When You Grow Up by James B. Nicola

When you grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in Massachusetts, where Arthur Feidler was a household name, you are sure to learn a bit about the history of music—and the music of history—through numerous performances—live, televised, or via vinyl—of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. My parents, for instance, loved taking us kids to Tanglewood, the outdoor music festival seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There, live cannons scored like musical instruments not only evoked the steppes of Russia but also seared into our collective memories the story of Napoleon’s folly and epic loss.

Besides this musical introduction to Napoleon, I also received an educational one. James Loewen tells us in Lies My Teacher Told Me (read it now) that every history textbook used in the U.S. public schools from the 1930s to 1970s was authored by someone who happened to be an Anglophile (not to mention a male, a person-of-pallor, and an Ivy League alumnus). So, Napoleon’s two big losses to the British, at Trafalgar and Waterloo, also became pretty much common knowledge by the time my generation broke into, or out of, high school. Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington’s names were bandied about like some kind of heroes, though not quite on the same level as Paul Revere or Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

I had already learned a few fun facts about this Napoleon fellow when I was in grammar school. Those were the years when the world watched on television for the first time A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars. Since I played the piano—in front of the whole school a few times, no less—Charlie’s friend Schroeder was my main man, or I suppose I should say cool kid, and his love for Beethoven became mine as well. In fourth grade, I read a big fat biography of him—from the library children’s room, but still, well over 300 pages. I used to sneak peeks at it beneath my lift-top desk (not when Mrs. Starr was teaching us something new, but during review lessons of things I understood the first time around). At age nine or ten, I knew that the symphony Beethoven started to compose in honor of Napoleon ended up being called the Eroica (“heroic”) instead of the Napoleon since the so-called “little general,” once the champion of the people, betrayed them—and Beethoven—by seizing power as dictator-cum-emperor. Ironically, he actually ended France’s first experiment with democracy, which had grown out of the French Revolution. (The first French revolution, that is.) When you grow up in Massachusetts, you get this story in the car or on the bus on the way to Tanglewood, Boston Common, or any other number of places where they roll out the cannons for Tchaikovsky and his 1812 Overture.

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In 1981, I am 22, just arrived for the first time in Europe, starting with a few weeks in Paris. I learn to order baguettes and pain-au-chocolat within hours of my flight’s 6 a.m. landing, after which I high-tail it on the Métro to Notre Dame cathedral (R.I.P.) in the première arrondissement. By the second or third day, I venture farther west to the Eiffel Tower and the Arch of Triumph—Napoleon’s triumphs, that is, as he was the one who commissioned the Arch when he was still, well, somebody. Nearby, I knew, was the Hôtel des Invalides, which, I also knew, housed his tomb.

We’d learned about Paris’s most famous attractions in junior high French class, where Miss Lukes (pronounced “Lucas”) would occasionally give us a break from responding to Est-ce un banc? with Oui, c’est un banc and the like. She may have shown slides or a film strip or maybe just opened the book she was reading from, but I do recall those first descriptions and images of the beautiful all-white Sacré-Coeur church in Montmartre overlooking the whole city, the Sainte-Chapelle church (or more accurately, a chapel) with its splendiferous stained-glass windows, the Louvre museum, and l’Etoile—where twelve big avenues came together at that Arch with no traffic lights (not too unlike Kelly Square in Worcester, putatively the worst traffic intersection in America till just about now). If we ever got to Paris, we’d have some idea what we were in for.

Later, I learned that Napoleon had contributed a lot to French culture besides its status of empire and the Code Civil. He oversaw the urban renewal, really the redesigning, of Paris, for example, with its broad boulevards and majestic monuments. He also renamed the days of the week—which took three days longer to get through, as there would be ten instead of seven.

