The Culture War Comes to the Old Dominion

Since 1969, "Virginia Is for Lovers" has been the tourism and travel slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Advertising Age called it "one of the most iconic ad campaigns in the past 50 years."

But the Virginia of 2020 seems to be another country than the friendly commonwealth to which this writer moved four decades ago.

Charlottesville, home to Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, has become famous as the site of a 2017 Klan-Nazi clash with Antifa over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a municipal park. During the clash, protester Heather Heyer was run over and killed.

There followed the inauguration of a new Democratic Governor, Ralph Northam, in 2018 and a new attorney general. Both, it was learned, had masqueraded in blackface in their college days. And two women accused their colleague, new Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, with rape.

Resignations were demanded. But all three hunkered down, and the crisis abated. Now a new cultural issue has emerged.

First-term Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, from the D.C. suburbs, has denounced Virginia's representation in the U.S. Capitol by statues of George Washington in the Rotunda and Robert E. Lee in the crypt a floor below. Both statues have represented Virginia for more than a century.

Wexton wants Lee replaced by an African American hero from a list that she and Rep. A. Donald McEachin reportedly submitted.

Two names on their list are unfamiliar figures from the desegregation days of the 1950s. The third is better known: Nat Turner.

In "The Americans: A Social History of the United States," published in 1969, author J. C. Furnas describes the deeds of the man Wexton and McEachin would be pleased to see replace Robert E. Lee:

"In August 1831, Nat Turner, paranoid slave preacher and cunjur man, led his superstition-fuddled followers to kill fifty-five whites of all sexes and ages in an aimless terrorizing of Southhampton County in the southeastern corner of Virginia.

"The poor twisted creature could hardly have found a worse time to sharpen Southern fears of a slave rising." Turner was tried and hanged and, that winter, writes Furnas, "The Virginia legislature voted down by a narrow margin a bill for gradual extinction of slavery."

Let me go out on a limb: If the Virginia General Assembly votes to replace Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol with a statue of Nat Turner, it will not be the unifying event Wexton imagines.

On Jan. 20, "Lobby Day" at the Assembly, thousands of gun advocates, many openly armed, will be coming to Richmond to protest new gun laws Northam and his new Democratic majority campaigned on and are determined to deliver.

Already, 110 towns, cities and counties in Virginia have created "Second Amendment sanctuaries" where new state laws that restrict gun rights will not be enforced by local authorities.

"Virginia is a former Confederate State with strong rural traditions and lax gun laws. Guns represent the strongest, reddest line against the demographic changes that have seen Old Dominion voters usher in a new era of Democratic leadership in recent elections.

"A Nevada-based group called the Oath Keepers said it is sending training teams to help form posses and militia in Virginia. The leader of a Georgia militia called Three Percent Security Force has posted videos and calls to arms on Facebook, urging 'patriots' to converge on Richmond."

Still, the divisions among Virginians are not only over history, heroes and guns, they are also moral and religious.

A year ago, Northam said he supported abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, and beyond, if an abortion were unsuccessful.

"(Third trimester abortions are) done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that's nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. ... The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother."

Unlike the seven states of the Deep South, Virginia did not vote to secede and leave the Union until President Lincoln issued his call to arms to put down the rebellion after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

Then the state of Virginia seceded from the Union as the colony of Virginia had seceded from Great Britain at Philadelphia 84 years before.

Today, it appears a new secession is underway. Virginians are separating from each other over issues as deep and divisive -- such as who can take innocent life and when -- as those that divided us in 1861.

Iconoclasm Spasm

Some Thoughts on the Destruction of Statues of Confederate War Heroes

My consistent reaction over time to the destruction of statues of Confederate generals has been to regard them as spasms of the mob and the product of cultish ideology. More particularly in the instances of Robert E Lee or Nathan Bedford Forrest, the desecrations are the product of a generation of miss education

Historically, they have a broader meaning and a sinister impulse. The French Revolution stands as an example of iconoclasm as a tool of social control rather than a mere expression of ideological purity.

