i have responsibilities managing the staff and doing reviews. i have responsibilities to speak and to share information about the council as i'm doing this morning. so, yeah, it's a big job. and when the full-time chairman arrives, i will -- i will welcome her with open arms. but it has been a very enjoyable experience. >> and joining us on american history tv as the acting chair and the vice chair of the advisory counsel on historic preservation joo jordan tannenbaum, appreciate your time. >> thank you very much, peter. a pleasure. a pleasure. controlled substance now is an mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of wrkt. keep up with big events of live streamen floor proceedings from the u.s. congress, white house events, the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics. all at your finger tips. you can stay current with the

latest episodes of jarkt journal and find scheduling information for tv networks and cspan radio. plus compelling podcasts. cspan now at apple store and google play. download it nou. the front row seat to washington, any time, anywhere. good evening, thank you for tuning in. on behalf of all of us at the locally based independently owned book store books and books in miami, florida and in partnership with miami book fair it's my pleasure to welcome to you a virtual evening with erin l. thompson and ariel sabar. erin l thomas is a professor of art crime at john j. criminal ofs justice also author of possession where the curious history of private collectors

and her writing a appearance in "the washington post" ab"new york times" and art in america. to moderate the conversation we are joined by ariel sabar who is an award-winning journalist whose work appeared in the atlantic, "the new york times," harpers and many other publications. he is also the author of veritas, a harvard professor. and the gospel of jesus's wife a finalist for the editor. and editors book award throughout the evening broadcast you are invited to ask questions by using the ask a question at the bottom of the screen. we appreciate eve and every order and the generous donations from viewers everywhere. and now without further ado, i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage. >> hi.

wow, so thank you all so much for coming. dr. thompson has written a really timely and compelling book. you should all buy it. first she is a terrific writer. so the book is just a pleasure to read. but more importantly i think her booklets us peer behind the bronze and guilt surfaces of the statues adongre public squares and let's us see the people who made and paid for them. gets us into the heads of politicians abi dee logs and gristers who put them on a pedestal and let's us hear the voices on the losing end of the public displays. i forget which mythical figure turned humans to stone. but dr. thompson does the opposite. turns stone to flesh. and gets back the simplistic takes so many heard in the aftermath of george floyd's murder. let's get into it here. you're a scholar of art skrim.

and much research folk ds on antiquities luting and fakes how did you come to write this book. >> it's essentially because my girlfriend makes really good negronis. so i had a couple of those very tasty cocktails. and opened twitter. so don't tweet after drinking. unless apparent you want a book deal. pan and i saw the video of the toppling of the columbus in st. paul state capital. and i jokingly wrote a tweet about. that tweet went viral. and i got denounced by tucker calendars for leading the. >> can you tell us the tweet without getting in trouble. >> something like as someone who study attention the deliberate drugs of cultural property one of my specialties i just have to

say next time they should use chains instead of rope because it would go faster. i ended up interviewing the organizer of that particular protects. profiled him in the chapter and he assured me it came down mighty quickly didn't need advice from me and i got to delve into the complex reasons why he that important to do this protest, that act of civil disobedience as the prosecutors termed it when sentencing him to community service. but what was interesting to me was not so much the tweet but the arguing that went on in the comments that the -- there are thousands of them and people would say some things like what's wrong with columbus anyway sns or it's somehow uncivilized or unhuman to tear down statues at all. luke this is something that

people don't do. i thought have none of you ever ripped a photograph of your ex-from the fridge before. a human tendency tp my ph.d. is in art history. practically everything i study as a classicist was atom point toppled and thrown into a pit by people wanting to forget about it. i wanted to explain how changing statues is something that happens really any time regimes shift any time communities come to a new understanding of who is and who should be in power. and america has just been exceptional in having a large period of stability of statues so to speak, because we have had the a very dominant mod of who should run the country for a long time. now that we are starting to really have shifting questions about who should be in power it's no wonder that the debates are crystalizing around monuments.

