9th law: You can’t fix the past

It's not broken. It's a work in progress

In the autumn of 2015 a group of students at Princeton University calling themselves the Black Justice League led protests against the university’s use of the name “Woodrow Wilson” on its school of public and international affairs and on one of its residential colleges. Wilson, the protesters said, was a racist and, as America’s twenty-eighth president, was responsible for expanding segregation in the federal workforce. Though Wilson had been president of Princeton before entering politics and for that reason might deserve recognition, the protesters allowed, the prominence of his name at the university was an affront to students of color and a deterrent to their inclusion and success there. The public affairs school and the college must be renamed.

In response, the university appointed a special committee of the board of trustees to examine the question. The committee consulted students, faculty, staff, alumni, historians and others, and solicited opinions on a website created for the purpose. After months of meetings, the committee decided not to change the names of the college and the school. “The challenge presented by Wilson’s legacy is that some of his views and actions clearly contradict the values we hold today about fair treatment for all individuals, and our aspirations for Princeton to be a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community,” the committee explained in its final report. “On the other hand, many of his views and actions—as faculty member and president of this University, as governor of New Jersey and a two-term President of the United States, and as an international leader whose name and legacy are still revered in many parts of the world—speak directly to our values and aspirations for our school of public and international affairs and for the first of our residential colleges.”

The committee chose to defer to their predecessors who decades earlier had attached the Wilson name to the school and the college, and also to a university award. “We believe there is and should be a presumption that names adopted by the trustees after full and thoughtful deliberation, as happened in both of these cases and in the naming of the Woodrow Wilson Award, will remain in place, especially when the original reasons for adopting the names remain valid. There is considerable consensus that Wilson was a transformative and visionary figure in the area of public and international affairs; that he did press for the kinds of living and learning arrangements that are represented today in Princeton’s residential colleges; and that as a strong proponent of education for use, he believed Princeton should prepare its students for lives in the nation’s service. These were the reasons Wilson’s name was associated with the school, the college, and the award.” And they remained causes the university endorsed.

All the same, the committee recommended measures to publicize what they agreed were Wilson’s failings. “Contextualization is imperative. Princeton must openly and candidly recognize that Wilson, like other historical figures, leaves behind a complex legacy with both positive and negative repercussions, and that the use of his name implies no endorsement of views and actions that conflict with the values and aspirations of our times. We have said that in this report, and the University must say it in the settings that bear his name.”

The Princeton exercise in reevaluating a figure from the past made news not so much from the care that went into the assessment, although it was unusually thorough, but from the outcome. It left Wilson standing, so to speak, at a time when other figures from the past, similarly haled into the court of reconsideration, were falling fast.

Cities, counties and states across the country had been weighing the merits of historical figures for some time, often focusing on racial questions. But the scrutiny intensified after the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist in 2015, and again after the killing of a counter-demonstrator at a rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Not least because the white nationalists wrapped themselves, figuratively and sometimes literally, in the flag and other iconography of the Confederate States of America, demand quickly spread to remove such symbols from public places. In the three years after the Charleston massacre, more than 100 Confederate statues, flags, place names and other public links to the Confederacy were removed or changed, according to the South Poverty Law Center.

Woodrow Wilson had nothing to do with the Civil War besides surviving it as a small boy in a preacher’s family in Georgia. But his attitudes toward race and his policy on segregation pulled him into the new debate. In at least one case he was essentially collateral damage. At the University of Texas at Austin, a statue of Wilson stood opposite a statue of Jefferson Davis at the head of the university’s South Mall. The university administration decided to remove Davis for his ties to the Confederacy, and took out Wilson for reasons of symmetry. At that time Wilson hadn’t become controversial in Austin.

The Texas case revealed a tendency critics of the iconoclasm had raised from the start. Jefferson Davis was the preeminent symbol of the Confederacy, the first on anyone’s list of Confederate removals. For others on the list, the indictment wasn’t so strong. On the sides of the South Mall at UT stood four additional statues of men connected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee. These were spared in the initial purge. “James Stephen Hogg, Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan had deep ties to Texas,” said UT president Gregory Fenves. Jefferson Davis had no such ties. As for Lee, he had spent time in Texas before the Civil War, which mitigated his historical guilt. “Robert E. Lee’s complicated legacy to Texas and the nation should not be reduced to his role in the Civil War,” said Fenves.