Foremost, though, I knew that he was most famous for losing. Three big battles. To the Russians in 1812 and to the English twice, in 1815. Plus, losing the whole shebang, for which he was exiled to his own private island—twice, the second island far more remote, so as to prevent yet another escape. (Atlases, too, were big in my house when I was growing up. You could see how ridiculous it was the first time around to enisle a dangerous prisoner, basically, in swimming distance to the mainland of Europe. The second island was much closer to Antarctica; that did the trick.)

What I was not prepared for in the Hôtel des Invalides, though, right by Napoleon’s understandably large tomb of rather beautiful, highly varnished wood, was the giant statue of him.

Statue? For a famous loser? Who set back the course of democracy in Europe a whole generation, or a half generation, or maybe a century—that question gets complicated in France, where revolutions and restorations and republics are as rife as bar mitzvahs in Israel or New York. (France has been enjoying its Fifth Republic since 1968, but number Six may not be too far behind.)

Anyway, there were no fellow sightseers to express this thought to aloud at the time, and I was not about to practice my meager French conversation skills with a guard at Napoleon’s tomb. I had only started getting comfortable saying “Bonjour, Madame” or “Bonjour, Monsieur” when entering a boulangerie or boutique.

Fast forward forty-one years. Just two months ago, I happened to mention this reaction of mine to my friend Randi. I mean, where else does the loser get a giant statue? No less one who betrayed the people and representative democracy. She said she had had the precise same reaction her first time in Paris, too, right there in the Hôtel des Invalides!

Around the same time, I also mentioned this to my brother, a much bigger history buff than I am. He told me a story I hadn’t heard before about something that happened when we visited our grandparents when we were kids.

***

Our whole family rode in our Ford® Falcon® all the way from Massachusetts one summer and visited various Civil War battle sites en route—Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain, for instance, where kids could climb on actual cannons, still aimed at the ridge opposite a hundred years later. It was that war’s centennial. Very educational trip.

Anyway, one day Grandpa took my brother, age eight, along with him to buy milk and whatnot. In the 1960s, in rural Florida, convenience stores dotted the countryside the way colleges do in Massachusetts. It was before the rise of 7-11 chain stores, so you could actually pick up a rifle and some ammunition along with that gallon of milk. Or souvenirs. My brother still remembers seeing on the wall, for sale, Confederate battle flags. Not the national flag of the Confederacy (the “stars & bars”), which, with its fat horizontal stripes, was tranquil in comparison.

Anyway, at the front counter, my brother sees those battle flags for sale and says out loud to Grandpa precisely what I would be thinking eighteen years later in Paris: “But they lost!” A tad too loudly, he tells me. Every eye in the store starts to dilate. Grandpa takes my brother’s little hand, and they beat a hasty retreat outa there. But every mind lurking behind those pairs of peering eyes knew that what the guileless eight-year-old said was true.

***

As you probably know, the stars-and-crossbars image was incorporated on five state flags until recently. Perhaps it was intended merely as a symbol of losers’ defiance or “pride” (proud of what, that is the question), but effectively, it has served as a symbol of terror during more than a century of Jim Crow laws (and crimes), lynching, and American apartheid.

Now, way back, at around the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I believe it was Ben Franklin who said something like, “We all had better hang together, or we are sure to hang separately.” All the signers risked their lives by putting their names below the treasonous prose that began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal….” They knew that if England won the war, they would all be hanged as traitors. John Hancock’s signature was not just the largest, as president of that Continental Congress; it was also the bravest! What a mensch. What a roomful of mensches, differences and character flaws notwithstanding. Our nation was lucky to have so many stalwart souls in the same place at the same time.

Fast forward four score and nine years to the end of a very un-Civil War. The Confederate leaders and generals were not hanged for treason in 1865 but rather forgiven by Abraham Lincoln and the United States and granted amnesty. Some even served in Congress again. But this generosity—you can call it a “strategy” if you’re a cynical sort, but it was still a pretty sweet deal (beats hanging)—anyway, it does not negate the fact that the insurrection was, in fact, an act of treason. Had the South won, of course, that would not have been the case.

