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 good evening. but not just. and thank you for tuning in. on behalf of all of a sudden locally based independently on bookstore, lots of books in miami, florida, and in partnership with miami book fair, it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening with darnell thompson and harry also barred to discuss matching statues, rise and fall of america's public monuments, published by our friends at w w norton and

company. danielle thompson is a professor vought crime at the john j college of criminal justice. she's also the author of possessions accuse history of private collectors and her writing is appeared in the washington post the new york times, quote,, quote, and art in america. to moderate tonight's conversation, we are also joined by ariel sabar, who's an award winning journalist whose work has appeared in the atlantic, at the new york times, harper's, and many other publications. he is also the author of very tough, a harvard curve faster [inaudible] and the gospel of jesus's wife, which was a finalist for the edgar award for best true crime book of the year and for the investigative recorded were bored reporters and editors of origin throughout this evening broadcast you're invited to ask questions by using gas 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 and we appreciate every each and every order in the generous donations from there's news everywhere and now without for david i'd like to which welcome

our guest to the virtual stage. >> hi. well. so thank you all so much for coming. doctor thompson's has written a really timely and compelling book and you should all by it and first she's a terrific writer so the book is just a pleasure to read. but more importantly i think herbert lets us appear behind the bronze and guilt surfaces of the statues that adorn our public squares and let us see the people who made and paid for them credit, gets us into the heads of the politicians, ideologues and, yes, grifters who put them on a pedestal and let us hear the voices of the communities on the losing end of these public displays. and don't forget which vertical figure turned human beings to stone but dr. thompson does the opposite ear. she turns stone back to flesh. and she does it anyway that gets past the often simplistic

takes that so many of us heard in the aftermath of the george floyd's murder. so let's just kind of get into it here. you know, you're a scholar of [inaudible] and much of your past research has focused on antiquities looting, private are collecting, and fakes. how did you come to write this book? >> well it's, a century because my girlfriend makes a really good [inaudible] . so i had a couple of those very tasty cocktails, and open twitter, so don't tweet after drinking unless [inaudible] and i saw a video of the toppling of a statue of columbus in the state ball state capital. and i jokingly wrote the tweet about that tweet went viral, and i've got, you know, denounced by tucker carlson for leading armies of needless to

talk both statues, blah blah blah -- >> getting in trouble? >> 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 robocalls it will go faster. i actually ended up interviewing the organizer of that particular protest [inaudible] profiled him in a chapter, empty [inaudible] it came down mighty quickly, didn't need any advice from me. and i got to delve into the complex reasons why he thought it important to do this process, this act of civil disobedience, as the prosecutors said, but ultimately, turned it, when sentencing human to community service. but what was interesting to me was not so much to [inaudible] the arguing that went on in the comments [inaudible] thousands of them. and people would say things like, well, what's wrong with

columbus, anyways? or it's somehow uncivilized or on human to tear down statues it all. like, this is something that we will go to. have none if you ever, you know, ripped a photograph of your x from the fridge before? this is a very human tendency. and as someone, my phd is an ancient art history, so practically everything that i study is as 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 anytime regimes shift, anytime communities come to a new understanding of who is and who should be in power. and america has just been exceptional in having a long period of stability of statues so to speak because we have had a very dominant [inaudible] role 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 really no wonder that these debates are crystallizing around monuments. >> and this would be really a perfect segue to my next question. i mean, that's going to fire right here, about 170 public monuments came down in the united states in the year after george floyd's death. about 100 of those were monuments to the contagion confederacy. about 70 were monuments to other club hero historical figures like restoring christopher columbus. as america ever seen a period before where so many ones came down so quickly? >> no, not at all. there were periods of questioning monuments after dylan ruth massacre in charleston, in 20, 15 and after the deadly unite the right rally in charlottesville in 2017. those also wear periods in which debate focused around naming and flags. so you saw a lot of removal of

