Renaming

The Great Renaming Craze of 2015

How a worthy examination of our country’s troubled past become a wholesale condemnation of our troubled forebears. And why we should be worried about it.

By David Greenberg

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. Jefferson was one of Roosevelt’s heroes, and FDR took the occasion to praise his predecessor in extravagant terms. He also commented on the vicissitudes of historical reputation. “Our generation of Americans can understand much in Jefferson’s life which intervening generations could not see as well as we,” he declared. Speaking as American GIs were fighting fascism to defend the basic ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, FDR continued: “He faced the fact that men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact. He lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men. We, too, have lived in such a world.”

A lot has changed since 1943. Today, many Americans are more likely to shrug at Jefferson’s liberalism than revere it. And FDR’s worshipful invocation of it will strike some people as blinkered. What about the interned Japanese-Americans, or the Jews turned away on the passenger ship St. Louis? We, too, like to think that our generation can see Jefferson in ways that intervening generations couldn’t—but for us, it’s his slaveholding and long relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, whose importance we are able to recognize.

Changing perspectives on Jefferson—and on scores of other historical figures and events—have in the past year prompted what we might call the Nomenclature Wars: a rash of efforts to topple statues, erase historical symbols, wipe names from buildings and institutions, and otherwise cleanse our heritage sites of any traces of our troubled past. In a few short months we’ve ricocheted from an overdue reckoning with the symbols of the Confederate South, through weird diversions like expunging William McKinley’s name from the Alaskan peak it had graced for a century, to a wanton and sometimes uninformed impulse to consign great but flawed men like Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to history’s hall of shame. We’re not yet with the French Jacobins, who remade their entire calendar in the hopes of reshaping human nature, but it can feel as if we’re moving in that direction.

Should Jackson or Alexander Hamilton be removed from the currency to make room for Harriet Tubman? Should Democratic dinners still be named for the party’s founding figures, Jefferson and Jackson? Should we rename the streets of New Orleans or the buildings of the Ivy League? The common thread in this year’s Nomenclature Wars has been a desire to highlight America’s shameful history of racial exclusion. That goal is among the worthiest that we can have in our public discourse, since we won’t be able to realize racial equality without an understanding of its deep roots in our culture, society and politics. But there’s a danger, too, that these campaigns will enshrine race as the sole criterion for judging our forbears—and will peremptorily end the conversation there. That may make sense for figures who matter mainly for upholding slavery or segregation, like Jefferson Davis or George Wallace. But with people whose achievement encompasses infinitely more, it’s short-sighted. Participants in these debates would do well to realize not only that a thorough study of history thwarts easy judgments about heroism or villainy, but also that the political passions of the current day typically prove to be a fickle guide to rendering lasting verdicts about the past.

When we undertake changes in our shared civic culture—whose pictures are on our currency, which flags top our legislatures, whose visages look down on us from the halls of our public buildings—we should do so with an eye toward the ages. We want our decisions to stand the test of time. We want to make sure that they won’t be subject to partisan whims, to the comings and goings of a Democratic or Republican Congress, or to social media-driven enthusiasms.

That means realizing, as FDR did, how much our own views of these figures are shaped by the exigencies and even the passing fads of our own time. We’re quite good at detecting the biases and limitations of our predecessors, but we remain oblivious to our own. (In another 70 years, it probably won’t be Jefferson’s views on race that loom largest in his legacy, but something else—something we can’t see or predict.) Renaming should be done not in a burst of iconoclastic zeal but in a spirit of humility and awe. Otherwise these names will cease to carry the dignity and weight of judgment etched in marble. Instead they’ll resemble the ephemeral, tossed-off opinions of a Snapchat message, dissolving into the ether after the fervor of the moment fades.

The critic Wesley Morris has observed that 2015 was “the year we obsessed over identity.” Even trivial news stories (about actor Ben Affleck trying to hide his family’s slave-owning past, or the “reverse passing” of Rachel Dolezal, a local NAACP official) triggered powerful emotions and fevered conversations. We also obsessed this year, perhaps more than at any time since the 1990s “History Wars,” over how we commemorate the past. What drove the 2015 Nomenclature Wars was the convergence of these two tendencies.

Morris suggests that “Barack Obama’s election was the dynamite that broke open the country.” The president’s election obviously didn’t bury racism, but it pointed our public discourse about race in new directions. Morris says that the president’s visibly biracial heritage made it easier for other Americans to claim identities that didn’t fit the old boxes. Another indirect cause of the renewed public emphasis on race may have been the disappointment many felt when the transformational change Obama promised never materialized. Back in 2008, Obamamania skeptics, on the left and right, warned that while the candidate talked in the abstract about racial reconciliation, he spoke little in the particular about intractable black-white gaps in life expectancy, incarceration rates, educational attainment and income. Voting for Obama, some feared, might encourage Americans not to extirpate our deep-rooted racial problems but to sidestep them, by imagining that a single historic vote could bring about change.

