I hear they put the 1891 monument in storage, which is better than simply destroying it. I think it’s important to remember not just what we value now, but what we once valued in the past, this includes the bad. The monuments are physical evidence of this. We never valued Benedict Arnold, but we do value all the innocent lives lost in the conflict, and once valued the lives of people like General Lee, who I honestly can’t fault for fighting the Union anyway, the guy might be the worst Confederate figure to point at for dishonor and suppression.
In regards to the rest of the discussion, I’m in general agreement with Dom (I think this is the first time we’ve been on the same side of an issue in this thread).
http://www.neatorama.com/2014/01/01/Americas-Monument-to-Its-Most-Infamous-Traitor-Benedict-Arnold/
Wow, I guess we’re closer to naming a military base after the guy than I thought.
Also, from an art history POV, the Confederate statues are mostly just mass-produced statues of the same guys over and over with different plaques underneath. They could probably destroy close to 700 statues and still have the complete set available for museums.
you think they are mass-produced?
At least a large portion are. Most were made all at once in a rush of Confederate fervor (basically when Reconstruction ended and the former Confederates wanted to signal to everyone who was in charge of their states again and not to get any ideas about things like retaining voting rights–they were intended to intimidate the nonwhite population, not to be the anachronistic larger-than-life participation trophies they are today). It’s cheaper to make one cast for multiple statues than one cast per statue. As long as you have enough different statues that there aren’t duplicates within one city, nobody will know the difference. At most, the local newspaper may run stories about how a statue had a “twin” in the town down the highway, just for local color.