images of confederate battle flags from state flags. but the statues still stayed in place, or were even more protected. so there was a sort of backlash to protest of the enactment of laws to protect monuments [inaudible] . 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 that to removal, it's up and all along. so one of the things that i am happy to talk 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, it sandra. 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 the 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, nearly proud rebelling americans tore the statue down. it was made out of lead so they melted it into bullets and then used those bullets to fight of the kings army. so -- >> [inaudible] story, wall told in the book it's. well pricey abortion on a oppressive mission as well. [inaudible] you make the bullets that will be fired on the british, correct? >> yes. they talk it out how they would be multi-majesty fired at the english troops. >> so 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, again, of the number and speed of statues coming down? i'm probably sending you back to grad school here, but what

-- where do we find this? or do we not? is there something singular about this? >> you know, i think that it is singular. because there are certainly lots of instances of massive statue removals like the in former soviet states, that one independence from the soviet union, iraq with the fall of saddam, and any type of sort of big position of power, you can look at the very satisfying videos of blown up swastikas and statues of hitler at the close of world war ii. but i think what's unique about what we are seeing in america today is there isn't, there hasn't been a regime change. we haven't yet arrived at the idea of, okay, who do we not want anymore? what we want? so we are seeing many more arguments and discussions about statues, rather than, all right, that one is definitively off, this one is on. >> so, what was different this

time? i mean, surely there were periods in american history, [inaudible] 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 the protests take this specific form this time? why just now? from the re-search you conducted? >> there is a book by the author karen cox, who sort of compliments of my book in looking at the history of protests against confederate monuments, up until about 2017, and so she found some people discussing even in the late 19th century anytime we walk through this city square we had some [inaudible] [inaudible] or whomever to show that we weren't accepting the statue or very interesting student protests in the 60s and 70s

that also would paint messages on confederate statues that sandra but i think that in that period there are some much of a focus on adding new statues, that's increase the representation in monuments. and there was a hopeful list of that [inaudible] by acting counter-monuments you could change the way that public space operated but i think 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 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 who watch some of these [inaudible] on tv probably remember, you know, the most sort of dynamic i cramming images which are

sort of like the images of [inaudible] this ropes and throwing them into rivers. you put out that some 80% of the monuments removed by public officials, did that figure surprise you, and to what extent do you think it's a significant? public officials? >> yeah, it's usually significant. because if you just looked at the headlines, you think, oh all of these ones were destroyed by the irrational acting mobs, and a lot of people, including in the [inaudible] tweet of mine, said maybe we should move [inaudible] we should have a democratic discussion, it shouldn't be at the hands of a few [inaudible] people. as i point 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 monuments should not be there. others to put it into storage to protect it. more importantly, to me, was

learning how often monuments -- sorry, my camera has turned off one. second while i switch. >> because still here, you're so -- >> okay. how often monuments that were turned down in 2020 had been the object of peaceful petitions, other sort of protests. but sometimes, not just amusement, decades. peoples entire lives. and there was just simply no way of those complaints being heard. so it's not surprising to me that if people lose all hope that there will be a peaceful way of resolving their difficulties, that they will turn to access civil disobedience. >> >> so, the book tells so many gripping stories about the

historical figure that crusade it to put up the confederate statues. somewhere straight-up charlatans, others unapologetic racists. was there a particular story if a research that really surprised me, or that changed your understanding of what you thought you knew about the history of these monuments? >> how long do you have? there's so many of them. >> really, what's sort of pops to mind for most? >> we were talking 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 monuments. it was carved starting in 1914 by a sculptor 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, just curving a single head of lee. and he was like, no, we need 100, figures he proposed 700 figure sweeping across the mountain. he did so because he got paid per figure, got a proportion of the total price. so, he wanted to glorify the confederacy in order to make some more money. he ended up really promising much more than he could provide, so he collected all of his money without carving out anything. he only finished a head of lee after spending the equivalent of several million of today's dollars. then they fired him at 1925, hired another sculptor and blasted the other head of lee

