The South needs some more Freedom to remind them of Slavery

A serious proposal for the Charleston Harbor -- a male version of the Statue of Liberty called the Statue of Freedom (they love that distinction, Liberty is so snooty) has made its way to the Patriot's Point Development Authority.

"At Tuesday’s monthly board meeting, Rodney Cook, of the National Monument Foundation suggested that a male version of Lady Liberty could house a museum about South Carolina’s role in the Civil War.

The statue would be the same size as the one in New York City, and cost about $150M. Most of that money would come from the private sector."

Wait . . . South Carolina's ROLE in the CIVIL WAR? -- you mean starting it and losing it, and now wanting to commemorate cotton and slavery with a big statue to duel with the North's much less homo-erotic one?

Good one.

Some words from the brilliant Geoffrey Nunberg on the shift from Liberty to Freedom after the leap ...

This shift from liberty to freedom is a subtle one, which few other languages would even be able to express. The French national motto is usually translated as "Liberty, equality, fraternity," but liberté could as easily be translated as freedom.

Even in English, the words can sometimes seem to be equivalent. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin used them more or less interchangeably in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," and so did the historian Eric Foner in his "Story of American Freedom," which traces the evolution of the concept from Colonial times. Indeed, the words are often incanted in the same breath. "The issue is freedom and liberty," Mr. Bush said a few days before the war began. Or as the Grateful Dead said, "Ooo, freedom/ Ooo, liberty/ Ooo, leave me alone."
But English hasn't taken the trouble to retain all those pairs of Anglo-Saxon and Latin near synonyms just so its thesauruses could be heftier. There's a difference between friendship and amity, or a paternal manner and a fatherly one.

Liberty and freedom are distinct, as well. As the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has observed, liberty implies a system of rules, a "network of restraint and order," hence the word's close association with political life. Freedom has a more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the absence of psychological or personal encumbrances (no one would describe liberty as another name for nothing left to lose).

But the two words have been continually redefined over the centuries, as Americans contested the basic notion of what it means to be free. For the founders of the nation, liberty was the fundamental American value. That was a legacy of the conception of "English liberty," with which Britons proudly distinguished themselves from the slavish peoples of the Continent who were unprotected from the arbitrary power of the state. Echoing John Locke, the Declaration of Independence speaks of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The text doesn't mention freedom at all. It was liberty that Patrick Henry declared himself willing to die for, and liberty that the ringing bell in Philadelphia proclaimed on July 8, 1776.

Liberty remained the dominant patriotic theme for the following 150 years, even if freedom played an important role, particularly in the debates over slavery. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address began by invoking a nation "conceived in liberty," but went on to resolve that it should have a "new birth of freedom."
But "freedom" didn't really come into its own until the New Deal period, when the defining American values were augmented to include the economic and social justice that permitted people free development as human beings. Of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms — of speech, of religion, from want and from fear — only the first two might have been expressed using "liberty.'

Share|