Street Names and Statues: The Arguments of Public History
In a much-discussed move, the San Francisco school board voted to change the names of 44 schools, including ones named for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. This relatively small-scale decision has all the commentariat in a tizzy, including (of course) the NYT opinion pages. Let’s all take a breath. This decision, like the decisions around statues and flags, deserves to be taken seriously, but not in a state of furor. It is a reasonable decision, to which there are reasonable counter-arguments. So let’s get into it.
What’s in a Rename?
People on the American political right like to argue that renaming initiatives are “erasing history.” People on the left like to point out that people like Lincoln are in little danger of being forgotten and that names have more to do with memorializing than with any historical fact. Both arguments are dancing around a central question: what is worth remembering, and how? History has a complicated relationship with memorialization, but it is not non-existent, as some progressives seem to believe. It is true that Washington is in little danger of being forgotten, but what about James Denman (another school up for rename)? He is basically now just a name on a high-school. He will be forgotten by all but the most intense of San Franciscan local historians if his name is removed. And what about John Muir, a somewhat well-known figure also on the chopping block, whose fame is in part because of how many things are named after him? While these figures are not going to be erased from history, they will be erased from the public imaginary, and whether you think that’s good or bad, it certainly should be taken seriously.
It is worth remarking that, historically, far-left movements have often taken issue with public remembrance. From the French Revolution to Mao, left revolutions have often explicitly taken up erasure as a public good, with catastrophic results. What the San Francisco school board (and proposals across the nation) are doing is actually quite different. They are not proposing that these high schools be renamed to de-emphasize the past, but rather that they be renamed after figures like Richard Bradley, a local civil rights protester. It’s still historical remembrance, just a reframing. While there is an erasure occurring, it is of specific historic figures, not of history more broadly.
The Power of Public Remembrance
Back in the days when I left the house, my bus route would take me past Ida B. Wells Drive. Every time the name flashed up on the bus banner, I thought of what I knew about Ida B. Wells, the bravest American. I thought of our past and what it takes to confront it. And I thought of her incomplete legacy and the work that needed to be done. Ida B. Wells Drive was renamed in 2018 (formerly it was Congress Parkway), and I applaud the power that was imbued in that renaming. Honoring a historic figure has meaning; it reminds people of the context of their community, the work that went into it, and the power of the individual to shape it.
Meanwhile, Andrew Jackson is on our most common denomination of cash. There is very little to find redemptive in Jackson’s history. He hated bankers and disdained the airs of high New England society, and that’s about it. Meanwhile, he was notoriously self-dealing, flouted the separation of powers, resisted abolition, and, oh yeah, began the Trail of Tears. He was monstrous, the direct author of one of the most acute acts of cruelty perpetrated by the American government, and sits smilingly on our money. He is a constant reminder of another aspect of historical remembrance: the public performance of forgetting. By honoring him, we purposefully emphasize that our history with the Native Americans is unimportant. And when people argue for Jackson’s continued presence on our money, I cannot help but think that what they are arguing for is an ideology that embraces that trivialization.
The Two Types of People Worth Honoring
Neither Ida B. Wells nor Andrew Jackson are particularly ambivalent historic figures. But most people in U.S. history fall somewhere between these two poles. For the entirety of its history, American society has been characterized by racism, sexism, ableism, nationalism, etc. Nearly every individual who has participated in public life has been guilty of these to one extent or another. This does not absolve anyone of anything; there is a strange argument floating around that public opposition to racism or sexism somehow didn’t emerge until the 20th century. This is untrue: Quakers began to petition the British government to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s. Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791. There is no way well-educated men like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington were not exposed to these ideas; they just didn’t agree with them. The insistence that such ideas have only emerged as part of modern morality is itself a denial of history.
And so, for the treatment of everyone else, we are left with two competing philosophies of memorialization: honoring the influential vs. honoring the pure. Arguments for memorializing the influential go something like this: Oftentimes the people who did the most good historically were not perfect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t honor what they did do. On the balance, they still helped people, even if their personal opinions were far from spotless (think Lincoln). People who support memorializing the pure have noticed that the “personal flaws” that we have ignored while memorializing all seem to revolve around how that figure treated the powerless. This group argues that we would be better serving today’s society by honoring the people who took moral stands, even if those stands were ultimately less influential.
The Pros and Cons of Honoring the Influential
In its best iteration, the choice to honor the influential emphasizes the way that people can and have made lasting changes for the better. Rather than focusing on lost causes and lone stands, it recognizes that meaningful change often happens at the hands of compromised figures with impure motives. LBJ was a raging racist. He also campaigned hard for a series of civil rights and voting rights acts, decisions that substantively advanced the political rights of African Americans. To the influential mindset, the debt we owe LBJ outweighs his personal shortcomings. When we honor LBJ, we honor the good that he did in the public sphere, but we’re not claiming he was a saint.
