The nutty professor makes the grade -- Sept. 17, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the first “Back to the Future” movie, time-traveling teen Marty McFly tells his eccentric friend Doc Brown, who’s living in the 1950s, that in 1985 Ronald Reagan is president.

“Ronald Reagan the actor?” Doc Brown asks incredulously. “Then who’s vice president—Jerry Lewis?”

That was a big laugh line 30 years ago. The former actor actually had become president, and everybody knew that funny man Jerry Lewis was unsuited to be vice president.

Those were the blissful days before Donald Trump. We’ll consider his comic possibilities another time.  

Today, many young people don’t even know that Reagan was an actor. Jerry Lewis, though, remains one of the most durable entertainers of the last century. Among his movie hits: “The Nutty Professor,” “The Errand Boy” and “The Bell Boy.”

The guy’s a survivor, literally. He has weathered two heart attacks, prostate cancer, diabetes and other health problems.

At 89, he’s still working, performing on stage and on screen. He plays Nicolas Cage’s dad in an upcoming crime thriller movie, “The Trust,” and recently signed on to appear in a National Lampoon flick, “Dead Serious.” He was the lead in “Max Rose,” a 2013 dramatic film. Critics say his stage show these days verges on the insulting, and they haven’t warmed to the serious Lewis. 

No matter. The Library of Congress announced Monday that it will preserve Lewis’ comedic contributions to American life in perpetuity. It has acquired more than 1,000 items -- films, TV clips and paper documents -- spanning Lewis’ career of more than 70 years.

“This collection will give the world a more complete picture of his life as a performer, director, producer, writer, recording artist, author, educator and philanthropist,” said James Billington, the Librarian of Congress.

The Jerry Lewis Collection includes films of TV and nightclub appearances with and without Dean Martin, home movies, 34-mm prints of his films and movie test footage. It will be in good company. The library has collections of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.   

Collections are stored and preserved at the library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. To celebrate, Lewis will perform Oct. 9 at “An Evening with Jerry Lewis,” a ticketed show at the State Theatre in Culpeper.

Lewis still loves to perform. “If I get more than three people in a room, I do a number,” he said in a statement, adding, “Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life’s work was one of the biggest thrills of my life.” 

Lewis met Dean Martin in the 1940s when both were performing separately in Atlantic City. They formed a duo club act in which Martin sang and Lewis interrupted with silly remarks. They became “the most popular duo in cinema” in the 1950s, according to the “Historical Dictionary of the Eisenhower Era,” which says that before the two went their separate ways in 1956, they had 17 comedy box office hits.  Martin died in 1995.

Everybody doesn’t love Lewis – except for the French, who may be his biggest fans. 

The French government gave “the French people’s favorite clown” the Legion of Honor medal on his 80^th birthday. Lewis went tie-less, wore slippers and hammed it up with “a virtual slapstick routine,” the Associated Press reported.

In this country, though, he alienated about half the population in 1998 when he said that women can’t be funny.  A woman comic sets him back, he said.

“I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies into the world,” he said. He and his first wife had six sons before he divorced her. Lewis later said women could be funny – but not if they were crude.

Lewis and Martin hosted the 1956 Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, and for the next 55 years Lewis volunteered as the event’s national chairman, raising nearly $2 billion. The association announced the telethon’s end in May.    

To us, Lewis may seem silly and dated, but Americans still desperately need a laugh. Even the Founding Fathers recognized the power of laughter.  

“Trouble knocked at the door, but, hearing laughter, hurried away,” Benjamin Franklin said.

Thanks for the laughs, professor.   

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A Crooked Road leads to music -- Sept. 10, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

“Loitering allowed,” the sign outside The Floyd Country Store in Southwest Virginia reads, and that’s good because nobody is going anywhere.  

It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday, 45 minutes until tickets for the store’s Friday Night Jamboree go on sale at $5 a pop, and people are itching to get in line. Every porch chair is taken. Inside, people sit in worn wooden booths, eating sandwiches, ice cream and slabs of carrot cake. Others fill paper bags with hard candy from barrels and browse bluegrass CDs, goat milk lotions and Carhartt work pants.  

