Honouring Saints and Sinners

Many activists are demanding an impossible standard

Last September, I wrote about the tendency to see history as a morality play and imagine that if we had lived in the past, we would have lived up to the highest moral ideals of the early 21st century. It’s a pleasing conceit, for obvious reasons.

It’s also presentist nonsense that is antithetical to a decent understand of both people and the past. And it is doing real harm to how we remember and honour major figures in the past.

A controversy embroiling NASA provides a perfect illustration.

James Webb, unworthy

In 2002, NASA announced it would name a planned space-based telescope the “James Webb Space Telescope.”

James Webb was the head of NASA from 1961 to 1968 and thus during the critical period that included the Mercury and Gemini programs and the beginning of Project Apollo, which led to the completion of the mission President John F. Kennedy set before Congress in 1961: "I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

No one protested the announcement. Why would they? Historians generally regard Webb as a highly competent leader who played an important role in the agency’s historic successes.

But in 2015, as the telescope’s construction neared completion, journalist Matthew Francis published an article in Forbes that claimed James Webb was a horrible bigot. In the 1950s, prior to heading NASA, Webb was a high-level official at the State Department who led a purge of gay employees and publicly disparaged gay people, Francis wrote. This article was touted on Twitter by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist and science communicator with a substantial public profile and Twitter following.

Hell broke loose. There were denunciations, petitions, demands. And understandably so. NASA’s telescope is one of its major projects in this era. This looked ugly.

But when American astrophysicist and science communicator Hakeem Oluseyi dug into the story, he discovered it wasn’t true. What Webb was accused of was done by someone else.

One would think this is good news.

Even better, Oluseyi found that in at least one notable instance, James Webb defended civil rights. As The New York Times reported in a lengthy examination of the controversy published in December:

He worked with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to integrate NASA, bringing in Black engineers and scientists. In 1964, after George Wallace, the white segregationist governor of Alabama, tried to block such recruitment, Mr. Webb threatened to pull top scientists and executives out of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

So everything is fine, right? Not quite.

The astronomers who were angry are still angry. Some are livid.

Careful examination of NASA files found there was a case of a low-level NASA employee who was fired for being gay during Webb’s time as head of NASA. Which isn’t terribly surprising. This was an era, remember, when gay sex was still a crime throughout the United States. The social stigma and bigotry gays faced was profound. As a result, national security officials worried that gay employees were subject to blackmail, making them a security risk, so an executive order signed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 essentially barred gay people from working for the government. That executive order remained in force throughout Webb’s career.

NASA was and is a huge agency. There is no evidence Webb knew of the firing. Last November, NASA’s chief historian, Brian Odom, issued an 89-page report that essentially cleared Webb: “In conclusion, to date, no available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation.”

But for those who wanted Webb’s name removed from the telescope, the man was anything but exonerated. “This is about who we canonize and who are our real saints,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein told The Times in an interview. “We can’t just exonerate a dead white guy who was in the thick of a repressive government.”

(I should note that Dr. Prescod-Weinstein was quite displeased with The New York Times story. She wrote a lengthy response you can find here. Three colleagues of Dr. Prescod-Weinstein wrote another response, claiming The Times article is politically motivated and misinformed. You can find that here.)

So let me summarize the arguments of the critics as I understand them.

Fine, they say, maybe James Webb didn’t personally lead purges. But he was a manager and a leader and as such he was responsible for what happens in his organization. And he didn’t put a stop to the persecution. That’s on him.

This is reasonable on its face.

But not in historical context. “No one in government could stand up at that time and say ‘This is wrong.’ And that includes gay people,” David K. Johnson told The Times. Johnson is a history professor at the University of South Florida and author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.

If Webb had protested, he would have jeopardized his career. If he had tried to obstruct an executive order, he could have been fired.

No matter, say critics. He should have fought back and been fired. Or quit in protest. He didn’t. So he’s as bad as the bigots who actively led purges.

Of course this reasoning applies to literally any manager who worked in the government of the day. They’re all guilty. They’re all unworthy of honours. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein even told The Times she thinks the Kennedy Center — which honours assassinated President John F. Kennedy — should be renamed.

Full credit to her for consistency.

John F. Kennedy, unworthy

As I see it, this sets up a two-part test that must be met by any historical figure we may wish to honour.

First, in all matters, including those entirely unrelated to the reasons we wish to honour this person, he or she must have thought, spoken, and acted in accordance with the moral judgements of mainstream Americans in the first quarter of the 21st century.

As I explained in my earlier article, that is a remarkable hurdle: We are shaped by our environments and experiences. That’s true of 21st-century Americans. It’s true of people everywhere, always. How likely is it, then, that someone born in early 20th-century America (Webb was born in 1906) and working in mid-20th-century America would think, speak, and act like someone living in early 21st-century America? It’s not. In fact, barring the invention of time travel, it would be downright miraculous to find someone with the full spectrum of early 21st-century views in Washington DC in the 1950s and 1960s. And the further back in time we go, the less likely it becomes.

