In light of the tragic consequences of American white nationalists clashing with anti-fascist demonstrators in Charlottesville, it can be easy to forget this started as a row about how councils should approach history.
A high school student, Zyahna Bryant, convinced the city council to vote to remove a statue of General Robert E Lee, among the most successful Confederate leaders during the Civil War, but a supporter of slavery, and to rename Lee Park as Emancipation Park. When Kristin Szakos, a city councilwoman, said the council voted to remove the 26-foot high statue because the city no longer wanted ‘to give pride of place to tributes to the Confederate lost cause', she might not have anticipated how the dispute would eventually lead the city into an international furore about statues and race.
Lee's statue is not the only historic monument in the firing line. Councils throughout America are rethinking more than 1,000 monuments deemed to lionize the architects and defenders of slavery. Since the violent events in Charlottesville, this programme has sped up. For example, the mayor of Baltimore ordered the removal of four Confederate statues in the city to be taken down in the dead of night. And protesters have taken matters into their own hands: in North Carolina they tied rope around the neck of a statue of a Confederate soldier and dragged it down, kicking and spitting on it. One statue of Christopher Columbus in Yonkers was decapitated, the head dumped next to a trash can. Another in Queens was defaced overnight with blue spray paint pedestal reading: ‘Tear it down. Don't Honor Genocide'. Some have noted these actions are chillingly similar to the barbarous assault on idolatrous historic carvings in the ancient cities of Palmyra and Nimrud by Islamic State.
Such controversies are now reaching the UK. While many don't culminate in such ugly scenes, passions run high on both sides of the history wars. This was illustrated by the heated arguments of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University's Oriel College, which demanded that a statue of the college's benefactor Cecil Rhodes be toppled because of his links to British imperialism.
And councils are in the middle of such rows. Examples abound.
When Nina Baker, a Green Party city councillor in Glasgow proposed renaming Buchanan and Dunlop Street, originally named in honour of tobacco magnates, she explained: ‘I thought we could start the ball rolling by raising awareness'. Now the ball is well and truly rolling.
Recently, a row broke out over plans to highlight Scotland's role in the slave trade with the council's decision to place a new plaque on one of Edinburgh's tallest statues to stress that 18th century politician Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, infamously delayed abolishing the slave trade. Edinburgh council now has to decide on a form of words for a plaque. Campaigner Adam Ramsay, whose public petition was first approved by councillors last September, wants it to say: ‘A prominent politician and government minister, Dundas was controversial even in his own era. He worked diligently to delay the abolition of the slave trade, blocked movements for democracy in Scotland, mobilised troops to quash protests against the Highland Clearances and, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was key to the expansion of the British Empire'.
But when the council declares that: ‘We remain open to new ways of interpreting history and the events they represent', it seems a dangerous precedent to start asking today's councillors to become so steeped in scholarship that they can be arbiters of historical nuance. Inevitably, there is a more complex story to be told. The current viscount said the proposed inscription was ‘wrong in almost every particular'. When Dundas, the most powerful Scottish politician of his day, amended an anti-slavery Bill to make abolition ‘gradual', some historians say he cost thousands of lives. However, others argue that this was ‘only to ensure that procedures were in place to deal with the repercussions of abolition' - think soft versus hard abolition. Can today's local government officials really be expected to decide on the historical truth?
In Bristol, the Colston Hall concert venue will reopen after refurbishment in 2020 with a new name, because Edward Colston, a 17th-century philanthropist who gave great sums of money to the city, made his money from slavery. He is memorialised throughout the city but the Countering Colston campaign is demanding that the large bronze statue of the slave trader should be moved by the council from the city centre into a museum. Of course, once you start the statue-phobia and renaming game, it can become relentless.
Nicholas Draper, director of UCL's Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership argues that until now ‘public culture…has been relatively unreflective of the post-colonial moment', but now however, ‘that is no longer a tenable position'. In this context, it might be tempting for British councillors to play this new history game to prove their anti-racist and progressive credibility.
But be wary. This is a politicised minefield and not necessarily popular despite the loudest voices lobbying and making the headlines. A poll for the Bristol Post found that people opposed renaming the Coulston Hall two to one and it is worth noting that more African-Americans would prefer the monuments to stay where they are than the take them down.
