by Catesby Leigh

For a vocal minority, the “Summer of Love” of 2020, with its “Black Lives Matter”, “occupied zones,” and “statuary vandalism,” shines brightly. It’s easy to understand why. It’s not hard to see why.

The Left is still attracted to the statuary excommunications, even though 2020 will be a year that most Americans are happy to forget. President Trump may now have brought back Christopher Columbus’ effigy to the nation’s capitol, but Capitol Square, Richmond, Virginia is in the crosshairs. The square still has three Confederacy statues in place. This includes a magnificent Stonewall Jackson by J. H. Foley. It also contains a Virginia Civil Rights Memorial and a Virginia Women’s Monument, which reflect recent political concerns. Capitol Square, which is home to the statehouse, the governor’s residence, and a 19th-century multi-figure monument featuring a mounted George Washington, has thus displayed the common sense lost during the Summer Of Love.

The media’s unwavering support for the crusade to remove Confederate monuments reflects an abridgement of cultural and historical understanding, rather than a widening. No longer are we encouraged to consider the virtues or loyalties of great commanders such as Robert E. Lee and Jackson. They are to be viewed as nothing but “traitors” who killed American soldiers in order to defend slavery — poster boys for white supremacy. It is impossible to view them as role-models, as many Southern-born soldiers who are now fighting against the Iranian mullahs do. Confederate monuments are only important because they represent or symbolize the racial injustice that has tainted the South’s history. Wokedom thrives, then, on a manichean and perversely simple outlook. As a vain exhibition of Confederate statues that were banned in Los Angeles attests to, its impact on South’s public sphere has been disastrous. The sooner Americans, North and South, white and black, see this authoritarian mentality for what it really is, the better.

Levar Stoney, the former mayor of the Confederacy’s once-capital, responded to the Floyd Disorders in River City by removing a dozen Confederate Memorials on Monument Avenue. He did this in conjunction with Virginia’s then-governor Ralph Northam – a.k.a. A medical school yearbook scandal led to the emergence of “Governor Blackface.” As a result, the city’s cultural legacy has been severely damaged. The Senate, shortly after the inauguration in January of a Democratic Governor and Legislature, passed a law mandating the removal of three Capitol Square Confederates. This included a Virginia Governor who had served as a Rebel General and Hunter Holmes McGuire. McGuire was an extraordinarily talented surgeon who, during the Civil War, saved many lives by initiating automatic exchanges of captured doctors between the two sides. This practice is now incorporated into First Geneva Convention. McGuire founded a Richmond hospital, a nursing school and a medical college. He was also president of the American Medical Association.

Time can often put a critical distance between monuments and their public without reducing its value. It is therefore foolish to remove Confederate monuments in a systematic manner. The National Park Service, under the Clinton Administration, designated Monument Avenue’s architecturally distinctive, beautifully landscaped mile long stretch, which includes statues of Lee Jackson Jeb Stuart and Jefferson Davis as a National Historic Landmark. It was then that it was recognized that monuments like these serve to remind us of our past, and not just where we are going. They also have a place-making effect, which is why they gave Monument Avenue a distinctive character. The late Berkeley professor Allan B. Jacobs, who included the avenue in his Great Streets magisterial survey published in 1993, believed that the statuary’s Lost Cause association was now vestige in a city where the political makeup had changed dramatically during the postwar period. Jacobs noticed groups of blacks and whites walking together along the avenue on Sundays. The Summer of Love’s iconsoclasts didn’t want to leave things alone.

Abigail Spanberger is unlikely to object if the Capitol Square Confederates are removed from the budget package that the legislature will be completing this spring.

