Reading the Plaques on the Mood Obelisk

On Southwestern’s campus, a number of monuments and memorials stand to prompt some remembrance of the past. One of the most distinct and prominent ones is the F.A. Mood Obelisk.

Situated in between the Admissions building and Mood-Bridwell, it is a regular feature of our everyday landscape on campus, constantly seen by students, faculty, and anyone else visiting Southwestern’s campus, whether people stop to look at it or not. What I do here is stop and look at the monument, particularly paying attention to what is written on (and absent from) the plaques inscribed on the monument.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

If you stop and read the plaques on all four sides of the large granite monument, you will read a very selective version of who Francis Asbury Mood was and why he is being memorialized on campus.

Containing information about who he was, and telling the public how he should be remembered, the plaques on all four sides carry different messages about the man Mood was (See full text of all 4 plaques in Figure 1 below). Overall, the plaques, which one plaque says have been "affectionately inscribed by his students," and which are inscribed into a durable material like granite, are designed to ensure that Mood would be remembered long into the future, asserting that his lasting legacy on campus should be tied to the fact that he was a gentleman, a Christian, and a faithful counselor to students.

However, while the plaques assert this, they simultaneously ignore certain significant parts of Mood's history that I believe contemporary members of the Southwestern community need to know—parts that challenge any easy celebration of him simply as “our” founder, including his entanglement with slavery and the Confederacy.

The first thing to say here is that although the words on the Obelisk are attributed to Mood’s students, we know from Claude Carr Cody’s 1886 biography of Mood that these words were actually produced shortly after Mood’s death in 1884 by Mood’s vice-Regent and the third Regent of Southwestern, John H. McLean. I don’t know whether Mood’s students would have agreed with the statements on the monuments, but I do know that it is problematic for an administrator to speak for students, then and now.

In analyzing the actual words on the plaques, I will show how the monument represents an implicit connection between Southern Methodism and white supremacy while concealing the truth about Mood’s connections to the Confederacy, which represents a more widespread issue of celebrating those with racist pasts on university campuses throughout the South without reckoning with the baggage that comes with it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It is clearly evident in the rhetoric on the plaques that (at least when it was founded) being a religious institution was central to what made Southwestern, Southwestern. As seen in Figure 3 below, it is evident how much the Methodist religion played a role in F.A. Mood’s life since he was a child. The plaque is engraved with words and phrases such as “baptised in infancy” and “professed religion and joined the church in early youth.” His relationship to Methodism is further depicted in rhetoric in Figure 4, such as referring to him as a “faithful counselor” and “Christian” as well as including a verse from Matthew that says “he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

The plaques are basically covered with ways to show his relationship to God and Methodism, which tells a very particular story of his life, one that focuses on him being a “good Christian man” who devoted his life to producing other good Christian men.

Even if we set aside the retro gender ideologies at the center of this claim and the presumption that being Christian is obviously a good thing in a multicultural world, we should at least recognize the racist implications. At the very time that F.A. Mood established Southwestern, White Christian theologies and doctrines sanctified the exploitation of African slaves through paternalistic and racist Christian doctrines and the dispossession of Indians of their land through the religiously inflected ideology of Manifest Destiny.

Whether it be associating being a “gentleman” with an implicitly White version of being a “Christian” or a scripture that essentially argues that if you aren’t Methodist and didn’t sacrifice your life for the sake of God, you will not rest peacefully, the signs of a very specific kind of Christianity associated the White male Southern elite are all over the plaques, but they are never spelled out.

In another project on the Mood Obelisk on the Southwestern Placing Memory website, Hannah Jury lays out the evidence for Mood’s direct connections to the Confederacy, most notably that he signed the very first Secession document (for South Carolina) and that he served as a Chaplain in the Confederacy. Hannah also shows that Mood was aligned with the Methodist Church South, which split from the Methodist Church in the 1840s over the question of slavery, and which helped provide the moral justification for slavery and for going to war to protect it. These are things the people who built the monument to Mood knew, and things that were normal to them then, but they are not values people at Southwestern would celebrate today.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here it is also important to notice when the Mood Obelisk was built, in the 1890s. Like many reverent monuments to people involved in the Confederacy, it was built not right after the Civil War, but during the Jim Crow period in between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

These monuments were a way to reinforce white supremacy by reminding African Americans that even though they may not technically be slaves anymore, they are not equal to the white men in power, nor will they ever be. Whether it be a statue, monument, or memorial of someone involved in the Confederacy, it sends a very clear message that white supremacy still exists and that we are not all equal.

Of course, I am not equating F. A. Mood with plantation owners and Confederate generals and klansmen, but to me it is significant that the main monument memorializing him on campus was built in the same generation as many other monuments to the Confederacy, including the Confederate statue in front of the Williamson County courthouse, which was installed in 1916, and which also was widely supported at the time by Southwestern students and faculty but actively challenged by us today.

Overall, I think that these four plaques send a clear message to anyone reading it that if you are not both White and male and Christian, you are inferior to someone like F. A. Mood. Clearly, this message would have worked differently in the early years of Southwestern, when everyone was White, and when the campus was still segregated also by gender. But now, when many students and faculty and staff are people of color and many of us are not Christian, this equation of whiteness, Christianity, and gentlemanliness is clearly problematic.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Southwestern University’s founder was a Confederate, but he is commemorated and celebrated throughout the campus in a multitude of ways—not only with the Obelisk, but with Mood-Bridwell Hall, where many students, faculty, and staff of color must wrestle with these legacies every day. Though being in the Confederacy does not negate all of the good Mood did in his life--including the founding of Southwestern--it is something that should not be forgotten and hidden from the public.

The question then is: Should we have a monument on campus celebrating someone who was part of the Confederacy? Should we also have a building right next to it carrying the same name?

There are questions many colleges and universities have grappled with, and one Southwestern also needs to grapple with. Often, the solution is seen in binary terms: keep it or remove it. But even schools who remove these monuments can remove one without dealing with the systematic racism that allowed them to stand unquestioned on their campuses for generations.

Many of these monuments were able to be put up because everyone in the institution at the time was White, and African Americans had no say in the matter at the time and no voice to express the potential impact they would have. However, as the culture continues to diversify and activists have demanded that we reckon with the effects of generations of white supremacy in the South, public opinions about Confederate statues have shifted. And yet, the monuments remain.

In studying the plaques on Mood’s Obelisk, it is clear to me that the lasting impression bestowed upon him from a previous generation of Southwestern’s students was that he was to be celebrated as a good religious man, the "founding father" of Southwestern. But this characterization avoids any of the connections to his racist past, exemplifying the widespread issue of Confederate monuments being present in the ordinary landscapes of the South, including Southwestern. So the question now is, what do we do that we know this?

Location

Metadata