>> and this is a perfect segue to my next question. let's i've about 170 monuments came down in the year after george floyd's death. about 100 of those monuments to the confederacy and 70 monuments to other historical figures like christopher columbus. has america ever before seen a period when so many monuments came down so quickly? >> no, not at all. there were periods of questioning monuments after dylan ruth's massacre in charleston in 2015 and the deadly unite the right rally in charlottesville in 2017. those were periods where debate focused around naming and flags. you saw a lot of removal of images of confederate battle flag from state flags. but the statues still stayed in place, or were even more

protected. so there was a backlash to protest of the enactment of laws to protect monuments from being moved. this is something that in quantity is unprecedented. but, again, not in human history. just in america and also if you want to talk about statue removal it's happened all along. one of the things i'm happy to have written about in the book is instance where statues were mechld owe removed because they offended with people power to remove them from the havls of congress et cetera. i also start the book with the abt fact that the first metal statue put up in america, the first equestrienne statue lasted only 7 years before torn down, the statue of george 3rd put up in 1770 in new york city. as soon as the declaration of

indpept was read newly proud rebelling americanser to it down. made from lead and made into bullets and used to fight the king's army. >> the price of admission alon. what a wild story. melted down to make the bullets that the -- that would be fired on the british, correct. okay. >> any, they talked about how there would be melted majesty fired at the king's troops. >> so if this is unprecedented in american history, where do we have to look sort of in sort of world history to find something roughly equivalent in terms of again the number and speed of the statues coming down? i'm probably sending you back to grad school here. but what -- where do they find this or do we not? is there something singular about this. >> you know i think it is singular.

because there are certainly lots of instances of massive statue removal, like the formerly soviet states, the independence from the soviet union, iraq with the fall of saddam, any sort of big change of power. you can fine the videos of blown up swastikas and stat yous of hitler at the close of world war ii. but what's unique in america is there hasn't been a regime change. we haven't yet arrived at the idea of okay, who do we not want any more? and who do we want? so we are many more arguments and discussions about statues rather than, all right, that one is definitely off. this one is off. >> what was different this time? surely there were periods in american history database let's take the late 1960s for instance when large numbers of protesters were angry about the rights and

living conditions of mine ortiz. >> there is a book by the author karen cox who complements my book in looking at the history of protests against confidante monuments up until about 2017. she finds some people discussing in the late 19th century, any time we would walk through this city square we would have something sharp to scrape away at the statue of john c. calhoun to show we didn't accept the statue. student protest nszs '60s and '70s that would paint messages on kvtd statues, et cetera. but i think in that period there

is more of a focus on adding new statues, like let's increase the representation in monuments. and there was a hopefulness of -- of that by adding countermonuments you could change the way that the public space operated. but i think in the last few years we've been realizing some of the monuments to continue to have -- to encourage harmful behavior to solidify people in their hatred and adding new monuments is not enough. we have to address the ones that we have. >> i see. so i think, you know people watching the takedowns on tv probably remember the most dynamic eye grabbing images, the images of mobs yanking them done with ropes and throwing them in rivers. you point out 80% of the monuments were moved by public officials. did that figure surprise you?

what to what extent do you think it's significant that public officials. >> it's hugely significant if you look at the headlines you think all the monuments were destroyed by -- by, you know, irrationally acting mobs and a lot of people including in the applies well we should -- maybe we should move monuments but it should be exact discussions not in the hand of a few angry people. i as i pointed out in the book the majority of 80% of the monuments removed have been done so officially. many -- for different reasons, some because the officials agreed that the monument should not be there. others to put it into storage to protect it. more importantly, to me it was learning how often monuments -- sorry. my camera has turned off. one second while i switch.

