Citizens today owe it to the past to know what their national heroes stood for

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln said: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality.” Woodrow Wilson was a staunch segregationist. All of them held the highest office in a nation that denied women the right to vote until 1920 and denied gays and lesbians the right to marry until 2015. Should the United States, as a country, still be honouring these men today?

That’s the question that we’ve grappled with, anew, since Sunday’s tragic events in Charlottesville and President Donald Trump’s subsequent response, but it’s not a new one. Two years ago, students at Princeton University, where I teach, occupied the college president’s office to demand that the name of Wilson — our most famous alumnus and a former Princeton president — be removed from our school of public policy and international relations and an undergraduate housing complex. This year, Yale University announced that it would rename a residential college named for Vice President John C. Calhoun, a fervent defender of slavery.

It is easy to take the position that Trump did, effectively, on Thursday, when he tweeted, “Can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” After all, the argument goes, weren’t these iconic figures simply men of their time? Weren’t their opinions and practices entirely ordinary for their social and political milieus? By the same logic, Trump implies, we should still respect the memory of figures like General Robert E. Lee, the statue of whom the Charlottesville City Council recently voted to remove. Indeed, in an NPRPBS NewsHour- Marist poll released on Thursday, 62 per cent of respondents said statues honouring leaders of the Confederacy should remain as historical symbols.

But Trump’s rationale falls short for two reasons.

First, while slavery may have been utterly ordinary in Washington’s time, and overt racial discrimination equally commonplace in Lincoln’s and Wilson’s, neither was universally defended at the time. Even in the 18th century, for those with ears to hear, numerous voices were making reasoned, impassioned cases against slavery. If a prominent American revolutionary like Benjamin Rush — friend of John Adams and signer of the Declaration of Independence — could conclude that slavery was a direct violation of the laws of nature and religion, why not Washington or Jefferson?

Second, the argument that these men were just men of their time is an example of something that political conservatives otherwise generally profess to loathe: moral relativism, the idea that different standards of truth and morality may obtain in different times and places. Few people in the US today would defend the practice of female circumcision, for instance, even though it is entirely ordinary in some parts of the world. Most people would say that no matter how customary, or perhaps even virtuous, this practice may seem to its adherents, it is, in fact, an affront to human dignity and human rights. Was slavery any less of an affront? No.

In the end, if we are to have any confidence in our own moral standards, we must believe that these standards are universally applicable, across time and space. And so, we must be ready to criticise figures in the past for attitudes and practices we consider abhorrent.

Yes, we also need to acknowledge that an overly rigid application of this principle would soon leave us with very little history to honour and celebrate, because few, if any, prominent figures of the past lived up to the moral standards of 21st- century Americans. Taken to the extreme, it would, indeed, mean tearing down the Washington Monument, and perhaps even the Lincoln Memorial.

But nations need their history. They need heroes and leaders to venerate, to inspire new generations, and to act as a source of unity. National unity can be a very fragile thing.

The conflict, then, is one between two principles. On one hand, we should not honour people who did things and held beliefs that were morally objectionable. On the other, we need a common history we can take pride in as a nation.

Deciding who to honour and who to condemn requires more than 140 characters. It requires serious thought and discussion. As citizens today, that’s what we owe to the past. David A. Bell is a professor of French history at Princeton University