Floyd, population 432, on the Blue Ridge plateau about an hour’s drive southwest of Roanoke, may have just one stop light but it’s a major venue on the Crooked Road, Virginia’s musical heritage trail. On Friday nights and other times a week, Floyd blossoms with bluegrass and old-time music.

“Floyd on Friday nights is transcendent,” said my friend Mary, who made the trip from Pennsylvania to Floyd last year. I was skeptical, but Mary was right.

Something extraordinary is happening in Floyd and other out-of-the-way places as the world beats a path to see people play traditional tunes on instruments they love. Appalachian music, crafts and outdoor recreation are helping to build a new, creative economy in a region that no longer can depend on coal, furniture and textiles.

“This is a place where there’s indigenous music alive in just about every community,” said Jack Hinshelwood, executive director of the Crooked Road, a 330-mile route from Rocky Mount to Breaks Interstate Park with eight other major venues, including the Birthplace of Country Music in Bristol, and 60 affiliated festivals and venues.

The Crooked Road was incorporated a decade ago to support tourism and economic development around the region’s musical traditions. A sister operation, Round the Mountain, supports crafts. Local, federal and state officials, including Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and business leaders are scheduled to speak Sept. 21 and 22 in Abingdon at a conference aimed at celebrating the creative economy.

Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky also have strong musical traditions. In Alabama, the Muscle Shoals area is called the Hit Making Capital of the World and in May the birthplace of W.C. Handy, Father of the Blues, in Florence received a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

I met Hinshelwood at a Thursday night open bluegrass jam session at Heartwood artisan gateway in Abingdon. The non-profit center opened four years ago to showcase regional crafts, foods and wines, including home-smoked meats, and music. An accomplished bluegrass musician himself, Hinshelwood explained that most players on the Crooked Road never had formal music lessons and most have day jobs.

“This is a place where music by and large is recreational and cultural. It’s not about people who make their living from music. It’s very much about a recreational way of life,” he said.

Rarely have I seen shows where the musicians and the audience have such good clean fun. The Floyd store operates on “Granny’s rules”—no smoking, no drinking alcohol, no bad language and no conduct unbecoming a lady or gentleman.

At 6:30, the evening begins with a prayer and gospel bluegrass. Recently, Janet Turner & Friends – among them her daughter Leona – played for the gospel hour. Turner, who is from Floyd, is a tiny woman with a froth of white hair and a strong voice. Her Facebook page – yes, she has one – says she has been playing bluegrass music more than 30 years.

Everyone sat quietly on folding chairs until 7:30, when the Friday Night Old Time Band took the stage. Little kids, their parents, grandparents, couples and singles practically ran to fill the wood floor, all flat-foot dancing, some with taps on their shoes, some barefoot.  A third band, 2 Young 2 Old, kept the crowd on its feet until 10:30 p.m.

In fine weather, fiddlers, guitarists, banjo and mandolin players spill onto the streets of Floyd, playing impromptu concerts on street corners and alleys.

A highlight of the evening is seeing who has traveled farthest. A pull-down map magically appears and Stewart Scales, who teaches geography at Virginia Tech and plays banjo with Turner, determines the winner. The other night, a young man from Paris – France, not Texas – edged out contenders from England and Wales. It’s not unheard of for travelers from China to find their way to Floyd.

Along the Crooked Road, musicians jam in barber shops, cafes, grocery stores and festivals. Free Midday Mountain Music performances take place every afternoon on the breezeway at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Galax. Nationally known bands play in the amphitheater.

The center’s Roots of American Music Museum, whose exhibits were curated by the late folklorist Joe Wilson, author of “A Guide to the Crooked Road,” includes historic audio and video clips and is first class. The center is open May through October.

Several veteran pickers entertained on the breezeway the other day, links in a musical chain that began years and years ago.

“You rosin the bow the same way and play the same tunes your great-great granddaddy played,” Hinshelwood said. “In this fast-paced world, there’s something anchoring about that.”

And, yes, transcendent.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Retirement -- obsolete, too early or just right? -- Sept. 3, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

As Americans enjoy the Labor Day weekend, some workers also dream of labor-free days – also known as retirement.

Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich, 63, is not among them.    

“What do you do?” Kasich, the governor of Ohio, asked a man at Dunkin’ Donuts.  

“Well, I’m retired,” the man said.