But the reprieve was temporary. Two years later, after the Charlottesville killing, Fenves announced the removal of the rest of the statues. “The historical and cultural significance of the Confederate statues on our campus—and the connections that individuals have with them—are severely compromised by what they symbolize. Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans. That remains true today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.” Fenves granted that the University of Texas had a duty to preserve and study history. “But our duty also compels us to acknowledge that those parts of our history that run counter to the university’s core values, the values of our state and the enduring values of our nation do not belong on pedestals in the heart of the Forty Acres”—a nickname for the UT campus. “We do not choose our history, but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus.”

#

This last sentence of Fenves reflected a sentiment common among those who wanted the statues down. They pointed out that the UT statues dated not from the era of the Civil War but from the early twentieth century, when white Southerners, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s endorsement of segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, and heartened by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and the concomitant revival of the Ku Klux Klan, often celebrated the Confederate “Lost Cause” in statuary. Fenves and those who agreed with him contended that tolerating the statues constituted a continuing celebration of those white-supremacist values.  

But did it? The defenders of the status quo—of leaving the statues in place—said they celebrated values other than white supremacy, or at any rate in addition to white supremacy. They celebrated courage, loyalty, devotion to the public interest. Echoing Fenves’s comments at the time he left Lee standing, the leavers asserted that the historic role of individuals shouldn’t be reduced to a single issue.

What went largely unasked in the statuary debate was whether a figure erected a century ago celebrates anything today. Is an old statue any more indicative of current political values than an old building is indicative of current architectural tastes? 

I work at UT, teaching history, and while statue matter was pending, I offered unsolicited advice to President Fenves. I suggested leaving the statues in place, with one slight modification. At the base of each statue should be affixed a small plaque identifying the year in which the statue had been erected.

My argument was that this would distance the current and future generations from responsibility for the statues. Viewers would learn that a certain previous generation had seen fit to celebrate Jefferson Davis and the other Confederates. This was important, for it was part of the history of the university. But viewers today would not be led to conclude that the present generation was celebrating them.

I suggested doing this for all the statues on the UT campus. In 1999 the university unveiled a statue of Martin Luther King; in 2007 a statue of Cesar Chavez; in 2009 a statue of Barbara Jordan. Public art is an aspect of public education, especially on a university campus, and a walking tour of a campus can show how the values of the university have changed over time.

President Fenves declined my advice. Of the seven statues on the South Mall, only one remains there: of George Washington. At the present moment Washington’s place seems secure. At least no one is demanding that he come down. But Washington owned hundreds of slaves; in this regard his sins against human rights and equality were among the greatest in American history. And he had no Texas connections. How long could his presence continue to be tolerated, if mere presence was taken to signal celebration?

#

At the heart of the matter was the notion, often inchoate, that the present is somehow responsible for standing in judgment on the past, and that people of good will have the right, indeed the obligation, to remedy those parts of the past that don’t accord with present values. Of course, they can’t actually go backward in time and keep unsatisfactory things from happening. But they can, and they must, eliminate public symbols suggesting even long-dead  approval for those unsatisfactory things.

The temptation isn’t new. In times past it was typically associated with illiberal regimes and movements. After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in the year 70 they destroyed the Jewish temple there. The apparatchiks of Soviet Russia airbrushed from official photographs commissars who had fallen from favor and been dispatched to the gulag or an early grave. When the Taliban of Afghanistan blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the action provoked an international uproar.

What is new, in America, is that the concept has been embraced by those calling themselves liberals. They do so with laudable motivation, typically framed as sparing emotional harm to persons who wish not to be informed or reminded of certain bad things that happened in the past. In 2016 Yale University fired an employee who deliberately broke a stained-glass window in (John C.) Calhoun College depicting slaves harvesting cotton. The employee called the image on the window “racist, very degrading,” and declared, “No employee should be subject to coming to work and seeing slave portraits on a daily basis.” The university subsequently changed its mind, reinstating the employee, replacing the window with one without the image, and renaming the college.

There is something to be said for the principle that offense is in the eye of the offended. But the principle is unworkable as a matter of general policy, for it has no predictive value. Even if an image today doesn’t give offense, who is to say it never will? Frederick Douglass spoke at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington in 1876. A former slave himself, Douglass told his audience of Washington freedmen, who had raised the funds for the monument, that they should be proud. “We have done a good work for our race today,” Douglass said. “In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator”—Abraham Lincoln—“we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us.” But times and attitudes changed. By the late twentieth century the monument, which shows a standing Lincoln and a crouching freedman, his chains newly broken, was often seen as an embarrassment to the black community, or worse. “The monument is not really about emancipation but about its opposite—domination,” said one critic.