The planned reinstallation is a more encouraging development. It will reunite the impressive monument which stood in the middle of the Confederate section of Arlington National Cemetery for nearly a century, until Joe Biden’s Pentagon ordered it to be disassembled and crated. They then placed it into storage, starting December 2023. Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a celebrated sculptor who was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to design a multitiered sculpture on a granite pedestal, created the bronze sculpture. The monument, which the UDC calls the Reconciliation Memorial while the Army calls it the Confederate Memorial, stood over 30 feet tall, with an eight-foot-tall circular frieze that included dozens of realistic, allegorical, and high-relief figures depicting the beginnings of the war. The composition featured a draped female idealized as a symbol of the New South. She holds a laurel leaf, a symbol of courage, and looks down at the Confederate graves.

The Army, who has jurisdiction over this cemetery, gave Virginia Ezekiel’s banished monument in August 2024. To avoid disturbing graves, only the granite plinth was left at Arlington. The monument was announced to be returning a year later by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. “We acknowledge our history. “We don’t delete it,” he stated. We don’t go along with the lemmings who want to destroy statues. We study and learn about our history in all its aspects.

You might think that the UDC is elated by this news. It sued the Department of War, and the Army just a few weeks after Hegseth made his announcement. The agreement between Virginia, the Army’s Center for Military History and the state to which it lends the monument for 50 years is not without its troubling aspects.

The opposite side of the nation, the woke iconoclasm found its neplus ultra at a Los Angeles exhibit, entitled MONUMENTS. It features ten banned commemorative works and the contemporary African-American artist’s responses to them. The unindoctrinated are likely to notice the lack of significance of the modern productions in comparison with the “decommissioned Confederate monuments” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, and The Brick. The show is funded by the Mellon Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and other large donors. The ones that haven’t been destroyed. The figurative bronze statues, still painted and displayed without pedestals, are worthy of the academic standards for their time. The exhibition’s piece of resistance is a contemporary artist’s mutilation of the exceptionally fine Stonewall Jackson horseman which stood in a park beside the county courthouse for over a century.

The bronze depicted Jackson during his Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. The head of his mount is now visible between the legs. The fragmented body of the general now bends forward. Stonewall’s face and head have also been removed. The hair and ears of Stonewall’s horse have been rammed in a relocated section of the leg. Stonewall has stuffed the tail of his horse between his legs and chest. The hilt his sword is dragged along the ground by a dislocated arm with gauntlets. The other arm is lying apart, amputated. This is a sick joke based on the amputation one of Jackson’s arm after he died from friendly fire in Chancellorsville.

It is obscene what Kara Walker did to the statue, which was created by Charles Keck. It will remind some of the horrifying spectacle that occurred when the bronze head belonging to Confederate commander Robert E. Lee melted in a furnace –“[. “His mouth seemed to widen and scream scarlet,” observed a New York Times after Charlottesville’s woke council transferred the equestrian statue of which the statue was a part to an African American heritage centre. MONUMENTS displays the bronze ingots from the 2023 meltdown of the statue. The ingots are stacked on wooden pallets. Both plaintiffs who contested its transfer were found not to have legal standing. Three postmodernist designers are competing to recycle bronze for what the Heritage Center calls “a new depiction of public memory.”

Four Baltimore bronzes, all removed at the behest of the city’s mayor after the August 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, figure in the Los Angeles show: a Soldier’s and Sailor’s Memorial with an angel supporting a standing wounded warrior with one arm and holding a laurel wreath aloft with another; a three-figure Confederate Women’s Memorial that includes a wounded soldier in the arms of a kneeling female; a seated statue of Roger B. Taney, the Maryland born-and-bred Supreme Court chief justice who issued the disastrous Dred Scott opinion of 1857 that denied any possibility of citizenship for black Americans; and finally an equestrian duo, Lee and Jackson, portrayed as they part ways at Chancellorsville–where the latter secured a major Confederate victory before being mortally wounded.

