Cut Off From History

There’s controversy over one of the latest inductees to the Idaho Hall of Fame, leading the Idaho State Journal to call foul:

But now it has been learned that Borglum had a relationship during the 1920s with the Ku Klux Klan, and was a friend of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, a convicted murderer. Howard and Audrey Shaff, historians at the Gutzon Borglum Historical Center in South Dakota, wrote that Borglum’s immediate concern during the 1920s was securing millions of dollars to create the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain near Atlanta — “and the KKK was offering to help raise the money.”

The Klan is a despicable organization and Gutzon Borglum was wrong to belong to it. However, should it disqualify Borglum from the Idaho Hall of Fame?

I think the answer to that can be found at other Hall of Fames around the country. Racists such as Ty Cobb and Cap Anson are in the Baseball Hall of Fame along with tax cheat Willie McCovey and drug user Orlando Cepeda, profligate womanizer Wilt Chamberlain is in the Basketball Hall of Fame, and Vanity Fair nominated former Grand Kleagle Robert Byrd to its Hall of Fame in 2003.

Sorry, but this is a Hall of Fame, not a Hall of Good. Does the planning and building of Mount Rushmore make him one of the most notable people and accomplished people to come out of Idaho? Yes.  Does he belong? Also, yes.

And the Idaho State Journal’s over the top suggestion that Richard Butler might be the next inductee is absurd. There’s a difference between a man who maintained a membership in the clan while in Georgia and someone whose entire legacy is based on his race-baiting.

The larger danger of this type of thinking is that it leads to us being cut off from the past or only given a sanatized or cartoonish version of the past. In the sanitized version, we ignore anything that happened in our history that was bad. In the cartoonish version, we pretend that anyone who was involved in an evil activity was themselves incredibly evil.

This isn’t to say that history hasn’t had some horrendous people in it: Adolf Hitler, Bull Connor, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were among some of the truly evil people in the history of the world. However, they couldn’t have done what they did without the help of a whole lot of not so bad people.

It’s easier to pretend that every man who fought for the South in the Civil War was a racist monster. When we find out that Stonewall Jackson established a Sunday School for blacks and was beloved by all the Blacks, free and slave in his town, it blows our mind away. And then we find out most the people who fought for the South didn’t own slaves,  that doesn’t compute.

We can’t comprehend the idea that a man who kissed his children and loved animals may also have been a man who shot Jews escaping from Auschwitz.

When we imagine people who supported evil things as being completely evil, it blinds us to when we support evil. We can’t imagine that we’d do something as bad as the Holacaust or slavery because we aren’t wicked like “those other people.”

How much better is our society than ages past? Not at all better. We’re capable of great evil. All we need ia s Supreme Court ruling to justify anything.

Let says slave became cheap, legal, and available through a sci-fi circumstance with an alien race being declared by the Supreme Court to be non-persons. Would slavers find buyers?  You bet they would. You would have TV commercials advertising easy financing available on slaves.  They would be the hottest trend in many suburbs. We’d come up with arguments for why the slaves weren’t human or deserving of freedom, or maybe we’d argue how slavery was good for them and much better than the alternative.

You’d have people going on TV talking about with all the hard work they do, they deserve a slave.  Heck, they might even throw in a slave as a prize on a reality show. After a while, you’d have liberals calling for fairness by granting taxpayer funded and subsidized slaves to all.  We have a selfish consumerist streak that wants to live with as much material abundance as possible no matter who it hurts, and in that way we’re little different from the Old South.

What if the courts or Congress eventually allows people to clone replacements for parts and this becomes a preferred treatment? How many people will choose to die of cancer rather than rip the organs of out a healthy human being? Wouldn’t we go through the same litany of excuses of why it was okay and why we deserved the organs more and deny the humanity of the clones?

When we paint the past as entirely evil and focus on one thing to the neglect of everything else, we really sacrifice an understanding of their great accomplishments.

The history of humanity is full of despotism, degradation, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, hatred, lack of respect for human life,  and racism of all sorts. If you want to be fair, you can cut off every society and every individual who has committed an action that would offend our modern sensibilities.

But you also cut yourself off from the works of William Shakespeare, the Proverbs of the Solomon, the Pyramids of Egypt and Tenochtitlan,  Charles Lindbergh’s flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, and Mount Rushmore. You dismiss Martin Luther as nothing more than an anti-Semite and Martin Luther King as a hypocritical womanizer.

 By emphasizing the failures of our ancestors, and minimizing their successes, we exalt ourselves as the arbiter of all wisdom and virtue.  Through our uninformed arrogance, we set ourselves up to commit great atrocities because we think a lot of our own virtues and downplay our vices as compared to the past.

As for me, I won’t view the past through rose-colored glasses, nor curse the whole thing. The fact that Abraham Lincoln wanted to send blacks back to Africa won’t stop me from admiring the genius of his second inaugural. G.K. Chesterton’s anti-semetic streak won’t stop me from reading Father Brown. Benjamin Franklin’s disbelief in the divinity of Christ won’t stop me from appreciating his wisdom on matters of practical living. The fact that Dashiell Hammett was a Communist doesn’t stop me from enjoying The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I refuse to be cut off from that horrible wonderful detestable beautiful thing that is our history.