“OK, but what are you doing?” pressed Kasich, who recounted the conversation at a town hall Aug. 19 in Salem, N.H.

“He may have recently retired, because he says he’s now working for his wife, taking care of things around the house,” Kasich said. “But we should never retire, never.”

We are put on this earth for a purpose, Kasich said, and we should use our gifts to make a better world.

That’s lofty, but there’s also a down-to-earth public policy question: When should Americans in the future retire and collect Social Security benefits? Social Republicans and Democrats in the 2016 presidential contest disagree.

Kasich and other GOP candidates are betting that younger workers will willingly wait longer than their parents and grandparents for their labor-free years -- if they’re convinced they’ll actually receive benefits. Most young people now think they’ll never see a dime.

Democrats contend that raising the retirement age is an unnecessary, back-door benefit cut. Some even say it’s time to expand Social Security benefits.

The split illustrates a shift in Americans’ attitudes toward retirement. Healthier as they age, people seem increasingly resistant to putting their feet up – or to admitting they’d like to. Many can’t afford to quit working, others fear too much leisure time and a few are blessed with work they love. It helps to be the boss.

Former President Jimmy Carter, 90, said he and his wife, Rosalynn, talked several times over the years about pulling back from the Carter Center.Not until he received a diagnosis of brain cancer after having surgery for liver cancer did Carter turn over the reins to his grandson, Jason.

Carter still hopes to go to Nepal to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in November, if his treatment schedule allows, he said last month.

Garrison Keillor, 73, announced (again) that he will retire from “A Prairie Home Companion.” Keillor has said for years he wanted to step back from the radio show he started in 1974. He said in 2011 he would retire in 2013, but didn’t.  

This time, though, Keillor said his last show as host would be in July 2016 and named a successor, musician Chris Thile.

“I have a lot of other things that I want to do,” Keillor told the Associated Press in July. “I mean, nobody retires anymore. Writers never retire.”

After nearly 40 years in Congress, Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland decided not to run for re-election in 2016. Mikulski, 79, said: “Do I spend my time raising more money or, do I spend my time raising hell?”

Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem, 81, has the same idea. She continues working to promote social justice and equality.  

“The idea of retiring is as foreign to me as the idea of hunting,” Steinem says.

People can collect Social Security at 62, and most do so, even though they would get larger benefits if they waited until the full retirement age of 66 for those born between 1943 and 1954. Those who can delay receiving benefits until 70 get the largest checks. 

For those born in 1960 or later, full retirement age is 67.

Nearly all the GOP presidential candidates say people in the future should work longer. 

“We need to look over the horizon and begin to phase in, over an extended period of time, going from 65 to 68 or 70,” to save Social Security for those under age 40, Jeb Bush said on “Face the Nation” in May. 

Chris Christie proposes to raise early retirement to age 64 and full retirement to 69. Rand Paul says retirement should start at 70. Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker all favor hiking the retirement age.

Democratic contenders Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley both want to keep the retirement age where it is. Hillary Clinton has said we shouldn’t “mess” with Social Security but hasn’t given details.

Any permanent fix of the Social Security system likely will include raising the retirement age in the future. Your presidential vote in 2016 may help determine how long young workers wait for benefits. Whether you’re still laboring or labor-free, speak up.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Heroes on a train: `Let's go!' -- Aug. 27, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Three young Americans on vacation captivated the world last week when they risked their lives to save hundreds of train travelers in Europe from a terrorist attack.

“They are truly heroes,” said Jane Hartley, U.S. ambassador to France. “When most of us would run away, Spencer, Alek and Anthony ran into the line of fire, saying `Let’s go!’ Those words changed the fate of many.”

As we go about our ordinary days, celebrating the extraordinary acts of Spencer Stone, 23, Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Anthony Sadler, 23, a question arises: Would I do what they did?

“I hope I would,” my dentist said as he cleaned my teeth. Me too, although I hope never to find out.

Nobody wants to think what might have happened had the three buddies not been aboard that particular car on the high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. The three acted instantly.

“It was either do something or die,” said Sadler, a student at Sacramento State University. The joyous news is that nobody died.  

Skarlatos, a specialist in the Oregon National Guard just back from nine months in Afghanistan, spotted the shirtless guy with an AK-47 rifle strapped to his chest.

