The statue problem

Sam Smith - A strong argument can be made for removing statues of Confederates except for one thing: removing them also removes the story of why they were put there years after the Civil War. An alternative would be to, say, save one in each town and put signage next to it that explains why it was built and what the Jim Crow era was like then. The danger in erasing bad history is just that: you make folks a bit less smart about the wrongs of the past.

In fact, history isn't pretty or nice. We've gotten where we are by creating new histories, like the civil rights movement, but you can't understand the civil rights movement without understanding what led to it.

The idea of doing away with evidence of our imperfect past has reached the point where a CNN commentator even wants to get rid of monuments to Jefferson and Washington because they owned slaves. And a similar scheme has been raised in England about Winston Churchill. But the difference between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson is that Jefferson also did a great deal of good while uncritically accepting some of the evil standards of his time. Lee was an aggressive leader of wrong. Jefferson's bad choices are not to be ignored but neither does they wipe out his positive actions. Similarly, as reported on the recent series about Franklin Roosevelt, FDR had a several relationships with women outside his marriage. Do we dump our celebration of the New Deal as a result?

If history were a happy story, we wouldn't have to work so hard to change the things with which it has provided us. We need to learn from its errors, to recognize that even the best can be flawed, and try to make things better while admitting that maybe we have also failed to do everything as well as we might have.