Despite our long history of questioning the authority of the statue landscape, no movement has been able to dislodge it. The “living memorial” campaign after World War I did not stem the flood of doughboy monuments. Maya Lin’s abstract “anti-monument” to Vietnam veterans was a worthy successor to Nicholas’ blank tablet, but ended up spawning a backlash of realistic statues at the end of the century. Even the trauma of 9/11 and the rise of victim memorials have not displaced figurative sculpture from the collective memorial imagination. At the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, the huge structure of suspended steel columns inscribed with names of lynching victims has a realistic counterpart in a group of chained Black figures at the entrance to the memorial site. Even as monument design has become more spatial and experiential, the demand for traditional sculptural icons has remained strong, especially for hero monuments like the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the Mall.
Now, for the first time since the Revolutionary era, we are witnessing a full-scale reckoning with the long inherited tradition of public statues. If the protests seem scattershot, aimed only at particular monuments to bad men and ideas, the national (and worldwide) scope of the movement is mounting a more fundamental challenge to the undemocratic system that elevated those conquerors, enslavers, robber barons, and Confederates in the first place.
Monuments have never arisen by magic out of some sort of democratic consensus. They have always been built by small groups with access to power in order to advance their own agendas in the present. Most monuments are more about their makers than about the historical subjects those makers enlist into their cause.
Not surprisingly, much of today’s protest against statues comes from the very people who were excluded from the process of monument making in the past. Their attempts to redress that exclusion peacefully and make their views known often go ignored. In the absence of a legitimate process of public engagement, protest is often the only way to amplify their voices in the monumental landscape. Even so relatively few statues have been brought down by crowds, and far more by local authorities.
The response from our current president is yet another top-down directive with no process of democratic engagement whatsoever. His executive order for a “National Garden of American Heroes” mandates a collection of “lifelike or realistic” statues, “not abstract or modernist representations.” Even with its politically correct sprinkling of women and Blacks, there is not a single indigenous person on the proposed list—not even Pocahontas—a fitting erasure in a pseudo-initiative released on the day of a fireworks show over the sacred tribal lands of Mount Rushmore. This frankly ridiculous directive has been creatively “revised” by the activist research studio Monument Lab.
No monument garden will forestall the reckoning we must have with our inherited statues. And any honest reckoning will inevitably result in removals.