The exhibit also includes a vandalized Jefferson Davis statue from the extravagant Monument Avenue tribute. The man is lying flat on his back with his head stoked in, his leg stained with urine and a remnant of Kleenex around his neck. A draped “Miss Confederacy”, idealized and unharmed, loomed above him in a different chamber. It was strangely lit, set against reflective panels and with a CCTV camera pointed down at her. The Matthew Fontaine Maury Monument is another “decommissioned” Monument Avenue piece. It features the internationally-renowned author of The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), seated in mufti and holding charts and a compass. Around the globe (which used to be perched on a high base), the forces of the nature — storms and flooding — buffet men, women and domesticated animal. Maury helped the Southern cause when he developed a mine which proved to be highly effective against federal vessels. Maury, along with Hunter McGuire – who was also portrayed as mufti in Capitol Square despite being a Confederate Army surgeon – was an eminent scientist and held a benighted view of race. It would be better to place biographical markers that put the two men in historical context than to remove their monuments, which will only dumb down the public domain.

The Los Angeles exhibit, which runs until May 3, also includes graffitied fragments of the 40-foot granite pedestal that was the Lee Equestrian (1890), situated in a turfed circle , and occupied pride of place along Monument Avenue. This statue, probably the most well-known Confederate monument in the South, was dismembered in 2021 following a long court battle.

A Dukes of Hazzardstyle Dodge Charger with its roof emblazoned in Stars and Bars and Robert E. Lee’s name is displayed on the front of the car. This latter piece is by the same artist who created the 20-ton memorial to Rev. King in Boston, which is a bizarre “intertwining disembodied hands”. Martin Luther King, and his wife Coretta Scott King. Charlottesville Stonewall pedestal’s granite base, with its allegorical figures in high relief of Faith and Valor, was cut into small fragments to represent the rose petals that Charleston freedwomen scattered on Union soldier graves after the war ended. Kara Walker has, on the contrary, decorated the severed top of the pedestal with a silhouette of an odd serpentine creature, with a human-like head wearing a kepi, which is an apparent reference to Jackson. The creature has a hand and a booted foot, as well as hooves and tails. It looks like a supersized doodle by an adolescent.

Leftist Southern Poverty Law Center deemed Confederate monuments as “symbols” of white supremacy and hate. But isn’t Walker’s Stonewall a clear manifestation of hatred. The statue was clearly not a monument to white supremacy, but rather to religiously-based martial valor. Wasn’t this what the pedestal’s now-destroyed relief figures showed? The MONUMENTS exhibition, with its many manifestations of artistic disability in the 21st century, also reflects a complete disregard, if it is not an outright hostility to aesthetic achievement and higher goals. Walker said last year that Keck was “the consummate sculptor for statuary”. Only noble feelings were present, and we don’t have many.

We don’t.

Leftist iconoclasts are also a part of an infantilized world, just like the followers of extreme right groupuscules. While many Americans have admired the South’s paladins, they do not subscribe to the Confederate cause. Keck is probably one of them. He was a former assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens and created a Booker T. Washington memorial for the Tuskegee institute in Alabama. The sculpture shows a standing Washington lifting a veil of ignorance off a kneeling young black man. A copy of the sculpture can be seen in Atlanta, in front of Booker T. Washington high school. Henry Merwyn Shrady was the principal sculptor for the now smelted Charlottesville Lee. He had also been a Saint-Gaudens’ understudy.

Northern artists such as Keck and Shrady embraced the Progressive consensus, which held that the Confederacy was a part of the American story. They thrived off this belief. The consensus included a recognition of the bravery and often malnourished soldiers of the South, even by those who had fought against them. Arlington Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial bears witness to this progressive consensus. The sculptor behind it, however, was not a Yankee. Moses Ezekiel is a unique American cultural icon: born in Richmond, he attended the Virginia Military Institute as Stonewall’s student, was the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a veteran of only the second battle in American History in which cadets fought – the Battle of New Market in Virginia – and, just as remarkable, was a product of Berlin’s Royal Prussian Academy who then moved to Rome’s Baths of Diocletian. Ulysses S. Grant was one of the many American visitors to the site, and he visited the sculptor on his world tour after his presidency.

