The hiding of history

There is a tendency when a group feels new and rebellious to obscure, edit or destroy the action and passions of the past. It seems to happen where history is thickest, oldest and the roots most deep and ancient; “Let’s get rid of Christmas,” new religious and political sects demanded periodically, even here in old Puritan New England.

{mosads}But that which is essential to soul and life force, like Christmas, persists and returns. Even the most ancient yearnings of the soul from primordial time eternally return, claims the great mythologist, Mircea Eliade, to make us new again. Attempts to edit or hide the human condition are futile.

In our times, we have seen the towering sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan destroyed by terrorists. And more recently, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) destroyed ancient tombs in Palmyra just days after they destroyed the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel.

But this year in America, there have been attempts to obscure, bury or ignore history as never before. From Yale University came demands to change the name of Calhoun College, named in honor of the antebellum Vice President John Calhoun, America’s most famous defender of slavery. Confederate battle flags have come down and there have been calls to remove statues of Confederate leaders and warriors from places across the South (the University of Texas did so in August), a reflex response to the tragic shootings at the Mother Emanuel church in South Carolina.

Worst of all in my opinion is the desire by Democrats in some states to remove the names of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual dinners, the “Jefferson-Jackson” annual gatherings, fetes in homage to presidents who held slaves in the era of the American frontier and formulation. Because without Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, there is no America.

The movement to change the name of Calhoun College, one of the residential colleges of Yale University, was begun by R. Owen Williams, then a graduate student. As he wrote this month in The Atlantic:

Fifteen years ago, as a Yale graduate student focused on civil-rights history, I began a quixotic campaign to change the name of Calhoun College. But after teaching and writing about racial injustice, and serving as president of a college in Kentucky and now as president at the Associated Colleges of the South, I have altered my thinking: It is better to learn from the past than to erase it.

Wholesale “name-changing” in the form of erasure is bad history and, worse, it represents the forfeiture of an important educational opportunity. Teaching students about whatever structural racism continues to exist in America requires using every available artifact, including Calhoun College.

Ten years after Yale, when Williams was president of Kentucky’s Transylvania University, some wanted him to change the name of Davis Hall, named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis. By then, he harbored second thoughts. Instead, he encouraged the university to celebrate the 50 years of integration and use Davis’s name to open a series of campus discussions on racism in America:

The U.S. should own up to the past; see it for what it was, not brush it away. Most [W]estern observers have been horrified by the recent desecrations of ancient sites committed by ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], not so much because of what we know about those structures, but because of what they represent — an important connection to our collective history and a vehicle for understanding who we are. Destroying history, good or bad, keeps us from knowing ourselves.

Calls to cleanse the South of any suggestion of the old Confederacy have even absurdly raised a cri de coeur from the cultural Eloi to remove the iconic Confederate flag from the roof of “The General,” the hellfire 1969 Dodge Charger of “The Dukes of Hazzard” fame.

But the more profound truth of time’s eternal return has more likely been found by Ben Jones, former Democratic congressman from Georgia who was made an honorary life member of the NAACP by the late civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks. Jones, probably better known as “Cooter” to the 30-million Americans who weekly watched “The Dukes of Hazzard,” wrote recently that:

The conventional wisdom of the political, academic and media “elite” promulgating the cultural cleansing of every vestige of the Confederacy holds that these symbols are by their nature a crime against enlightened sensibilities. This is sanctimonious political correctness run riot, and every national poll shows that the American people oppose these totalitarian-style actions.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.