CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“REVISING HISTORY: HOW FAR SHOULD NAME
CHANGES GO?”
Historical revisionists are hard at work today, not just in California
but all over America. In some places, this practice has merit, but it’s
expensive and often seems unjustified.
In Virginia the other day, a local school board lifted the
names of past Presidents Woodrow Wilson and John Tyler from elementary schools.
Wilson, the first Southerner to become president after the Civil War, was not
dishonored for leading America into World War I or for doggedly promoting the
former League of Nations, for which the Senate rejected U.S. membership.
Rather, the onetime head of Princeton University, wrote a
textbook praising both the slavery-centered Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan.
The school formerly bearing his name will now be called Manor High School. At
about the same time, Princeton removed Wilson’s name from two of its
institutes.
Tyler, the 10th president, also later sided with
the Confederacy and briefly served in its House of Representatives. His namesake
school is now called Waterview Elementary.
Those renamings, done so that Black children would not have
to attend schools called after men who worked to keep their forebears enslaved,
look justifiable in the modern era. Slavery, odious through all time, is not
open to much debate.
But the revisionism in California can sometimes become ludicrous.
For every justifiable effort to remove the recently sainted Junipero Serra’s name
from streets and schools because the chain of missions he founded in the late
1700s survived through Native American forced labor, there are multiple others
without much merit.
Even Abraham Lincoln and current U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein
have been targeted. Lincoln, often credited with freeing the slaves via his
Emancipation Proclamation (which officially freed only slaves in Confederate
states), is now targeted by some Native Americans and their allies. These efforts
are nowhere stronger than in San Francisco, where 42 schools see their current monikers
challenged for the alleged sins of their namesakes.
Was Abe Lincoln a bad guy, despite struggling to hold the
Union together and letting most slaves go free? Well, note some, he enabled the
U.S. Army to carry on the Indian Wars. That, of course, ignores the fact that
Lincoln would have been ridden out of Washington, D.C. on the proverbial rail if
he had not provided men and resources to protect white settlers during America’s
expansionist era.
If he had not done this, of course, the shape of the modern
world would be quite different from today, in ways no one can know.
So, should his name disappear from all those Lincoln High Schools
and middle schools? It’s an open question. The same for George Washington, long
recognized as “the father of his country,” but also a slave owner. Washington,
admired for refusing to become king of America when he could have after his two
terms as the first president, instead retired to his Mt. Vernon plantation where
he was served by scores of slaves.
Should his name become anathema because he was born into weath
in an English colony? Just how much rebellion against his day’s norms can we expect
from him? It’s another open question.
Feinstein has been condemned by the San Francisco school system
for her alleged role in evicting 150 elderly Chinese and Filipino residents of a
hotel that was demolished in 1977 – a year before Feinstein became her city’s
mayor. The school board also calls her out because a Confederate flag once flew
at City Hall during a design exhibition – years before she was mayor. Trying to
hold Feinstein responsible for these episodes looks like unfair historical revision.
Other activists around California want to remove the names of
poet James Lowell and pioneering conservationist John Muir from schools and
buildings because they were insufficiently supportive of Black equality in
their turn-of-the-20th-Century era, when very few whites were active
in that cause.
It’s all supposed to give schoolchildren proper heroes to admire
and emulate. But because most humans live in their own times and don’t know the
future, it’s hard to assess how politically correctly we can expect anyone to
have behaved in prior eras.
Or maybe, suggested one wag, we should give our schools
numbers, as in New York City. Anyone for P.S. 19 instead of Lincoln High?
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment