thousands more online at c-span.org/history. good evening buenas noches, and thank you for tuning in on behalf of all of us at the locally base independently owned bookstore books and books in

miami, florida and in partnership with miami book fair. it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening with aaron l thompson and arielle savar to discuss smashing statues the rise and fall of america's public monuments published by our friends at ww norton & company. aaron l. thompson is a professor of art crime at the john jay college of criminal justice. she is also the author of possession the curious history of private collectors and her writing has appeared in the washington post the new york times and art in america to moderate tonight's conversation. we are also joined by arielle savar who is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the atlantic the new york times harpers and many other publications. he is also the author of veritas a harvard professor a convent and the gospel of jesus's wife, which was a finalist for the edgar award. the best true kind book of the year and for the investigative reporters and editors book award. throughout this evening's broadcast. you're invited to ask questions

by using the ask a question feature at the bottom of the screen and please order your copy of smashing statues from books and books below by pressing the green button. we appreciate each and every order and the generous donations from viewers and everywhere. and now without further ado. i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage. hi, wow. so, thank thank you all so much for coming dr. thompson is written a really timely and compelling book and you should all buy it first. she's terrific writer. so the book is just a pleasure to read but more importantly i think her book lets us peer behind the bronze and guilt surfaces of the statues that adorn our public squares and let's just see the people who made and paid for them kind of gets us into the heads of the politicians ideologues and yes grifters who put them on a pedestal and let us hear the

voice is the communities on the losing and these public displays. i forget which mythical figure turned human beings to stone but dr. thompson does the opposite here she turns stone back to flesh and she doesn't in a way that gets past the often simplistic takes that so many of us heard in the aftermath of george floyd's murder. so let's just kind of get into it here. you know, you're you're a scholar of and much of your past research has focused on antiquities. looting private art collecting and fakes. how did you come to write this book? well, it's essentially because my girlfriend makes really good negronies, so i had a couple of those very tasty cocktails and and open twitter. so don't tweet after drinking unless apparently you want to feel and i saw a video of the toppling of a statue of columbus in front of the sea palsy have a saint paul state capital.

and i jokingly wrote a tweet about that tweet went viral. and i've got you know denounced by tucker carlson for leading armies of nihilist at topple statues blah blah. so what was consult with the pre was without getting in trouble and it was something like as someone who studies the deliberate destruction of cultural property, which is one of my specialties. i just have to say next time. they should use chain instead of rope because it'll go faster and i actually ended up interviewing the organizer of that particular protest my forte profile him in a chapter and he ensure me it came down mighty quickly. he didn't need any advice for me and i got to delve into the complex reasons why he thought it important to do this protest this act of civil disobedience as the prosecutors in minnesota

ultimately termed it when sentencing him to community service. and but what was interesting to me was? not so much the treatment all the arguing that went on in the comments of the suit. there are thousands of them and people would say some things like well what's wrong with columbus anyways, or it's it's somehow uncivilized or unhuman to tear down statues at all. like this is something that people don't do and i thought have have none of you ever, you know, ripped a photograph of your ex from the fridge before this is very human tendency and and as someone at my phds in ancient art history, so practically everything that i study is a classicist was at some point toppled and thrown into a pit by people who wanted to forget about it. so this 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 and having a long period of stability of statues so to speak because we have had a very dominant model of who should run the country for a long time. and now that we are starting to really have shifting questions about who should be in power. it's not really no wonder that. these debates are crystallizing around monuments. and this really is perfect segue to my next question. i mean, let's let's quantify here about 170 public monuments came down in the united states in the year after george floyd's death about a hundred of those were monuments the confederacy and about 70 were monuments to other historical figures like christopher. columbus has america ever bore ever before senior period when so many monuments came down so quickly. no, not at all. i'm there were periods of

questioning monuments and after dylan ruth's massacre and charleston in 2015 and after the deadly unite the right rally in charlottesville in 2017, and those also were periods in which debate focused a lot around naming and flags. so you saw a lot of removal of images of confederate battle flags from state flags. but the statue still stayed in place or were even more protected so there was a sort of backlash to protests of the enactment of laws to protect monuments from being moved. so 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 statute removal, it's it's happened all along. so one of the things that i am happy to have written about in the book is a number of instances in which statues were

removed because they offended people with the power to remove them from the halls of congress etc. but also i start with the book with the fact that the very first metal statue put up in america the very first equestrian statue lasted only seven years before we tore it down. it was a statue of george the third put up in 1770 in downtown new york city and then as soon as the declaration of independence was red newly proud rebelling americans tore the statue down it was made out of lead, so they melted into bullets and then use those bullets to fight the kings army. so that's right. so well told in the book it's worth the price of mission alone. what a wild story. yeah so good. so go actually melt it down to to make bullets that the that would be fired on the british, correct? okay. yeah, they talked about how there would be melted majesty fired it at the king's truth.

