A week or so ago, I was riding my bike near the Statehouse and stopped to look at the prominent statue of Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor and senator who was active in politics from 1890 until his death in 1918. Tillman’s legacy stoked controversy last year as social activists campaigned to remove his name from Clemson University’s historic Tillman Hall. Recalling that Tillman was a white supremacist who boasted about his involvement with a lynch mob, I was somewhat surprised to see engraved on his statue’s placard the words: “He was the friend and leader of the common people. He taught them their political power and made possible for the education of their sons and daughters.” My guess is that those who put up the statue believed, as Tillman did, that the "common people" did not include African Americans. This placard has a glaringly racist blind spot, which needs to be corrected. In fact, my first inclination was to call for the statue to be removed altogether.
As I thought about it, though, I wondered why I would call for the removal of one racist figure’s statue from the Statehouse grounds but leave others. Take Strom Thurmond, the U.S. senator from South Carolina who served for 48 years and championed segregationist interests. Thurmond led resistance to the dismantling of the Southern segregation system but later adapted to the new civil rights status quo. Should we vilify him for his previous racism and ignore his later change of heart or deny his long and faithful service of our state?
The recent trend of trying to disassociate ourselves from the uncomfortable realities of the past has included efforts to change the name of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a petition to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the University of Missouri and a row over one of Yale’s colleges being named after South Carolina’s greatest 19th-century champion of racist ideology, Sen. John C. Calhoun. But while I sympathize with these movements, I think they are in danger of falling into oversimplification and heavy-handedness, painting people as one-dimensional bigots without taking into account the complexity of human nature or the influence of culture on thought and deed. I propose a more thoughtful and less reactionary approach to deal with the flaws of historical figures.
Though I believe in absolute morality, I would say the best way to judge controversial historical figures is to examine their actions and beliefs in light of their cultures. For instance, many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and most if not all did not view black people as equal to whites, but did this make them the monsters modern people would be if they did the same? I think not. While it was just as morally wrong to own slaves then as now, Southerners in the 1700s certainly did not perceive owning slaves to be as morally wrong as we do now. People such as George Washington were probably just aligning themselves with their culture’s values rather than displaying the level of malice and racism that enslaving another person would entail today.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t assume that our society has it right on everything now. While I believe having an abortion is a morally wrong act, I would not say that having one makes you an evil person. In fact, with the greater societal acceptance of abortion now than in the past, a woman who has one in a modern Western society is not only less negatively perceived by the community at large, but is probably less likely to feel she has done wrong than in a more traditional society. Again, the morality of the action hasn’t changed, only the perception (including self-perception) of it.
How far could activists go in their campaign to dethrone figures whose beliefs or actions we now disagree with? If you look hard enough, you can find something objectionable in the lives of just about any historical figure. Along these lines, my colleague at The Daily Gamecock, Griffin Hobson, urged me in a column to abandon my support of “[Republican] legislators enabling arrests and beatings and killings” of trans people. Current Republican legislators have not been any less concerned with the rights of trans people than have legislators in the entire history of politics until perhaps 1975, when Minneapolis became the first city to ban discrimination against trans people. And what about gay marriage? Does the fact that no country before the Netherlands in 2001 legalized same-sex marriage mean that we should discredit the legacy of all previous generations because of their trans- and homophobia? I certainly hope not.
Part of the reason this has become such an issue is that our culture seems to be moving away from the idea of tolerance as being willing to listen to someone even if you disagree with them and not dismissing them as a source of truth just because they hold a different position than yours. If we embrace the fact that people are complex and multifaceted rather than one-dimensionally good or bad, we can condemn aspects of someone’s belief or actions while not letting that unduly influence our perception of the person as a whole.
But back to where we began. We shouldn’t let a point of disagreement unjustly influence our perception of a person. With regard to historical figures, that means not treating them as if they acted within our current ideological frameworks but measuring them against the standards of their own day. In his comments to The State, University of Denver law professor Thomas Russell, an expert on race on college campuses, provided a helpful way to accomplish this: “A person’s actions must rise to a level that warrants stripping his or her name from a building. Rhetoric alone shouldn’t justify renaming a building. Neither should simply going along with the prevalent culture of the day.”
In trying to strike a balance between honoring the legacy of historical figures and being sensitive toward people who are offended by those figures, we should apply this rule. Let's factor into our judgments the different cultural expectations placed on them by their societies and tolerate those who were merely carried along by the negative elements of their culture rather than leading the propagation or implementation of those elements.