Iconoclasm and the Monumental Presence of the Civil War

Abstract

Iconoclasm and the Monumental Presence of the Civil War Thomas J. Brown (bio) Events have moved swiftly since I finished my slow work on Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. During the eight years after the killing of Trayvon Martin in February 2012, twenty-seven communities in the South removed thirty-seven free-standing outdoor Confederate monuments, mostly during the period between the Charleston massacre of June 2015 and the four months after the Charlottesville violence of August 2017.1 In the six months since the murder of George Floyd, eighty-five Confederate monuments have come down in communities where slavery was legal before the Civil War; at least sixteen more removals are readily foreseeable, and the prospect continues to be discussed in many jurisdictions.2 The resumed iconoclasm has radiated beyond relics of the Lost Cause at an even greater rate of acceleration. Protests have spread to commemorations of different historical events and encompassed at least [End Page 145] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tasos Katopodis, Image of George Floyd Projected onto Lee Memorial, Richmond, June 18, 2020. Courtesy of Getty Images. [End Page 146] a dozen countries. Even as the conversation widens, however, the Civil War remains at the center. For reasons directly related to the processes and consequences of mobilization, the war was crucial to the proliferation of memorials in the American landscape. The thousands of Union and Confederate monuments explored many possibilities of the cultural form and established enduring conventions. Civil War monuments inspired a long tradition of artistic and literary engagement, which recent iconoclasm has renewed in responses from several of the most eminent creative figures in the nation. The thematic case study of the Civil War illuminates characteristic features of the public monument as a genre, and those elements remain important in thinking about the future of commemoration. At the same time, the medium offers distinctive insights for interpretation of the Civil War. ________ The prominence of Confederate monuments in the public response to the death of George Floyd illustrates the interplay between form and content. Unlike the violent white supremacists who embraced Confederate symbols in Charleston and Charlottesville, the police murder in Minneapolis did not directly invoke remembrance of the Civil War. The crime was more similar to the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, after which iconoclasm began to gather a momentum more powerful than previous protests against Confederate monuments. In drafting the script that would take hold in the wake of Charleston and Charlottesville, activists in New Orleans recognized a connection between tributes to proslavery secession and the campaign against militarized police oppression. The white supremacism of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South touched all aspects of life, but Lost Cause monuments have been lightning rods specifically for resistance to violent racial domination. Monuments have not figured conspicuously in rallies against other patterns of racism that have flourished recently, such as voter suppression or dismantling of public education or unequal administration of health care or disregard for affordable housing. Death was the initial bedrock of Civil War monuments, as death is the starting point for the paradigmatic monument, the grave. Iconoclasm in remembrance of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or the Emanuel Nine or George Floyd has recognized the loss of Black lives. The response to George Floyd’s death extended a close relationship between public monuments and photography that dates to the Civil War. The specter of death in the war was important to the growth of both cultural forms in America. When Alexander Gardner closed his Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) with an obelisk raised at Bull Run in June 1865, he announced a marriage that would ripen in the heyday of the [End Page 147] postcard.3 The advent of motion pictures opened a fraught new phase in the nexus. Digitization added more layers. The tagging of monuments expanded alongside photosharing technology and the introduction of hashtags, including #TakeEmDownNoLa and #BlackLivesMatter. The excruciating eight-minute-and-forty-six-second recording of George Floyd’s murder updated the efforts of early Civil War monument sponsors to record the circumstances of individual deaths, including names and military units and dates...