Ezekiel’s frieze is unusual for a Confederate memorial because it includes two black figures. In one, a body-servant in uniform sets off to war with his boss, while in the other, a “mammy” holds up an infant so that its uniformed dad can kiss him as he departs. A child tugs on the mammy’s apron. Ezekiel’s frieze is centered on the figure of Athena supporting the fainting female representing the Old South, whose shield bears the words “The Constitution”–meaning (for Ezekiel and Southerners of like mind) the Constitution that supported states’ rights and free trade. She represents the “Lost Cause”, a phrase which originated with the defeated Roman Republican Cato, whose laconic Latin lament was inscribed–and the South no longer. A former Confederate Chaplain is also credited with another inscription:

These men did not do it for the fame, reward or position. They were not influenced by ambition or necessity.

In contrast to the usual cemetery layout of straight rows, the nearly 500 Confederate graves are laid out in concentric circular patterns with the monument at their center. Ezekiel was buried at the foot his monument, as he requested, after Woodrow Wilson accepted it on behalf of the nation in 1914. Past national commanders of the Grand Army of the Republic (the fraternal organization of Union Army veterans) spoke both at the cornerstone laying and the dedication of the monument two years later. This monument was a elegiac memorial despite its defiant vindication for the Confederacy. The monument also served as a guide for those looking to find the Confederate grave section.

In late 2020, Congress, in response to the Floyd-related aftershocks created the “Naming Commission”. The commission was charged with “removing all names, symbols and displays that honor the Confederate States of America, as well as monuments, paraphernalia, and other commemorative items.” . . The commission was left to define what the term meant. The structure did not meet the narrow definition of the commission, even though Ezekiel and three Confederate officers are buried beneath the monument. Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, accepted the removal recommendation.

The “Pieta” photographs in the MONUMENTS exhibit are certainly highly selective. The “Pieta”, photos in the MONUMENTS exhibition are undoubtedly highly selective. This is because the number blacks who have been fatally shot by police officers has increased by more than 25 times over the past few years. Richmond’s Capitol Square is likely to lose this interplay. In 2020, the Virginia Military Institute lost the fine statue of Stonewall that stood in front VMI’s historical Barracks. It was moved to a parking lot next to the institute’s Museum at the New Market Battlefield, 75 miles north. In the 1950s, a statue honoring VMI graduate and General George C. Marshall stood next to Ezekiel’s Stonewall. Marshall is best known for his eponymous post-war reconstruction plan in Europe, but he was also an advocate for the integration of African American soldiers into the military. Marshall, like many other American soldiers who served their country, revered Stonewall.

Associated Press reported at the time of Hegseth’s announcement in August that the Confederate Memorial’s reassembly, refurbishment and replacement of the granite plinth was expected to cost $10 million and take two years. Some believe that the Pentagon’s longer restoration timeframe is a sign of concern about Democrats exploiting the monument’s return in Arlington during the midterm elections this year. It’s clear that the historical complexity is a problem for conservative politicians. It’s much easier to run a campaign against obvious progressive abuses such as critical race theory (CRT), DEI (transgender ideology), and open borders, than it is to defend the retention of Confederate statues. In February, Virginia’s tightly divided Senate voted unanimously against removing three Capitol Square monuments. But Spanberger’s predecessor as governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin – a retail politician with national ambitions – avoided spending political capital to defend such monuments.

According to the Virginia-Center for Military History Loan Agreement, Ezekiel’s memorial will return to the Commonwealth in 50 years unless both parties agree on an extension. The agreement can be amended at any time by the parties. For example, a Democratic Administration in Washington or a Democratic Governor of Virginia may agree to banish the monument again from the cemetery. The UDC lawsuit filed last fall in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims contends that Virginia’s gifting of the Confederate Memorial to Washington in 2023 and its subsequent removal violated a “implicit”, but “enforceable”, contract between the federal and UDC. In return for placing the monument at the center of the cemetery’s Confederate area, the UDC took on responsibility for funding, designing, and building the monument. UDC wants to own and permanently reinstall the Ezekiel Monument at that location or alternatively $1.8 million damages. The UDC, like Defend Arlington – the organization who has been the driving force behind the preservation of Ezekiel’s monument in the cemetery – views it as a gravestone.

