When public names have political ends
09/14/15 06:42 PM—UPDATED 09/14/15 06:45 PM
By Sanford Levinson
... The same week that McKinley became Denali, the University of Texas was removing a statue of Jefferson Davis from a place of honor on its main campus. It was deemed inappropriate to continue honoring the former head of the Confederate States of America, a man who did his part to trigger a war to maintain chattel slavery that ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Of course, the Texas-sized elephant in the room remains the large statue in front of the State Capitol, honoring only the Confederate war dead, on which Davis stands alone at the top. What, indeed, is to be done about such political symbols and artifacts?
... I can say three things with confidence. The first is that there is no satisfying general rule that allows us to determine when to adhere even to possibly uncomfortable status quos and when to act to change them, whether by changing names or monuments. Should we remove Alexander Hamilton from the ten-dollar bill, or President Andrew Jackson from the twenty, as some critics have recently argued? What do we lose or gain by emphasizing one history over another?
The second is that such choices are never apolitical. It should be obvious that mountains, airports, and cities do not announce their own names, any more, for that matter, than pets or newborn children do. We assign the names or, with regard to statuary, decide who is worthy of public honor. But the third is that even if “we” have a great deal of autonomy in naming our individual children or household pets, “we” are certainly not equal with regard to controlling public space and allocations of honor. Some of us have more power than others. From time immemorial, those with power – including the power that comes with great wealth – have used their control of public space to try to mold a certain kind of political consciousness ...
... There is a reason that a common trope of political revolutions, much beloved in the modern era by photographers, is the destruction of statues of tyrannical leaders, such as statues of Stalin in Budapest or Prague, or the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. There were no photographers to cover the scene, but part of the American Revolution was the destruction of a statue of King George III, which was pulled down from its place of honor in front of King’s College and melted to make musket bullets ...
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/when-public-names-have-political-ends