Once elected, Obama studiously downplayed race, as Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in 2012. Racism instead worked its way onto the national radar through local incidents: Henry Louis Gates’ mistreatment by a Cambridge policeman; the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida; the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of the police. As if prompted by the clock ticking down on Obama’s presidency, a new campaign arose in 2014 devoted to curbing police brutality, bringing sustained attention to the underlying cause of virtually all of the past century’s urban race riots. Determined to proceed with or without presidential leadership, the Black Lives Matter movement inspired Americans seeking to uproot systemic racial injustice. And because the problem of race ran deep into the past, the remedies demanded a deeper understanding of our national history. This fall, college campuses became the arena of conflict, with the call to rename buildings and remove statues emerging as only the most talked-about demand of student protesters nationwide.

For all the excesses of the fall’s campus outbursts, including calls to restrict free speech and remove offending administrators from their jobs, the underlying desire to call attention to America’s history of exclusion was emphatically a good thing. In his influential 1999 book Civic Ideals, the political scientist Rogers Smith provocatively argued that inegalitarianism was as central to the American public philosophy as the Lockean liberalism noted by Louis Hartz or the civic republicanism seen by J.G.A. Pocock; collectively, we are still figuring out how to fit that inegalitarianism into our historical narratives. Yet in the current vogue for renaming, some of the most vocal advocates of change seem not to want a thorough exploration of our history, or even a many-sided discussion. In some cases, rather, the demand is that we accept a limited and tendentious account of America’s political leaders that knows its conclusions before it starts.

Simply as a matter of argumentation, making race the only basis of judgment for men like Jefferson, Jackson and Wilson does violence to the spirit of historical investigation, because it reduces complex individuals to game show contestants who must simply pass or fail a single test. It also amounts to a logical fallacy, presenting an answer as if it were a question. In ruling out of order any consideration of these men’s other historic contributions, a race-only approach more or less guarantees negative verdicts; given the racism that permeates the American past, virtually all of our leaders will necessarily come up short. And ironically, a race-only approach to judging figures from the past also reinforces a “great man” view of history that lays the blame for our failures at the feet of a few individuals while minimizing the role of society as a whole in perpetuating racist practices and institutions.

Woodrow Wilson’s case, much in the news lately, provides probably the clearest example. Some Princeton students want to take his name off their public policy school and remove his image from around the campus. In recent weeks, their sympathizers have aggressively publicized Wilson’s shameful record in extending (though not initiating) the segregation of the federal civil service. Though that record is well known to most people who teach and write American history, this publicity has expanded the knowledge of many lay citizens. Those same citizens, of course, probably remain unfamiliar with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act or the Heinrich Albert Affair or even perhaps the Fourteen Points—all crucial developments of Wilson’s presidency that need to be understood before assessing his record. Still, one can argue that an educational process is beginning.

Unfortunately, the briefs against Wilson published in the media often seem bent on pressing a lightly researched case with a predetermined conclusion, not in digging further. Several recently published pieces rely on what can charitably be called “potted history”—the same handful of old chestnuts trotted out again and again—and toss about unfounded hyperbole (“racist pig,” “white supremacist”). Other articles have repeated falsehoods, such as that Wilson “admired” the Klan, or have perpetuated apocryphal stories, such as that he said of the film Birth of a Nation, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” (He screened it at the White House as a favor to the writer Thomas Dixon, an old friend, who deliberately didn’t tell Wilson about the film’s racist content in advance. The quotation appears nowhere in the record until decades later.) In fact Wilson’s own History of the American People, which did share the prevailing view of Reconstruction as a misguided failure, nonetheless contains harsh words for the Klan. That Wilson was neither a partisan of the KKK nor a white supremacist doesn’t render his role in enacting segregation any less deplorable. But none of his critics has explained why this dishonorable record should be the only basis for forging his reputation.

If the calls to efface Wilson’s name and likeness reflected a sincere engagement with history, as opposed to a narrowly delimited interest in it, they would also be offering judgments about Wilson’s sweeping progressive agenda: reforms in tariffs, trade, taxation, banking and labor law that amounted to the boldest egalitarian program any president had ever enacted into law. Or they would weigh in on his success in keeping the United States out of the European war for years, despite German provocations; his leadership of the Allies to victory once war became unavoidable; or his vision of a postwar world order based on national self-determination, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. A judgment about Wilson’s worthiness for commemoration has to consider not just his role in upholding Jim Crow but his full record as president—to say nothing of his tenures as governor of New Jersey and president of the very university where he has come under fire.

