Scholars and intellectuals are sometimes so focused on tracing the specific provenance of various theories and ideas—in part because we need to have our own contributions acknowledged for the sake of our own reputation—that we miss those moments when an idea becomes generalized, a general form of social reason.
Somewhere between 1921 and 2021, the wider society came to accept an understanding of power that decouples it from formal political systems and that no longer sees power as purely coercive, constraining or dominating. Think of all the contexts in which we seek empowerment in a largely positive fashion, or talk about power imbalances as an embedded, ordinary part of many social and cultural relationships. We may seek equity in the distribution of power, but we don’t seek to be free of it. In fact, we almost mean to say that it is synonymous with or a replacement for what we might have meant but autonomy or freedom—that to be free, we have to have the power to do as we will, and that has to go for everybody—that as long as power is given to one by depriving another of it, nobody is really free. That has something to do with Foucault and poststructuralist thought, and something to do with many social movements and conceputalizations of identity, but I think to some extent the formal thought was parallel to a social transformation rather than the cause of it.
So we don’t see power as a zero-sum formality any more—that you have it or you don’t. We don’t see it as something confined to formal systems of authority: it can be everywhere. We don’t see it as something that is always repressive or coercive: it can be the infrastructure of freedom. Tomorrow more people can have more power than there was available to have yesterday. But many of us do also understand that expansion of power as a redistribution of it as well.
We say that victors write the history books. More than anything else, that explains why some people fight to keep Confederate statues and why some people fight to keep English country houses unassociated with slavery or empire. The people fighting to keep the statues, to forbid the audits, to keep out the new signs or exhibits, say that they are fighting to keep the truth of history intact. And so they are, in their way. The statues are not artifacts of the American Civil War at its conclusion, a sign of peace-making. They were erected by the winners of the Second Civil War that began at the end of Reconstruction, by the architects of a new white supremacy that took shape at the close of the 19th Century and began to fall apart in the 1960s.
Victors put up statues. The Confederate statues were erected by the power of the winners of a long struggle between freedom and oppression that followed the Civil War. The winners fought for oppression, and that is what those statues have always meant ever since: that oppression won that round.
Victors write plaques and create meanings: the English country houses after the 1930s were remade by the National Trust to be the blandly safe mansions of history’s benign gentlemen surrounded by history’s yeoman farmers, ready for picnics and the singing of “Jerusalem”. To forget what the previous centuries had meant and been, whether it was the dark satanic mills but a few leagues from the houses, the whips and chains of slavery in the Americas, or the looting of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Historians today like to bewail that people either have forgotten the real history of these commemorations or become attached to a kind of landscape of civic familiarity that has no particular meaning to them. I think this puts us in a familiar losing position of scolding unruly pupils who didn’t study for the test.
It takes the edge off of what we’re really doing, which is the redistribution of power. Not a zero-sum redistribution. The English country houses can still be a place for picnics and tours. All empires, all states, all societies, leave behind them artifacts and objects that we can find aesthetically and culturally pleasing and interesting. To know the Pyramids of Giza were erected by slaves shadows their meaning, but it doesn’t require us to demolish them or reduce them to nothing more than blood and death. To tour Dyrham Park and know of its connection to slavery—visible in artwork within the house—doesn’t reduce it to nothing more than this connection. To insist that this connection, this undeniable truth, be visible at all times to all visitors, on the other hand? That is a redistribution of the power to make history.
To pull down Confederate statues that were not made at the end of the Civil War as a commemoration of its violence and its peace but were made by Lost Cause ideologues to announce the ascension of Jim Crow and a new national form of white supremacy? That is correcting a lie, but it is also a redistribution of the power to make history. We can make new monuments, if we choose—or choose other forms and shapes for public memory.
The struggle to recommemorate and decommemorate the built landscape of modern Western societies is certainly a struggle between truth and falsehood. But we cannot stop there. It is true that Jim Crow was established, and true that the Confederate statues commemorated its victory. At the time they were erected, their builders scarcely bothered to hide that precise truth: Julian Carr told those gathered at the erection of “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina in 1913 precisely what the statue meant: the victory of “Anglo-Saxons” and the violent punishment of Blacks. It is true that the English country house was a conscious fabrication of a symbol of white English national belonging even as the United Kingdom struggled to be part of a world full of newly independent nations made from the colonies it had exploited and dominated.
As we succeed in removing those statues, making those audits, rewriting those plaques and explanations, changing those meanings, we are succeeding in the redistribution and expansion of power over and through history. More people with more power to make the truth visible—and so we commemorate, sometimes through absence, a victory in a still-unfinished struggle to secure the freedom of all.
Image credit: "File:Robert E Lee statue removed from column New Orleans 19 May 2017 12.jpg" by Infrogmation of New Orleans is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Having just finished reading How the Word Is Passed, I could not agree with you more.
Not to detract from the original point of your post, Tim, but contemporary Egyptologists have moved away from the old idea of “slaves building the pyramids” to something more along the lines of young men owing labor/duty (bak) to their lords working in shifts around the agricultural cycle built the pyramids. These labor units evidently named themselves things like “Drunkards of Menkare,” according to graffiti found around the plateau, and consumed a great deal of bread, beer, and beef while performing their bak. That doesn’t detract from their hard, dangerous work, but buttresses your point that understanding the true history of things like monuments should enlighten us about the social and political circumstances of how those things came to be erected.