>> we can still hear you. so. >> okay. >> that's good. >> how often monuments that were torn down in 2020 had been the object of peaceful petitions, other sort of protests. for sometimes not just years by decades people's entire lives. and there was just simply no way of those complaints being heard. it's not surprising to me. but if people lose all hope that there to be a peaceful way of resolving their activities that they will turn to acts ever civil disobedience. >> the book tells so many crew cader putting up confederate stats some charltons, racists. was there a story in the

research that really surprised or that change your understanding of what you thought you knew about the history of these monuments? >> oh, man, how long do you have? there are so many of them. >> one that really -- what sort of -- sort of pops to mind when i -- foremost. >> well, we were previously about stone mountain. so i had actually never heard of stone mountain before i started writing the book. but it's the world's largest confederate monument, carved starting in 1914 by a skupter gus tom berg lan known for carve karvel mount rushmore but he was

hired to carve a head of lee. but he proposed multiple figures sweeping across the mountain did so because he got paid per figure, a proportion of the total price. he wanted to glorify the confederacy in order to make some more money. and he ended up really promising much more than he could provide. so he collected all of this money without really karvel almost anything. he only finished the head of lee after spending the equivalent of several million of today's dollars. they fired him and hired another skupter and blasted the head of lee. they he they lost one head of lee i figured one do you one to

go. >> this was a sculpture doing figures of lincoln -- there was no ideology willing back bone. he was looking to sort of cash in. >> he had made his fame skupting union leaders, lincoln in particular. he was gunning for the -- being chosen to do the lincoln monument memorial, soo hard this he named his son lincoln. he didn't get chosen. he was down on his luck when stone mountain came up. >> one of the most surprising and sort of counterintuitive pieces, passages for me was your argument that many confederate monuments were designed to keep white southerners in poverty by discouraging them from joining labor unions, end quote and finding common cause with black people. can you talk a bit about the evidence that led to you that

conclusion? it's not something that people would pick up on right away thinking about the monuments. how did they actually -- the silent sentinel statues maybe you can describe those a bit, what did they communicate to white southerners about their place in that -- in the political order? >> yeah, well, i sort of see this as me asking a seerds of stupid questions and tracking them down. of the questions is do these monuments honor people's artists? because that's a defense of confederate monuments encapsulated in heritage not hate. so they're about the heritage of the people who fought in the civil war, not about hating anybody. so i started to look at what people said about these monuments as they dedicated them. there are a lot of historical

newspapers that are digitized. and they love to report at length all the speeches given at the dedication of the monuments. and i saw that what was being praised about confederate soldiers at the dedication of monuments -- because the vast majority of confederate monuments are not a named general but the unsnoen soldier, and the duty to self-sacrifice, obedience who is paying for the monuments who wants to make this space it turns out many confederate monuments especially from the turn of the century up until around world war i were paid for by factory owners, mine owners, chile collar entrepreneurs who depended on

the low paid workforce. and they praised the working class men for accepting a life of social saturate fiks. in the hopes that they had be better employees. not just in general i also found often you see a confederate monument with the dedication speech go up in reaction to unionization efforts. the case is most clear in what i write about in bhirmg confederate monument which went up in two parts, nine years apart, both in reaction to a strike and both times the strike was organized interracially. it was really appealing white working class families to say don't cross the color lines in

hopes of improves your lives. you should pay attention to us, your betters and keep things as they were. one of the speeches even talks about, anydescendants of confederate veterans you are working as they did to combat the hideous specter of racial equity. >> keep people divided along racial lines they won't recognize they share economic interests. is that sort of the message? and i'll ask the next question realize going might sound a little fake. but i think dechgss are important. so i'll ask. why do civilizations put up statue. it ridiculously stupid. i want to dw get that out there. why do we put up statues? what is the work they are supposed to do. >> statues are community selfies. showing ourselves aso at our best angles, really about the

future not the past. they are to show us what we think should be honored, give us ideals, give us aspirations to make life better for ourselves in to it future. they are to show us who we should emulate. so i think when we have a certain type of person honored in monuments to the exclusion of others, then that makes it hard for everybody, especially in such a diverse country as america to see themselves on monuments. that's really to me a waste. shouldn't which be encourage everybody to live better lives rather than saying, you, over there you cabinet really do much just be happy earning low wages and pay attention to better people. >> politicians, including a certain former president have said that to remove a statue so to erase history.