If there’s a lot more to Wilson than his record on race, there’s also a lot more to America’s history of racial exclusion than Wilson. The historian Eric Yellin, who literally wrote the book on federal segregation in the Wilson years, has pointed out that while Wilson bears his share of responsibility for government segregation, “the racism that pervaded his government and his nation was the work of ordinary Americans, too. It was the result of a developing institutional racism and a long-standing racist culture that cannot be pinned on one ‘great man’ alone.” Wilson’s actions reflect those of his party, the law as then interpreted, the political system at the time, public opinion and the prevailing norms of his age.

Consider the role of the Democratic Party. As the first Democrat elected to two consecutive terms since Jackson in 1832, Wilson depended crucially on the South, which was then the party’s most loyal constituency. He could no more have kept out of his Cabinet Southern reactionaries like Albert Burleson—the postmaster general who oversaw a great deal of the patronage appointments—than a Democrat today could bypass women, blacks and Hispanics. Indeed, despite appointing Burleson and William McAdoo (a Tennessee native who would marry Wilson’s daughter), Wilson did more than any Democrat before him to move his party away from its reliance on Southern ideology and to embrace Northern progressivism. All of which is to say that assessing whether and how to honor Wilson—a complex and contradictory man—is a difficult matter, and should probably be based in a lot more information than we’re aware of through the op-ed pages, no matter how genuinely moving or shocking individual stories may be.

We can undertake similar exercises with Thomas Jefferson. He, too, is coming under fire with calls to remove his name (and Jackson’s) from Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners and his statue from campus quads. The case against him rests on Jefferson’s slaveholding, his political support for the planter class and in some cases his seemingly long-running relationship with Hemings, a slave who was also the half-sister of his late wife, Martha. It’s certainly true that for too long Jefferson scholars—and the public—dismissed stories of the affair with Hemings as implausible, and that they made little effort to understand how the main author of the Declaration of Independence could also endorse human bondage. But again, while the reassessment is a good thing, much of the case against him is merely polemical. Jefferson’s entanglements with slavery belong in any account of his life, but so do the Declaration, his insistence that the Constitution include a Bill of Rights, lifelong advocacy of civil liberties, diplomacy, polymathic brilliance, the Louisiana Purchase, his promotion of public education and much else. Labelling Jefferson a “racist” or even a “rapist” (as some students have with post-it notes attached to his statues) might in some sense be accurate, but as a measure of the man it is deeply inadequate.

As for Jackson, I have made the case for his importance in Politico before. It rests primarily in his role in expanding American democracy beyond the elite classes that ruled during the nation’s first few decades. Here, too, the light being shone on the forced relocation of the American Indian tribes of the Southeast, as well as Jackson’s brutal warfare against Native Americans earlier in his career, is welcome and important. But anti-Jacksonism has rapidly become a knee-jerk position on the left, embraced by freelancers who get published reciting their high school history lessons and business-page reporters who aspire to pundithood. Jackson was in many ways a dislikable man, but his chief legacy will almost certainly remain his use of the presidency to promote a more egalitarian democracy.

The fickleness of historical reputation requires that the process of removing a person’s name from a school or a statue from a public space should proceed slowly and with humility. Perhaps 70 years from now, if Bernie Sanders’ description of the Iraq War as “the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the country” remains a widely shared position, Americans will be stirred by a campaign to rename the George W. Bush Institute. Or maybe, for reasons we can’t anticipate, indigenous Antiguans will insist on restoring the original name Boggy Peak to the island’s hastily named “Mount Obama,” pointing out that this president has never visited the place.

The need to reflect America’s history of racism in our public commemorations is real and urgent. But we have to remind ourselves that judgments made amid heated political debates are far from infallible and inherently provisional. As stare decisis shapes jurisprudence at the Supreme Court, overturning the judgments of the past should be done not with revolutionary ardor but respect and hesitation.

To see how swiftly judgments can change we need consider only a stretch of the West Side Highway that I exit when I drive home to Manhattan from points north. Though the sign bearing the sponsor’s name has been there for years, attesting to his contribution to highway beautification, only in recent weeks have my family members started howling about being forced to see a portion of our neighborhood road devoted to proclaiming the generosity and civic-mindedness of Donald J. Trump.