After Charlottesville: Trump and taking down statues

Donald Trump has come up with some interesting remarks on the clashes that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. These were the background that led to the murder of a protester  leading to the murder of a protester, Heather Heyer, and the injury of several others, by a white supremacist who took a leaf out of the terrorists’ book, and drove a car into the crowd. 

Trump said:

Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee. This week, it is Robert E Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop? George Washington was a slave owner. Are we gonna take down statues of George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? ... Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now are we going to take down his statue? … You're changing history, you're changing culture...

Robert E. Lee: should his statue go?

In a sense, he has a point, though not the one he thinks he’s making. It’s true that iconic figures from the US past have terribly tarnished images: George Washington was a slaveowner who never freed any of his slaves, even on his deathbed.

Thomas Jefferson too, who penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” clearly felt the right to liberty was alienable for anyone with African blood. Why, he even took it from his own family. Visitors to his house at Monticello commented on the strange sensation of being served at table by slaves whose looks made it absolutely clear they were Jefferson’s own sons. He had fathered them on another of his slaves, Sally Hemings. 

He enslaved his own children? What an indictment.

So one can see an argument for taking down their statues.

However, that would mean simply ignoring their real achievements elsewhere. One of Washington’s finest was to have led the American army to victory over the British colonial power, and then to have resisted the temptation to take on the military dictatorship that was clearly open to him. And Jefferson was the voice of the revolution. He may have behaved shockingly in his home, but at least he set certain principles for democratic behaviour – though limited only to white males at the time – which have become a benchmark for the rest of us to aim at (but for everyone).

So maybe their statues should remain after all.

What about Lee?

I’ve never understood why he had monuments anyway. He swore allegiance to the United States, served in its armed forces, and when his state rose against his country, chose to side with his state. He couldn’t, he claimed, draw his sword against his “country”, but by that he meant Virginia, not the USA.

That made him an oathbreaker and turncoat. In absolutely strict terms, he committed treason. And that betrayal was directed at the very country, the United States, most Southerners would loudly uphold today.

Why on earth celebrate such treason? Why tolerate monuments to it? Why aren’t they in the forefront of the movement to tear down his statue?

Don’t think it was the only option open to him. His fellow-Virginian, George H. Thomas, made the opposite decision. He remained loyal to the country to which he had sworn allegiance and to the army in which he served. He became, in my view, the most effective general on either side – significantly better in that respect than was Lee himself.

That view runs counter to the claims of many who maintain that Lee deserves our respect as a great soldier. Really? He sent men to march a mile under devastating fire from enemies in well-protected positions, in what became known as Pickett’s Charge on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. George Pickett himself, the man who gave his name to the charge though he didn’t order it, when asked to put his division in order for a defensive fight after the charge, replied that he no longer had a division.

Men like Douglas Haig, who threw away hundreds of thousands of lives of British soldiers under his command in the First World War, and his equivalents in the French and German armies, simply took Lee’s Gettysburg lunacy to a new level of carnage.

As for Stonewall Jackson, well there’s little to say. He was a religious maniac and a man of appalling brutality. An effective soldier maybe but a thoroughly unpleasant man. Take down his statue by all means.

And why not, indeed, Lee’s too.

So, you see, Trump has a point. Though I doubt he’d agree with it if he thought it through. On the other hand, who’s ever accused Trump of thinking things through?

Oaks rather than mere iron

It’s always fun, or at least more often fun than it is instructive, to work your way through those self-help books that teach you all the wisdom you need to succeed in business, society or indeed life generally.

They tend to pick anecdotes carefully to illustrate their points. That makes me think of a vital principle from that unquestionably valuable book, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking fast and slow, “what you see is all there is”. We chuckle over one anecdote that seems to make an author’s point and conclude that it’s representative, rather than exceptional, and therefore proves a law. Often that’s a wild presumption.

Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way is the latest of these texts that I’m working through, and it’s certainly proving fun. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced: he argues, for example, that we need to focus on the thing in front of us, the task to be undertaken immediately, and not be distracted by visions of the remote goal. I’m convinced that it wouldn’t take long to find a book arguing, with equal conviction, for the opposition point of view, backing some variant of “not seeing the wood for the trees” to argue that without a vision of the whole, the work on any detail is likely to be misguided.

One of Holiday’s better anecdotes concerns Sam Zemurray. In the early years of the twentieth century, he was involved in a struggle with one of America’s leading corporations, United Fruit, for ownership of 5000 acres of land in Guatemala, ideally suited to the growing of bananas. The problem was that two individuals were in dispute for ownership of the land, so who could sell it?

United Fruit shipped in high-powered lawyers and set to work examining all the documents so they could establish, beyond all doubt, who had title to the land. This was an array of resources their competitor couldn’t match. That was a game they were bound to win.

Zemurray simply called in both putative owners and bought the land off both of them. So he paid twice. But he had the land. 

He beat them by playing a different game.

What Holiday doesn’t mention is that Zemurray later engineered a coup in Guatemala and eventually won control of United Fruit himself. A role model? I think perhaps not.

Still, he showed great ingenuity in winning that first battle. Ingenuity and above all, flexibility. That’s the notion I want to focus on.

Another book I’m not so much reading as listening to – one of the beauties of dog walking – is a biography of George Thomas. He was, in my view, probably the best of the US Civil War generals, and perhaps even one of the best generals of any war, anywhere in the last couple of centuries. He never lost a battle, he won the Union’s most comprehensive victory, and he never wasted his men’s lives in hopeless, glorious, criminal charges.

