for religious liberty, on religious, not en­lightened or pragmatic, grounds. Stuyvesant reacted to it by browbeating the authors and locking them up. Not a good guy.

 

And yet, as Shorto points out, Stuyvesant was public-spirited and capable; he gave New Amsterdam, his colony’s port and capital town, paved streets, a post office, and a hospital; he played a weak hand skillfully against the more populous Eng­lish colonies on his northern flank. When England finally sent an invading armada to end his reign, he longed to fight, manning a cannon by himself if need be, but he acceded to the pleas of his terrified subjects and surrendered. Curiously, he stipulated in the terms of surrender that their new masters grant them the very religious liberties he had trampled. Summoned to Holland to account for his defeat, he chose afterward to return to his former domain. He is buried on his Manhattan farm, or bouwerie, now the East Village. The long road that led to it from downtown is still called the Bowery. The park containing his statue, a housing development, and an elite public high school bear his name.

 

This summer an Israeli activist demanded that Stuyvesant’s statue be retired because of his anti-Semitism. (Intersectionally, Israelis, and indeed all Jews who are not anti-Israeli, are considered suspect, but they can be used for specific purposes.) Quakers have been quieter, perhaps because Stuyvesant’s statue must spend its silent afterlife gazing at the Friends Seminary, which anchors one corner of his park; that, they may think, is punishment enough for him.

 

T. S. Eliot grappled with the legacies of the past in his last quartet, “Little Gidding.” Writing in the midst of World War II — the poem describes an air raid — he turned to the English Civil War, contemporary with Stuyvesant’s career. The past and its conflicts, he wrote, need not require servitude from us; regarded with charity, they can be a source of liberation from old hatreds and desires. Thus Eliot, the reactionary royalist, finds a good word to say for the republican John Milton (whom he deplored poetically as well as politically).

 

Understanding our past is also the road to self-knowledge.

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

 

Eliot starts his poem at an Anglican church in the Cambridgeshire countryside. We might start an exploration with a statue in a park.

 

There is another purpose for public art: to proclaim purposes we should still hold dear. In this my friend the site director is right: Parks are for the living, and some statues tell us what we ought to live for. The LaGuardia statue embodies demotic democracy, which, for all its vulgarity and limitations, is how politics gets done in a modern republic. The statues of Sherman and Farragut tell us what it took for our republic to save itself, and to save its ideals: lots of dying, lots of killing.

 

When Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant, are smeared or demolished, it is not random vandalism or animal spirits. It is a declaration that the principles they expounded and up­held are bogus, pernicious, worthless. Toppling their statues is the 1619 Project with ropes and blowtorches. Maybe the most grotesque victim of this year’s saturnalia was Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant, abolitionist, and Republican Party activist, killed at the battle of Chickamauga. In June his statue in Madison, Wis., was pulled down, decapitated, and dumped in a lake. My leftmost friend lives in Green Bay. He is a socialist and a Bernie supporter, but also an American exceptionalist; I tease him that his time on the left is limited. When Heg came down, my friend emailed, “Ignorant sh**s.” Most people in most mobs are ignorant, but the organizers of this one knew exactly what they were doing. Heg wanted to save his new country; they want to destroy it and start over.

 

Sometimes statues are torn down rightfully. George Wash­ington had the Decla­ration of Independence read to his troops in New York City on July 9, 1776. When the reading was done, a mob went to Bowling Green Park at Manhattan’s southern tip and tore down a gilded equestrian statue of George III. The story goes that the lead that lay beneath the gilt was melted into bullets; tests of bullets found at the site of the Battle of Monmouth (1778) show that they were indeed made from the toppled royal statue.

 

Washington himself disapproved of the toppling; he was no fan of mobs. But George III had earned his subjects’ wrath; he had refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good, called together legislative bodies at places unusual, dissolved representative houses re­peatedly, and all the rest. You can look it up in the Declaration.

 

If today’s vandals are as serious about their handiwork as the crowd in 1776 was, then they are agitating for regime change. Since our regime is the best thing that has happened in the poli­tical world in the last 250 years, they must be suppressed, just as His Majesty’s armies, the Confederacy, and Alger Hiss were.