February 28, 2006
Eponymous Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:15 AM EST Another point Joshua Zeitz raises in his review of Taylor Branch’s book is the ever-vexing question of naming buildings (and monuments and institutions and such) after imperfect people. After mentioning J. Edgar Hoover’s long years of harassing and spying on his enemies, Josh wonders why Congress has not rechristened the FBI’s headquarters building, which is currently named after Hoover. There’s a lot of that going around. In recent years, numerous localities across the country have prohibited naming schools after people who owned slaves, including most of our early Presidents. Some Southerners object to naming parks, roads, or anything else after Confederates. Woodrow Wilson’s name has been removed from schools because of his racist views (he repeatedly praised the Ku Klux Klan, for example). I once read the autobiography of Thomas Hunter, the nineteenth-century founder of New York City’s Hunter College. As I recall, it ends with a bizarre disquisition on phrenology that purports to prove the inferiority of non-white races based on the shapes of their heads. Will Hunter College be next? It’s easy to make fun of this tendency?but then I remember something that I noticed at a recent college basketball game. The program listed the players’ high schools, and I saw that one of them had gone to Nathan Bedford Forrest H.S. The player in question was a black woman, and I wondered how she felt about attending a school named after the perpetrator of the Fort Pillow massacre and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps she didn’t care. Teenagers tend to be ironic about such things, and I can even imagine someone viewing her attendance as a way to posthumously stick it to General Forrest. But I can also readily understand someone objecting. This is a case where if a significant fraction of the area’s residents object, it’s probably best to change the name. In general, though, I wonder if we pay too much attention to such things. Sure, Hoover was a sneaky creep, but he also built a very effective law-enforcement operation that caught thousands of criminals. And what about Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who imprisoned hundreds of thousands of American on no charge except having the wrong ancestry? Should their names be stripped from our government buildings and public works? As I said, in the grand scheme of things, the name of a building is not very important. If people care enough to want to change it, we should be glad to see them taking an interest in history. But to avoid too sweeping a purge, it might be best to evaluate the people for whom we have named things in light of the time and place in which they lived. Owning slaves was not unusual in the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or even those of Ulysses S. Grant, who owned some slaves for a few years. In the states where those men lived, it was not even looked down upon. So from that standpoint, barring their names would seem a bit excessive. The views of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Hunter, strange as they sound today, were also quite widely accepted in their time. Forrest is a little harder to defend. There’s no question that he was brave and resourceful, and excuses can be made for his conduct, but my sense of the situation is that there are other soldiers with fewer blemishes on their records that we could honor just as well. Controversies of this sort make me think of Malcolm X. While I’m not a fan of his, I know that many people are, and most of them manage to draw inspiration from him without adopting his wilder ideas. So when I see Malcolm’s image on U.S. stamps and his name attached to schools and highways, I don’t protest the use of my tax dollars to glorify someone with whom I have severe differences; I accept it as part of living in a pluralistic society. I think a sizable dose of toleration, along with a healthy measure of teenage-style irony and whateverism, would leave everyone better off. Above all, however, I think that disputes of this kind show how strong America already is. Happy indeed is the country that has the leisure to spend its time worrying about building names and state flags.
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