do you agree? when trump was going on about how he needed to create a national statutory garden of -- there is a national executive order to this. he said they can't be in modern style. they have to be traditional representational style. but one of the people listed in the order is columbus, why i found deeply ironic because we don't have have any contemporaneous portraits of columbus it would have to be a speculative representation. that never happened. i thought the idea to take down a monument to erase harts, what i say to that is monuments are not how history is it taut. monuments themselves erase history by positing certain narratives and ignoring others. something i talk about in the

book northern civil war memorials hardly ever even acknowledge the existence of african americans, despite an incredibly high percentage of black men fighting in the union army. instead, if they acknowledged their existence they're depicted in sort of ration, kneeling, receiving emancipation as a gift rather than as happened in reality fighting -- or risking their lives to free others. so to take down this -- what history is that erasing? it's erasing a very particular picture of history design to enforce social norms. i'm not saddened. i think that history doesn't get erased until you erase all forms of communication of knowledge. and if you are walking around in your community and you think, oh, i'm not sure who is is that guy on that horse over there,

you'll know that not all statues do a great job of communicating any information whatsoever. >> i think you interviewed when you interviewed the indigenous activist make forsha he said that tearing down history, no we're exposing. he said the tearing down statues was a historical reckons which i was i thought was effective way to put it. >> just to say that he is a very interesting perspective. he had tried to get the statue removed peacefully for decades but didn't want it torn down in the story. he wanted it to be on display in what he terms a hall of shame with information about why it was there, the role columbus played, the role of add las vegas of columbus in america, et cetera. so he wasn't given a choice besides this -- sort of

desperate act versus a conversation. >> this leads perfectly to my next question. others support of the of the the removal of monuments that no longer community values but say they should be preserved in mums but rather than destroyed. in the museum the a argument goes the retrograde monuments can be interpreted by panels or art that diffuses or counterprograms the statute. the statue -- even in these proechgs. i wonder if you could tell us about what happened at the houston museum of african american culture after it took in the spirit of the confederacy statue and how that affected your view about the extent to which oppressive works of statary can be disarmed. >> i think taking down a statue doesn't erase history but lessens honor. if you are concerned about history you can think what -- how else can we display the statue to learn not just about the history it purports to represent but the history of its

use a monument, et cetera. a lot of people seem to flay like a duh answer. ut put it in a museum. but i don't think this is as sample an answer as one mantai think rich first of all storage is expensive display is it press expensive. preservation is expensive who is paying for all of this? a lot of museum professionals i talk to are kind of like, you know, we're not america's attic for racist stuff that we want to hide or america's strategist racism reserve there's not the role of museums. so really change people's minds or open people's mind to different perspectives to not have a museum gallery become a site of appreciation of the martyr dom of a statue, et cetera, you have to do a lot of work and so i decided in the book to profile the houston museum of african american culture which is the only harvicken american institution

to have rehomed a removed monument so far. what they did is take a lot of steps to ensure that this monument didn't exert dsht power it was designed to have. because it's a powerful monument, a beautiful gilded statue of an attractive person, winged, nude representing the ideals of confederacy. his body draws you in. so they put in a closed courtyard, surrounded him with other art works that are skurpts to know he is being watched. they have made other artist works that call it into question. they have a symposium. they have a goal, not just we don't want to destroy history. no, they want to use the statue to get to a better promotion.