There are other lessons from America. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio opened a Pandora's box when he announced on Twitter that ‘after the violent events in Charlottesville, New York City will conduct a 90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property'. But as New York is home to the largest Italian-American population in the country, his anti-Columbus stance has provoked angry demonstrations from those residents. Sal Albanese, who is challenging de Blasio in the Democratic primaries has pointed out that the 1892 statue at Columbus Circle was funded by hard-earned contributions from Italian immigrants. To confound things further, one 23-year-old Haitian immigrant, Herve Monestime, quoted in the media, was generous about Columbus, despite his role in ‘the extermination of the indigenous population of the Caribbean island', explaining that ‘if it weren't for Columbus, Haiti wouldn't be Haiti. I can't say he was completely a bad guy. He was somebody who took a lot of risks. He was a brave guy'.
And isn't that the point? History is more complex. British cities are littered with statues and municipal buildings named after those who were heroes in their day and helped shape history, but whose views and actions we might find unsavoury today. Queen Elizabeth I murdered and persecuted catholics, Oliver Cromwell butchered the Irish, Palmerston starved peasants, Octavia Hill opposed votes for women. Margaret Thatcher was hated by millions, so inevitably the already contentious row between Westminster City Council and those behind the bronze ‘life size and-a-half' statue, created by the sculptor Douglas Jennings who want it to go up in Parliament Square - home to 11 statues – (the ‘monument saturation zone, considered unsuitable for new memorials') is now being opposed for fear of vandalism. Theresa May's spokesman said it was a decision for Westminster City Council, but added that ‘statues are a key part of this country's heritage' and those in Parliament Square were an ‘important reminder of people who've played a key role in this country's history'.
Then there are Britain's most illustrious stately homes, built or bought with money reaped from slavery. Should these historic buildings and everyday monuments, seen by people as they walked to work or went for a jog for decades, suddenly be viewed as a poisonous presence and worth so much political energy to remove? Who decides?
Afua Hirsch arguing in the Guardian that we should remove Nelson's statue from his column in Trafalgar Square, says the nation's hero is ‘what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist'. Instead, Hirsch demands that we honour abolitionist William Wilberforce, who she dubs as ‘unquestionably a force for good'. Is this the same Wilberforce, who after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 supported repressive acts against further protests and blamed ‘noxious doctrines' for the ‘discontents of the people in Lancashire'. As James Heartfield, author of The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 1838-1956 points out: ‘Trade unionists and democrats might say that statues of Wilberforce should be brought down, outraged at his hostility to the campaign for the vote for working people'.
Of course it is great to debate monuments and their history, but with a particular concern about whether it amounts to Khmer Rougesque iconoclastic demands to tear down these statues are a performance of historical amnesia airbrushing history.
The problem for councils is if they give in to campaigners whose logic seems to be cleansing of public life so that we should see only historical figures activists approve of and who police history can often seem more about today's activists fighting their own contemporary battles imposition of ‘correct' historical and political thinking a projection of political correctness into the past than a genuine attempt to set the historical record straight.
Professor Sir Geoff Palmer welcomed the Edinburgh plaque by arguing: ‘A lot of prejudice today is based on the cruelties of the past…Putting up plaques can help dampen racism and potentially remove it'. But to demand that the past conforms to our present-day beliefs means putting forward a version of history that can be manipulated to suit the present. Alfred L. Brophy, professor of law at the University of North Carolina, warns against the rush to make Confederate artifacts disappear because it ‘allows certain people to rewrite history' contending ‘that removing these monuments leads to forgetting', and will, ‘quite literally, erase an unsavory – but important – part of our nation's history'. Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull condemned the 'cowardly act' of iconoclasm against Columbus, wrote on a Facebook post. 'We do not advance the clear-eyed telling of the truth as we see it today, by trying to obliterate the reality of the different perspectives of times past'.
When renegade Irish republicans blew up Nelson's pillar, in the centre of Dublin in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the poet WB Yeats said: ‘We should accept the whole past of this nation, and not pick and choose.' Even the IRA noted that ‘we have refused to settle for the destruction of the symbols of domination; we are interested in the destruction of the domination itself'.
Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas