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 statues coming down. i'm probably sending you back to grad school here. but what what where do we find this or do we not is there something to singular about this? you know, i think it is singular because there are certainly lots of instances of massive statue removals like the former soviet states that the independence from from the soviet union iraq with the fall of the dom any type of sort of big transition of power. you can look at the very satisfying videos of blown up swastikas and statues of hitler at the close of world war two, but i think what's unique about what we're seeing in america today is there isn't there hasn't been a regime change.

and we haven't yet arrived at the idea of okay, who do we not want anymore? and who do you want? and so we're seeing many more arguments and discussions about statues rather than all right. that one's definitely off. this one is awesome. so what was different this i mean surely there were periods in american history. i mean, let's take the late 1960s for instance when large numbers of protesters were just as angry about the rights and living conditions of minorities and women, why did post the protest take this specific form? there's taught why this now from the you you conduct your book? i there is a book by the author karen cox who so complements my book in looking at the history of protests against confederate monuments up until about 2017. and so she finds some people discussing even in the late 19th

century, you know any time we'd walk through this city square we'd have something sharp to scrape away at this statue of john c calhoun or whoever to to show that we weren't accepting the statue or very interesting student protests in the 60s and 70s that also would paint messages etc. and i think that in that period there's a much more of a focus on adding new statues like let's increase the representation in monuments. and there was a hopefulness of that that by adding counter monuments. you could change the the way that public space operated, but i think in the last few years, we've been realizing that these monuments some of these monuments continue to have to encourage harmful behavior to solidify people in their hatreds

and adding new monuments is not enough we have to address the ones that we have. i say so i think you know people who watch some of these takedowns on tv. probably remember, you know the most sort of dynamic eye-grabbing images which were sort of like these images of mobs yanking them down with ropes and throwing them into rivers, but you point out that that some 80% of the monuments were removed by by public officials did that did that figure surprise you and do you what exact you think? it's significant that the public officials? yeah. yeah. it's usually significant because if you just looked at the headline if you think oh all of these monuments were destroyed by by, you know, irrationally acting mobs and and a lot of people including in the replies to that tweet of mine said, well, we should maybe we should remove money is but we should have democratic discussion. it shouldn't be in the hands of a few angry people. and so as i pointed out in the book the majority 80% of

monuments that have been 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 was learning how often monuments. uh, sorry my camera has turned off one second while i switch, uh, we can still hear you. so, okay and 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 but decades people's entire lives. and it and there was just simply no way of those complaints being hurt. so it's not surprising to me

that if people lose all hope that there be a peaceful way of resolving their difficulties that they will turn to access civil disobedience. catcher so the book tells sony gripping stories about the historical figures who crusaded to to put up the confederate statute some of them were straight up charlatans others unapologetic racists. was there a particular story that you discovered in your research that really really surprised you or the change your understanding of what you thought you knew about the history of these monuments. oh man, how long do you have any of that? well one that really like what what sort of sort of pops to mind when i foremost well, we were talking previously about and 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 and it was carved starting in 1914 by a sculptor gutsen berglund who would go on to become much better known for carving mount rushmore, but he was hired by a local confederate widow to sort of think about doing this project of just carving a single head of lee and he's like no. no, we need like hundreds of figures us. he proposed 700 figures sweeping across the mountain and did so because he got paid per figure. you know, he got a proportion of the total price. so he wanted to glorify the confederacy in order to make some more money and and he ended up really promising much more than he could provide. so he a collected all of this

money without really carving almost anything. he only finished ahead of lee after spending the equivalent of several million of today's dollars and then they fired him in 1925 hired another sculptor and blasted borglam's head of lee off of the mountain. so the world's largest confederate monument is already lost one headedly. i figure one down once ago, and this is this is a sculptor who had previously like done statues of lincoln and and union leaders right at i mean, he was sort of he had no, i mean there was no sort of like ideological backbone. he was just looking to sort of cash in on yeah, he had made his fame sculpting union leaders and lincoln in particular he was gunning for the being chosen to do the lincoln monument memorial is so hard that he even named his son lincoln.

he didn't get chosen and so he was really down in his luck when suddenly stone mountain came up. one of the one of the most surprising and sort of counterintuitive pieces or passages for me was your argument that many confederate monuments of quoting here were designed to keep white southerners and poverty. by discouraging them from joining labor unions and end quote and thus finding, you know to a common cause with black people. can you talk a bit about the evidence that led you to that conclusion? it's not something that people would have sort of pick up on right away when they think about these monuments. i'm how did they actually be sort of silent sentinel statues and maybe you can describe those a little bit. how did what did they communicate to to white southerners about their place? in in that in the political order. yeah, well, i i sort of see this book is as me asking a series of stupid questions and then tracking them down. so what are the stupid questions

wait do these monuments actually honor people's ancestors because that's a big defense of better at monuments that's encapsulated in phrase heritage not hate so there are about the heritage of the people who thought in the civil war not about hating. so i started to look at what people said about these monuments as they dedicated them. there are a lot of historic newspapers that are digitized and they just love to report at length all of the speeches given at the dedication of these 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 name general. they're an unnamed anonymous lowering soldier and what was being praised was this soldiers devotion to duty and self-sacrifice and obedience. and i thought wait a minute.

that's not you know rebellion or knowing your own mind or heroics fighting. who's this peg for these monument who wants to make this praise and it turns out that many of these confederate monuments. especially from the turn of the century until around world war one. we're paid for by factory owners. mine owners white color entrepreneurs who depended on having a low-paid workforce and they were praising these these working class men for accepting a life of social stratification of not getting really ahead of listening to their betters in the the hopes that they'd be better employees and not just in general i often i also found that often. you'll see a confederate monument with this type of dedication speech go up precisely in reaction to unionization efforts in it. really the case is most clear in

in what i write about in a chapter of the book about the birmingham confederate management. which wind up in two parts nine years apart both in reaction to a strike and both times. the strike was organized into racially, so it was really appealing to white working class families to say don't cross the color lines in hopes of you know, improving your lives. you should you should pay attention to us. you're better and keep things as they were one of these speeches even talks about, you know, yeah descendants of confederate veterans. you are working as they did to resist the quote hideous sector of racial equity. interesting and so sort of divide if you keep people divided along racial lines, they won't recognize that they share economic interest. is that sort of the message it was being okay, and i'll ask

them to ask in the next question realizing that it might sound a little thick but i think definitions are important. so i'll just ask it why why do civilizations put up statues? it's a ridiculously stupid cloud, but i just want to like get that out there. why do we put up statues? what is the work that they're supposed to do? statues are communities selfies. they are showing ourselves that are best angles and they're all about the future not really the past there to show us what we think should be honored. give us ideals give assessorations so we can make life better for ourselves in the future. they're the to show us who we should emulate so i yeah, no, please. so i think that that when we have a certain type of person honored in monuments that to the exclusion of others then that makes it hard for everybody especially in such a diverse

countries america to see themselves on monuments and that's really to me at waste shouldn't we be encouraging everybody to live better lives rather than saying and you over there you can't really do much just, you know, be happy earning your low wages that pay attention to better people. so politicians including a certain former president have said that to remove a statue is is to erase history. do you agree? then trump was going on about how he he needed to create a national statuary garden of american heroes or something like that. there's had actually executive order to this and he said that that they all they can't be in like modern style. they to be traditional and represent. style, but one of the people who listed in that order is columbus, which i found deeply ironic because we don't have any contemporaneous portraits of columbus. we don't actually know what he looked like so it would have to

be a speculative representation. that never happened. yes, so i got this a lot the idea that to take down a monument is to erase history and what i say to that is that monuments are not how history is taught monuments actually then cells often erase history by a positing certain narratives and ignoring others. something for example, i talk a lot about in the book is how northern civil war memorials a hardly ever even acknowledged the existence of african americans despite an incredibly high percentage of black men fighting in the union army instead if they acknowledge their existence there depicted in sort of rags kneeling receiving emancipation as a gift rather than it happened in reality fighting for risking their own lives for free others.

