By Brian Carnell

Friday, October 22, 1999

I agree with Foner's plea in a review of James Loewen's Lies Across America, for a more accurate depiction of American history in its monuments (on the other hand I think Loewen himself tends to be as biased as those he criticizes in his books):

Americans applauded the Muscovites who in 1991 toppled the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, but citizens of New Orleans who demanded the removal of the monument glorifying the White League were denounced as "Stalinists" by a leading historian in the pages of the New York Times. The point is not that every monument to a slaveholder ought to be dismantled but that existing historical sites must be revised to convey a more complex and honest view of our past, and that statues of black Civil War soldiers, slave rebels, civil rights activists and the like should share public space with Confederate generals and Klansmen, all of them part of America's history.

Source:

Our Monumental Mistakes. Eric Foner, The Nation, November 8, 1999.

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