off of the mountain. the world's largest confederate monument has already lost one head of lee, one down one to go. >> this is a sculptor who had previously done statues of lincoln and union leaders, right? he had no, there is no ideological backbone. he was just looking to cash in? >> yeah, he had made his fame sculpting union leaders and lincoln in particular. he was gunning for being chosen to do the lincoln monument, a moral. so hard that he even named his son lincoln. he didn't get chosen. and so he was really down on his luck, when suddenly stone mountain came up. >> one of the most surprising and counter intuitive pieces or passages for me was your argument that many confederate monuments, i'm quoting here,

were designed to keep white southerners and poverty by discouraging them from joining labor unions, and quote. and that finding 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've picked up on right away when they think about these monuments. how did they actually, these silent sentinels statues, maybe you can describe these little bit, what did they communicate to you to white southerners about their place in the political order? >> yeah, well, as sort of see this book as me asking a series of stupid questions and then tracking them down. so, one of the stupid questions was wait, to these monuments actually on our peoples ancestors? because that is a big defensive confederate monuments that is encapsulated in the phrase heritage not hate. 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 historic newspaper that are digitized and they just love to report at length all of these beaches given at the dedication of these monuments. and i saw that what's being praised about confederate soldiers at the dedication of monuments, because a vast majority of confederate monuments are not a named general, they're an unnamed anonymous low ranking soldier. what was being praised as the soldiers devotion to duty and self sacrifice and obedience. and i thought, wait a minute, that's not rebellion or knowing your own mind or heroic fighting. who is paying for this monument and who wants to make this phrase? it turns out that many of these confederate monuments, especially from the turn of the century up until around world

war i, where paid for by factory owners, mine owners, white collar entrepreneurs who depended on having a low paid workforce. and they were praising these working class men for accepting a life of social stratification, of not getting ahead and listening to their betters, in the hopes that they will be better employees. not just in general, i found that often you'll find a confederate monument with the sort of dedication speech go up precisely in reaction to unionization efforts in a community. the case is most clear and what i write about in a chapter of the book about the birmingham confederate monument, which went up into parts, nine is a part, 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 improving your lives. you should pay attention to us, your betters, and keep things as they were. one of the speeches even talks about descendants of confederate veterans, you are working as they did to resist the, quote, hideous specter of racial equity. >> so, if you keep people divided along racial lines they will recognize that they share economic interests. is that sort of the message? okay. i'll ask the next question, realizing that it might sound -- i think definitions are important. why do civilizations put up statues? it's a ridiculous stupid question, i just want to get that out there. why do we put up statues, what is the worker?

supposed to do >> statues are communities selfies. they're putting ourselves at our best angles, and they're all about the future, not really the past. they're there to show us what we think should be honored, give us ideals and aspirations so we can make life better for ourselves in the future. they're there to show us who we should emulate. >> go head, please. >> so, i think we have a certain type of person honored and monuments, to the exclusion of others, that that makes it hard for everybody especially in such a diverse country's america to see themselves on monuments. that's really to me a waist, should we be encouraging everybody to live better lives rather than saying you over there, you can't really do much? just be happy earlier low ages

and paying attention to better people. >> so, politicians, including a certain former president, has said that to remove a statue is to erase history. do you agree? >> when trump was going on about how he needed to create a national statuary garden of american heroes or something like that, there is a natural executive order to this. he said that they can't be in modern style, they have to be traditional, representational style. but one of the people listed in that order was columbus, which i fancy plea ironic because we don't have any contemporaneous purchase of columbus. we don't actually know what it looked like. , so it would have to be a speculative representation. anyway, that never happened. so, yeah, the idea to take down a monument is to erase history and what i say to that is that monuments or not how history is taught.

