"Stewards of an Intergenerational Project"
Old place names have their own histories, whatever their origin
Ask 1,000 people about the origins of the name “New York” and most — let’s say 997 — will say it was named after the English city of York. Which makes sense. Before the city was taken from the Dutch and renamed, it was “New Amsterdam,” in honour of Amsterdam. Same idea, different honouree.
But that’s wrong.
“New York” was chosen to honour a man named James. When New Amsterdam became New York, this James was better known as the Duke of Albany, a Scottish title. Hence, the name of New York state’s capital. His English title was Duke of York. Hence, New York.
James, the Duke of York, became James II, King of England. As monarch, his principal legacy was to confirm Parliamentary supremacy by being removed from the throne and exiled.
As controversial as he once was, activists today do not revile James II. And they do not demand that New York be renamed. Which is curious. Because there are good reasons to be uncomfortable with the link between the city and the duke.
Before becoming king, James was Governor of the Royal Africa Company. It was a trading company, and what it traded, mostly, was enslaved people. To expand English market share, James ordered the Royal Navy to attack Dutch slave-trading forts in West Africa. In the ensuing war with the Dutch, the English took New Amsterdam and called it New York.
Is this really someone who should be honoured in the name of the world’s most famous city?
No, I am not going to argue that New York needs a new name. That would be ridiculous.
But why would it be ridiculous?
That’s what I want to tease out. Because it gets to something that should be — but seldom is — an explicit part of any debate about erasing old honours, including names and statues.
Let me begin by laying my cards on the table.
I often write about history, memory, and monuments, and as longtime readers know I am generally skeptical of tearing down and renaming. I feel strongly that we should not treat cities, countries, universities and other collective endeavours as the exclusive property of those who happen to be alive today. We are “stewards of an intergenerational project,” to borrow a phrase from a wonderful Yale report that examined the principles that should guide any call to change names and other honours. We are caretakers. Not owners.
We are also flawed. We may think our moral judgements are superior to those of past generations, but so did those past generations. If they erred, we may err. And future generations may consider some of what we say and do as appalling as we consider the slavery and racism embraced by past generations.
Combine these two views and the conclusion is clear: We should be cautious and reluctant to erase what past generations built and honoured, just as we hope and expect future generations will be cautious and reluctant about erasing what we build and honour. This does not mean nothing should ever change, as that Yale report emphasized. (And Yale demonstrated, when it took John C. Calhoun’s name off a Yale college.) But we should make retention the default; make the burden of proof for change high; and most importantly, temper our moral judgements of the past with awareness of the human fallibility we share with generations past and future.
Revolutionaries who blithely sweep away names and statues and other memorials — wiping the intergenerational project clean so they may write whatever they wish on the blank slate — are arrogant fools.
Which brings me to the City of Toronto.
Dundas Street is a major artery running through the centre of the city. Dating back to the late 18th-century, when Toronto was “York” (named in honour of the Duke of York, again, but a different Duke of York) it is almost as old as the city itself. But in 2021, city council voted to erase the name in response to a petition by Black Lives Matter protestors. That hasn’t been done yet, thanks in no small part to the estimated $8.6 million it will cost a city whose finances are as solid as a Trump casino. But it’s coming.
The protesters were aware — unlike the vast majority of residents — that Dundas Street was named for Henry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville, a Scottish aristocrat who became a major British political figure in the late 18th century. In the last decade of the 18th century, the protestors argued, Dundas amended legislation before Parliament, delaying the abolition of the slave trade (which was finally done in 1807.) This made Dundas such an odious figure, the protestors felt, that to have his name on the street was too offensive to bear — just as the statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederates that were the target of Black Lives Matter protestors in the American South were too appalling to stay. Those statues had been erected quite explicitly as symbols of Jim Crow, and many were erected in explicit opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, facts which were rightly considered damning in the American debates. The naming of Dundas Street had no similarly grim history. In fact, the man who named the street, Governor General John Graves Simcoe, was an avowed abolitionist who passed landmark anti-slavery legislation. But that difference was simply ignored, as it almost always is in the worldwide debates about public memory that the American protests sparked. (Here’s an earlier piece about why the histories of the statues themselves should be considered, but seldom are.)