“Let’s go!” he said. The three tackled the heavily armed Moroccan Ayoub El Khazzani, 25, who viciously slashed Stone, an airman first class in the U.S. Air Force, with a box cutter. British businessman Chris Norman, 62, an IT consultant, heard “Let’s go!” and joined the three Americans. He tied up El Khazzani. 

Stone nearly lost his left thumb and suffered other wounds, but he still saved the life of Mark Moogalian, 51, a French-American professor at the Sorbonne. Moogalian, originally from Midlothian, Va., is also a hero.

Moments earlier, Moogalian tried to wrest the rifle from the terrorist and was shot in the neck. Bleeding profusely, he could have died but for Stone, an EMT who used his uninjured hand to apply pressure to Moogalian’s neck to stop the bleeding until help arrived.

“Let’s go!” reminds many Americans of other heroes. On Sept. 11, 2001, “Let’s roll!” was the rallying cry of Todd Beamer and other passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who tried to storm the cockpit, where terrorists had taken over the plane, rather than allow the terrorists to fly it into the U.S. Capitol. The passengers sacrificed their lives to change the fate of many.

The American friends were just 9 or 10 years old on 9/11 and have grown up under the constant threat of terrorism. The military men said their training kicked in on the train.

“It was not really a conscious decision,” Skarlatos told reporters. “We just decided to act … It was gut instinct.”

French President Francois Hollande, who presented the Legion of Honor to the Americans and Norman, said: “We are still vulnerable. This is further evidence that we must prepare ourselves for more assaults, and thus we must protect ourselves.” Moogalian and a Frenchman who confronted the gunman will receive the honor later, authorities said.

Not only France needs to be watchful.

U.S. government reports have warned for years that America’s passenger rail system is vulnerable to terrorist attack. Whether Congress should pour billions into tightening passenger rail security and whether passengers would put up with the time and inconvenience required is open for debate.

The busiest U.S. train stations do have armed guards, plain-clothes officers who watch for suspicious behavior, random passenger and bag checks and bomb-sniffing dogs, but Amtrak carries about 32 million passengers a year to 500 destinations in 46 states. Every day, more than 86,000 passengers ride more than 300 Amtrak trains. Most stations have minimal security.

Three times as many passengers take the train as fly between Washington and New York. Between New York and Boston, trains carry more riders than all of the airlines combined, Amtrak says.

For the foreseeable future, it’s up to passengers to stay vigilant. “If you see something, say something” still applies. But in a rare, horrifying moment, ordinary people may have to do something extraordinary.  

British businessman Norman, who lives in France and travels frequently, had thought ahead about the nightmare scenario.

 “My position was, I’m not going to be the guy who dies sitting down,” he told CNN. “If you’re going to die, try to do something about it.”

© 2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Trump's gift to Hillary is born in the USA -- Aug. 20, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Here we go again. Donald Trump’s proposal to stop birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants is forcing Republicans into a debate they can’t win and should have ended decades ago.

In 1996, the Republican Party Platform called for a constitutional amendment to end automatic citizenship for children born to parents who are in the country illegally or are not long-term residents. The party's presidential and vice presidential nominees Bob Dole and Jack Kemp both rejected the plank. 

“Born in America, you’re an American,” Kemp declared.

But that wasn’t the last word.

Since 2007, as anti-immigrant sentiment has flowed, a few congressional Republicans have backed bills to stop birthright citizenship. A measure by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, has 27 cosponsors, all Republicans. 

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing on birthright citizenship in April that he rarely has a conversation about immigration policy without someone asking about automatic citizenship. 

“The question of whether our forefathers meant for birthright citizenship in all circumstances to be the law of the land is far from settled. In any event we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today,” Goodlatte said.

But there’s little appetite for the issue in the Senate, even among Republicans. A bill introduced by Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana has zero cosponsors.

Now comes Trump and his extreme immigration plan released Sunday. He cited Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid as wanting to end birthright citizenship, which Reid did -- in 1993. By 1999 Reid called his own proposal an embarrassment, high on his “list of mistakes.”

“I didn’t understand the issue,” Reid explained, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in December 1999. “I’m embarrassed that I made such a proposal.”

Naturally, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was quick to criticize Trump’s plan.