use the emotional pull and bomerring and around. >> and did you a great job of explaining how complicated this was. i think was it the museum the statue was to damn beautiful. like it still exerts a sort -- its influence even if surrounded by in deprogramming. but in the end i think he makes the decision to -- to keep it, right, he says i like to keep the evidence. another great line. i like to keep the evidence so people can't live in denial. but you make the point that this -- a lot of work has to go into getting it just right. it matters whether the museum is sort of run and managed by people coloring in this case

versus white folks have it out there as token display about their ownership and management matters as well as the -- the immediate visual context. is that? >> yes, and i just want to say with, you very kwindly said earlier that he was i was a good writer. but i feel like i was getting to put together all the dynamite ideas and quotes given to me by john guess the buy mike fors shchlt, randall wints, the mayor of birmingham >> i want to jump in with an a audience question. practical equip, how long did it take to write this book? >> i sold the book proposal in august 2020 and submitted the manuscript in march of 2021 which is ridiculous. >> that's very fast.

>> but. >> you have to sort of like drop everything and just focus on this or able to multitask and write a full. >> no i was doing anything else. but i -- it was -- every single moment of my time that was not spent with my kids. >> gotcha. >> to the extent that all of my social interaction tp during pandemic so i had my friends and family in the bubble. they heard a lot of -- it was a real period i was writing the stone mountain chapter which has a lot of klan involvement okay today's klan facts and my family was like, why? >> it took over your life for those months in many ways not surprising. >> still very urgent to write. i was in the middle of the countryside in vermont for the pandemic. i had family members who are, you know immunocompromised. i couldn't go to protest. i was outside of my city.

and the -- it felt like something i could do. >> let me ask you this. i think whether it's sort of liberal activists take taking down confederate statues or conservatives banning library books in curricula about america's long and ugly history of racism, the country seems to be in all-out war about the stories about its past. and there are critics saying the fights are more about performance and substance. there is a “washington post” article you site in one of the footnotes for instance, bearing the headline rovers controversial memorials are surprisingly erds it pull down fixing the world that built them is harder .as one black activist put it about the removal of the confederate monument quote we are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckoning with the institutional racism inside. so in your research for the book did you fine the removal of the statues serve as a quick

cathartic release substituting for real change? or did you find the takedowns launched sustained forms of collective action. >> first to challenge something you said at the beginning, i don't think that debates with about monuments of the past are a particular feature of the present. i think they are just able to happen more in public. because one side is not winning so heavily. so, you know, i quota letter that fredrick douglas wrote to a washington newspaper after the day after the dedication of the freedman memorial complaining about the representation of a black man as more like an animal than a man. so people have been spotting the issues in problematic statues since they went up. it's just the voices have been effectively squashed through very concerted campaigns to shape what vision of history

gets taught, especially to american school children. so in the early 20th century, the united daughters of the confederate swib a confederate heritage group which do things like stamp unfair to the south in textbooks that they thought for example a ho attributed the war to slavery rather than states rights. so i think what we are seeing now is not suddenly new complaints or new defenses. it's just a change in perceptions and sort of coming out to public because one side is not so successfully tamped down on all of the complaints. >> sure. >> and yeah, so i think i have seen a lot of analysis of statue protests with commentators thinking they knew what protesters wanted from it. but not a whole lot of people asking protesters. which is why wapt wanted to talk

to to mike forshap he has had a life of direct attention of caring for indigenous elders. and unhoused people, protests oil lines, et cetera. he is risking his -- his reputation, his freedom potentially. he didn't have a criminal record at all to do what might seem to be a highly symbolic gesture of pulling down a statue. but he explained it as a way of making more visible the -- the people who had been silenced who weren't present on the court -- the statehouse lawn had beeno, whose histories had gone expressed and ignored. he has passed the ropes to indigenous women and took down the statue in memory of indigenous women whose cases aren't prosecutored or solved as often, ignored. his question essentially being

why are we paying more honor, more visibility to this hung of someone who never set foot in north america versus people who are living right now? so, sure, maybe in some cases taking down qb -- shopko chopping the head of columbus in the middle of the night doesn't mean anything or lead to lasting change. but in other cases these removals have -- or even the debates, the lack of removing have led to really interesting ongoing conversations about the values that a community wants to see represented. >> sure. so we have a couple -- we have two audience questions here around the same theme. i'll read one and summary the other. this person writes i believe that all sculpture is artistic as well as sometimes irrelevancic and representational they should be preserved regardless how inappropriate they may be.