so to take down this what history is that erasing it's erasing a very particular picture of history that was designed to enforce social norms at the time. so i'm i'm not too saddened and i think that history doesn't get erased unless you erase all forms of communication of knowledge and if you are walking around in your community, and you think i'm not really sure who's that guy on that horse over there. you'll know that not all statues. do a really great job of communicating any information whatsoever. i think you interviewed when you interview the indigenous activist mike forces that he pronounced his name. he said tearing down his street. no, we're exposing it. i think these are actually the tearing down on statues is kind of historical reckoning anyway, which i thought was quite quite effective way to put it so other and just to say that i he's a very interesting perspective.

he had tried to get the statue remove peacefully for decades, but he didn't actually want it to be torned out and destroyed he wants it to be on display in what he terms of hall of shame with with information about why it was there the role columbus played the role of adulation of columbus in america etc. so he wasn't given a choice besides. this more desperate act versus the conversation this leads perfectly again to my next question is, you know, others support the removal of monuments that no longer reflect a community's values, but say they should be preserved in museums rather than destroyed in a museum. the argument goes these sort of retrograde monuments could be surrounded by interpretive panels or art that defuses are kind of counter-programs the statute in spassing statues skeptical even of these approaches, and 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 of statuary can can be disarmed. yeah, so i think that taking down a statue doesn't erase history, but it does lessen honor. alright, so if you are concerned about history, you can think what how else can we display this statue so we can learn not just about the history it purports to represent but the history of its use as a monument etc. so a lot of people seem to say like a duh answer put it in a museum. but i i really don't think this is as simple of an answer as one might think. first of all storage is expensive displays extensive preservation as expensive who's going to pay 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 like america's strategic

racism reserve it. no, that's not the rule of museums. so to to really change people's minds or open people's minds of different perspectives to not have a museum gallery become a site of appreciation of the martyrdom of a statue etc 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 african american institution to have rehomed a removed monument so far and what they did was really take a lot of steps to ensure that this monument didn't exert. it's the power it was designed to that because it is a very powerful monument. it's a very beautiful gilded statue of an attractive person winged nude representing the ideals of the confederacy. he really his body draws you in and so they put him in it closed

courtyard they surrounded him with other artworks that are sculptures of eyes to make sure he knows he's always being watched and they have had a number of artists and residents to make other senses other works that call into question they've had symposiums and they and they they have a goal not just that. oh, we don't want to destroy history. no, they want to use this statue. to get to a better future so they want to use its emotional pull and sort of boomerang around to having conversations about what it was like to resist discrimination while under the eyes of so many monuments like that. right and in the end, i mean the you do a great job sort of explaining how complicated this was. i mean, i think i think it was the the had a museum said it was the statute was just too -- beautiful. is that so like it's it is still exerts. it's sort of it's influence even even if it's surrounded by these

sort of this deprogramming but in the end, i think he makes a decision to to keep it right. i mean, i think he says i like to keep the evidence another great line. i like to keep the evidence of the people can't later live in denial, but but you make the point that this is this a lot of work has to go into getting this just right and it matters whether the museum is sort of, you know, run and managed by people of color in this case versus white folks who are just sort of have it out. there's a kind of token display, but that through ownership and management matters as well as the the immediate context. is that correct? yeah, and i just want to say you you very kindly said earlier that i was a good writer, but i really feel like i was just getting to put together all the dynamite ideas and quotes given to be my john guess the the director of this museum by mike forte by randall woodfin the mayor of birmingham. i was very lucky getting to put

them together. yeah. so i'm gonna jump really there's not one on audience question here at the moment. i have more but i want to jump in here with an audience a question practical question. how long did it take to write this book? i am sold the book proposal in august 2020 and submitted the manuscript in march of 2021, which is ridiculous. that's very fast. but sort of like smokes on this are you able to multitasking and write a full way. i was not doing anything else, but but i i was every single moment of my time that was not spent with my kids to the extent that all of my social interaction. it was during pandemics. i just had my friends and family in the bubble, but they they heard a lot of there's a real period where it is writing the the stone mountain chapter which has a lot of clan involvement

and be like sitting down at lunch and saying okay. today's clan facts are right so it took over your life for the for those months anyways and not surprising feel very urgent to write. you know, i was in the middle of the countryside in vermont for the pandemic i had family members who were you know compromised so i couldn't go to protests. i was outside of my city and this felt like something that i could do. mm-hmm. let me ask you this. you know, i think whether it's sort of liberal activists taking down confederate statues or conservative is banning library books and curricula about america's long and ugly history of racism. the company seems to be in a kind of all-out war over the stories. it tells itself about its past. i mean, then there are critics you say that these fights are more about performance than substance that there's a washington post article.