The bronzes in the MONUMENTS exhibition from Baltimore and Richmond have not been given a future plan. Aside from the damaged Davis statue which is presumably returning to Richmond’s now woke Valentine Museum, there hasn’t been any announcement about the future of the bronzes. Baltimore’s sculptures were placed in the city impound yard after their removal in 2017. Richmond’s decision to transfer ownership of the monuments it had removed, under Stoney’s direction, to the Black History Museum of Richmond in May 2022, was almost certain illegal. Stoney, for one thing ignored state and local public procurement ordinances. BHM did not submit a bid as required by law, which was initiated by the city in August 2020. Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation has sued the city for submitting bids on three monuments: the Monument Avenue Stonewall Equestrian statue (not to confuse with the butchered Charlottesville monument), a statue honoring Confederate cavalry leader Williams Carter Wickham and a Soldiers and Sailors Monument with a Confederate Sentinel perched at the top of a lofty pole. These artifacts will serve as landmarks on battle sites managed by the federally recognized nonprofit in the Valley.

Northam had given the city the Monument Avenue Lee equestrian originally owned by the state. The contract for 2022 required that the museum take possession of these monuments. The museum still hasn’t done so nearly four years after the contract. Officials at the BHM have stated that it does not possess the physical space to store them. The disassembled monuments, shrink-wrapped, and covered with tarps, still linger on the grounds at Richmond’s wastewater plant. In a December Richmond Times Dispatchop ed lauding MONUMENTS, the museum’s director expressed no interest in restoring what she called “symbols” of hate, regurgitating Southern Poverty Law Center meme. She also noted that BHM was working on a “long-term stewardship” plan with a woke Mellon funded Philadelphia public art think tank, Monument Lab. This entire incident has been a mockery to the law. A Shenandoah County Circuit Court judge, after ruling against Richmond’s motion to dismiss the battlefields lawsuit during a hearing on March 6, urged the city of Richmond to reach a settlement.

It would be in better hands than BHM to have the monuments.

The MONUMENTS exhibition, which is essentially a massive publicity stunt, does not convey the unsavory tactics used by leftist activists during the Summer of Love that culminated in the degrading of one of America’s most beautiful boulevards. Kimberly Gray was a bravely outspoken former black city councilmember who represented Monument Avenue. She witnessed the nightly noisy crowds that gathered at Lee Circle to see the equestrian statue and its hideously painted pedestal. She says that “most of the kids were white, and many of them came from outside of town.” The spectacle was a manifestation of the anti-fa movement’s logistical approach, which worked in tandem with Black Lives Matter to create the River City 2020 disturbances. Gray watched as “bike marshals”, who were disembarking from vans to disperse bottled water and snacks, disembarked. Vehicles parked nearby served as dispensers of snacks and bottled waters. Even medics were present in case there were any altercations between the police and the protesters (which were, in fact, few). At the circle, armed white militants in body armor and gas masks were constantly on guard. They did not fight with the police. They reinforced the atmosphere of revolutionary autarky by serving the Antifa/BLM cause.

Gray, who was deeply affected by racism in her childhood, supported the removal of Confederate monuments as did many of her constituents. Some of them, Gray admits, were motivated by fear. She was forced to endure a noisy demonstration outside her home after a Charlottesville activist (a white software developer) posted her address on the internet. Her two children were terrified by potentially eye-damaging beams of light that flashed out the windows.

Gray is the only one who can understand that the Summer of Love did not advance the cause of racial equality. She also appreciates the artistry of the monuments that were removed. It is a long-term, difficult task to reach a consensus on the restoration and reinstallation at least of some of these monuments, as well as the erection new monuments that emulate past artistic accomplishments.

This would be a much better option than dumbing down Capitol Square.

Catesby writes about architecture and public art. She lives in Washington, D.C. and this essay was originally published in The City Journal. It is republished with permission.