Leave monuments choice up to local governments – Times Daily

More than 150 years after Gen. Robert E. Lees surrender at Appomattox Court House, we are still fighting the Civil War, highlighting that more than states rights and maybe even more than slavery, the War Between the States was a clash of cultures.

How else can one describe how people look at monuments to the Confederacy today and see such radically different things? To some, they are monuments to bravery and heroism in the face of inevitable defeat. To others, they are monuments to a political system built on oppression oppression not only of blacks held captive in chattel slavery but of poor whites held down by the plantation aristocracy.

Just as the Civil War was a cultural battle between a rapidly industrializing, mercantile North and an agriculture-dependent, feudal South, so, too, the modern battle over Confederate monuments often comes down to culture.

On the one hand, there is the Old Souths preoccupation with tradition, honor and all the sorts of aristocratic, upper-class virtues one finds in old Arthurian romances. On the other, there is the New Souths hard-nosed pragmatism, which focuses on the commercial values of the middle class.

Perhaps no one has ever understood this divide better than Mark Twain, a man of the South who ultimately sided with and moved to the North. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court both take the side of common-sense pragmatism over what Twain saw as aristocratic hypocrisy.

The debate over Confederate monuments isnt just about race. Its about one side that wants to honor its past, and another that fears scaring away business and tourists. And now the divide isnt North vs. South, but between different groups within the South.

That is why the most sensible compromise in dealing with Confederate monuments is to leave the matter to the local governments whose taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for the monuments upkeep.

New Orleans decided to take its Confederate monuments down. Agree with the decision or disagree with it, it was the citys decision to make, and no other level of government stopped them.

The same, however, cannot be said in Alabama. Here, the state Legislature has stepped in where it is not needed, forbidding the removal or renaming of monuments and buildings without first going through a cumbersome review and approval process. The new laws backers say theyre protecting history, but none of this would be an issue were not other states and cities re-evaluating their Confederate memorials, many of which were erected during the height of the civil rights era and with, at best, dubious motives.

That is why Hanceville Mayor Kenneth Nail might ought to be careful what he wishes for.

Nail has written the mayor of New Orleans a letter asking to take New Orleans unwanted Confederate statues off its hands.

New Orleans leaders have other plans for the monuments and are unlikely to say the least to gift them to Hanceville. So, Hanceville may have dodged a bullet.

Once erected, the monuments would be subject to Alabamas new law, and who is to say that in a few years the people and leaders of Hanceville would feel the same about maintaining Confederate monuments and unwanted hand-me-downs from another state at that?

South Carolina lowered its Confederate flag for good when it threatened to cost the state business.

The spirit of Twains Connecticut Yankee prevailed even in the sharpened edge of the Confederacy. It might someday prevail in Hanceville and other Alabama cities and towns, too.

Thats the real reason the modern-day aristocrats in Montgomery took the decision out of local hands and into their own.

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Leave monuments choice up to local governments - Times Daily