#

The same desire to repair the past gives rise to the campaign for paying reparations to descendants of American slaves. Again, the motives of the advocates are understandable, indeed noble. A great wrong was visited upon Africans and their descendants compelled to toil as slaves in the United States. Violence, rape and degradation were essential parts of slavery as an institution. Even when emancipation came, the former slaves were typically left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They received no compensation for their stolen labor and their suffering; they were turned loose into a world that largely despised them and continued to oppress them. They should have received compensation at the moment of their freedom, the argument of the reparations campaign goes, if only the “forty acres and a mule” they were sometimes promised; because they didn’t, their descendants should receive compensation now. In other words, what past generations got wrong, the present generation should fix.

If only it were that simple. A difficulty with most schemes to fix the past is that they create more problems than they resolve. The advocates of reparations are frequently vague about the form reparations should take, and they disagree among themselves. Yet at the heart of the reparations idea is some sort of payment to descendants of slaves. And as soon as anyone starts talking about payment, the questions arise: Who pays? Who receives? How much?

Obviously, there are no former slaveholders still alive, and no former slaves. So there is no one who directly stole the labor from someone else, and no one whose labor was directly stolen. We are, in most cases, several generations removed from slavery. Many descendants of slaves are also the descendants of non-slaves; into which category do they fall: the payers or the payees? Should there be proportional payments in cases of mixed ancestry? Should descendants of slaves be required to prove they are descendants of slaves, and not, say, of immigrants who arrived in America after the end of slavery? And not the descendants of the small but not insignificant group of black slaveowners? On the paying side, should the descendants of immigrants who arrived after the end of slavery—of Chinese contract laborers imported to build railroads, for example, or Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia—be required to pay?

The questions are distasteful merely to pose. And they will get worse the closer reparations come to reality. An essential premise of the reparations movement is that the descendants of slaves would have been better off had their ancestors not been enslaved. Some will question whether this is so. If there had been no slavery in the United States, there would have been little emigration from West Africa to the United States. Most of those who are now descendants of American slaves would be living in West Africa, if living at all. The per capita income in Ghana today is about a sixth that of African Americans in the United States. By this reckoning, the descendants of slaves came out ahead as a result of slavery.

The outrageousness of this exercise is its point. Would anyone really make such an argument?

Almost certainly yes. And more like it. The greatest liability of the reparations movement is that it would generate a backlash that would overshadow any good it might accomplish. It is probably fair to say that most of those who favor reparations didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Much of the support for Trump came from white voters who believed that the political system had tilted against them. Affirmative action was often cited as evidence. Yet affirmative action touched only a modest number of people, typically those who applied for government jobs or for admission to selective colleges. Reparations, if financed by taxes, would touch nearly everyone.

Polls demonstrate that reparations are broadly unpopular, garnering the support of fewer than a third of Americans. Until this changes, there’s not much chance of a reparations policy becoming law. But if it did, it could set back race relations in America for decades—to the Jim Crow era, the last time racial distinctions were enshrined in America law. Some reparations supporters say: Tough luck; the law was written against black people for centuries; now it’s time for payback. But whatever the payback in monetary terms, the cost to hopes of racial tolerance and equality before the law would be far greater.

#

The desire to fix the past arises from a belief that we of the present are more enlightened than the generations that came before us, and that this enlightenment gives us a right to stand in judgment on them.

Are we more enlightened? Do we have that right?

It is certainly tempting to say we are more enlightened, at least on some topics. We don’t tolerate slavery (out in the open, that is; there are almost certainly more unfree laborers today, in the shadowy sectors of the world economy, than there were legal slaves in the nineteenth century). We allow women to vote and work outside the home (although in America we haven’t approved an equal rights amendment). We let consenting adults marry whom they wish (yet only one at a time; polygamy remains forbidden).

But we have our own faults. It’s just that they’re not so obvious to us as our grandparents’ faults are. And not so obvious as our faults will be to our grandchildren.

The point is not to absolve our grandparents for their failings, nor even to ignore those failings. The very fact that we can see where they fell short is evidence that we humans are making progress. We’re not perfect. We never will be. But we improve.

Rather than look back and feel morally superior to our ancestors, we should look forward and ask how we can produce a better world for our heirs. Prosecuting the past might make us feel righteous, but it can’t undo the past’s failures, and the effort tends to blind us to our own.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” says Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. He’s telling his listeners not to worry too much about the future. It’s good advice about the past, too.

See the other laws of history at https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165