Here’s a striking paragraph, typical of Percy’s Southern Stoicism:
Instead [of Southern cuisine, the best, only cuisine in America], you will find in any Southern town a statue in memory of the Confederate dead, erected by the Daughters of something or other, & made, the townsfolk will respectfully tell you, in Italy. It is always the same: A sort of shaft or truncated obelisk, after the manner of the Washington Monument, on top of which stands a little man with a big hat holding a gun. If you are a Southerner you will not feel inclined to laugh at these efforts, so lacking in either beauty or character, to preserve the memory of their gallant & ill-advised forebears. I think the dash, endurance, & devotion of the Confederate soldier have not been greatly exaggerated in song & story: They do not deserve these chromos in stone. Sentiment driveling into sentimentality, poverty, &, I fear, lack of taste are responsible for them, but they are the only monuments which are dreadful from the point of view of æsthetics, craftsmanship, & conception that escape being ridiculous. They are too pathetic for that. Perhaps a thousand years from now the spade of some archaeologist will find only these as relics of & clues to the vanished civilization we call ours. How tragically & comically erroneous his deductions will be!
This does not quote address the matter—there is much to which to object in many statues raised at the turn of the century—but who would have thought that the problem with Percy’s idea would be that there’s no thousand years from now, nor indeed even an hundred. But I suppose this fits perfectly into Percy’s intention to prove equal to unequal circumstances, to note without too much commotion the passing of a way of life. What in America lasts very long? We still have the Washington Monument, at any rate, though I do not doubt that, since he, too, owned slaves, his memory will soon need defending, such that heartbreak must come. Meanwhile, New York City has gotten rid of a statue of Thomas Jefferson—also a slaveowner. Both men were once held to be the greatest Americans. They were & are.
Fine, fine book. CS https://www.alibris.com/Lanterns-on-the-Levee-Recollections-of-a-Planters-Son-William-Alexander-Percy/book/28779072?matches=23