Sunday, June 21, 2020

What’s next? Should the state of Washington rename itself for honoring a man who owned slaves even while he was president?


The Seattle Times once editorialized that it wasn’t really a big deal that the state was named after a slave holder; in fact Washington is the only state in the entire country that is named after a person (although Virginia was named in “honor” of the “virgin” queen Elizabeth), and the powers-that-be had to pick a slave owner. The Times suggested that George Washington actually treated his slaves “well,” and he was of course a product of his times, so he shouldn’t be judged too harshly, and the citizens of this state can go to bed with a guilt-free conscious. Of course it is just hypocritical; wasn’t it just dumb luck that the state had Martin Luther King Jr. available to stand in for the former slave-owning vice president King County wished to “honor”? Geez, were the first residents of this territory Southern transplants? 

Maybe we can rename the state after Denzel Washington. Should I ask that brother who is being paid to be a security guard, whose been down here in the break room for the past hour?  I guess I’ll have to wake him up first.

Meanwhile, the current fad of tearing down statues seem to me to be increasingly more about simple nihilistic vandalism that it does concerning historical reality; pick a name and you will find some skeleton in the closet (feminist hero Margaret Sanger was an adherent of Nazi-style racial and class eugenics theories and policies). The vandalism of Albert Pike’s statue in Washington D.C. has excited the ignorance of both Donald Trump and those who tore it down and burned it; Pike’s statue was in commemoration of his Freemason ties, not because he was a Confederate general. Pike was in fact a life-long supporter of the rights of Native Americans; he agreed to a commission in the Confederate Army in order to enlist and lead a contingent of Native American soldiers in support of the Confederacy, with the promise by Confederate leaders to Native Americans within their jurisdiction that they would have their own “state” if the South won the war. However, Pike came to disbelieve this promise, and along with it his support of the Confederate “cause.”

But the destruction of statues in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this weekend was even more the action of numskullery. I could understand why Francis Scott Key’s statue was torn down, because he was a slave holder and possessed clearly racist views, rendering his “The Star Spangled Banner” the subject of derision even in his own day for its hypocrisies. Why it was chosen as the national anthem in 1931 over the much more benign and more melodic “America the Beautiful” is something that should be debated. Yet it has been sung millions times before sports events in this country, and quite often proudly by black singers, for whom the racism of its author is not an issue worth considering. I mean, if there was ever a reason for athletes to kneel during the National Anthem, this would be the reason for it. Yet there has never been a discussion to change the anthem itself, which makes the destruction of the statue symbolic of nothing more than cynicism.

Then there was the toppling of the statue of Spanish Catholic missionary Junipero Serra, a priest and Franciscan friar, whose statue in Los Angeles was also taken down and desecrated.  Note that media references to Serra fail to point out that in Catholic circles he is known as Saint Junipero Serra. This time the historical ignorance and hypocrisy of the people responsible is even more palpable. Serra is an important figure because he helped lay down the “civilizing” that would become the foundation of the state of California. Serra’s mission, as he saw it in his time, was to “save” the native peoples he encountered both in Mexico and in California from a fate in “hell” because they were non-believers. Why should we disbelieve his sincerity in this mission? Yes, he attempted to enlist native peoples into the Catholic faith. Yes, he attempted to force those who agreed to do so to live and work on mission lands. Why did he do so? Because he knew, rightly, that if he allowed the “converts” to leave and mingle with the unconverted they would likely reconvert, and his efforts wasted. Serra was not some “monster” who enslaved native peoples. He also fought to remove military interference from missionary business, which he believed was undermining his work. 

Today, Native American Catholics in California have a much different view of Serra than those who view him merely as an oppressor, and unlike Anglos who invaded the rest of the country, Serra—like the Spanish generally—did not attempt to drive Native Americans off their land and onto reservations, but to convert them into “Spanish” citizens for population purposes. The non-Hispanic Californians who are supporting and participating in the violence against his statues actually are hypocrites bar none, because what their ancestors did to Native Americans after the seizure of California from Mexico was far worse than what the Spanish did here.

Even more stupefying is the destruction of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Like I said, everyone has a “skeleton” in their closet—including those people engaged in this destruction business—and so why shouldn’t Grant? His “sin” it seems, was that unlike his abolitionist father he was at least before the Civil War more ambivalent about slavery, mostly due to the fact that he was married to a woman whose family owned slaves in Missouri. Before he became a hero in the Union Army, Grant was mostly a failure at business. This included his stint as a farmer in Missouri, where his father-in-law “loaned” him a few of his slaves to help him build a house and work in his fields. Grant himself was no slave driver; he worked in the fields alongside his “hired” help. It was observed that Grant was “ashamed” of using slaves and was himself no good at making them do any work because of his easy-going nature; because his father refused to give him loans to help make a go of it, Grant gave it up and returned to Ohio. 

Grant did in fact acquire one slave which he kept for one year, before freeing him with no conditions on his return to Ohio. Grant certainly deserves more credit than he is being given by the vandals. He agreed with Abraham Lincoln that Union victory was made more probable by emancipating slaves, and that enlisting black soldiers would have a demoralizing effect on the Confederates. Grant also refused prisoners exchanges unless all captured black soldiers—including former slaves that the Confederates insisted on keeping—were part of the exchanges. Grant also maintained the Reconstruction policy throughout his presidency, which white Southerners to this day still decry, but was necessary to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution against recalcitrant former Confederates, who after Reconstruction would soon promulgate Jim Crow and the peonage “system”—i.e. a form of slavery under a different name.

Grant also supported Native American rights, to a point. His military secretary during the war was Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian. As president he sought to reform the Indian affairs division, which he believed (rightly) was corrupt to the core, and appointed Parker as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, with the expectation that with sufficient resources, Native Americans on still large reservations could be converted into your typical average American citizens. Not all Native Americans favored this, but Grant and Parker’s main adversaries were the wealthy Americans on the Commission of Indian Affairs, mostly businessmen who sought to exploit the Natives and enrich themselves through government contracts. The commissioners had powerful allies in Congress, many who were outraged that a non-white like Parker could be in a high position of authority; Parker was in short order ousted on trumped-up charges, and the previous corrupt practices were reinstated, which led to greater conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. government and its military forces when Grant left office.

And then it gets even lower. The statue of Miguel de Cervantes was defaced (although not destroyed) in the Golden Gate rampage. What was Cervantes crime? Well, nothing, except that he has a Spanish name, which is the excuse for many a racist crime in this country. Cervantes, of course, is basically known for one thing, and one thing only: He is the author of Don Quixote, widely recognized as the first “modern” novel, and perhaps the most influential work of fiction, ever.  

What is that saying, about giants being torn down by midgets?

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