“It is disturbing that Republican presidential candidates continue to embrace extreme anti-immigrant positions as core pieces of their immigration platform,” Lorella Praeli, Hillary for America Latino Outreach director, said in a statement.

If Democrats now are united behind birthright citizenship, Republicans are in disarray. Presidential hopefuls Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal support ending automatic citizenship. Others, including Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum have supported changing the law in the past.

Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush prefer sticking with the law.   

“Mr. Trump can say that he’s for this because people are frustrated that it’s abused. But we ought to fix the problem rather than take away rights,” Bush said on CBS. There must be ways short of a constitutional amendment to deal with the phenomenon of pregnant women entering the country to give birth so that their babies become citizens, Bush said.

Bush knows his brother George got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2004 presidential election, according to exit polls, a modern record for a Republican. In 2012, Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, after his comment that undocumented immigrants should “self deport.”

The Constitution as originally written did not define citizenship, but since after the Civil War, anyone born in the United States has been a citizen. The 14^th Amendment in 1868, a Reconstruction measure pressed by Republicans, overturned the Supreme Court’s odious Dred Scott decision that no black persons who had been “imported into the country, and sold as slaves” or their descendants could ever become citizens.

The 14^th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen even though the parents could never become citizens because of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Changing the law would require passage of a constitutional amendment, a feat of bipartisanship nearly unimaginable in this era. Most legal scholars consider the 14^th amendment settled.

So do pragmatic Republicans, those who actually want to win in 2016 – and not merely make debating points.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about immigration,” Trump bragged at the first Republican candidates' debate. He’s right. Most GOP candidates would prefer not to alienate a large swath of Hispanic and other immigrant voters with a plan that’s going nowhere.

But Trump might be making someone happy. Her name is Hillary.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Play ball! Hoping for Coolidge luck -- Aug. 13, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Novelist Henry James said the two most beautiful words in the English language are summer afternoon. I’d say that on any summer afternoon, the two words that bring joy and hope are “Play ball!”  

What better escape from the bizarre 2016 presidential race and assorted national and international crises than an afternoon or evening outside at the ball park? In August, we may dream about October but we don’t fret. Much.

In the nation’s capital, baseball comes with a side of presidential history. At other major league ballparks, sausages or pierogies are racing mascots, but in Washington it’s the Racing Presidents who compete in a fourth-inning sprint down the warning track and foul line. They are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and, as of last month, Calvin Coolidge.

Silent Cal seemed an odd addition to the presidents, but he did attend 10 baseball games while he was in office from 1923 to 1929. He was the first president to attend a World Series opener and the first to throw out a first pitch at a World Series game.

Coolidge didn’t lose an election in 30 years in politics, so he was thought lucky. Fans credited the “Coolidge luck” with the Washington Senators’ winning two of their three pennants. They won the 1924 World Series and the American League championships in 1925, during his tenure. 

These days, a president who ventures into a stadium may get booed. That’s what happened when President Barack Obama threw out the first pitch of the season at Nationals Park in 2010. What did he expect when he put on a Chicago White Sox cap?

Coolidge wasn’t much of a baseball fan, but his wife, first lady Grace Coolidge, was.

Called the “first lady of baseball,” she kept a scorecard at games and when she couldn’t be there in person listened on the radio. The Coolidges were in the stands at the first game of the 1924 World Series, when the president decided it was time to go back to the White House. The score was 2-2 in the ninth inning.

“When he rose to leave, the first lady, resplendent in her `good luck’ necklace of seven ivory elephants, snapped, `Where do you think you’re going? You sit down,’ seizing his coattails to emphasize her point. Coolidge obeyed and stayed on to see the Giants win in extra innings,” William Bushong, chief historian of the White House Historical Association, writes in an essay. 

Grace Coolidge told a presidential historian that her husband never played baseball or any other sport, and “He did not share my enthusiasm for baseball,” John Sayle Watterson reports in his 2009 book, “The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.”

Watterson knocks Coolidge as “athletically challenged,” the worst natural athlete in presidential history from 1901 to 2005.

The new focus on Coolidge and baseball is the result of an unusual partnership. For the first time, the historical association, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the White House and educating the public, has joined in a multi-year agreement with a sports team, the Nationals.   