monuments are actually themselves erasing history by positing certain narratives and ignoring others. something for example i talk about a lot in the book is how northern civil war memorials oh hardly will -- or even acknowledge the existence of african americans, despite it incredibly high percentage of black men fighting in the union army. instead, if they acknowledge their existence, they are depicted in rags and kneeling, receiving amounts of patient as a gift rather than, as happened in reality, fighting and risking their own lives to free others. so, to take down what history has done, it's everything a particular picture of history that was designed to enforce social norms at the time. so, i am not too sad and i think that history doesn't get

raised until you raise all forms of communication and knowledge. if you are walking around in your community and you think i'm not really sure who is that guy on that horse over there, you will know that nadal statues to a real great job of communicating a information whatsoever. >> i think you interviewed, when you interviewed the indigenous activist, mike forcia, is that how you pronounce his name? he said tearing down history, tearing down statues as a historical reckoning. which i thought was a quite 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, he wanted it to be on display in terms of a hall of shame with information about why it was there and the role that

columbus played, the role of adulation of columbus in america, et cetera. so, he wasn't given a choice besides this desperate act, versus a conversation. >> this goes perfectly to my next question. as other support the removal of monuments and no longer affected communities values, but they say be kept in museums rather than destroyed. in a museum, that are you because, these retrograde monuments can be observed by panels or art that the fuses are canter programs the statue. -- you seem skeptical even of these approaches, and i wonder if you could tell us what happened at the houston museum of african american culture after it tucked in that confederate statue and how that affected your view as to how oppressive works of statuary can be just honored? >> yeah, i think that taking down a statue doesn't erase history, but it does lessen

honor. so, if you are concerned about history, you can think how else can we display the statues that we can learn not just about the history it purports to represent but the history of its use as a monument, et cetera. a lot of people seem to say it's a dumb answer, put it in a museum. but i don't think it's as simple as an answer as one might think. first of all, storage is expensive, display is expensive, preservation is expensive. who is going to pay for all of this? a lot of museum professionals i talked to are kind of like, where not americas attic for racist stuff that we want to hide or america's strategic racism reserve. no, that's not the role of museums. so, to really change peoples minds are open people's minds to different perspectives, to not have a museum gallery become a site of appreciation

of the martyrdom of a statue, et cetera, you have to do a lot of work. and so i decided at the book to profile the houston museum of african american culture, which is the only african american institution to have re-homed a removed monument so far. what they did was really take a lot of steps to ensure that this on your meant didn't exert the power it was designed to have, because it is a very powerful monument. it is a beautiful, gilded statue of an attractive person, winged, nude, representing the ideals of the confederacy. his body really draws you in. so, they put him in a closed courtyard, surrounded him with other artwork that are sculptures of eyes. to make sure he knows he's always being watched. and they have always had a number of artists in residence to make other performance and

work that call into question, if at symposiums. and they have a goal, not just that they don't want to destroy history. no, they want to use the statue to get to a better future. they want to use with the motion of paul and boomerang around to having conversations about what it was like to resist discrimination while under the eyes of so many monuments like that. >> and in the end, i mean, you do a great job explaining how complicated this was. i think this was the head of the museum said the statue was just, to them beautiful, was that it? so it's still exert a sort of, its influence, even if it's surrounded by these, sort of, this deprogramming. but in the end i think he makes a decision to keep it, right? i think he says i, like to keep the evidence, no? another great lie. and i like to get the evidence. so that people can't later live in denial. but you make the point is that this is a lot of work has to go

into getting this just right. and it matters whether the museum is, sort of, run, managed by people of color in this case, versus white folks who are just sort of, have fun [inaudible] about their ownership and management matters as well as they, the immediate visual context, is that correct? >> yeah. and i just want to say, 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 in quotes given to me by john giest, the director of this museum, by mike forcia, but i randall woodfin, the mayor of birmingham. i was very lucky in getting them together. >> so i'm going to jump really -- there's an audience question here, i have more here, but i want to jump in here with an audience question. practical question. 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 [inaudible] . >> but [inaudible] . >> [inaudible] drop everything and just [inaudible] were you able to multitask and write a full length -- >> no, i was so i, stopped doing anything else. it was every single moment of my time that was not spent with my kids. >> gotcha. >> to the extent that all my social interaction, you know, it was during pandemics. i just had my friends and family in the bubble, but they heard a lot of the -- there was a real period where i was writing the stone mountain chapter, which has a lot of plan involved, and i would be like, sitting down, and lunching, so i will be sitting down watching and saying, today's klan facts are [inaudible] . >> phil urgent to write. i was in the middle of the

