Robert E. Lee or George Floyd?
Which American hero seems handsomer in historic retrospect?
There’s been a lot of talk this week about Robert E. Lee of all people.
Was he a hero like President Eisenhower argued?
After President Dwight D. Eisenhower revealed on national television that one of the four “great Americans” whose pictures hung in his office was none other than Robert E. Lee, a thoroughly perplexed New York dentist reminded him that Lee had devoted “his best efforts to the destruction of the United States government” and confessed that since he could not see “how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.” Eisenhower replied personally and without hesitation, explaining that Lee was, “in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. . . . selfless almost to a fault . . . noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities . . . we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.”
For example, when I was at Rice U. in the late 1970s, Rice, like quite a few Southern colleges at the time, had an academic honor code that had been, at one time before my day (1976-1980), pretty explicitly based on the notion of What Would Robert E. Lee Do?
Hence, we still enjoyed luxuries like take-home closed-book finals: i.e., you could take the test anytime you wanted anywhere you wanted, but you just couldn’t peek in your textbook once you’d begun the test.
How could they tell you wouldn’t cheat? Well, they’d trust your honor as a Southern gentleman.
Personally, the only thing Southern about me was that I was from Southern California.
Still …
After all, would Robert E. Lee have peeked?
When I read about all the conniving and corner cutting going on at Stanford and the like in the 2020s — 38% of Stanford undergrads have recently had themselves declared “disabled” (up almost 300% in one decade), and thus in need of extended time on tests — I wonder What Would Robert E. Lee Have Done?
What Would Robert E. Lee Do seems like a very different question from What Would George Floyd Do?
But surely Lee was a traitor so we must melt down his statues to recast them as George Floyd statues?
Perhaps George wasn’t a saint, but at least he didn’t defeat the United States government in a half-dozen major battles?
Well, the definition of treason wasn’t clear in 1861. In writing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers had kicked the can down the road of whether secession from the United States, which had been founded by an act of secession from the British Empire eleven years before, was allowed or not, and whether supreme loyalty was owed to state or country. Rather than debate various scenarios, which would probably have derailed ratification of the Constitution, they just left those contentious questions out of the Constitution.
That act of prudence worked pretty well for 70 years. But then …
Paywall here.