you cite in one of your footnotes for instance bears. the headline controversial memorials are surprisingly easy to pull down fixing the world that built them is harder or as one black activist put it about the removal of a confederate monument from the charlottesville courthouse quote. we are making the courthouse look more equitable without reckoning with the institutional racism that takes place inside. so in your research for the book, did you find that the removal of statues served as a kind of quick cathartic release? it's substituted for real change or did you find that these takedowns help to launch? same forms of collective action well first just to challenge something you said at the beginning. i i don't think that debates about monuments are the past are particular feature of of the present. i think they are just able to happen more in public because one side is not winning. so heavily and so, you know, i quote a letter that frederick douglass wrote to washington

newspaper after the day after the dedication of the friedman's memorial complaining about its representation of a black man is more like an animal than a man. so so people have been a spotting the issues in a problematic statues since they went up it's just that those 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 literacy a confederate heritage group would do things like ask school boards to stamp unfair to the south in textbooks that they thought. for example a tributed 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 in

perceptions and and sort of coming out into public because one side is not so successfully too much down on all right. and and yeah, so i think i have seen a lot of analysis of statue protests with commentators thinking that they knew what what protesters wanted from it, but not a whole lot of people actually asking protesters which is why i wanted to talk to for example my portrait of well, what do you what do you want to do? why did you do that? because he's someone who has had a life of really direct action of caring for indigenous elders and on house people protesting oil lines etc. so and he's risking and his his reputation and 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'd been silence who weren't present on the court or the state house. and whose histories had gone suppressed and ignored so he passed the ropes to indigenous women and they took down the statue in memory of missing and murdered indigenous women in the community whose cases aren't prosecuted as often or solved as often who are ignored. so his question essentially being why are we paying more honor more visibility to this hunk of someone who never even set foot in north america versus people who are living right now. so sure maybe in some cases taking down, you know chop in the head off of a columbus and boston in the middle of the night. it's just a surpassing women of somebody that doesn't really mean anything or lead to laughing change, but in other cases these removals have you're even the debates the lack of

removal has led to really interesting ongoing conversations about the values that really wants to see represented sure. so we have a code. we have two audience questions here that are surround the same theme. i'll read one of them and kind of summarize the other this person writes. i believe that all sculpture are is artistic as well as sometimes historic and as such representational as such they should be preserved regardless of how quote inappropriate they may be they may be seen by some over the years. the argument is essentially like do these statues have artistic value separate and apart from their politics and shouldn't that artistic value continue to have have certain merit and argue for preservation. maybe a lot of confederate monuments were actually mass produced is especially a delightful to learn at the same factors would make both union and confederate monuments. so they look exactly the same

except for details of uniform that uses lightly different world and if you look at videos for example of activists pulling down the confederate monument in durham, north carolina, you'll see they they tie to rope around its neck and then yanked on it and he kind of like 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, you know, they're the copies, you know what they look like etc. i know this is a heretical viewpoint from an artist story, but i also think about all of the things that have been allowed to dec. because they weren't thought as important as these monuments. and there was a really interesting 2018 smithsonian magazine investigation that found and i think over the previous four years american taxpayers that said at least 40

million dollars to preserve confederate monuments and heritage sites. whereas and there's all sorts of african-american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that are i essentially crumbled away through lack of funding. so if you're going to say artworks are 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 and then just public monuments. your your candid about how complex decisions about monuments can be and 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 and towards the end of your book you offer some some advice for how communities should go about deciding whether to put up or remove them on a monument. can you tell us a bit about how

you think that process should work in an ideal world and how it improves on? we make those decisions now. well the way we make these decisions now is very limited in who gets to participate in the decision. so when you hear public monument, you might think there's some sort of public participation in monuments and you'd really be surprised how little of their ah is both in when they come down and and when they go up so 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's getting a statue of the great ruth bader gets broken and i think she's great, but i thought wait a minute. i shouldn't there be more discussion in this community of whom they want to honor. i'm so statues have often like this been airdropped into

