There are a lot of things being renamed and not just Calhoun college as we saw for Georgetown. Our school district wants to rename the middle school that Walter Cronkite attended at a cost of 500,000 while cutting 1 million in funding because they are short on funds all because the guy was in a confederate army.
I am pretty much in favor of getting rid of all the confederate names on public buildings and all the confederate statues in public spaces. It is a discussion going on where I live. Some folks I know are in favor of taking all the statues out of public spaces, and putting them in museums. If anyone ever wants to go visit them, study them, or write about them - there they are and they aren’t lost to history. There will be a museum record of their history wherever they were and when they were removed.
I have no opinion on your local budget issues. That sounds difficult.
adding: we have to decide what to do about the cemeteries as well. I just don’t know about that. It is difficult and complicated.
I’m glad we are trying to deal with it, though.
It is more of a - you want to do what with my tax dollars based on what? It is essentially cutting a bunch of afterschool programs just to rename several schools.
@texaspg, that is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Probably the real reason is that Lanier was “only” a poet who isn[t well known these days and Cronkite was ON TV!! Famous!! I mean, seriously, Cronkite always seemed like an admirable guy, but so was Lanier.
There will always be reasons not to change the status quo. Some will involve money.
I doubt that Sidney Lanier is going to be a source of money for this or any other school. Cronkite, on the other hand B-)
I thought texaspg made a good point that it takes money to rename buildings. It takes money to remove statues from town squares and put them in museums. It has to come from someplace. In the case texas cites, the money is coming from taxes and the school budget for after school programs. I can’t judge what is more important there. Luckily, it’s not up to me.
So now we have to change the name of anything named after anyone who was in the confederate army?
Perhaps it was Calhoun’s writings such as these that mean we should change the names of landmarks:
Oh wait, that wasn’t Calhoun. That was Samuel F. B. Morse. And Yale named a residential college after him in 1962!
That’s how I’ve felt about every war and drone program since I’ve been a taxpayer.
Clearly, the balance between god and evil in a person’s life depends on who is doing the reckoning. When it is almost exclusively white, Christian, men…
Heck, even the ‘good’ guys have bad things in their closets. UCSD has a college named for John Muir. Great guy. Conservationist. Instrumental in preserving Yosemite. Just don’t read the things he wrote about blacks and Indians.
Then there’s Earl Warren. Supreme Court Justice in Brown v. Board of Education. Just hide that he was a force behind removing Americans of Japanese descent to concentration camps.
History is messy. No one is perfect.
I wonder if anyone is willing to start a campaign to rename Muir Woods.
This national renaming effort will be a sad waste of money. I can’t imagine cutting school programs to rename a public school for $500K.
This is something only white Northerners believe to make themselves feel good, as compared to the South, not that it is historically accurate. Let’s take the words of MLK himself, as he described white Northerners:
So, who are we to believe, MLK or white Northerners that they (Northerners) were superior to white Southerners?
As one poster said, “history is messy,” and this idea there will be some group/people, which arbitrates who has the requisite mix of “good and evil” to pass some arbitrary “naming” test does not make sense, as it is a matter of perspective.
Clearly, for MLK, many Northerners, in general, would not have made it into his “non-racist” column, even though white Northerners seem to think they would be there.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-mlk-chicago-20160118-story.html
History is messy. People are imperfect. People can be capable of doing great good and still be backwards by the standards of today’s times. There is not a single historical figure, president, senator, etc who doesn’t have something “bad” - because they are human beings. That is why I dislike the trend of trying to assure every single name on every single building was “pure.” It’s just not realistic.
Btw, this has zero to do with northern vs southern. Of course there were/are racists in the north, duh. No need to pretend anyone is saying otherwise. It’s just, in case you hadn’t noted, that we fought an internal war related to this particular issue of slavery (and yeah yeah states rights. To own slaves).
I personally grew up, not as a “Northerner” (who thought that way???) but as an American. Oh yeah, we had a civil war in our history, but that’s over with and buried and we are all one big happy country and there was no need to continually re-fight it any more than we need to re-fight with Great Britain. So I really feel blindsided and mystified by all this south-shall-rise-again stuff which has only intensified in recent years for a variety of reasons.
I went to sleep last night trying to think of ANY historical figure who couldn’t be criticized for words or deeds that would disqualify them from having a building named after them. (That is, that it wouldn’t offend some group or another).
I couldn’t.
I’ve been thinking about this passage from pickpocket’s link in #488 and wondering if somehow this “romanticizing” is what resulted in naming the colleges after those who supported slavery. Perhaps it points out the problem with saying: " Oh yeah, we had a civil war in our history, but that’s over with and buried and we are all one big happy country and there was no need to continually re-fight it any more than we need to re-fight with Great Britain… "
PG: I do not know the answer.
I spent some time yesterday looking around at various internet sites where Yale alums have discussed this and found posts from purported Yalies stating that they had been upset by the Calhoun name when they attended Yale in the 60s and 70s, and that this wasn’t a new discussion on the part of students. That was pretty interesting to me.
I understand it’s a difficult line to draw when someone is “good enough” to deserve to have their name on a building. Crimes against humanity is a pretty easy disqualifier for me.
Regard romanticizing the Civil War and slavery, Gone with the Wind was published in 1936. Apparently there was something in the air. The rising threat of fascism and communism?
It won a Pulitzer and the movie swept the Oscars.
I have lived in US for about 30 years now. When I first started college, I had a hard time trying keep track of the British vs metric calculations where US is still the largest country following the British system while most countries have moved onto metric system. The reason given was it costs several billion dollars to change everything everywhere. That cost number has only gotten bigger with the inflation. I wish someone would find money to get that going!
I am also not happy with cities in India going back to their original names from the British imposed ones over the past 10-15 years. Now I am confused when people say Chennai instead of Madras or Mumbai instead of Bombay and some names are still changing. Not that I am nostalgic about British rule which ended couple of decades before I was born but I am not happy that all the names I grew up with are being wiped out systematically over time while I live in another country. I still wonder how they find the money to support all the name changes which could be well used elsewhere.