Omigod we're advocating the erasure of history!

-- or so they say.

So here's a different perspective: The Confederate General Who Was Erased.

you know, from an actual historian and all that. Do you want to know what real erasure from history is about?

Here's what Jane Dailey says about those wonderful monuments to the Confederacy we want moved to museums:

By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.

So the monuments were themselves "designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress." And, as it turns out, the nice neo-Confederates whose ideas of memorabilia apparently extend to Confederate statues wanted to conceal the past of one of their own! His name, for those who didn't read the link, was William Mahone. The nice neo-Confederates like the Confederate general, but are desperate to have you forget the senator. What evils did this fellow commit in Virginia after the war given his stout loyalty to the Confederate cause, you may ask?

Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests.

And how did they get rid of him?

The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity.

In short, they got rid of his out of generally racist motives, after he pleased their hearts by being a Confederate general and all. No wonder his later life isn't part of their history.

Or here's another example: Judah Benjamin.

So what about Judah Benjamin? Here's what Ari Feldman says:

Though Judah Benjamin was a brilliant legal mind, a legendary orator and Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ right-hand man, it is likely that he has no major monuments because he alienated himself from both Jewish and non-Jewish Southerners.

“Non-Jews didn’t make statues of him because he was a Jew, and Jews didn’t make statues of him because he was intermarried and not really associated with the Jewish community,” said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and author of “Lincoln and the Jews.”

So let's be honest, folks. The public display of statues of Confederates is not "history" that we'd "erase" by putting the statues in museums. It's a selective version of history, concocted some time after the Civil War was over, promoting white-supremacist nostalgia and whimsical preference. Our best bet is to save the statues in museums, as a testament to the historical power of the Great Men version of history over the writing of history (a relatively esoteric topic) rather than as artifacts of some mythical History Itself that we'd be "erasing" if we moved the statues.

Which brings us to the real matter at hand, the Great Men version of history, of which Confederate nostalgia-history is an especially egregious version.

Most of what counts as history-building is this Great Men version of history, history as recorded and revered by the chroniclers of the exploits of history's "leaders." If you want to read a quintessential version of this history, try one of John Julius Norwich's books on Byzantine history. So here's the background: the Roman Empire, as many of you know, lasted 800 years in the east after its 5th-century disintegration in the west, and the result of this survival was a Greek "Roman Empire" whose subjects called themselves Romaioi, or "Romans" in Greek. This is what later French historians called the "Byzantine Empire," and much of what survives as its history is the history of its emperors.

Now, of course, Roman society, even in its Greek "Byzantine" form, was hierarchical, and patriarchal, so much of its history can be read as the chronicles of a top-down society. Either the Great Men were great, or they were not so great, depending upon what they did and upon the biases of the original-text historian or chronicler you're reading. The puzzle, for instance, of the Emperor Phocas (who ruled between 602 and 610) is that there are (IIRC) no surviving friendly sources on him, all the surviving sources were biased against him, so he goes down in history as a Not-So-Great Man. Historians are thus left to guess about what a good guy Phocas might have been (but nobody really knows).

And much of this early history can be excused as Great Men history because the history of Great Men was what was written down at the time (and what survived, for instance, the Christian destruction of polytheistic texts, or the great fires of 1203, or the Crusader conquest of 1204 or the Ottoman conquest of 1453). And so what we have are tales of emperor after emperor, from the young and ineffective Arcadius (395-408) to the various and mostly-foolish House of Angelos, whose political failure consisted in inviting the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople and then prompting them to warfare against the Byzantine state. Jonathan Phillips' book on this event is fun.

(Some of these Great Men emperors were in fact women, most importantly Irene -- and this should provide a degree of fun to those who wish to counter the generally patriarchal drift of ancient history; and this applies to the historians too, so one can read the translated words of the famous historian Anna Komnene in a nice Penguin paperback volume, and that doesn't fit the mold either.)

At any rate, the point of this brief little excursus on Byzantine history is to suggest that history, as written previously, developed an emphasis upon Great Men because many societies were hierarchical (and thus controlled by their Great Men) and because the histories of Great Men are the ones which were written down and which survived. Historical circumstances, then, hierarchy and patriarchy, embraced the writing and the privileging of this version of history. Modern historiography, on the other hand, often tends to work against the grain, emphasizing the efforts of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

What's curious, though, about Great Men history, are the efforts to preserve Great Men history into an era in which we have plenty of well-documented lives of people who were neither great, nor men. And so, for instance, one can read the complaint about history-teaching to be read in James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me:

in 1925 the American Legion declaimed that the ideal textbook:

must inspire the children with patriotism,
must be careful to tell the truth optimistically,
must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success,
must give each State and Section full space and value for the achievements of each.

Loewen's complaint was that the textbooks all pretty much followed the pattern endorsed by the Legion. (And of course there is no version of history like the Great Men version of history for meeting the Legion's criteria, emphasizing patriotism through Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and so on.) So is that the point of teaching history, to inspire children with patriotism or some other such ideological derivative? Or are we all trying to come up with a clear picture of what history is?

To lead us back to Confederate history: the question of the statues is one of what version of history we are trying to teach. If we're trying to teach an ideology, the statues are just fine where they are, unaccompanied by explanations or by equal statues depicting our best-efforts reconstructions of their lives. If we're trying to teach what we know about history, let's try something else.