countryside in fremont for the pandemic. i had family members who were going to be immunocompromised, so i couldn't go to protests. i was outside of my city, and this felt like something that i could do. >> let me ask you this. you know, i think whether it's sort of a liberal activists taking down confederate statues more conservatives banning library books and curricula about americas along and ugly history of racism, it properly seems to be an all at war for the stories that it tells the story of about the past. i mean there are critics who say that these fights are more about performance than substance, that there is a washington post article you cited in your footnote, for instance, there appears to headline, a controversial memories 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 hot

courthouse look more equitable without reckoning about the institutional racism to takes inside. for you so for your research for the work that you find out the removal of statues served as a quick, cathartic release that substituted for real change? where did you find that these takedowns helped launch more sustained forms of collective action? >> well first, just to challenge something you said at the beginning, i don't think that debates about monuments of the past are particular of a particular feature of the present. i just think they are able to happen when public, because one side is not winning so heavily. so, you know, i quote a letter that frederick douglass wrote to a washington newspaper after, the day after the dedication of the, complaining about its representation of a black man as more like an animal that a man. so people have been spotting the issues in problematic statues since they went up.

it's just that those voices have been effectively squashed through very concerted campaigns to shape what's vision of history has taught, especially to american schoolchildren. so in the early 20th century, the united daughters of the confederacy, a confederate heritage groups, would do things like ask school boards to step, unfair to the south, in textbooks that they thought, for example, it 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, in perceptions and sort of, coming out in the public because one side has successfully tempt down on [inaudible] . >> sure. >> and yeah. so i think i have seen a lot of analysis of statue protests with commentators thinking that

they knew what protesters wanted from it, but not a whole lot of people actually asking protests, i [inaudible] wanted to talk to, [inaudible] , what did you want to do? why did you want to do that? because he is someone who has had really a life of direct action, of caring for indigenous elders, and unhoused people, protesting all lines and center. so he is risking 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 people who had been silenced, who weren't present on the court or -- the state house long. 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 are prosecuted as often or solved as often, were ignored. so his question, essentially, being, why are we paying more on, 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, chopping the hitter off of a columbus in boston in the middle of the night, it's just a surprising win that doesn't really menacing or lead to lasting change, but in other cases, these removals, even the debates, the lack of removal, have led to really interesting ongoing conversations about the values that community wants to see represented. >> joe. so we have a few audience questions here that are on the same team. i'll read one of them and kind of summarize the other. this person right, i believe

that all sculpture is artistic, as well as sometimes historic and [inaudible] representational. the house touches should be preserved regardless of how, quote, appropriate they maybe, they may be seen by some. 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 a certain merit and, argument for preservation? >> maybe. a lot of confederate monuments were actually mass produced. it's especially delightful to learn that the same factories were making but union and confederate monuments, so they look exactly the same except for details of uniforms in cases slightly [inaudible] . if you look at videos, for example, of activists pulling down a confederate monument in durham, north carolina, you'll see they tied around its neck and then they found [inaudible]

that 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? we've got copies, you know what they look like, et cetera. i know this is her medical viewpoint from an artist dorian. but i also think about all of the things that happen have been allowed to decay because they weren't thought as important as these monuments. there was a really interesting 2018 smithsonian magazine investigation and that found, i think, over the previous four years, american taxpayers had spent at least $40 million to preserve confederate while humans and heritage sites, whereas there is all sorts of african american or indigenous sites and historical landmarks and monuments that are essentially crumbled away through lack of funding.