communities sometimes against their will and are now often also plucked from them without enough debate. so something that i feel strongly about especially after writing this book and doing this research is that these debates shouldn't be just about the character of the person represented, but they should be about investigating how this monument has been used as in monument who put it up what were their motivations and what do they want them on you to do? what messages did they want it to communicate? and how has it been used sets 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 these been changed so the lincoln memorial for instance was put up in a in a very questionable. i would say way the the

dedication ceremony was segregated, but it has been transformed by its use as rallying point for a very marches the backdrop for speeches. so i think it's much different now now than it was so. in in some ways it might seem like a complex project. you have to stay the whole history of monument. but but as i found you can really look into historic newspapers. there's a lot of digital archives online and you can figure out what people said they were doing when they put these things up and 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 we are there communities that are actively using this

more democratic process? you describe because it seems like from the examples in the book the the political action surrounding this has more been a reaction to it where you have legislatures quickly in the south in acting laws that say don't touch our monuments don't move them and creating all these almost impossible to clear criteria for even 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 it's hard to find because there are some states that have passed laws to really protect monuments to remove them from democratic discussion whatsoever and then in states where that hasn't happened where laws don't necessarily name monuments to their pedestals. there's very often just a lack of procedure for raising any questions or the monument, but i will say that just a few weeks ago new york city finally took down a statue of theodore roosevelt that had been the object of protests again for

many many years and there's a large number of public hearings and discussions about that monument that resulted in that rule and similarly boston took down a copy of the friedman's memorial that had been in a park in boston 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 because to me who cares what happens with this particular metal but to come together as a community is really important in especially in these days when all 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 talk a little bit also about up the idea that statues that just sort of contain just one figure that we're all supposed to put on pedestal and kind of warship or at least a civic way worship or honor that itself is sort of

limiting and that i think in a man probably i'm not an artist source i make it these terms wrong, but i think some places you're arguing for a little bit more abstraction and a little bit less. is it figurism? is that the word that that some more people can kind of see themselves in a work so it's more open to different sort of readings. and you say that america needs new monuments to quote honor ideas and actions that would have horrified the makers of those older monuments. so i'm wondering like at what point like it's tricky though, right? because if it's so abstract and everyone kind of sees what they want to see is that what is that particularly honor? i mean it at some point you do have to take some you are taking sides, right? i mean, so i wonder if you talk about like how more apps abstract monument might let itself to more open readings of certain values. i'm thinking like the vietnam veterans memorial say, um, but also how do you still have it mean something and not just be like, you know, i see an airplane. you see a bird i see, you know the face of jesus like, how do

you what's that? how do you how do you strike that balance? i actually think that vietnam veterans memorial is a perfect example of this type of extraction where people can read into it what they want you could see that is an unquestioning honoring or as an anti-awar statement. it really depends on how you come to it, but it does raise emotions. it's an emotional experience to visit that and that type of heightened state which asks leads us to ask questions is is what i think monuments can do. so most american monuments, especially traditional style pre myelin don't want you to ask questions. they want you to sort of feel a vague patriotic thrill and then keep living life as it's living but i think monuments that are a bit more confusing that don't sort of speak spoon feed history to you can lead to more debate

about what america should look like in and it's tricky though, you know, 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 i will note that a lot of current discussions about what new moneys should go up are sort of just replacing the person on the horse like 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 quoted that nobody's perfect. you can't any even if you found a perfect person that person wouldn't represent at every single person who might look at them. so i think it's time to think creatively about monuments rather than struggling to keep to a model that really hasn't worked for us and i should ask our host here. how much more time do we have? i know that they were running up against the the end here. can i ask one more question? let me see if there's anything

else from we have some time so no, right. so let me ask you this one more question here. i mean you don't gloss over this sort of complicated cases where you have let's say statues of columbus in which italian americans draw a lot of pride, but native americans sort of see him as a catalyst for genocide and you talk about the minneapolis columbus statutes an example that how do you negotiate these discussions where we're different groups? i mean, marginalized groups if we don't want we're clearly i want to honor racist get that but given modern immigrant groups that may have been at one point at loggerheads who take different meanings from a columbus monument. what is the discussion that should be had between say it's an italian american community. it feels honor in this statue and a native american community that sees something very different. it's it has become over the course of doing this research

