Say It Isn't So

According to Reuters (and many other sources) “Princeton University has pledged to consider renaming buildings dedicated to former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the latest U.S. campus effort to quell student complaints of racism.”

It's about time!

Students have pointed out, quite rightly, that those of the past have not lived up to our twenty-first century standards and should be held accountable.

And the New York Times agreed. “Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House.” If the Times says it, it must be true.

But the protests do not go far enough. We should begin by renaming our capital's most striking monument. George Washington was a slave owner all his life, only agreeing that they be freed after he died. In fact, we should rename the city itself. Racism is wrong and we cannot condone it, especially in the name of our capital. Instead we should switch to the District of Columbia – except Columbus oppressed Native Americans and took their land. (Indeed, we're obliged to change the name of the school which has hosted so many protests.) That won't do for a country as great of the United States of America. (Actually we'd better rename our great country since Amerigo Vespucci “captur[ed] some 200 Native Americans in the Bahamas to take back to Europe as slaves.” – check the internet and see http://ageofex.marinersmuseum.org/index.php?type=explorersection&id=166

Clearly this is a matter that the Democrats should discuss at their next Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner (both were slaveholders), and they should then rename the occasion – except I don't know to what.

Republicans can deal with the issue at their Lincoln Day Dinner (of course the Emancipation Proclamation was a political statement rather than a philosophical one, even though Lincoln favored a policy of no new slavery) after altering the appellation.

Changes in thought, beliefs, and preferences have occurred over time and we must not honor those who shared the views of their times if those ideas are now considered reprehensible. Those who favored expansion of our country at the cost of Native Americans, often breaking treaties with them, should be shunned; slaveholders and other racists should be reviled; religions that proscribe women as leaders cannot be tolerated, nor should we memorialize their members. (We can, however, ignore the fact that President Roosevelt turned away the St. Louis, and the founder of the New York Times was determined “not to have The Times ever appear to be a ‘Jewish newspaper.’” If we were to apply the same rules to anti-semitism we'd wind up with no one to honor. And, as that great philosopher Tom Lehrer said, “Everybody hates the Jews.” Always have, always will. Let's let that one pass.)

Our problems are that we're arrogant and we're revisionists. We're convinced that our principles are absolutes, and violation of them invalidates the rest of someone's life. We second-guess the past in the light of current beliefs and rip pages from the history books if they don't conform to our standards. We don't want to see and honor the past, we want to transform it into a prior present. Dogma trumps education and achievement.

But we shall be judged by the standards of others in the future as we judge those in the past. Perhaps our descendents will consider abortion to be murder, or our attitudes toward prostitutes to be too restrictive, or too lenient. Perhaps they'll feel that those who favor incarceration of criminals or the use of service animals are wrongly restricting the freedom of members of the animal kingdom. They might even consider protesters to be disrupting the freedom of others. And they may obliterate any reference to anyone holding such views, or tolerating those who do so. They might require a “donor's advocate” to defend the placing of a philanthropist's (or anyone else's) name on a university building, in order to prevent the pollution of future seekers of truth.

Or perhaps we should recognize that times and prejudices change, and that we only harm ourselves when we suppress the knowledge of what actually happened before, and when we deny honor to those who may have accomplished great things but who had opinions that differ from ours.