On 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper interviews the Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu. Landrieu has approved the removal of four Confederate monuments on public property in the city. For 133 years, one colossal statue of General Robert E. Lee has stood in the center of traffic circle in downtown New Orleans. It was removed in May 2017. Landrieu says “the statues were a lie.” He explains that Lee “was used as an example to send a message…that the confederacy was a noble cause. And that’s just not true.” Landrieu, who keeps the location a secret, shows Cooper where the statue of Lee is currently stored in a wooden shed with the statue of Civil War General P.G. T. Beauregard. (Beauregard thought his contributions were more significant than Lee’s and was disappointed when Lee received more brevets than he did. After the war, Lee counseled Beauregard to seek amnesty as a former Confederate officer by publicly swearing an oath of loyalty, which he reluctantly did before the mayor of New Orleans on September 16, 1865.)
[Beauregard is described as “excitable, unreliable, and contentious” in P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray]
Not everyone agrees that the statues should have been removed. William Cooper, a retired professor of history at Louisiana State University, says it’s a slippery slope. Cooper tells Anderson Cooper, “One of the things that bothers me most as a historian is what I call ‘presentism,’ judging the past by the present, figuring that we are the only moral people.” He reminds Cooper that Thomas Jefferson believed in white supremacy, “Should we go burn Monticello down tomorrow?” On Sunday, March 11, 60 Minutes will air new episodes at 7pm and 8pm on CBS.
