By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Much of the country has demanded the elimination of
references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to
Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.
In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if
done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected
representatives.
Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park
honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding
members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote
the majority opinion in the racist Dred
Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.
But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide
liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down
hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.
In the present climate of auditing the past, it is
inevitable that Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood will have to be
disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and
eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the nonwhite population.
Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the
Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity,
Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion
(“growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”).
Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The
progressive suffragist once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before
I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed
for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was
California’s attorney general.
President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces
were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does
Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to
African-American causes?
Wilson’s progressive racism, dressed up in
pseudoscientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious than that of the old
tribal racists of the South, given that it was not regionally centered and was
professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the power of the presidency
behind it.
In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be
a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and
roads still dedicated to the late Democratic senator Robert Byrd, former
“exalted cyclops” of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his
disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word?
Why is Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman,
in the 20th century, still honored as a progressive hero?
So, what are the proper rules of exemption for
progressives when waging war against the dead?
Do they tally up the dead’s good and bad behaviors to see
if someone makes the 51 percent “good progressive” cutoff that exempts him? Or
do some reactionary sins cancel out all the progressive good — at least in the
eyes of self-styled moral superiors to those hapless Neanderthals who came
before us?
Are the supposedly oppressed exempt from charges of
oppression?
Farm-labor icon Cesar Chavez once sent union thugs to the
border to physically bar U.S. entry to undocumented Mexican immigrants, whom he
derided as “wetbacks” in a fashion that would today surely earn Chavez
ostracism by progressives as a xenophobe.
Kendrick Lamar, one of the favorite rappers of former
president Barack Obama, had an album cover featuring a presumably dead white
judge with both of his eyes X’d out, surrounded by black men celebrating on the
White House lawn. Should such a divisive racialist have been honored with a
White House invitation?
What is the ultimate purpose of progressives condemning
the past?
Does toppling the statue of a Confederate general —
without a referendum or a majority vote of an elected council — improve racial
relations? Does renaming a bridge or building reduce unemployment in the inner
city?
Do progressives have their own logical set of selective
rules and extenuating circumstances that damn or exempt particular historical
figures? If so, what are they?
Does selectively warring against the illiberal past make
us feel better about doing something symbolic when we cannot do something
substantive? Or is it a sign of raw power and ego when activists force
authorities to cave to their threats and remove images and names in the dead of
night?
Does damning the dead send a flashy signal of our
superior virtue?
And will toppling statues and erasing names only cease
when modern progressives are forced to blot out the memories of racist
progressive heroes?
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