Destroying the past

Demolishing yesterday doesn’t make today honorable

Maybe it’s because I graduated from Wilbur D. Mills High School in Little Rock that I’m a little averse to this current program of erasing historical monuments and references to people who did great things but were, in one way or another, very flawed human beings.

Wilbur D. Mills was a powerful congressman from central Arkansas who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from, get this, 1939 to 1977. For 17 of those years, he was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee back when Congress got things done. There were times when people considered Mills even more powerful than the president.

But Mills is perhaps most remembered by Americans for what happened one night in 1974 as he drove in Washington, D.C. A police officer pulled him over because his car’s headlights were off. Mills’ companion, a stripper known as Fanne Foxe, ran from the car and jumped in the famed Tidal Basin in an effort to escape. Mills was drunk. It wasn’t the last time Mills’ actions while inebriated damaged his reputation, and it eventually led to his resignation as committee chairman and his decision not to seek re-election.

But my alma mater is still named for the congressman, as is Interstate 630 in Little Rock and a variety of other facilities throughout the state.

In today’s environment, I wouldn’t surprised if someone were to suggest Mills name should be erased from any of them.

Today’s environment lately, of course, arises from the campaign to remove the Confederate flag from a monument to the Confederacy on the grounds of the state Capitol in South Carolina. That followed the awful slayings of nine churchgoers at a historically black church in that state. The Confederate flag has become the outlet for modern anxieties about the racism behind that terrible event.

Now, in many communities, attention has turned to other statues related to the Civil War or to individuals who demonstrated character or carried out such actions for which previous generations decided to pay tribute. This is longstanding tradition. Even today, honor is paid to people for acts of generosity or bravery or achievement and the like. And sometimes, the people honored are very flawed in other ways. Indeed, they all are.

A bust honoring John F. Kennedy? Didn’t he have some issues with infidelity?

A star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame reflects a history-making comedian, Bill Cosby. But today there’s a movement to remove it because of accusations of many sexual assaults dating back decades.

A diary of sorts in former Sen. Dale Bumpers’ papers at the University of Arkansas exposes some of the senator’s strong and unflattering opinions of Bill Clinton, the Arkansan who would become governor and eventually president. Bumpers’ family had it removed from the public collection. Bumpers famously returned to the U.S. Senate after his retirement to defend Clinton in his impeachment, but it troubled the family to learn of his comments from years earlier. They even questioned their validity, but circumstances suggest they felt the need to scrub those unflattering comments out of some misguided idea that it might hurt Bumpers’, and perhaps Clinton’s, legacy.

I think both men’s legacy can withstand such reflections, just as I believe this nation can handle having monuments to men and women who may have taken stances history has proven to be wrong-headed. The Confederate flag needed to go because of the racist emblem it became in the 20th century, but monuments marking historical figures and events don’t need to be torn down as though they’re statues of Saddam Hussein.

Americans should not move to eliminate honors bestowed by past generations based on modern sensitivities. Rather than erasing that, modern-day Americans should try to ensure such public monuments teach honestly about both the honorable aspects of lives and the flaws or mistakes that made them just like all of us – human. This nation’s own history has some serious flaws. Just ask some of our Native American friends. Yet we do not judge our nation solely on its worst actions or decisions. Nor should we.

If Americans are going to reanalyze historic statues in the context of new sensibilities and modern political correctness, we might as well stop trying to honor anyone. Tomorrow’s sensitivities will always promote backward glances that find our heroes less appealing than the generation that pays homage to them did.

Streets named after Bill Clinton? But wasn’t he the guy who was impeached because of what he did during his presidency? The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is deserving of honor, unless one finds adultery enough to raise the question of whether he’s perfect enough to be memorialized in stone in the nation’s capital.

A nation’s monuments are pieces of our historic quilt and need not be viewed as modern approval of everything in the honored person’s life. New realizations should not evoke a move to erase our cultural past.

Let’s build new monuments here in the 21st century to the men, women and ideals we cherish and hope that they reflect well on our generation. Destroying the monuments of past generations does not bring honor to our present.

Our past is our past, no matter how big an eraser we try to wield.