In a grim October that has been filled with news of war abroad and the continued march of far-right extremism at home, the story of how Charlottesville’s statue of Robert E. Lee met its 21st century Appomattox in the melting fires of a furnace is both salve and warning for our besieged union. Once the focal point of right-wing protests that culminated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville that took the life of one counter-protestor and injured dozens of others, the statue had been dethroned from its public display and passed into the possession of the Charlottesville black history museum. The museum subsequently agreed to a plan to melt down the general-astride-his-horse combo and to use the resulting stock of bronze to create public art in Charlottesville; the first part of the plan was successfully carried out earlier this month, at an undisclosed Southern foundry somewhere outside of Virginia.
Information about the transport and destination was closely guarded, as organizers of the effort wanted to avoid violence or intimidation — and this is the first remarkable fact that we need to note about this remarkable event. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, those who believe that the United States should not valorize a man who engaged in treason had legitimate fears that General Lee still retained admirers who would resort to violence to defend his statue. More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, what rightly should have been a highly public ceremony and celebration was forced to take place more or less underground, for fear that the inheritors of the Confederacy might kill in defense of a mere representation of their degenerate hero. This circumstance alone should fill every decent American with revulsion, and anger — not only due to the unforgivable baseline threat to Americans’ ability to go about free from physical harm, but because of the way this threat has deprived a broader public of participating in a righteous ritual of exorcism and renewal. The recycling of the Lee memorial was a blow against white supremacism and in favor of a pluralistic, egalitarian America, and there is tremendous power in the fact that it happened at all; yet it is a sure sign of our times that to destroy the mere statue of a Confederate general required such caution.
Yet this context of underlying threat makes it all the more important that we publicize and celebrate the fact that Lee’s furnace-fired Waterloo did in fact happen; to this end, the Washington Post’s account is invaluable for capturing the event. A few aspects in particular stand out to me. The first is the commentary by participants in this righteous meltdown, who make clear that they grasped the gravity of their project (amazingly, the Post notes, this may be the first Confederate monument ever to have been melted down). Jalane Schmidt, a University of Virginia professor, commented that melting it was superior to sending Charlottesville’s “white supremacist toxic waste” to another town, and that, “We are taking the moral risk associated with melting it down in the hope of creating something new.” As metal-workers began to cut up Lee’s head, one remarked that, “It’s a better sculpture right now than it’s ever been. We’re taking away what it meant for some people and transforming it.” And the African-American foundry owner told the Post that, “It is time to dismantle this hate, this infection that has plagued our beautiful country. It is time to rid these icons of hate.” The sense of mission, of seriousness of purpose, is inescapable; these are fellow Americans who not only took seriously the individual parts they played, but recognized the victory it represented against dug-in structures of white supremacism and in favor of an America which possesses the power to literally forge a better future out of a broken past. This feels like democracy in action: ordinary Americans playing their small parts in making the country a better place.
And so the deep ritual of the event is likewise striking. In order to fit into the furnace, the statue of Lee astride his horse first had to be cut into pieces — a dismemberment that you can’t help but read as deeply symbolic, as is the satisfying big melt that turned the fragmented statue into molten metal and then ingots as the metal cooled. The videos that accompany the Post article convey both the practical mechanics of the operation and the tangible reality of reducing the statue into the pools of bronze from which it came. As the metal-workers zap and heat the chunks of statue, you’ve got a perfect tableau of humankind using primal forces to make and unmake the world. Seeing the general’s face heated to a demonic glow before its final undoing, I had a notion of false gods and idols being consigned to their proper fates. And the plan to turn the recovered bronze into public art — art that will presumably be far more inclusive and benign than the Lee statue — is a beautiful and heartening recycling of the very worst parts of our country into something hopeful, humane, and uniting.
Symbols play an enormous role in how we collectively understand the meaning and power structures of our world. The longtime ability of defenders of the Lee statue to argue on behalf of its innocuousness in defense of a vague “Southern heritage” was an exercise of white supremacist power, a way to present it as a natural aspect of American life while reminding African-Americans that their revulsion, anger, and fear were part of the point being made by the statue’s public display. The past several years have seen an increasing public awareness, driven in large part by African-American activists, that monuments to the Confederacy aren’t just harmless tokens but active reminders on behalf of white supremacist strains in American society — and that they have continued to exist both because Blacks lacked the power to remove them and because enough whites appreciated, consciously or not, the message of racial subjugation that they projected.
I believe the story of Charlottesville’s General Lee statue carries lessons for those on the progressive side of American politics who wish for the triumph of a more egalitarian America. Democrats have shown an aversion to “culture war” politics, but as the fight over the Lee monument shows, fights over symbols do matter — both for the clarifying focus they can place on broader discussions of momentous political questions, and as a way to display the nature and extent of one’s political power. The cost of the battle here was truly terrible — the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer and the injury of many others — and the willingness of democracy’s enemies to resort to violence was a preview of more horrors to come. But was it really a sideshow to American politics for protestors to call for the removal of this Confederate monument, when their effort revealed the extent and ferocity of the white supremacist forces still alive and well in the United States — including then-President Trump’s complicity with this reactionary movement, as he tried to excuse the actions of the worst among us with his noxious “both sides” comments? In retrospect, it’s clear that civil rights protestors and others sparked a confrontation that did the rest of us a favor, by exposing democracy’s most dedicated enemies as the extremists and freaks that they ultimately are: less a group of heartland “real” Americans, and more a gang of tiki torch thugs who bear more than a passing resemblance to Nazi brownshirts and KKK foot soldiers.