In what seems like an instant, Black Lives Matter has become the central issue of our time.
Consider: On May 25, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. On June 1, demonstrators were cleared from Lafayette Square ahead of Donald Trump’s photo-op in front of St. John’s Church, prompting nationwide protests. And on June 10, the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was toppled from its base in Richmond, Virginia.
The following day, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a remarkable statement. He apologized for his role in Trump’s Lafayette Square visit, and also supported removing the names of Confederate generals from military bases.
Milley called the Civil War “an act of treason,” and said soldiers of color — 43% of today’s military — must wonder about training on bases named for men “who fought for an institution of slavery that may have enslaved one of their ancestors.”
Most of Richmond’s Confederate monuments have now been removed, in response to the same question: Although it was the Confederate capital, why — 155 years after the end of the rebellion — are its symbols those of a cause that, as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote, “was one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Not until a century after this “lost cause” was invented were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enacted, putting an end to legalized segregation. But equality of the mind — broad acceptance that all citizens should have equal authority and autonomy — has seemed as distant as ever, and even receding.
Now, amid a pandemic that’s upended societies worldwide in a manner not seen since the Great Depression, we may have reached a point of clarity, where the founding vision of true equality is no longer a mirage.
Young people are leading the way. They are more tolerant, more accepting, and less offended by distinctions of race or gender than any previous generation.
There’s no reason to expect Confederates ever to be put back on their perches, or to be displayed except in museums, where they belong: We shouldn’t seek to destroy the past, but learn from it.
Yet the liberation of rethinking often extends well beyond the original object. One that’s now roiling institutions across the country has come to Maine — which has no Confederate statutes, though before statehood it did have slaves.
The problem is eugenics, the early 20th century movement that advocated selective breeding to, in essence, create better human beings. At the time, it didn’t seem remarkable to many people.
Humans have been breeding plants, horses, dogs, and cats for centuries, without many qualms. And anyone who believes that humans do not “self select” when choosing partners hasn’t been consuming romance novels or royal family sitcoms, let alone historical tomes.
Eugenics has, of course, a dark underside. Although advocates were among leading progressives of their day — British socialists and American urban reformers — the movement became identified with notorious anti-immigrant legislation passed by Congress in the 1920s. It seemed to target the disabled and poor, and its nadir was undoubtedly the Supreme Court decision from Oliver Wendell Holmes — counted among our greatest judges — in which he pronounced, upholding forced sterilization, that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The eugenics movement was destroyed by Adolf Hitler, whose ravings about a “master race” led to World War II as surely as the “slave power” produced the American Civil War. Yet blaming eugenics for Hitler makes as much sense as blaming Richard Wagner’s operas; we’ll never listen to Wagner the same way, but no one is currently banning his music.
Eugenicists are being banned. The name of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and an eugenics advocate, is being removed from its Manhattan Health Center.
And last week, the Jackson Laboratory said it was deleting the name of its founder, C.C. Little, from its Bar Harbor conference room, saying eugenics cast “a long shadow over his achievements.”
Little — earlier president of the University of Maine — might have appreciated the irony. Jackson’s considerable success as Maine’s leading high-tech employer stems from Little’s insights into selective breeding of mice, still at the core of its world-class research capabilities.
Without Margaret Sanger, there would have been no Planned Parenthood. Without C.C. Little, there might not have been a Jackson Lab. Should we remove their names from the institutions they founded?
Historical questions are often vexed. In this case, though, we might venture a distinction.
The Confederacy’s legacy is, or should be, its absolute rejection. The Sanger and Little legacies are a little more complicated.
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, reporter, opinion writer and author for 35 years, has published books about George Mitchell, and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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