Second, it’s not enough for historical figures to live up to our moral standards. They must live up to our moral standards in our most idealistic imaginings. So they can’t have merely refrained from expressing and acting on bigotry. They must have fought any and all varieties of bigotry so fiercely that they were willing to sacrifice their careers and livelihoods to the struggle. Only then do they deserve to be called, in Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s words, “our real saints.” Only then do they deserve to be honoured.

I’ve read enough history to know there are people who have, when the times demanded it, sacrificed to that extent. But I’ve also read enough history to know they are extremely rare.

And remember, both tests must be met. So what happens when the first and second expectations are combined? It can be expressed mathematically:

A wild improbability x the extremely unlikely = pretty much zero.

I can’t prove a negative but I have read a lot of history and I’m pretty sure there is no one, in all the long record of humanity, who would satisfy this test if it were applied as rigorously as the activists are applying it to James Webb.

But then, I suspect that this controversy, like many others involving history and public honours, isn’t about so much about history. Or public honours. It is rather, as I wrote in September, about performance, with the self and others as the audience.

Loudly condemning historical figures and demanding the removal of honours can be an excellent way to grab attention and raise one’s profile but, in most cases, I don’t think that’s the chief appeal of this sort of activism. I think it’s more psychological. Loudly condemning historical figures for failing to meet your high moral standards affirms to yourself and the world that you have high moral standards. You are a good person. The very fact that you are offended proves it. The more offended you are, the better the person you are. And you are extremely offended! You are outraged! Why, if you had been alive back then, you would have known what was right — which is what 21st century Americans judge to be right — and you would have done what was right no matter what the cost! Unlike the scoundrel you are denouncing.

But this whole construction is built on delusion.

If you (or I, or anyone) had been alive back then, you would have grown up in a very different world and been shaped in very different ways. And living in very different circumstances. You would not be an early 21st century American (or Canadian, Brit, etc.). And, like the overwhelming majority of human beings in all times and places, you would not be a saint.

If you (or I, or anyone) had been alive back then, you would almost certainly have done what most people did. To think otherwise replaces historical analysis with fantasy role-playing.

Thomas Jefferson, unworthy

In August, 2017, when white nationalists rallied to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia — leading to the murder of a protestor — President Donald Trump made a series of comments that were stupid, offensive, or both. One involved the statue itself.

The statue should stay, Trump said. Sure, Lee fought for slavery. But George Washington owned slaves. As did Thomas Jefferson. “So will George Washington now lose his status? … Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”

As I wrote last March, observers at the time were incredulous that Trump couldn’t see the difference between a statue honouring Lee and a statue honouring Washington.

Jamelle Bouie (now a New York Times columnist) responded:

Jefferson was a slaveholder. Washington was a slaveholder. But the reason we memorialize them is not because of their slaveholding. We memorialize them because one wrote the Declaration of Independence, and one led the Continental Armies and basically formed the model for the presidency. And while their public memories should include the fact that they owned slaves – I think it should be pretty central to how we remember them – in terms of memorializing there is material for creating a broad narrative that everyone can buy into. That was basically the whole project of the musical Hamilton.

Lee is only famous because he led Confederate armies. If secession had never happened and the Confederacy had never come into existence, Lee would have lived his life and died as an obscure member of the United States military. You can’t untangle him from the Confederacy. And if you look at even a cursory history of the memorialization of the Confederacy, it all pops up in the 1890s and 1900s and 1910s, as Jim Crow was being codified. These statues were explicitly raised as symbols of Jim Crow and white supremacy.

So Trump’s comparison there is dumb. It doesn’t really even make any sense. And the notion that there’s some slippery slope is dumb.

Lee was honoured for the deeds that we, today, condemn him for. But Washington? He was not honoured because he had slaves. He was and is honoured despite having had slaves. That’s what makes one honour acceptable, and the other not.

I think this reasoning is airtight.

Yet Bouie was wrong about the slippery slope — because this reasoning has been junked by activists.

Sir John A. Macdonald, unworthy

It pains me to even type these words, but … Trump had a point: In the years since Charlottesville, a prominent statue of Jefferson was indeed removed because Jefferson was a slaveholder. Statues of Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, have been torn down across the country, and his name removed, because Macdonald started the policy of residential schools for indigenous children. Franklin Roosevelt’s name will be taken off a school in Ontario because he committed racist acts, including interring Japanese-Americans. San Francisco considered — then retreated after a backlash — stripping the names of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even Abraham Lincoln from its schools. Many statues of Winston Churchill have been vandalized, while activists demand their removal. This is only a tiny sampling. There’s a long, long list of other cases. The trajectory in these cases is clear.

Historical context is increasingly marginalized. Why an honour was bestowed — a factor which was correctly prominent and persuasive in the arguments over statues of Confederates — doesn’t matter in the slightest. The gravity of offence required for cancellation is shrinking. The moral preening and self-righteousness of activists is growing.

Thus we get to James Webb, a man born in 1906 who stands accused of not thinking like a 21st century American and failing to sacrifice himself in a way few, if any, 21st century Americans would.

It’s hard not to conclude that, for those who think this way, the only people deserving of honours is themselves — or to be more precise, the heroic saints they are in their own daydreams.