surprising to me and that there is not more sympathy felts by by those who are defending statues because they're saying give us like leave us columbus. we're have been a marginalized discriminated against group. we know how it feels to be rejected by america by city said that we're less, but that's the same feeling that many indigenous people are saying that the columbus is reminding them of so why why resist so intensely why perpetuate the same experience? and i also think that columbus is maybe not the the best figure to cling to in terms of representing italian american identity. so the many of the statues of columbus in america went up starting after the 1924 immigration quota restriction act and 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 non-white as lesser. as not fit for any intellectual labor, etc, etc. and there are a lot of efforts to restrict immigration. so the that act passes in 1924 worries are a switched about a wave of immigrants and the the task turns to assimilating the immigrants to making them into americans 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 of an argument that italian should count as white which was very unclear before and 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 and celebrating. and a certain italian inflected religious rituals and other cultural customs dressing in a certain way etc. 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 and in a way that doesn't directly remind other people of genocide of their culture. so i feel like give a little get a little that's right. we haven't we have an audience question here. have you seen the mispronounces the octavius valentine cato 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. you're familiar with the statue any comments. i am not but that's great. yeah, i wonder about the i mean it has there been much. knows like researchers sort of social psychological research on i think there's a lot of research across on the effects of representation on children minority children, but you write it quite pointedly at one point in your book. i'm shuffling. so one of the things that's interesting is that though these statutes have have been taken down. they're not they're not out. they haven't been most of them have not been melted down into like, you know into something else like bullets or recycling, you know, so there's still like in store it somewhere or they're being held in a warehouse where they might sort of rear their heads again, and but you argue that show shuffling statues around our cities is like this quote is like moving and abusive priests to another parish may not be around as many potential. made up as any children or

potential victims, but quote still in a position to abuse and you write that not a single child deserves to grow up looking at a piece of stone or metal that tries to convince them. they are not that they are not equal to other americans. i mean, i think i think you know, i think a lot of us when we see we don't like most people when they walk through a park don't even necessarily pay attention. it's like, oh there's another like old dude on a horse like do we get a sense of like these statues actually being implicated in shaping children's understanding of who they are whether they belong you encounter any any research specifically about statues as opposed to other kinds of representation. yet there is a there's not enough of it for me to feel comfortable, you know setting in the big being discussion because not because it isn't there, but because not enough people have you know had the research funds to measure statue specifically, but the research the preliminary

findings the smaller studies and the theoretical discussions. i found i did point to seeing statues that especially those that honored someone who had a history of oppression of people from the group you belong to or statues that contain a stereotyped or racist vision of someone from the group you belong to have, you know a slow but steady affect their like microaggression in the visual world, and i came across a lot of really moving and disheartening quotes from from people saying you know like the friedman statue with the kneeling of black man in washington dc like i don't want my kid to walk past this like every time we come to the park my kid says, you know oh daddy is up there. it's like that's not the the

representation of that. i that i want to see so and i think that i too often thought i again they're just statues. i don't pay attention to them when i'm walking, but i realized when writing the book that that's sort of privilege of disregarding statues is very much minus the white middle class person and you can't stand that to everybody sure. so last thing here is before we wrap up. is there anything that you want readers to come away with after they've read this book and i hope they all will buy it and read it because you can we're just we're just giving the surface in this in this conversation, but is there something like that you want people to put down the book and sort of continue to think about an inform. right 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. yet so i was only able to tell stories about a handful of

monuments in the bookcase. i wanted them to be really engaging and full stories, but that left out. literally thousands of monuments in in the us 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 and thinking to themselves or out loud about whether or not that should be there. what monuments should be because this is a period where nobody has very clear ideas of what should be so i think that it gives an opportunity for voice to be hurt. this fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson, really really interesting talking to you and i'll pass it back to books and books. thank you both so much for this conversation. and thank you arielle for moderating tonight's conversation and thank you again. and thank you everyone who joined us tonight, and don't forget you can purchase your copy of smashing statues at

books and books online or in our stores. and thank you. all again. i hope everyone has a great night.

of his book history disrupted. this evening we are joined by reed gutchberg. we'll be presenting on her book useful objects museums science and literature in 19th century america. after a short induction to the work, she'll be joining co