Statues are icons and for millennia icons have stood in the place of written language. They are a visible, physical symbol of what is to be respected, venerated or even worshiped. Often after an episode of iconoclastic destruction new icons are erected to represent the new values to be respected, venerated or worshiped.

So in the French Revolution we saw the deliberate destruction of churches as well as the physical destruction of the bodies of priests and nuns, we saw the decapitation of the statues of Kings along the façade of Notre Dame, we saw the decapitation of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. All this was part of the rabid anticlericalism of the French Revolution. But keep in mind, the destruction of religious icons in the course of the French Revolution was not limited to the initial adrenaline upheaval but extended for four years when one might have expected passions to have cooled.

Not surprisingly, after Robespierre had led the way in a blood spasm of murder and iconoclasm, he turned about and erected a new icon toward a supreme being and summoned the people to a festival. Shortly thereafter he was guillotined.

Robespierre had erected a new icon to represent a new supreme being who was to be celebrated, venerated or even worshiped. Napoleon came along and was not in doubt about what should be the object of iconic worship; statues of Napoleon together with paintings exaggerating his Imperial magnificence became abundant. The phrase, the man on horseback, suggests statues of Napoleon. Not coincidentally, the more the cult of Napoleon grew, the more intrusive waxed his secret police.

The point is that the iconoclasm unleashed by the storming of the Bastille, a solid fortress torn down to rubble in a fit of iconoclasm, was a tool of the revolution, as was the propaganda of Goebbels that served the ideology of Nazism. The Jacobins knew that the icons of their ideology must supplant those of the ancient regime so they changed the calendar, renamed the months and supplanted every icon of the ancient regime they could lay their hands on.

Czar Nicholas of Russia and his family learned to their sorrow, just as Louis XVI and Marie Annette learned to their sorrow, that living human bodies are also seen as icons that must be destroyed if the ideology they represent is to be successfully supplanted. Small wonder that figures of dead Confederate generals must also be executed, decapitated, and rendered into rubble.

Quite often the iconoclasm assumes the aura of religious indignation. That is the sort of iconoclasm we have seen when the Taliban smote graven images into bits but hopefully not out of history. We saw much the same during the Protestant Reformation among the nonconformist sects who effaced religious images from church walls. These examples are illustrative of an impulse to destroy an icon not just because its presence is repugnant but because the absence of an icon is needed to conform to the theology of Islam or nonconformist sects. We are reminded that the 30 Years War was one of the worst holocausts to be visited on Europe. The German town whence my ancestor left for America in its website today describes the carnage as worse than that experienced during the second world war.

The French Revolution justified its iconoclasm by declaring it stood for liberty, equality, fraternity -all certainly enlightened impulses. But regicide or the murder of priests and nuns can hardly be described as enlightened. The Taliban justify their iconoclasm because it obeys the diktat of Allah but they proffered the same justification when they severed the heads of women and children.

When 21st-century American Talibans smash Confederate icons, they are preening their virtue for all the world to see that they themselves are not racists. They will not admit the humanity of the men whose effigies they destroy. They must make way for a whole new reality and they must sweep away historical reality to do so. The destruction of Confederate statues is not just a reaction but also a tool for social control.

God help us if the tearing down of 19th century men evolves into the destruction of 21st-century men. History tells us the temptation for the iconoclasts to indulge their ideology in blood and murder is very real.

Well, at least he recognized what the civil war was about.

"I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the north about. I've never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery."

Letter (1894), as quoted in The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (2005), by John M. Coski

"The South went to war on account of slavery. South Carolina went to war, as she said in her secession proclamation, because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln. South Carolina ought to know what was the cause for her seceding. The truth is the modern Virginians departed from the teachings of the Father's."

Letter to Samuel "Sam" Chapman (June 1907)

And he knew what fighting for the confederacy made him.

"Tell Mr. Gordon to load himself up on States' Rights before I come. Did he ever read John Baldwin's testimony before the Reconstruction Committee in wch., in answer to a question, Baldwin said that he & all Confederates had committed treason? I say the Confederates who deny they were rebels are ashamed of it. I am proud of it. What's the difference.

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