Where, though, were the stalwart souls of the South? Why, instead, have there been so many statues and symbols—in public places, that is—to honor losers and traitors? Benedict Arnold was a great American military hero before he turned traitor, back in that War for Independence. Are there any statues of him in the original thirteen states or any of the current fifty? Methinks not.

What about other historical figures who are famous for losing? All the conquests of Alexander the (so-called) “Great” were promptly lost upon his demise. Are there statues of him all over the Balkan peninsula? Methinks not.

 Cleopatra lost Egypt to the Roman Empire. Egypt had flourished as an empire for several millennia, but, since Cleopatra, was not independent again for another TWO THOUSAND years! Many statues of her? Nope. Why not? She lost. (Though her full story is far more complicated than that, I know, and yes, Egypt had been conquered a few times long before the Romans.)

What about England’s own dictator-of-the-people (as opposed to a king or royal dictator), a century and a half before Napoleon? Cromwell. Any statues? Hardly. He lost.

Lenin? Big statue in Moscow once he won. But even though it was not till seven decades later communism in Russia finally lost. Statue down.

Hitler? Statues? He lost. And he was a traitor to the whole human race, wasn’t he?

Well, just think about this: Didn’t every Confederate general—every Confederate soldier, no less—fight to defend a system not too unlike Nazi Germany whereby one group of people, the ones in power, fought—and killed tens of thousands of other people in the process—to perpetuate and protect their LEGAL right of enslavement, torture, dispossession, dismemberment, imprisonment, abuse, theft, lynching, rape, forced breeding, and massacre of another group of people? Answer: Yes, that is indeed what the South was fighting for—Slavery—actually, chattel slavery, a bit different from anything in the ancient world (or Biblical times). Slavery was mentioned in every single Confederate state’s articles of secession. (So, if someone tries the smoke-and-mirrors trick of mentioning “states’ rights”—they got it backward. The southern states wanted the latest federal laws enforced, like the Fugitive Slave Act: that is, for the national government to DENY the northern states THEIR states’ rights—which it did!)

***

By the way, I did not see statues of Napoleon all over Paris. Nor France, for that matter. Just one. At his tomb. And the famous painting of him in the Louvre museum is there because it is by a great painter, Delacroix. I think there are a few other portraits of him scattered about the planet, as well. They are portraits of a loser.

Another by-the-way: Today, in Germany, neo-Nazis notwithstanding, most folks know and subscribe to the doctrine of “Never Again.”

In the U.S.A., a lot of Southerners do, too.

Is that too much to ask of the rest of us Americans today? This is not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know.

If you want to celebrate Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis—loyal Confederates, albeit indisputable traitors to both the United States and humanity, who were lucky to be granted amnesty—then is it not enough to place their statues where they are buried, in one (preferably private) cemetery? Why in heaven’s name would you want one in a public square of a proud American city or state capital—no less of a state capital like Lexington, Kentucky, whose country Lee fought AGAINST?

Let’s name places, bases, buildings, forests, parks, and the like after Americans who saved this country rather than attacking it and who fought for, not against, humanity. People like Abraham Lincoln. Ulysses Grant. Frederick Douglass. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. When we see their names south of the Mason-Dixon line, then we are on our way to becoming a United States of America at last. Maybe we need an American Tchaikovsky. Maybe we need American teachers who believe in the promise of the Declaration of Independence, not in romanticizing an ignoble Lost Cause by trying to deny it was either ignoble or lost.

As sure as Silence is Complicity, Denial is Conspiracy, isn’t it?

By the way, I don’t think I am particularly peculiar for thinking this way. All the formerly Confederate states have finally removed the Confederate battle flag image from their state flags, nor is that losers’ symbol of treason and violence flown at Nascar® events anymore. That looks like a good beginning, I think. I hope. Like growing up.

But what in heaven’s name took so long?