so if you are going to say artworks are, should always be preserved, we do have a limited amount of funding. so short, but let's have that preservation dollars be spread around more equally than just public monuments. >> you're [inaudible] about how complex decisions about monuments could be. and you write, should we honor only perfect people? if not, how much imperfections we tolerate? we should make these decisions and how? and towards the end of your book, you offer some advice for how communities should go about deciding whether to put up or remove a monument. can you tell us a bit about how you think that process should work in an ideal world? and how [inaudible] the way we make those decisions now? >> well, we make these decisions now is very limited in who gets to participate in the decision. so we need [inaudible]

public monuments. you might think there's some sort of public participation in monuments and you can really be surprised how little there is, both in when they come down and when they go up. someone's are usually put up by huge by 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, and put things getting a statue of the great with greater 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, just been erupting to 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 a monument. who put it up? what were their motivations? what do they want the monument to do? what messages do they want it to communicate? and how has it been used since? as it continued as stone mountain continued to foster hatred? the ku klux klan was revised not once but twice on the slopes of stone mountain in association with this project to do a confederate memorial. or has this been changed? so the lincoln memorial, for instance, with 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 just in

the state of [inaudible] 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 it, 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? >> you know, are the communities that are actively using this more democratic process you are describing? because it seems like, from examples in the book, the political actions surrounding this has been more of a reaction to it where 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 for even laying a finger on them. so other 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, where laws don't necessarily [inaudible] monuments [inaudible] pedestals, that is just a lack of procedure for raising any questions on 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 and for many, many years. and there was a large number of public hearings and discussions about that monument that resulted in [inaudible] and similarly, boston took down a copy of the freedman'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 it's worth it, again because when you compare what happens with this particular [inaudible] battle, 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 are 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 the idea that the statues that just contained one figure that were also posed to put on a pedestal and warship, or at least in a civil way warship are honored. that itself is sort of limiting, and i'm not an artist so i may get these terms run. but in some places there's a little bit more abstraction and a little bit less, is it figure-ism? so more people can see themselves and i work, so it's

or more open to different sorts of readings. you say that america needs more monuments that, quote, on our ideas and actions that would where the makers of those monuments. i wonder at one point -- it's tricky, though, because it's abstract and everyone sees what they want to see. what does that particularly honor? at some point, you are taking sides. so, i wonder how a more abstract monument might open itself to more readings of values. i think about the vietnam veteran memorial, per se. but how you have it be about something and not be about just as an airplane, you see a bird, i see the face of jesus. how do you strike that balance? >> i actually think the vietnam veterans memorial is a perfect example of this type of abstraction, where people can read into what they want. you can see that it's an

unquestioned honoring or an anti-war statement. it really depends on how you come to it. but it does raise a motions. it's an emotional experience to visit that, and that sort of heightened state which leads us to ask questions is what i think monuments can do. so, most american monuments, particularly the traditional style pre milan, don't want to ask questions. they want you to feel a vague patriotic thrill and then keep on living life. but i think monuments that are more confusing, that don't -- can lead to more debate about what america should look like. it's tricky, though. i thought at first i would have a whole chapter about what monuments should look like. and then i was like, you know what, i don't know.

i will note that a lot of current discussion about one new monuments 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 someone else who is a better model. but i think, as you put, it that nobody is perfect. even if you found a person who was perfect they would be privy to anyone who sees them. so, i think it's time to think more creatively about monuments rather than struggle to keep to a model that has really worked for us. >> 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 from -- >> we have some time, so no rush. >> let me ask you at least one more question here. you don't class over the complicated cases where you have, let's say, statues of columbus and which italian americans draw a lot of pride

but native americans see him as a catalyst for genocide. you talk about the minneapolis poem best at you as an example. how do you negotiate these discussions where groups, marginalized groups, we clearly don't want to honor racists. different if a great groups that may at one point have been at loggerheads we take different meanings from a columbus monument. what is a discussion that should be had between, say, and italian american officials on a statue of a native american community that see 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 clump's statues. because they're saying, leave us columbus, we have been a marginalized and discriminated against group, we know have feels to be rejected by america

