A Hall Divided

SHOULD Harvard honor the men who died defending the Confederacy? Although the Harvard Corporation last year rejected a plan to add the names of the Confederate dead alumni to the inscriptions in Memorial Hall, some faculty members are still calling for the names to be inscribed. Many are confident that the wounds of the conflict have long been healed and must be put in perspective; this is the third request to add the Confederate names since Mem Hall was completed more than 100 years ago.

Faculty critics of the request argued that honoring those racist rebels would be a slap in the face to Blacks and to dead Union soldiers. For many, 123 years after Lee's surrender, the Civil War scars still remain. And maybe they should.

Unfortunately, a lot of the Civil War myths remain. We teach our children that the war was fought to end slavery because we can't teach them the truth--that hundreds of thousands of Americans were sacrificed so that Abraham Lincoln could be the president of both Boston and Baton Rouge.

To make the carnage bearable, we tell each other that the North was fighting for God and goodness--"Glory, Glory, Hallelujah." We insist that for one brief moment, right and might were allied to crush the evil South. And so we honor the memory of the victors in America's great crusade; Memorial Hall was built for the explicit purpose of honoring the Northerners.

WE honor the memory of rich white Harvard boys whose slaves were poor white immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. We bestow greatness upon a region that also slaughtered Indians, abused ethnic minorities--white and black--and persecuted non-Protestants.

This is not an apology for the South. It is bad enough that we make heroes of the Northerners. It would be even worse if we also made heroes of the Confederates.

After the fall of the Confederacy, Southerners erected their own monuments. They honored their fallen sons. They recorded their struggle in the pages of history.

There is, therefore, no need to honor the Confederate dead. They've been honored already by their neighbors and friends. It would be a waste of marble to add their names in Memorial Hall.

And yet, somewhere on campus, the College could have a small monument erected to remind us of the horrors of Civil War Not a tribute to valor, strength, and battle, but a testament to the carnage of war. List the names of all dead alumni in alphabetical order. Do not mention their place of birth or allegiance. Harvard must avoid making the monument a list of good guys versus bad guys.

THE College must also be certain that the monument does not glorify the South. The Civil War was primarily a political and economic struggle. But the Confederacy, Dixie, and the Stars and Bars have all become symbols of hate. In Alabama, the state capitol is topped by a confederate flag. It wasn't placed there during reconstruction, but during the battle over desegregation in the 1950's.

The flag of the confederacy--once a badge of honor--has become a badge of hate. In North Carolina, school officials are facing a new form of civil disobedience. Junior high and high school students are pinning the flag to their apparel, much to the alarm of school administrators who fear the flag will increase racial tensions. Students who refuse to remove the flag are being kicked out of Carolina classrooms.

When a group of Blacks tried to march through white Forsyth County, Georgia they were countered with the stars and bars. At Ku Klux Klan rallies from Maine to Mississippi, you'll see it as the symbol of white supremacy.

Honoring the Confederacy would open up the wounds of the 1960's, not the 1860's. Few people remain bitter over theCivil War. But memories of Alabama police chiefs, water cannons, and attack dogs still linger in the minds of millions of Americans. Most Americans can still remember the debate over the Civil Rights Act. They remember the words to "We Shall Overcome" and the day Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis.

Because the South supported slavery and because the Confederacy has become a rallying symbol for American racists, the College must never honor the Confederacy. But Harvard can honor its dead, without honoring the South.