In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, protestors and state and local government officials have taken down monuments honoring Confederate military and political leaders. Protesters pulled down statues in Washington, DC, Virginia, Alabama, and Tennessee. The governor of North Carolina ordered the removal of Confederate statues in the state capitol. The governor of Mississippi has signed legislation to remove a Confederate emblem from the state’s flag. Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy and Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate indicated they were open to renaming military bases — until President Trump tweeted he would not even consider a change.
Protesters have also defaced and taken down statues and demanded the renaming of buildings honoring Americans who were not Confederates, including several presidents of the United States. Statues of George Washington, a slaveholder, were vandalized in Baltimore, Md., and Portland, Ore. A statue of Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder and Indian hater, was defaced in Washington, D.C. A statue of U.S. Grant, who accepted a slave as a gift and freed him a year later, was toppled in San Francisco. Last week, Princeton University, citing Woodrow Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies,” announced that the name of the 28th president (who was also president of Princeton) would be removed from campus buildings and programs.
Symbols matter. They confer honor, legitimacy and, at times, an endorsement of values and policies. All the more so when they dominate public spaces. Decisions to scrub Confederate names from statues, monuments, buildings and bases are — or should be — easy. After all, President Trump’s executive order subjecting anyone “who destroys, damages, vandalizes or desecrates a monument, memorial or statue” on federal property to up to ten years imprisonment (and threatening to deny federal funding to state and local law enforcement officials who do not protect them) includes a definition of “extremists” that fits Confederates more than it does the vast majority of protestors: i.e. they have “explicitly identified themselves with ideologies… that call for the destruction of the United States system of government… and seek to impose that ideology through violence and mob intimidation.” Confederates were traitors. They were also losers, the kind of people Trump usually derides and disdains.
Decisions to take down monuments to Washington, Jackson, Grant, Wilson, and other oft-acclaimed Americans, even when there is compelling evidence that they were racists, it seems to me, are harder to make. The report of a Yale University committee to establish principles on renaming in 2016 provides a framework for addressing this complicated and controversial issue. Renaming (and, presumably removing), committee members maintained, should be an exceptional event. That said, making a change based on contemporary values is sometimes justified. A decision to do so, however, should be made following a thorough examination of the “principal legacy” of the individual (for which that person is remembered) — and a determination that it is antithetical to those values. Mahatma Gandhi, the report acknowledges, “held starkly racist views.” His principal legacy, committee members imply, was as leader of Indian independence and proponent of non-violent protest. Frederick Douglass contrasted African Americans with Indians, who, he predicted, would “die out.” He is remembered as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to cite one more example, warned that white women would be degraded if Negro men got the right to vote before they did. She is best known as a pioneer in the women’s rights movement.
No doubt, some Americans will disagree that principal legacy should be the principal criterion for removing or renaming. And reaching a consensus on what constitutes a principal legacy may well be difficult.
Nonetheless, it is worth noting Peter Solovay, the President of Yale, announced in 2017 that John C. Calhoun’s name would be removed from one of the university’s residential colleges, and replaced by Grace Murray Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist. Acknowledging that Calhoun was a United States senator, Secretary of State, Secretary of War, champion of states’ rights, and respected constitutional theorist, Solovay declared, correctly, in my judgment, that his principal legacy was as a white supremacist and the foremost promoter of slavery as a “positive good” in the first half of the nineteenth century. To ensure that history was not erased, Solovay indicated that Yale would memorialize the fact that a residential college bore Calhoun’s name for 86 years.
At this promising — and perilous — moment, principal legacy, which compels us to understand our history and use it to inform the present, seems like a reasonable place to inform discussions about removing and replacing.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.