The Meaning of Statuary, Confederate or Otherwise

--25 June 2020

             Humans began building monuments about the same time they settled into permanent communities about twelve thousand years ago. Ancient Mesopotamia was dotted with temple complexes, created to give the people a place to gather for worship. Often near those were palaces, created to show the people who was in charge. Around these one would find statuary depicting the gods and the current and former kings, much of which was larger than life, thereby lending it an added importance.

            Certainly, the most famous example of such monuments and statuary are the pyramids and Sphynx at Giza, Egypt. These structures are not only meant as a show of power by those who ordered and arranged their construction but are also intended as objects of veneration long after the pharaohs who intended them as their tombs were gone. This was, in fact, the point: the pyramids were central to temple complexes where Egyptians could leave offerings and ask favors of their gods. These complexes required a great deal of organizational authority to build over the course of many years, if not decades, a mark of the power wielded by the pharaoh who also paid, housed, and fed the workers.[1] Even now, thousands of years after their construction, the pyramids leave no question as to who ruled supreme.

            The Greeks and Romans were also great lovers of statuary, particularly of their gods, but also of themselves. In Classical Athens, a statue of Athena was served and honored with regular supplications and offerings. There was even a group of priestesses who were charged with changing her clothing on a regular basis. The Romans also used statuary as objects of veneration and offering. Additionally, to the temples dedicated to the major gods, they had household shrines populated with figurines representing deceased family members whose genius (soul or spirit) they could venerate and ask favors of.

            In Rome, virtually all public works and statuary were an indication of wealth and power of some individual or family. During the Republic, there was relatively little in terms of publicly funded infrastructure. Private citizens would pay to have temples built, roads laid out, make new additions to the forum, etc. Everyone who used these spaces would know exactly who had paid for them because the benefactor would make a point of having his name and/or likeness included in the project. For those with aspirations to the higher levels of political office, it served to remind voters who would (ostensibly) provide for them if elected. For those who had already held high offices, such projects indicated their continuing service to the Roman people. When these men (invariably) fell out of favor with the Roman people, they had no qualms about defacing or removing monuments or images. They were, however, an eternally practical people: a statue of an unpopular man could almost always be recycled by simply replacing the head.

            The use of statuary and monuments continued similarly though the European Medieval period, though it tended more toward the veneration of God and the saints than the commemoration of great men. Even so, the people knew who arranged for such holy places to be built, and thereby understood the power wielded by those men. Much the same can be said for the Renaissance, during which artistry and sculpture were taken to great heights, backed by a powerful purse. For example, the works of artists who beautified Fifteenth-century Florence do not exist separately from the Medici funds which fed, clothed, and housed them. Just because the work is one of great artistry and beauty does not mean it can’t inspire deference to those who funded it.

            This brings me to the recent (and not-so-recent[2]) arguments over the removal of statues depicting leaders of the Confederate States of America. People have argued that they are representative of an important part of American history and I cannot disagree. The period in history they represent is not, however, the Civil War, it is the Jim Crow era. A good number of these statues were erected in the 1920s, at the behest of (and often funded by) the local members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were not placed in locations relevant to the war with the intention of commemorating a battle or a gravesite, they were placed in conspicuous, high-traffic locations to guarantee that they would be seen and paid attention by all passers-by, White or Black. Many of them are in states which were not only not members of the Confederacy, but were staunchly anti-slavery and whose troops fought on the Union side. They were (and are) a show of power, indicating in no small way that the racist ideology which caused the Civil War was not forgotten. Emancipated slaves, their children, their grandchildren, and further descendants, walked past statues of those who sought to keep them subjugated. And, though I’ve not read of a specific instance, there is no doubt in my mind that a freed person encountered a statue of the very man who had held them in bondage.

These statues were not built to prompt people to consider the past and learn from it, they were built to show who had the authority (Whites) and who that authority sought to dominate (Blacks). They were constructed with the intent of venerating the men who started and conducted the Civil War, a war fought over the question of the validity of one person owning another, men who ultimately lost the war and were unquestionably on the wrong side of the issue. These monuments had no business being put up in the first place, their removal is a long-overdue correction.

[1] It is a common but mistaken belief that the pyramids were entirely built by slave labor. Most of those working on the structures were skilled stonemasons; additionally, Egyptian commoners would take on the job for a few months between planting and harvesting seasons. Alongside the pay (and, perhaps, more importantly), they had the personal honor of having contributed to the structure that would house the pharaoh’s body after his death. Were there slaves involved? Undoubtedly, as the Egyptians were slaveholders, but it definitely didn’t look like the scenes in The Ten Commandments.  

[2] See this twenty-year-old editorial on the Confederate flag by Dr. Eric Foner in The Nation: http://www.ericfoner.com/articles/012700nation.html