And missing from almost all the discussion about legacy, Reconstruction backlash, and so on, is any recognition that a statue is a work of art. I was touched by the testimony of a young woman on one of the news shows at the height of the marble-and-bronze mêlee. She was herself an artist—a painter, I believe, and I regret not recalling her name—and entirely in favor of removing the generals from public view. Still, she confessed that every time she saw one of them fall to the pavement, a part of her, the artist part, felt a pang. Someone (and I’m elaborating the young woman’s thoughts now) had sculpted Jubilation, had bent his or her skill, muscle, and imagination to his every facial feature, every detail of uniform and equipment, every twist of pose and attitude. She knew, I’m guessing, how it would feel to see her own work defaced. These considerations do not mean that all those statues should stay in place. But they should at least be accorded due process. The history of the statue itself and of the individual it represents should be given informed evaluation by people qualified to evaluate, as should the artistic quality of the work and the standing of its creator(s).

In the first evenings of television reportage, I saw many a statue take a dive without a clue as to the identity of either subject or sculptor. But soon, the sanctioned target area was broadened to carpet-bombing dimensions, taking in representations in which subject and artist are both well known. There was the instance of the famous grouping of T. R. in mounted splendor and his African- and Native-American companions on foot, carted away (whither is not yet known) from its position in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (In this case, I was the hometown white boy.) Its creator was James Earle Fraser, a highly regarded sculptor whose best-known creation is probably The End of the Trail. The T. R. group was for years a source of aggravation and debate, open to conflicting interpretations. But as I write this, there is the bewildering objection to the Boston monument that celebrates the bravery and sacrifice of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, whose charge on Ft. Wagner in Charleston, S. C., was the subject of the movie Glory. It valorizes the Union, not the Confederate, cause, and an abolitionist commander. When the monument was commissioned, it was intended as a memorial to Shaw alone, but his family insisted that Shaw would have wanted the African-American soldiers who served under him to be honored as well. So when the monument was unveiled in 1897, it, like the T. R. trio, showed a white leader on horseback, with his African-American infantrymen pressing forward on foot. The work was considered radically progressive at the time by Bostonians both white and black, and has occasioned no protest till now, when it is accused of portraying a racial hierarchy. And in a sense it does—the hierarchy of military rank. Shaw was white, the unit he commanded black. That’s just the historical truth, the way it was. And here the sculptor was Augustus St. Gaudens, a leading figure of the Beaux Arts movement (Fraser, in fact, was for a time one of his pupils) and creator of many an iconic figure, including several Civil War heroes of the North. He worked on this piece for fourteen years, and some consider it his greatest, not least for its portrayal of African-Americanness in a style that is a bonding of detailed realism with idealism. Nonetheless, there are cries for its transfer to a museum setting. And for a similar (or worse yet) fate for the dozens of marmorealizations of just about all the Founding Fathers, along with an assortment of Bible thumpers, age of Discovery voyageurs from Columbus on down, civic Pooh-Bahs, and others of imperfect moral standing.