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It's time to re-up the archivist energy on the Confederate monuments in the civic squares of this country: are they "art" that must be protected?
No. They're mostly shit.
Not just for what they represent, the Lost Cause, but inherently. The statues came from fucking factories.
No. They're mostly shit.
Not just for what they represent, the Lost Cause, but inherently. The statues came from fucking factories.
Late 19th and early 20th century papers have no shortage of ads like this for "National Fine Art Foundry" and other companies that upgraded their business from cemetery headstones to mass-producing the soldier boys everyone wanted for their town.
The Lost Cause ideology was wildly popular with people just distanced enough in time from the conflict to feel nostalgic for a time they never experienced, a war they saw as having been wrongly lost by the noblest side, and the urge to "commemorate" it was overpowering.
And boy did the market respond to the demand. Here's a sketch of the Monumental factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Now remember - once you've made a mold for a metal statue, making additional copies is trivial. Just use the same mold over and over, and cast it again and again.
Now remember - once you've made a mold for a metal statue, making additional copies is trivial. Just use the same mold over and over, and cast it again and again.
So they printed catalogs you could order soldiers from. Here's a popular one Monumental made, with a customizable option: make it a Union soldier or a Confederate soldier by changing the belt buckle and cartridge case.
Now that you know this, you'll realize that there must have been mistakes, and you're right: lots of them. It's really not uncommon to see a soldier's monument with what a trained eye can tell is from the wrong army, but no matter. All sales are final, towns put them up anyway.
Here's one a lot of Virginians will recognize: there are ten of him in Virginia alone, and at least 26 documented in situ throughout the South.
Knowing these Confederates are largely mass-market products helps explain how it is that so many of them went up so quickly. Here's a rough frequency of the installation of Confederate war monuments, which you'll note overlaps with explosions in overt, aggressive acts of racism.
And this dude, well, he was the most popular soldier of all that came out of the monument mills, as the original foundry actually made a mint selling *copies* of the *mold* to other foundries so they could make him too.
There are *86* of this exact statue still standing.
There are *86* of this exact statue still standing.
So in short, no, the bulk of the Confederate monuments that infest the South do not represent achievements in the art of sculpture, great lifts of craftsmanship, or anything of the sort.
They were ordered out of a catalog and shipped via rail from a factory in New York.
They were ordered out of a catalog and shipped via rail from a factory in New York.
(and finally, no, you don't get to fucking keep the ones that are custom jobs because the reason you put the fuckers up was still to be racist fucks)
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