they may be seen by someone over the years. the argument is essentially like do these statues have artistic value separate and apart from politics shouldn't the artistic value continue to have certain merit preservation? >> maybe. a lot of confederate monuments were actually mass produced, especially delightful to learn that the same factories would make both union and confederate monuments so they'd look exactly the same except for details of the uniform. if you look at videos, for example, of activists pulling down a confederate monument in durham, north carolina, you'll see they tied a rope around its neck and yanked on it and it kind of bent in half because it's very thin metal. so a lot of these mass produced fairly cheap statues i'm not too

sad to see. it's like throwing away old dvds. i know this is a heretical viewpoint but i think about all of the things that have been allowed to decay because they weren't thought as important as these monuments. there was a really 2018 magazine investigation that found over the previous four years, american taxpayers spent at least $40 million to preserve confederate monument sites. whereas there's all sorts of african american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that have essentially crumbled away through lack of funding. so if you're going to say artworks should always be preserved, we do have a limited amount of funding, so sure, but let's have that preservation

dollars be spread around more equally than just public monuments. >> your comment about how complex decisions about monuments can be, you write at one point should we honor only perfect people? if not, how much imperfection should we tolerate? who should make these decisions and how? towards the end of your book you offer some advice on how communities should go about deciding whether to put up or remove a monument. could you tell us how you think that should work in an ideal world and how to improve on the way we make these decisions now? >> well, the way we make these decisions now is very limited in who gets to participate in them. when you hear public monument, you might think there's some sort of public participation and you'd really be surprised how little there is, both when they come down and when they go up. monuments are usually put up by

very small groups of people. even new monuments even today. so, for example, after the death of ruth bader ginsburg, governor -- then governor cuomo announced a couple of days later, all right, brooklyn is getting a statue of the great ruth bader ginsburg. and i think she's great. but i thought wait a minute, shouldn't there be more discussion in this community of whom they want to honor? and so statues have often like this been air dropped into communities, sometimes against their will, and are now often also plucked from them without enough debate. so something that i feel strong about especially after writing this book and doing this research, these debates shouldn't just be about the character of the work represented but they should be about investigating how this monument has been used as a monument. who put it up, what were their motivations, what did they want

the monument to do, what messages do they want it to communicate and how has it been used since? has it continued as stone mountain continued to foster hatred? the ku klux klan was revived not once, but twice on the slopes of stone mountain in association with this project to do a confederate memorial. or has it been changed. the lincoln memorial, for instance, was put up in a very questionable, i would say, way. the dedication ceremony was segregated. but it has been transformed by its use as a rallying point for various marches, a backdrop for speeches, so i think it's much different now than it was. so in some ways it might seem like a complex project, but as i said you can really look into historic newspapers. there's a lot of digital archives online. you can figure out what people said they were doing when they

put these things up, and people, especially in the early 20th century, are often surprisingly candid about things that they would not be saying today. and just think about, you know, is this an object that's encouraging us all to come to a better future or are we hanging on to it through some sort of inertia. >> and are there communities that are actually using this more democratic process you described? because it seems like in the examples in the book, the political action surrounding this has more been a reaction to it and you have legislatures particularly in the south enacting laws that say don't touch our monuments, don't move them and creating these almost impossible to clear criteria or even laying a finger on them. so are there places that you look to as hopeful examples of community involvement in deciding what the public visual space looks like? >> it's hard to find, because