The 30^th president is also the subject of the association’s 2015 official Christmas ornament, which celebrates Coolidge’s lighting in 1923 of the first national Christmas tree on the Ellipse. The ornament is itself a Christmas tree with 14 decorations that commemorate events in Coolidge’s life, including a baseball. An LED light is incorporated in the design, another first. 

Racing Presidents make personal appearances outside the ball park, and Coolidge likely will be in demand. While most historians rank him among our worst presidents, blaming his policies for the start of the Great Depression in 1929, Coolidge is the darling of Tea Partiers and right-wing talkers, who love his disaffection for big government and taxes.

Ronald Reagan put Coolidge’s portrait in the Oval Office and praised his policies, and several books recently have tried to put Coolidge’s policies in a better light.

Today’s Washington fans hope for a revival of the Coolidge luck when they hear those magic words: “Play ball!”

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Readers have their say about new monuments -- column of Aug. 6, 2015

By MARSHA MERCER

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in this space about the opportunity cities and towns in the South have as they weigh moving Confederate monuments from streets and parks to museums.  

If cities relocate the statues, as I believe some will, they then can move on to consider new monuments that reflect modern sensibilities. Surely, 150 years after the Civil War we can think beyond the bronze hero on a horse and find other men – and women – whose accomplishments and stories we want to pass to future generations.

Traditionally in this country we have memorialized presidents, generals and victims of disasters. In the 21^st century we can widen our horizons and honor the artists, athletes, composers, entrepreneurs, explorers, scientists, writers and others who have contributed to America’s rich cultural history.

I asked readers to email me their answers to the question: To whom – or what – would you like to see a monument in your community? Today I share your ideas.

This is nothing close to a scientific sample, but several people who wrote me objected to my guess that a year from now we’ll find more Confederate statues in museums and fewer in streets and parks. They made it clear they want the Confederate statues to stay right where they are, thank you.

“We are remembering our Confederate ancestors who fought in a long and brutal war for a wide range of reasons – and not necessarily for slavery,” a reader from Richmond, Va. , wrote.

He insisted that Confederate memorials are no more backward-looking or divisive than memorials to black soldiers who fought for the Union.

“`Moving on,’ as you recommend, should not mean taking down or hiding away all things Confederate. Rather it should mean constructively adding to that national memory and narrative – not destructively subtracting from it,” he said.

Another reader wrote: “I don’t want to change my American history. For better or worse, it is what it is. You want to add to it, fine.”

Neither offered any names for new monuments. One even defied me to find a leader “who doesn’t lie to us every other day. Someone who cares about this country and not his party. I cannot.”

Whoa.  The last thing we need is a monument to a living politician.  

But my correspondents raise an excellent point. Even if Confederate statues stay in place, this is a good time to consider adding to the mix of outdoor memorials.

A supporter of a proposed Fallen Heroes Monument in Richmond told me about a campaign by local veterans to honor on Monument Avenue the collective sacrifice of Richmond’s citizens in foreign wars. 

While many other communities have memorials commemorating the generations that have answered the call to military service overseas, Richmond does not.

First, though, supporters need funds and approval to build the monument.  

Most Confederate monuments were paid originally by private funds. In our time, too, individuals are stepping up to contribute.

For example, in New York’s Central Park, there are 22 statues honoring men but not one honors a woman. Instead, there are statues of fictional characters -- Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose, Juliet (with Romeo) and various nymphs and angels. A fundraising campaign is underway to build a monument to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, along with other pioneers of women’s rights. 

Several readers suggested a monument honoring Maggie L. Walker, the Virginia civil rights activist and entrepreneur. Walker was the first African-American woman to found and be president of a bank. Her childhood home in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood is a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service.

Walker deserves “a statue or some sort of memorial, if not on Monument Avenue, then in a prominent place,” wrote one woman, who called the Confederate statues along Richmond’s Monument Avenue “great examples of civic art of the times” they were built.

“I don’t want the city to spend any money removing them but if private groups want to do this, I’d enjoy a discussion of this idea,” she said.

And she proposed something we all may be able to agree on that could be done soon: Rename Jefferson Davis Highway, as parts of U.S. Route 1 through the South are called.  

“If another name is needed, how about Reconciliation Highway?” she said. It’s a good start. 

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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