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Modern Liberalism’s False Obsession With Civil War Monuments
By Jason L. Riley
A
statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson in
Richmond, VA - Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Black
accomplishments in the ’40s and ’50s prove that today’s setbacks are not due to
slavery.
Visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York
City, and between exhibits of dinosaur skeletons, Asian elephants and Alaskan moose
you might notice a bust of Henry Fairfield Osborn and a plaque honoring Madison
Grant. Osborn and Grant were two of the country’s leading conservationists in
the early 1900s. They also were dedicated white supremacists.
Osborn, a former president of the museum, founded the
Eugenics Education Society—now known as the Galton Institute—which sought the
improvement of humanity through selective breeding.
Grant, a co-founder of the
Bronx Zoo, is known today for his influential 1916 best seller, “The Passing of
the Great Race,” a pseudoscientific polemic arguing that nonwhite
immigrants—which included Eastern and Southern Europeans by his definition—were
tainting America’s superior Nordic stock.
Osborn, who was a zoologist by
training, wrote the introduction to Grant’s book, which Hitler called “my
Bible.” The New Yorker magazine once described Grant as someone who “extended a
passion for preserving bison and caribou into a mania for preserving the
‘Nordic race.’ ”
Given their options, why are liberals so focused on
monuments to Civil War figures?
Politically, it makes some tactical sense.
The
GOP has spent decades warding off claims of racism, and forcing Republican
politicians to defend prominent displays of Confederate statuary keeps them on
the defensive. [Even though Democrats created the Confederacy and put up the Confederate statuary.]
On another level, however, liberals make a fetish of Civil War
monuments because it feeds their hallowed slavery narrative, which posits that
racial inequality today is mainly a legacy of the country’s slave past.
One problem with these assumptions about slavery’s
effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were
able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when
white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert
E. Lee’s likeness in a public park.
Today, slavery is still being blamed for
everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black
neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income. Yet
outcomes in all of those areas improved markedly in the immediate aftermath of
slavery and continued to improve for decades.
Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black
marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates.
In
the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black
incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by
40 percentage points.
Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and
prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class
professions quadrupled.
In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady
progress was being made.
Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve
due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve
notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal
segregation.
In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow,
stall, or in some cases even reverse course.
The homicide rate for black men
fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s.
But in the 1960s all
of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly
90%.
Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow
or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left
will even entertain.
Just ask Amy Wax and Lawrence Alexander, law professors
at the University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego, respectively,
who were taken to task for co-authoring an op-ed this month in the Philadelphia
Inquirer that lamented the breakdown of “bourgeois” cultural values that
prevailed in mid-20th-century America. “
That culture laid out the script we all
were supposed to follow,” they wrote.
“Get married before you have children
and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for
gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Be respectful of
authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
The professors noted that disadvantaged
groups have been hit hardest by the disintegration of these middle-class mores
and that the expansion of the welfare state, which reduced the financial need
for two-parent families, hastened social retrogression. “A strong pro-marriage
norm might have blunted this effect,” they wrote. “Instead, the number of
single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic
failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.”
For the suggestion that something other than continuing
racial bigotry and the legacy of slavery has contributed to racial inequality,
a coalition of faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania promptly
accused the professors of advancing a “racist and white supremacist discourse.”
The reality is that there was a time when blacks and whites alike shared
conventional attitudes toward marriage, parenting, school and work, and those
attitudes abetted unprecedented social and economic black advancement.