One of the generals who served with him, and later became President of the United States, James A. Garfield, said of him that he was “not a man of iron but of living oak”. That description struck me as highly attractive. Unlike iron, living oakwood is strong and yet adaptable, in that it will bend with the wind to avoid breaking, though it can also withstand a great deal. Above all, it is, as Garfield’s words especially underline, alive with all that implies of warmth and openness to other living beings.

That in turn got me thinking of a more recent time when “iron” was used as an epithet for character. The “Iron Lady” was Maggie Thatcher. She was truly iron in just the way that Thomas was not. Inflexible, sure she was right, she purused the objectives her ideology dictated to her inexorably and without compassion.

Her baleful shadow hangs over us still . Britain has been pursuing Thatcher-style austerity for seven years, with the stated aim of reducing debt – which has doubled. It still regards “regulation” a dirty word – and the terrible fire that killed at least 80 in Grenfell Tower has shown where that leads.

The difference now is that signs are beginning to emerge of a tiredness with this dogmatism. Far more people voted against the Tories in the recent general election than many of us expected. The most recent social attitudes survey shows opinion beginning to harden against austerity . And the decision to prosecute people, 30 years on, for the deaths of 96 people at the Hillsborough football stadium disaster interestingly includes charges that health and safety concerns were ignored, as at Grenfell Tower. Generally, the terms “health and safety” tend to be followed by the words “gone mad”, to make the notion a favourite butt of the anti-regulation crowd.

Well, maybe just as people are realising that austerity can be bad for your health, they’re also waking up to the fact that health and safety are to be cherished rather than despised.

Could this be the dawning of a time for people of living oak rather than iron ladies?

Those who emulate the ingenuity and flexibility of Zemurray, rather than Thatcher’s obstinacy?

Although perhaps we needn’t going quite so far i following him as to back coups in vulnerable foreign nations...

Sometimes it's the less well known who are the most interesting

George H. Thomas isn’t exactly a name to conjure with. And yet, sometimes, the obscure figures from history can inspire as much admiration as the celebrities.

Thomas had a lot in common with a much more well known military character, Robert E. Lee. Both men won good reputations for themselves during the Mexican-American War. Later Thomas was posted to the US Military Academy at West Point, where he served under Lee. Most important of all, though, both men were Virginians. “the Old Dominion” was the wealthiest and most populous of the British American colonies, which produced some of the most significant figures of the Revolutionary War, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. After independence, it was the leading State, producing four of the first five presidents.

George Thomas: overshadowed by more famous men

In 1861, the United States were torn apart by Civil War. Again, Lee and Thomas had similar attitudes: neither liked slavery, both deplored session. But there the similarity ended.

Lee made a decision which leaves me appalled even today. Despite his views about slavery and recession, Lee announced that he couldn’t “draw his sword” against Virginia. So when his State joined the Secession, he resigned from the army of the United States and went on, as is well known, to become the outstanding general of the Confederacy.

Thomas, on the other hand, took a decision which strikes me as far more comprehensible and, above all admirable. He went with his conscience rather than his roots, and stayed with the Union.

Although in the end he had a distinguished Civil War record with the Union, it wasn’t a straightforward process. His first major achievement was at a serious Union defeat: at the battle of Chickamauga, Thomas was serving under General Rosecrans whose army broke and fled – with the exception of Thomas’s division which stood firm and prevented a defeat turning into a rout.

The achievement won him the nickname “Rock of Chickamauga”. it also gave him command of the army in which he was serving, when Rosecrans was relieved.

It was in that role that he faced the last great counter-attack by the Confederacy in the War, in the Battle of Nashville. And the confederates weren’t the only adversaries he faced. Ulysses Grant had by then become commanding general of the Union armies. He may have had some doubts about Thomas’s loyalties, but he was above all concerned by his slowness in tackling the army threatening Nashville. He wasn’t alone: Abraham Lincoln, who’d been disappointed by a whole string of dilatory, slow, timid generals who failed to tackle Lee when they could win, and lost when he took them on. Would Thomas be simply another such?

He was nothing of the kind. At first, he was waiting for his cavalry to be fully ready. And then – it was December – ice storms turned the country impossible. Thomas waited for the thaw and almost waited too long: the general Grant had sent with orders to relieve him if Thomas had still not initiated action, was already on his way, and Grant himself not far behind him, when Thomas decided to engage the Confederates.

The result was one of the great battles of the War, and one of the most decisive victories: the army against him was badly mauled and so disorganised that it  it never operated as a fighting unit again. Despite the pressure from Washington, Thomas had a major success to his credit.

After the war he commanded a large area of southern territory, based around Tennessee, and used the authority this gave him to act on behalf of black freed slaves who were suffering at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan or simply of racist judges. Later on, Andrew Johnson, who took over as President after Lincoln’s assassination, fell out with many of the men who’d been closely associated with the murdered statesman, including Grant. He asked Thomas whether he would replace him as commanding general, but Thomas refused on the grounds that he wasn’t interested in playing political games.

He ended up appointed to command in California, where he died sadly young, at 53. But the saddest thing of all? None of his relatives attended his funeral. They couldn’t forgive him for having turned against Virginia.

Like I said. The more obscure characters from history can sometimes be the most intriguing.