“No one will say that a lively sense of history is one of the intellectual virtues of the American people,” wrote Lionel Trilling in his introduction to The Proper Study (Anderson, Quentin and Joseph Mazzeo, St. Martin’s Press, 1962), a collection of very high-level essays on Great Books of the Western Tradition. These essays include ones on Homer and Aeschylus, Plato, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Cervantes and Dostoevsky — twenty-eight splendid essays in all — essays on people whose thought formed ours. Formed the thought, except, of course, of those who have not read them.
Granted, these are almost all Dead White Men. Though one piece on “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” was by Simone Weil, most were written by now Dead White Men. Actually, Augustine may have been tan — Berber-like. Nonetheless, these are the ones who formed us. Radicals will disagree, as radicals always do about everything. the best working definition of a radical being “someone who thinks no one knew anything before him.” (For that reason, many radicals are young: they are punks, but some of them only pro tempore.) It is further granted that the lives of these important folk in the history of the Western tradition may have been flawed, as is common with humanity, but what they have written surmounts that.
This I mention in regard to the recent decision by the Gelehrten of Louisville, Kentucky to remove statues of two local men, both once of importance: one is of General Castleman, and one of another sort, a longtime local newspaperman, Editor George D. Prentice. (So far, only Prentice has been moved.) Certainly, I do not think these decision-making folks enlightened at all but rather that they are ignorant (Cf. Trilling, above), which is a charitable assessment since the other alternative is that they are political hacks doing the expedient, that they are intellectual punks.
Louisville is just one smallish place, but it is representative enough. The key word is place: old statuary, old buildings, old parks, old neighborhoods—Louisville has a few of those—all of these give a sense of time and place. Thus, erasures of these in part or whole, tend to lead to facelessness: unless one is of the sort who finds rest in a world painted by de Chirico, as texted by Kafka, this can lead to a sort of anomie. This is not good for anyone, even punks, young or old. Not every Miranda has a Prospero to guide her.
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The first offending statue is of John Breckinridge Castleman and his horse. He was anti-slavery (the horse was non-committed) but for States’ Rights and served in the Confederate army, attaining the rank of Major. In the Spanish-American War he was a Brigadier General in the US Army. In between and afterwards, he did many good works, too many to enumerate here but including improving the park system of his city. But he was for a time a Confederate soldier and thus punks vandalized his monument, splashing paint on it. They did it more than once, no doubt considering themselves virtuous for doing so. His monument has for about a hundred years been near one of the parks he worked to help. He also worked to integrate them racially but failed.
This is a matter, then, of removing visual history, of a sense of place. Punks both young and intellectual have no sense of this. Even leaders of a certain historical church (one a couple of thousand years old, and mine) seem to have lost the notion of a church being a place “used to being prayed in” — that’s TS Eliot, isn’t it? — but now construct sorts of communal halls instead, ones that with but little modification could have suspensible basketball backboards on opposite sides. So it’s not only an American situation, it’s everywhere. But I write here of a local instance of it.
Now to return to the other offending statuary: he was a newspaperman who came from the East, George D. Prentice, who became a great fan and promoter of Henry Clay. He edited the Louisville Journal and was pro-Union during the Civil War. But in the 1850s he had been a Know-Nothing supporter and anti-immigrant, especially those of the German and Irish Catholic sort. He later regretted it, but he had done it. His statue had long been in front of the central public library. He once was politically correct. But no longer.
Okay, but if these two works are to be removed by those who in a minor mode want to emulate the French and Soviets who each for a short time tried to erase the past even by starting the calendar anew, changing names of months, and so on, then they missed a few monuments, street and expressway names, even county and city names. To begin with, there is one of Daniel Boone that will have to go since he was quite rude to Native Americans. He was a conflicted man anyway, wanting both to live out of the sight of his neighbor’s chimney smoke, but sometimes also working for a Virginia land company and bringing white pioneers in through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky to settle on the land marked out. Land that was to be taken from Native Americans, though it is true that Indians seemed a little vague on private property rights.
Ditto that of George Rogers Clark, Revolutionary War hero, but a slave owner who refused to free his man York even after the latter’s faithful service on the long trek to the Northwest and back. A grade school was named for Clark so that also must go. (Rename it for York?) Across the river in Indiana there is a Clark County, the shame of which name seems not yet to have reddened the faces of Hoosiers, but they need to call it something else. Here they have been warned.
Waterfront Park, pxhere
Then there is a large statue of Abraham Lincoln on the grounds of the same library that the one of Prentice faced. Our sixteenth president was quite racist by modern standards, having pledged to export ex-slaves from the United States (and when in office he tried to do it, so it wasn’t just a campaign promise), and having made many similarly indicting comments easily found by any caring to do the research. Never mind his accomplishments.
On that note, in case any chaps dream of erecting a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., forget it — he was a notorious womanizer. For that same reason, an existent statue presently also on the grounds of the main library, one of Benjamin Franklin — sometimes called “Old Lightening Rod” — will have to be removed. The large one of Louis XVI — given to the city after the French didn’t want it — has no relevance except his support enabled Washington to win at Yorktown. After the piece is removed, that city’s name also will need changing.
Similarly, the name of the Watterson Expressway (I-264) must be shifted, Marse Henry Watterson having been a Confederate soldier and well-known for racial attitudes common then but which are dated today. (And if the attitudes are not au courant, they certainly are not welcome.) This would mean also that the name of the local paper must drop Courier from its masthead, that having been the name of the paper edited by a fellow surnamed Haldeman a while before it merged with the Journal. It was pro-Confederacy, though soon shut down by Union troops. There is a street named Haldeman, one begging for emending. (The Journal part of that name also should be scrapped because of its editor, Prentice. However, The Courier Journal, did do an in-depth and good piece on Castleman, but the name is embarrassing.)
Then there is the matter of the name of the county being inappropriate. It is called Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson owned during his lifetime over two-hundred slaves, numbers of which he sold whenever he got into debt, which was often. He wrote some good lines here and there, but those who today are morally perfect don’t need to bother with those.
That’s enough of this exposé of banality: such exposures, if they go on too long, become themselves banal. If you don’t believe it, read a novel by Sinclair Lewis. He was current in his day, got the Nobel Prize for Literature when Europe was on one of its periodic (between wars) anti-American jags, but is ignored now except by PhD candidates in something like American Literature or Studies, but even there, the students have to choose him deliberately.
Finally, a humorous conclusion that should work to embarrass punks young and old: when the Nazis [National Socialist German Workers Party, rulers of German 1933-45] sought to remove a statue of the composer Felix Mendelsohn — a Christian but one of Jewish background (a grandfather had founded Reform Judaism) — the Gauleiters sent to remove it from the park didn’t know much, so they looked for the statue with the largest nose and took down one of Schiller instead. Schiller was a Gentile.
And a post note, offered in fairness. In an effort to retain a faςade of the past — literally, in this case — the facing of certain old buildings have been propped up, retained, backed up by modern structures. These are on what is called Whiskey Row, a place where distilleries were. The local paper hypes that bourbon background; I give them credit for that though I cringe at their urging of booze consumption, cringe as should cringe the son, grandson, nephew, and stepson of alcoholics.
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Twin spires were stuck on top of the modernized racetrack called Churchill Downs. Silly, even when they try to retain a semblance of the past.
About the Author:
James H Bowden (PhD, University of Minnesota, 1970, American Studies) is retired from the Indiana University system where he was a Professor of English. His publications include Peter DeVries, a Critical Study, (TUSAS #448), 1983, a novel, Reve Americain, a short story collection, Don’t Lose This, It’s My Only Copy, both under his pen name of Greenfield Jones, and a number of essays and many poems.
