Rhodes and Lee

[steepholm]

Last year I spent some time on Facebook arguing with people who thought that the "Rhodes must fall" campaign was wrongheaded because it was erasing history.

I suggested that putting a statue up to someone was generally (and in this case undoubtedly) not intended as a dispassionate recording of the fact that such-and-such had occurred, but rather a celebration of that person's life and deeds. In this case, the statue of Rhodes marks the approbation of the Oxford college he had endowed with some of his very ill-gotten African spoils.

True, came the reply, but that approbation is itself a historical artefact, and to take down the statue is to erase it. Well then, why not put it in a museum, along with the other historical artefacts, and stick a label on it detailing exactly how Rhodes came by the money to endow colleges and scholarships? Why keep it in a place of honour, thus perpetuating the honour done to Rhodes?

Of course, taking down a statue can never be more than a symbolic act, any more than raising it, or indeed keeping it. Symbolism is the currency of statues. To try and pretend that they are naturally evolve into some kind of historical resource is profoundly disingenuous. (In the case of Rhodes, I don't think anyone tried to argue that the statue was a thing of beauty, but aesthetic arguments fall into much the same category.) Museums and art galleries are themselves far from politics-free zones, obviously, but at least they make some overt attempt to defuse and reframe such things as historical and/or aesthetic objects rather than direct political statements.

In the end, Rhodes stayed of course, because Rhodes's successors (the college's current donors) threatened to withdraw funding if it was removed. ("Now I see, I see, / In Fulvia's death, how mine received shall be," as they put it.) As ever, money shouts.

Anyway, I was just wondering to myself how the people I was arguing with on FB last year (nice liberal types, every one) feel about Trump making exactly the same arguments this week? Were they nodding along? If not, why not?

As a tangential postscript, I gave my friend Haruka a lift to Brighton yesterday (I was helping my daughter move some of her things back to Bristol), and we stopped in at my mother's for a cup of tea en route. Haruka took this picture of my mother. It was only after five minutes that I noticed that it also includes her care assistant, Haawa. Talk about hidden black history!



Can you spot her, readers?

Comments

[redbird]

My alma mater just renamed one of its residential colleges, to honor Admiral Grace Hopper instead of the pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun. People who were affiliated with it pre-2016 have the option of identifying with the college by either name. Hopper stands out obviously as the only woman they've named one after, and not quite as obviously as the most recent by several decades, which makes sense because the other names were chosen in the 1930s. There was of course quite a bit of argument, but I noticed that it was all "tradition" and "we shouldn't deny history," but they didn't exactly try to teach us who Calhoun: what I had at the time was the factoid "first man to resign as vice president," and I didn't get that from Yale, I got it from coming to political awareness around the time Spiro Agnew became the second.

Thinking about the list of namesakes for Yale colleges, it's mostly people and places few people outside the university has heard of: Timothy Dwight and Ezra Stiles were presidents of Yale, and Saybrook and Branford are towns in Connecticut. The famous end is Samuel Morse, Jonathan Edwards, and Bishop Berkeley. From a historical angle, it's not so much "these people deserve honor" or "were important to the university" as, maybe, "here are bits of the university's history." From that angle, the nonexistent plaque ought to say "on this spot, Yale University chose to honor the legacy of slavery from the 1930s until 2016." Others might say things like "this college is named in honor of a classical scholar who was president of Yale" and "a Christian preacher who was part of the Great Awakening." (If you still have no idea what I'm referring to, that's pre-Revolution American cultural/religious history.)

[steepholm]

Well, I have to admit I hadn't heard of most of those. I'm interested to learn of Berkeley's Yale connection, though! My mother, a native of Wrexham, always told me that Yale was founded by someone from that town - but I have no idea whether she was right, and somehow I don't want to clip an angel's wings by googling it.

[redbird]

I don't think there was a direct connection, but that he had talked about founding schools in the Americas. IIRC, there is or was one in Bermuda, and a connection to UC Berkeley.

What I remember about the founding of Yale is that it was started (I think in Saybrook, Conn.) as the Collegiate School, then named for Elihu Yale after he gave them a small library's worth of books. (There may have been a cash donation as well.)

[thistleingrey]

Yes, UC Berkeley's campus tours (led by undergrads) still say that the blue in Cal blue/gold is deliberately a few shades off from Yale blue. Haven't overheard any of the tour guides give both pronunciations of the name, though; I learned of it from a professor who's a linguist, though the class I took from her there, years ago, was not formally in linguistics.

[steepholm]

Okay, I succumbed and googled anyway. The connection seems to be Elihu Yale, who lived out his days in the town. Naturally, he was another slave trader...

The inscription on his tomb in Wrexham is interestingly equivocal:

Born in America, in Europe bred
In Africa travell'd and in Asia wed
Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; In London dead
Much good, some ill, he did; so hope all's even
And that his soul thro' mercy's gone to Heaven