Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues by James Gill and Howard Hunter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues by James Gill and Howard Hunter Shae Smith Cox Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues. By James Gill and Howard Hunter. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. viii, 225. $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-3332-7.) James Gill and Howard Hunter's timely Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans Confederate Statues focuses on the creation of, the debates around, and the eventual removal of four New Orleans monuments: Robert E. Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and Liberty Place. The first three chapters describe New Orleans as historically and culturally complex [End Page 429] from the antebellum period through the Civil War. Chapters 4 through 6 discuss why and how Confederate leanings took hold in such a culturally diverse city during the beginnings of Jim Crow. Throughout, the authors discuss the reasons for memorializing the person or event in stone and the process of commemoration. The authors do well in describing the story of the Robert Charles riots by making the connection that the monuments, specifically Lee's, were a meeting place for working-class white men who "proceeded on a rampage through the city, killing three Blacks and seriously wounding six" (p. 107). Meeting at a figure known for perpetuating the subjugation of Black people and then enacting violence on those people spoke volumes. In the last few chapters, the authors detail the public conversation from the 1990s to the late 2010s on the push to desegregate the Mardi Gras krewes led by Dorothy Mae Taylor, moving through interviews conducted without significant analysis and the legal challenges of removing monuments. The book has a sprinkling of primary source gems such as the story of the "mimicry of war," a "Civil War–style reenactment to raise money for a Confederate Soldiers' Home in the Crescent City" (p. 9). Such detail shows that the authors could have crafted a well-sourced microhistory of a city that removed its controversial Confederate and white supremacist monuments. The book's core ideas—the history of the monuments and the cultural climate, law, and politics of their removal—are fascinating, but the result is problematic. To begin with the simplest issue, the scant use of endnotes is troubling, specifically because of the emphasis on secondary source material; more credit is due to the authors of the works used. More crucially, Gill and Hunter seem to determine a woman's value by discussing the men in her life. The authors would have benefited greatly from digging further into the papers and actions of the women who aided in erecting the monuments to demonstrate these white women's abilities to raise funds and perpetuate their narrative. Contrary to what Gill and Hunter state and the source from which they found the following quotation, the post–Civil War period was not the first time women were thrust into new roles or "'forced to solve their own familial problems or to earn their own livelihood'" (p. 166). Women had been doing those things long before the Civil War. Gill and Hunter's description of Michael Quess Moore as a "dreadlocked teacher at a local charter school who fancied himself a poet" feels a bit pointed (p. 13). Is that really the best way to describe Moore, especially when white people have policed Black hair since their abduction from Africa into enslavement? Also, the authors do not describe the white participants by their appearance in that way. They use insensitive racial terms such as "uppity Negroes" and "Negro rule" without quotation marks or any indication that they are citing a source (pp. 60, 68). Gill and Hunter concluded their epilogue with the thought that "[Mayor Mitch] Landrieu's speech offered a rite of purification, to make the city whole by washing away the past. But history cannot be willed or washed away. And if New Orleans has always contained a multitude of voices, what about the descendants of the vanquished, both Union and Confederate?" (pp. 168–69). But the United States was not vanquished, and the voices of Confederate descendants trumpeting the Lost...