It’s important to note, however, that what exactly Dundas did with that legislation, and why, is contested. Some historians support the protestors’ view that Dundas intended to defend the interests of slave owners. Others dispute this, arguing that his amendment was merely a tactical concession to the politics of the moment, and wasn’t intended to impede the abolition movement. (I’m not remotely qualified to have an informed opinion, so I’m agnostic.) Disagreements like this are common in history. Hashing them out — finding new evidence, marshalling better arguments — is a big part of what historians do.
But politics abhors shades of grey. So City of Toronto staff consulted with historians, wrote a report siding with the anti-Dundas camp, and declared that what Dundas had done was so abhorrent that the street name is “no longer considered to be reflective of the city’s contemporary values.” And should be removed.
You remember that Yale report I cited? The one that so wisely considered the role of public memory, and intergenerational stewardship, and the principles that should guide any consideration of erasing old honours? There wasn’t a whiff of that thoughtfulness in the Toronto report. In fact, the Toronto report is a good illustration of the shallowness and arrogance the Yale report warned against.
How arrogant, you ask? The city staff who prepared it weren’t content to condemn one long-dead British aristocrat. Instead, they compiled a list of sixty streets named for historical figures they considered so morally abhorrent that the streets should be renamed. Some figures were local grandees who had owned slaves in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. But that was just the appetizer. The Duke of Wellington, who beat Napoleon at Waterloo. William Gladstone, the reforming Liberal prime minister of Victorian Britain. Winston Churchill, who… Well, it’s Winston bloody Churchill.
You get the point. Pretty much anyone who ever said or did anything that offends activists or bureaucrats in 2023, and is the namesake of a street in Toronto, is on the list. Away with old rubbish! shouts the revolutionary. A superior new era begins!
Toronto isn’t alone in embracing temporal arrogance, unfortunately.
A San Francisco school board declared it would erase 44 offensive school names, a list so sweeping it even included Abraham Lincoln. When the Great Emancipator isn’t up to moral snuff, you know the bar of righteousness is high. That initiative was ridiculed into submission but a school board in London, Ontario, apparently thought it was a swell idea. It compiled a similar list of offensive school names and it is now erasing names with vigour. First to go was a school dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (All the Allied leaders of World War Two were war criminals we should revile, apparently. No mercy merely because they beat Hitler and saved the world.) Then came a school named for Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. They also compiled a long list for future erasures, a list which includes essentially anyone with a “Sir” or a “Lord” or a “Prince” preceding his name — including Prince Charles, who, as the reader may know, was recently promoted. And is now Canada’s head of state.
I can see the appeal. Imagine being the judge when Winston Churchill is in the prisoner’s dock! What a wonderful, moral, accomplished person you must be. How very important you are.
The people who push this stuff imagine they are the polar opposite of Victorians, but in their moral absolutism, their self-righteousness, and their arrogance, they are, in fact, perfect little Victorians.
But I digress. Because I’m angry. Sorry.
One aspect of almost all these cases involves something that’s almost never mentioned, but should always be considered. We can spot it by answering the question I started with: Why would it be ridiculous to argue that New York City’s name should be changed because James, the Duke of York, was involved in the slave trade?
One answer comes right at the start of this column. How many people even know New York was named in honour of the Duke of York, much less what the Duke of York got up to? Very few, I’d wager. When people see “New York,” they don’t see “the Duke of York is such a splendid fellow we named New York after him.” And no one, I’m pretty sure, sees “cheers to the Duke of York for beating the Dutch and expanding our slave trade!”
They see and hear the name of the city. And nothing else.
Names are symbols whose meaning evolves as time and generations pass. A name like New York, a name that has existed for centuries, a name whose meaning has grown and changed as the city evolved, a name enshrined in countless songs, novels, movies and television shows, has a long and rich history all its own. Its connection to the Duke of York is interesting to trivia buffs and history obsessives like me but a thousand-page book about New York could omit the Duke of York entirely and leave out nothing of consequence.
There are so many other examples.
Louisiana was named for — anyone? — Louis XIV.
The literal embodiment of monarchical absolutism (l’etat, cest moi) probably isn’t someone we would choose to honour today, even if we don’t know that the same Louis XIV was responsible for the codification (the Code Noir) of French slavery. But “Louisiana” ceased to be a mere honour for a French king centuries ago. It is now a living, breathing symbol of a place and its people and their long history. How absurd would it be to scrap that simply to snub a long-dead king?