there are some states that have passed laws to really protect monuments, remove them from democratic discussion whatsoever, and then in states where that hasn't happened, there's very often just a lack of procedure for raising questions about the monument. but i will say that just a few weeks ago, new york city finally took down a statue of theodore roosevelt and there's a large number of public hearings and public discussions that resulted in that removal. similarly, boston took down a copy of the freedman's memorial and again after a large number of hearings. so these types of debates take a lot of effort, take a lot of time, take a lot of expense, frankly, but i think is worth it. again, somebody who cares what happens with this particular hunk of metal, but to come

together as a community is really important, especially in these days when we all keep talking about how america is fractured and we don't talk to each other. well, if we're willing to talk to each other about statues, i think that's a really good place to start. >> you talked a little bit also about the idea that statues that just sort of contain just one figure, that we're all supposed to put on a pedestal and worship, at least in a civil way, worship or honor, that in itself is limiting. i may get these terms wrong but in some places there are a little more abstraction and a little less figuresome, so more people can see themselves in a work so it's more open to different sort of readings. you said america needs new monuments to honor ideas and actions that would have horrified the makers of those older monuments. so i'm wondering at what point -- it's tricky, though,

right? it's so abstract and if everyone sees what they want to see, what does that honor? at some point you are taking sides, right? so i wonder if you could talk about how more abstract monument might lend itself to more open readings, like the vietnam veterans memorial, say, but also how do you still have it mean something and not just be like i see an airplane, you see a bird, i see the face of jesus. how do you strike that balance? >> i actually that the vietnam veterans memorial is a perfect example of this type of extraction where people can read into what they want. you can see that as an unquestioning honoring or an anti-war statement. it really depends on how you come to it. but it does raise emotion. it's an emotional experience to visit that. and that type of heightened

state which leads us to ask questions is what i think monuments can do. so most american monuments, especially traditional style don't want you to ask questions. they want you to feel a vague patriotic thrill and keep living life as you're living. but i think monuments that are a bit more confusing that don't speak history to you can lead to more debate about what america should look like. and it's tricky, though. i thought at first i would have like a whole chapter about what monuments should look like and then i was like, you know, i don't know. i don't know. i will note that a lot of current discussions about what new monies should go up are sort of just replacing the person on the horse. all right, let's take robert e. lee off the horse and put on somebody else that's a better

model. but i think as you put it, nobody is perfect. even if you found a perfect person, that person wouldn't represent every single person who might look at them. so i think it's time to think creatively about monuments, rather than struggling to keep two models. that really hasn't worked. >> and i should ask our host here, how much more time do we have? i know that we're running up against the end here. can i ask one more question? let me see if there's anything else -- >> we have some time, so no rush. >> so let me ask you at least one more question here. you don't gloss over complicated cases where you have statues of columbus where italian americans draw a lot of pride. native americans see him as a catalyst for genocide. and you talk about the minneapolis columbus statues. how do you negotiate these discussions where different

groups -- marginalized groups. we clearly don't want to honor racists. given immigrant groups that may have been at one point at loggerheads who take different meanings from the columbus monument, what is the discussion that should be had if an italian american community feels honor and a native american community that sees something very different? >> it has become over the course of doing this research surprising to me that there is not more sympathy felt by those who are defending columbus statues because they're saying give us -- like leave us columbus. we've been a marginalized, discriminated group. we know what it's like to be rejected by america and felt like we're less. that's the same feeling that many indigenous people are saying that columbus is reminding them of. so why resist so intensely --

why perpetuate the same experience? and i also think that columbus is maybe not the best figure to cling to in terms of representing italian american identity. so many of the statues of columbus in america went up starting after the 1924 immigration restriction act. so many italian americans have their roots in immigration shortly before this. there's a lot of discrimination, a lot of essentially regarding italians from southern italy as nonwhite, as lesser, as not fit for any intellectual labor, et cetera, et cetera. there are a lot of efforts to restrict immigration, so that act passes in 1924. worries are assuaged about a wave of immigrants and the task

