There is an august statue in the otherwise lovely environs of Mt. Vernon Place in my native city that has puzzled me for most of my life. It honors Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1836 until his death in 1864. Taney delivered the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, ruling that because the Constitution originally held African-Americans to be “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” they could not be considered citizens of the United States. It was greeted as rankly racist in its day, indeed as an indirect cause of the Civil War, and its notoriety has grown ever since. In 1887, the Walters family of Baltimore, now esteemed for creating the renowned Walters Art Museum, also on Mt. Vernon Place, saw fit to donate the statue to the city in Taney’s memory. One can only conclude that it has rested in place for all these years because most Baltimoreans eventually forgot who he was. It will probably soon be removed along with other old pro-Confederacy monuments.
Now another “originalist” Supreme Court justice, for whom similarities to Taney abound, is ripe for public imagery installed by rich admirers. Antonin Scalia was something of a Taney fan, in fact, referring in 1992 to his “great Chief Justiceship” in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which challenged the legality of abortion. (Scalia argued that because a right to have an abortion was not mentioned in the Constitution, it was not a protected liberty. He would opine the same way in 2003 about gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas. Originalism was always a convenient intellectual cover for bigotry. The 1992 reference to Taney was part of a peculiar analogy that showcased Scalia’s twisted rhetorical skills.) But the terroir of ostentatious prejudice has shifted much farther South in the past century, so that Texas’s cities are more likely to be burdened by Scalia’s likeness than Maryland’s. Perhaps it will then take another hundred years for them to remove the detritus.
Update 8/16/17: Done.
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