On Histories and Monuments

Bonard Molina
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

The President has asked: If we remove monuments to Confederate heroes, must we not also remove monuments to slave-owning George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

I think, in a way, yes.

Condoleezza Rice said earlier this year that “when you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better, it’s a bad thing.” I agree with that statement. But we have no simple history, we have histories, and the question becomes which of these we honor as a people.

One slice of history I have heard is that Robert E. Lee was a good man and an honorable general. Let us take that as true. It is easy then for me to imagine a people honoring such a man, gracious in defeat, moving with head held high with malice towards none and charity for all.

Another slice of history I have heard is that George Washington was a brave commander who defeated the greatest military force the world had ever known, and a principled man of integrity who did the unheard of by choosing to step down from power after two terms. A people honored this Father of the Nation with an impressive monument that stands tall in the nation’s capital, taller than anything else for miles around.

And I have heard of Thomas Jefferson, an incomparable genius from whose illustrious head sprouted both the Declaration of Independence and the swivel chair. And the people honored him with a memorial in which he stands tall, immortalized in bronze, surrounded by those immortal words of his that have inspired nations around the globe.

Robert E. Lee’s monuments are being removed because on closer inspection they are a monument not to a great man but to white supremacy. To the degree that Lee deserved honor for being a gracious loser, the monuments at issue are at least as much about reminding the emancipated that the world was still not their own, that even in defeat, Lee’s army rode on in the hearts and minds of the people who held the reins of power. But if that is the case, we cannot forget that Washington and Jefferson enslaved human beings and worked to build a country designed to permit such enslavement.

So the President stumbled onto something. If slavery is so bad that it is going to make us remove monuments, and since Washington and Jefferson were slave owners (and from Virginia to boot), and since no one can say with any certainty that they and Lee would have been enemies if they had lived long enough, does this not also place the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial under threat?

It should.

It is a bad thing to treat the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial as sacred ground. We deify these men. We glorify them. In the Capitol dome there is a painting called the Apotheosis of Washington in which he is seen in heaven, Christ-like, surrounded by the angels of liberty and victory. It is a bad thing to teach our children that Robert E. Lee was an American hero fighting for state’s rights and that the removal of his statue is an attack on a people’s heritage. But it is also a bad thing to teach children that their nation was founded by demigods who glowed in life and shat virtue.

Washington and Jefferson were great men, but they were no saints, and it might even be good for us that they were not. They were real. Imperfect. Washington had messed-up teeth. The swivel chair was probably squeaky. They were slave owners. And we must come to grips with the fact that these fathers of liberty fought for a universal equality that was universal only for white men of a particular class.

Herein lies the paradox so many of us cannot stomach: these founders did such a good job that they actually founded a nation greater than the one they intended to found.

In 2017 people of color, women, and the poor can vote along with propertied white men, and we can and do all marry each other. Our face is changing. Our histories are manifold. I do not want my children growing up in an America that dangerously clings to its apotheosis of Washington.

So I think yes, Mr. President, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial should come down as well, but not in the sense you meant. Instead, we need to remove them from the idolatrous niches they hold in our hearts and minds and allow them to serve as true reminders of all of the histories those men touched, of all of the histories that intersect because of these great men’s deeds, the ones we celebrate, and the ones that are so shameful, painful, and hurtful, that we refuse to even look at them.


A shorter version of this piece was published as a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun. Read it here.

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