White Supremacy

Whether “The Aviator” tied into the deeply-held program of white supremacy that was part of this view of the South is less clear. Much has been written about the Lee statue and its distance from current academic views of the general’s meaning for history, especially in light of the deadly Unite the Right Rally that took place in Charlottesville in 2017. Statues can mean a lot more than history books. Certainly they can carry a great variety of different meanings from what is any monograph.¹ In this case, the McIntyre statues clearly told viewers that this history of triumph and resilience did not include the Black community of Charlottesville in the builders’ eyes. Many people, in fact, could be expected to understand from these statues also signified the racism that helped build this vision of Virginia. However, the only point that can be addressed here, briefly, in terms of “The Aviator,” is the issue of whether the public message of the McConnell memorial connects the academic vision of Alderman for the university to the racial oppression in the city at the time. Though they did not always consider themselves hostile to Blacks, UVA students at the time often shared in a casual sense of white supremacy,² Though it could be openly hostile as well. In 1922, while the Lee statue was being finished, the school yearbook included, without apology, an illustration of Klan riders on the front page of its club section.³ Faculty at UVA promoted the Lost Cause mythology that had such a large role in the twentieth-century spread of Confederate monuments. In fact, Alderman wrote that Heath Dabney, a leading proponent of the Lost Cause, worshiped the McConnell statue and brought students to see it.⁴ The strongest connection to white supremacy, though, is visible in the figure itself, in that it characterizes an ideal of whiteness that highlights a sense of difference from anyone else. Like the young figures of Faith and Valor at the base of the Stonewall Jackson statue, the airman has the look of an Aryan “type” that would be recognized in the Kultur magazines of the German Empire and the medical lectures on the grounds of UVA itself at the time.⁵ Only a man of McConnell’s race and class could soar with the wings of the aviator. As Thomas J. Brown writes, “Remembrance of war from the late eighteenth century until the mid-twentieth century drew on a widely shared vocabulary, elements of which developed much earlier and parts of which were not unique to military contexts.”⁶ Viewers of this monument would have understood who in their society had the opportunities to be warriors like the aviator in the statue, and who they expected to be subject to such men. And the references to Icarus, too, himself a lost cause in many ways, align with notions of Southern masculinity that also limit participation in the ideals of the monument to people who look like McConnell.⁷