Erase “New York” and you eliminate the taint of an association few know and fewer care about, but you also sever a thread that runs for centuries. So much lost for so little.
As with “New York,” so with “Louisiana.” And the street names on Toronto’s to-be-erased list.
Most are at least a century old. Many are far older.
“Yonge Street” is on the list. Not only is Yonge Street one of the principal arteries of the city, it’s probably the most famous street in Canada. Like Dundas Street, it was built in the 1790s by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, who named it after a friend, Sir George Yonge, who was an expert on Roman roads and road construction. But Yonge was later involved in the slave trade, so Yonge Street must go. (As I mentioned, Simcoe was an early and ardent abolitionist who passed landmark anti-slavery legislation in Ontario, but streets named after him are also on the list. Because why not.)
For many years, the Guinness Book of World Records touted Yonge Street as “the world’s longest street” — 1,896 km — but that was calculated by including Highway 11, which Yonge Street turns into. Highway 11 runs all the way to and through Northern Ontario. I grew up in the north, next to Highway 11. To me, it seemed almost magical that this thin strip of asphalt running through the vast forests of the north led directly to the centre of Toronto, a city as alien as the capital of Mars to a kid growing up in Northern Ontario. “Yonge Street” meant something to me. And it had nothing to do with Sir George Yonge.
Over the centuries, generations were born, lived, and died. Toronto grew and changed. Yonge Street was always there, evolving with the city in both physical form and meaning. It meant something — many different somethings — to countless people.
The same is true of “Dundas Street.”
As I mentioned, it is almost as old as the city itself. Older, if you date the city from its incorporation as Toronto. And it has meant something to so many. When I was first travelled all the way down Highway 11 on the back of a turnip truck and arrived in Toronto, Dundas Street, for me, meant Sam the Record Man, the venerable record retailer at Yonge and Dundas.
Sam is long gone, sadly. But now there’s an impressive square and bandstand at Yonge and Dundas, across from the Eaton Centre. The evolution continues.
Or rather, it should continue.
But those in charge of the city for this one brief moment in history do not see themselves as stewards of an intergenerational project.
They see themselves as the city’s owners. Its streets and public places are theirs to do with as they wish, so they declare that all the city’s names and monuments must reflect “the city’s contemporary values” — and even a tenuous connection with an 18th century historical figure who may or may not have done something we find odious, a connection few know about, and fewer are bothered by, means more than two centuries of history must be cut adrift and left to fade into the past.
That’s no loss to those in charge, after all. For arrogant fools, all that matters is the present.
Un digestif pour vous?
That was a little heavy and political. Sorry. So let me leave you with something a little light and fun.
The year is 1915. The Great War rages in Europe.
In the United States, activists are pushing hard to get the vote for women.
Writer, poet, and suffragette Alice Duer takes the commonly used arguments against women’s suffrage and applies them to men.
Why We Don’t Want Men To Vote
Because man’s place is in the army.
Because no really manly man wants to settle any question otherwise than by fighting about it.
Because if men should adopt peaceable methods women will no longer look up to them.
Because men will lose their charm if they step out of their natural sphere and interest themselves in other matters than feats of arms, uniforms, and drums.
Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit to govern.
(From 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza. A wonderfully entertaining read. Highly recommended.)
If it is arrogant to remove old names, it is also arrogant to put any person's name on public buildings and other institutions and infrastructure. After all, the future may find feet of clay on today's heroes -- especially since so much now is electronically documented forever and easily discoverable. Moreover, as you point out in the York confusions, a name with any unfortunate association can never be used again because it might offend the confused. Not only must the honoree be perfect, but so must be everyone who shares the name.
To put things in even greater perspective, not only may future generations think that our current ways are morally and ethically bankrupt; we would be judged just as harshly by people in the past if they could have seen into the future. Our ancestors would be horrified by us and deeply dismayed at the depravity of their descendants. Things we accept as normal and even enlightened would be seen as abhorrent: multiple premarital partners, homosexuality, freedom of religion, atheism, erosion of parental or patriarchal authority, decline of traditional notions of honor or duty, inversion of tried and true social orders or hierarchies. They would be in anguish to see the total vanquishment of their values and everything they cherish.. We have to face the truth that we too might see our own descendants as depraved and thoughtlessly casting aside the cherished legacy we left them, much of which will one day be seen as quaint, useless, or misguided.