Honoring the influential runs up against a few problems though. First, it can tend toward power fetishization. Especially when it comes to politicians, we often end up honoring people just because they were influential, not because they used their power for good. And honoring the influential often treats historicity as its own good without asking what message our ongoing veneration is propagating in the present. For example, many historically influential men treated their wives very poorly. Today, we still have a problem with powerful men mistreating the women around them (with a wide spectrum of behaviors, from taking their labor for granted to outright abuse). By saying that the good someone did in the public sphere outweighs the way they acted in their personal life, we carry that argument into the present, with horrible results.
The Pros and Cons of Honoring the Pure
The advantages to honoring people who were nearly blameless are obvious. First of all, it addresses the way that groups that have been historically oppressed can be reminded of that oppression in casual and cruel ways. Imagine how a person of Japanese descent might feel walking through the FDR memorial in DC: millions of dollars and a site in the capital extolling the virtue and wisdom of a man who put people like you in concentration camps. And that is just one data point in a pattern of conveniently forgetting the horrible things that “great” people did. Secondly, it acknowledges the small acts that also make up history. It pushes against the “victors write the history books” mentality, wherein success is the only measure of worth. It also has knocked some people off the “honored” list who have no place being there, which is a minor point compared to the greater systemic benefits, but consider this example: McKinley was a horrible president who fought a war on false pretenses against Spain and annexed Hawaii. Taking his name off Denali was a great move.
The disadvantages are subtle, but they are real. The purity mindset will come for everyone’s sacred cows, even the oppressed. If you think it’s important that influential men who treated women poorly should not have statues, eventually you are going to come up against the uncomfortable reality that MLK was a serial adulterer. And the purity mindset seems to treat everyone like they are defined by their worst moments. Lincoln said some racist things when he was an up-and-coming politician in Illinois, and he didn’t fully resist the Dakota War of 1862 or the treaty repudiations in the aftermath. The second one is pretty bad, and if that was all he did, I’d happily rename all the high schools with his name. But that is not all Lincoln did, not by a long shot, and acting like those acts define his legacy strikes me as myopic. And the purist argument can spin itself out, spending all its energy on symbolic arguments. In the end, the strongest argument against the renaming initiative in San Francisco is the one the mayor made, which is that in a moment of crisis in the public education system, the school board taking up this issue seems performative and tone-deaf.
The Pendulum and Ambivalence
Alright, cards on the table, I am much more sympathetic to the purist argument than the influential one. It is very clear that in the United States, we honor powerful people, especially politicians, way too much without really examining their career. We also have a whole host of less celebrated historical figures, from Clara Barton to Dorothea Dix to W. E. B. DuBois to Jonas Salk, who all deserve to be on Mount Rushmore more than Teddy Roosevelt, a very mediocre president.¹ The problem is that these types of figures — scientists, activists, organizers — do not yet form an American mythos the way the Founding Fathers do (with other presidents grouped in). And it is unclear to me whether the purist camp is interested in a sort of alternative American (or perhaps international) mythos, a type of “memorialization from below” that focuses on resistance, or whether they object to historical myth-making whole cloth. (I myself am more interested in creating a different historical narrative than de-emphasizing public history as a morality tale.)
That being said, I am sensitive to the argument that the pendulum could swing too far in the other direction, abandoning the lessons of important individuals from history like MLK who have moral failings but also much to offer us now. I think that ultimately both mindsets suffer from the same weakness, a weakness baked into how Americans engage with public history. There is no real structure that helps us contend with ambivalence. If the influential mindset is too enamored with heroes, the purist mindset is quick to villainize, and there is little room in between. Things like street names or statues are unambiguous honors, and I suspect will be the main site of conflict between the two camps for years to come. Meanwhile, spaces like museums or memorials, which do have the space to engage with ambiguity, rarely take up controversial subjects for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. And that is the outcome I fear we are headed toward: a leaching of public history, not as a direct campaign, as in the Maoist approach, but as a type of cultural detente, to avoid conflict in the public sphere. But there is a lot to be learned from ambivalent figures. Margaret Sanger is perhaps the American who has done the most for women’s liberation. She is also a major contributor to the American eugenics movement. She is simultaneously one of the greatest humans to ever live and one of the worst. We need to find a way to keep the full, complicated picture of her in the public imagination because her lesson is a stark and important one for Americans: Even when we think we are being righteous, we can perpetrate great evil. That’s the type of lesson I’d love to see imparted in public history.
[1] Also, Mount Rushmore should not exist.