and to be said that were less. but that is the same feel like that many indigenous people are saying, that indigenous people are reminding them. so, why resist and perpetuate the same experience. 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 went up starting after the 1924 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 and lesser, as not fit for any intellectual labor, et cetera

et cetera. there's a lot of efforts to restrict immigration. so, that act passes a 1924, where is our s waged about a wave of immigrants and the task turns to assimilating be immigrants and making them into americans, not italians anymore. in 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 have an argument that italians should count as white. which was very unclear before. so, by pinning a new identity on columbus, i as a tool for assimilation with a knife because he forced a lot of people to cut off a -- celebrating certain italian

inflected religious rituals and other cultural customs. resting in a certain way, et cetera. there's a real attempt to fit in. 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 remind other people of the genocide of their culture. -- >> we have an audience question here. have you seen this, i might mispronounce this, the octavius valentine catto statue in city hall in philadelphia? honoring the 19th century african american leaders considered a martyr for voting rights, having been assassinated in philadelphia on voting day in 1871. are you familiar the statue, any comments on that? >> i am not, but that's great. >> has there been much research or social, psychological

research on -- i think that's a lot of research on the effects of representation on children, particularly minority children. but you read quite pointedly at one point in your book, one of the things this interesting, is though these statues have been taken down, they are not out. most of them have not been melted down into something else like bullets or recycling. so, they're still in storage somewhere, they're being held in a warehouse where they might rear their heads again. but what are you that shuffling statues around our cities it's like, this is your quote, like moving an abuse of priests to another parish. may not be as round as many potential children or potential victims but, quote, still in a position to abuse. you write that not a single child deserves to crowd looking at a piece of stone or metal that tries to convince them they are not equal to other americans. i think a lot of us, most

people when they walk through a park don't necessarily pay attention. it's, like there's another old dude on a horse. do you get a sense of the statues actually being implicated in shaping children's understanding of who they are and whether they belong, did you encounter any research specifically about statues as opposed to other kinds of representation? >> yeah, there is not enough of it for me to feel comfortable citing it in a big theme discussion. not because it isn't there but because not enough people have had the research funds to measure statues specifically. but the research, the preliminary findings, the smaller studies, the theoretical discussions i found did point to seeing statues that -- especially those that honor someone who had a history of

oppression of people from the group people onto our statues that contain a stereotype or racist vision of someone from the group you belong to, they have a slow but steady effect. they're like a microaggression in the visual world. i came a lot across a lot of moving and disheartening quotes from people saying, you know, like the freedman statue with the kneeling black man in washington, d.c.. they were like, i don't want my kid to walk past this. every time i come to the park my kid says, oh, daddy, it's up there. that's not the representation of what i want to see. so, i think that i too often that the statues that i don't pay attention to when i'm walking. but i realize when writing the

book that sort of privilege of disregarding statues was very much mine as a white middle class person. and you can't extend that to everybody. >> sure, sure. the last thing here before we wrap up, is there anything that you want readers to come away with after the read this book? and i hope they will all by it, because we all can, we just keep getting the service in this conversation. but is there something like, you want people to put down the book and continue to think about and inform the way they act on or think about the monument 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 of stories. but that left out literally thousands of monuments in the u.s.. while our communities have them. so i really hope that people take another look at something they might walk or drive passed every day maybe, do some

research, may be [inaudible] 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 a very clear ideas of what should be. so i think that it gives an opportunity for everybody's voice to be heard. >> that's fascinating. thank you so much, dr. thompson. really, really interesting talking to. and i'll pass it back to add books and books. >> thank you both so much for this conversation. and thank you aerial, for moderating tonight's conversation, and thank you can. 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. >> goodnight.

with the 1973 roe vs. wade case and abortion being widely debated and discussed in the nation today american history tv is looking back to see wha