turns to assimilating the -- to making them into american, not italians anymore. and columbus is sort of a symbol of the assimilation of the argument that italians can be of service to america, just as columbus had been, and more deeply an argument that italians should count as white, which was very unclear before. so by pinning a new identity on columbus, i say that he -- as a tool for assimilation was a knife, because he forced a lot of people to cut off a lot of parts of themselves that had been important, speaking italian, celebrating certain italian religious rituals and other cultural customs, et cetera, et cetera. there's a real attempt to fit in. and i think there's a lot wider

range of italian heritage that can be explored in a way. in a way that doesn't directly sort of remind other people of the genocide of their culture. so i feel like get a little, give a little. >> we have an audience question here. have you seen the octavius valentine statue on the apron of city hall in philadelphia honoring the 19th century african american leader who's considered a martyr for voting rights, having been assassinated in philadelphia on election day in 1871? are you familiar with this statue? any comments on that? >> i am not. but that's great. >> what about the -- has there been much research or sort of social psychological research -- i think there's a lot of research on the effects of representation on children, minority children. but you write quite pointedly at one point in your book, one of the things that's interesting is

that though these statues have been taken down, they're not out. most of them have not been melted down into something else like bullets or recycling, you know. so they're still like in storage somewhere or being held in a warehouse where they might rear their heads again. but you argue that shuffling statues around our cities is like, this is your quote, is like moving an abusive priest to another parish. it may not be around as many potential children or potential victims but still in a position to abuse. you write not a single child deserves to grow up looking at a piece of stone or metal trying to convince them they are not equal to another americans. most people when they walk through a park don't even pay attention. do you get a sense of these statues being implicated in shaping children's understanding of who they are and whether they

belong? do you encounter any research specifically about statues as opposed to other kinds of representation? >> there is not enough of it for me to feel comfortable in the big discussion, not because it isn't there, but because not enough people have had the research funds to measure a statute specifically, but the research -- the preliminary findings, the smaller studies, the theoretical discussions i found did point to seeing statues that -- especially those that honored someone who had a history of oppression, of people from the group you belonged to or statues that contained a stereotyped or racist vision of someone from the group you but

long to has a slow but steady effect like microaggression in the visual world. and i came across a lot of really moving and disheartening quotes from people saying -- like the freedman statue with the kneeling of a black man in washington, d.c. i don't want my kids to walk past this. every time i come to the park, my kid says, oh, daddy is up there. that's not the representation that i want to see. so i think that i too often thought, eh, they're just statues, i don't pay attention to them when i'm walking. but i realized when writing the book that that sort of privilege of disregarding statues is very much mine as the white middle class person and you can't extend that to everybody. >> sure, sure.

so the last thing here before we wrap up, is there anything that you want readers to come away with after they have read this book? and i hope they all will buy it and read it because we're just skimming the surface in this conversation. but is there something that you want people to put down the book and think about and inform the way they act on or think about the monuments that they pass every day on the way to work or on the way to the park or wherever they're going? >> yes. so i was only able to tell stories about a handful of monuments in the book because i wanted them to be really engaging and full stories, but that left out literally thousands of monuments in the u.s. all our communities have them. so i really hope that people take another look at something they might walk or drive past every day, maybe do some research, maybe do some thinking to themselves or outloud about whether or not that should be there because this has appeared

where nobody has very clear ideas of what should be, so i think that gives an opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard. >> just fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson. really interesting talking to you and i'll pass it back to books & books. >> thank you both so much for this conversation. that you for moderating tonight's conversation and thank you again. thank you, everyone, who joined us tonight. don't forget you can purchase your copy of "smashing statues" online or in our stores. thank you again. i hope everyone has a great night. >> good night. c-span's new american presidents website is your one-stop guide to our nation's commanders in chief. from george washington to joe biden. find short biographies, video resources, live facts, and rich images that tell the stories of their lives and