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There’s a Chance to Tell a New American Story. Biden Should Seize It.
How to reimagine the country’s memorial landscape.
By
Mr. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
On July 9, former Vice President Joseph Biden announced a new slogan for his campaign: “Build Back Better.” In economic terms the tag line makes sense even if it lacks moral inspiration. It complements the call others have made for a “Building Back Freer” Covid-19 recovery process that both incorporates our current racial reassessment in the United States and responds to an escalating crisis of labor exploitation and modern slavery across the globe.
When Trumpism can finally be ushered into oblivion, there will be much to rebuild. Our new Reconstruction will need local imagination, but also federal leadership on the cultural front.
The Biden campaign has established task forces on health care, immigration, the economy and racial inequality, education, climate and immigration. The campaign should promptly do the same on our roiling national confrontations over monuments, memorialization, and the learning and uses of history.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, between the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., in June 2015 and June of this year, as the protests against the murder of George Floyd filled American streets, over 100 Confederate monuments or symbols were removed across the country. Many more have been toppled in the past month. Thousands more statues, street and school names, plaques and other emblems of the Confederacy remain. In time much if not all of this memorial landscape in civic spaces may be removed.
Similarly, there are countless other troublesome memorials in America unrelated to the Confederacy, but now under scrutiny and attack by comparable impulses born of the oppressive histories they represent. In New Mexico, a crisis over public memory has arisen again over the Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Onate. Three monuments may come down soon, and the mayor of Santa Fe, Alan Webber, has called for a “truth and reconciliation” commission.
California is once again confronting the monuments to Junipero Serra, a founder of the missions that exploited and led to mass killings of Native Americans. On June 20, a monument to Father Serra was removed in Los Angeles. This month, a mission founded by Father Serra in San Gabriel, Calif., was badly damaged by fire.
And we haven’t even mentioned how Christopher Columbus’s days on the American public landscape may be numbered.
The Biden campaign should seize this historical moment. If this election is about the “soul” of America, let’s probe its historical depths. Never before has such a public debate occupied our consciousness about national memory. Public monuments and memory underwent an artistic and political revolution in the five or six decades after the Civil War, and the Confederate Lost Cause ideology fared far better than the story of Emancipation or even that of Union victory.
The Vietnam War, the AIDS crisis and Sept. 11 all had their influence on how we comprehend public memorials, as did an ever-growing knowledge of Native American history. But never have we seen such a wholesale effort to remove a huge part of public representation of our past as in the five years since Charleston. This process will continue to be chaotic, pluralistic and driven by excesses as well as reasoned deliberation. But it needs leadership.
The Biden campaign might take its cues from the Congressional Black Caucus. In recent weeks under the leadership of Representatives Karen Bass, Sheila Jackson Lee and Barbara Lee, among others, the caucus has proposed a commission on reparations for slavery and segregation, a separate commission on the “legacies of slavery,” a quest to remove all 13 Confederate monuments from the Capitol, and a robust bill on criminal justice reform and policing that includes an appeal for a federal anti-lynching act, an idea now 99 years old.
Mr. Biden and his campaign should support this effort, not by endorsing one specific measure after another, but by creating a serious task force or commission that would first comparatively study the issues of “repair,” monuments and memorialization, and promoting a richly pluralistic version of American history to the largest possible public. A wide array of cultural institutions have been doing so for many years.
Mr. Biden could name someone like Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian and the founding director of the National African-American Museum of History and Culture, to lead such a task force. Representative Bass would make a great co-chair, as would Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico. If Mr. Bunch considers the role a conflict at this point given his position, perhaps former President Barack Obama could take the initial role as chair. He possesses a demonstrated sense of history and would lend tremendous prestige.
Appoint to the commission museum professionals, historians, curators, art historians, writers, practicing artists, some members of Congress and perhaps some citizens who have long demonstrated informed interest in advancing a proud but diverse and contradictory American story for the ages. The chaotic process of the monument wars needs national leadership, not to tell local leaders and groups what to do, but to provide research, informed guidelines, best practices, new and imaginative ideas — a history — to the challenge of making a “new” national memorial landscape.
The task force should not merely provide lists of new “heroes,” nor any “gardens” of monuments. Perhaps we need to think of memorializing ideas, concepts, epic historical movements and events. Men on horseback had their day aesthetically. Let’s have the courage to imagine government as a source of creative engagement with our most difficult pasts, our most harrowing tragedies, our renewals and our enduring values. Let’s not look for purity in past or present, but let imaginations soar. Assemble people who have already been doing this for much of their lifetimes, however messy, conflicted or strained the task.
The national task force can in time recommend ways to provide localities with resources, models, advisers and even artists. The task force can study how South Africa, Germany, Brazil and many other nations have or have not confronted their pasts in public memory or in law. We hear every day that Americans must confront “400 years of racism.” But what does that mean? How do we find the access points to this story in its nearly countless and changing contexts? History is not a scoresheet; it is a land both foreign and familiar. It lives in us even as it can seem so far away.
Let’s have the moral courage to demonstrate that Americans actually can face their pasts, and organize their incomparable intellectual, artistic and organizational resources to forge as honest and as cleareyed a public historical landscape as that of any nation in the world. To the bafflement we now face around the globe as a country that could still commemorate so widely the side that lost our Civil War in an insurgency to preserve slavery and destroy the American experiment, we would show the world that we can make ourselves better — and freer — again. Americans claim a redemptive narrative, but we know the darker stories as well. Let’s declare that we can do this by acknowledging and not by denying our pluralism, our inhumanity, our bitter contradictions, our victories and our humane gifts to the world.
As we are witnessing, the problem of the 21st century in this country is some agonizingly enduring combination of legacies bleeding forward from conquest, slavery and color lines. Freedom in its infinite meanings remains humanity’s most universal aspiration. How America reimagines its memorial landscape may matter to the whole world.
Americans ache for leadership on this question even as we will fight like the devil, our natural right, over its outcomes. Joe Biden can provide that leadership.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale and the author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
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