With the exception of Benjamin Franklin, perhaps, the only Founding Fathers to claim a place in the popular American memory are those who rose to presidential office. For that reason the name of John Witherspoon (1723-1794), along with the large majority of the other names appended to the Declaration of Independence, would probably go unrecognized by most Americans. Does Button Gwinnett ring a bell? Joseph Hewes? But as Witherspoon was an early, long-serving , and consequential president of the educational institution now known as Princeton University, located in Princeton, N. J., where I live, his memory is indeed preserved here. Not long before I retired the University installed a large and imposing statue of Witherspoon on a prominent campus site. To the extent the town has a “downtown,” its center is the point at which Witherspoon Street begins its northward course at right angles with the main drag, Nassau Street, at the gates of the University campus. One of the town’s public schools is named after Witherspoon—and here, of course, today’s essay begins.
Witherspoon owned slaves. The question of the degree to which this undoubted fact was consistent with his role as a prominent Presbyterian divine or an alumnus of the Scottish Enlightenment has not been wholly ignored; but it became decisive for the town’s school board, which voted to remove his name from “his” school. The erasure is definitive, but I believe that dickering continues concerning the most appropriate replacement name. Since there is no requirement that a school has to be named after anybody, something like P.S. no. 3 might be the best bet to avoid future controversy. Saint Augustine reminds us that all human funerary customs, while ostensibly honors for the defunct, are actually and necessarily palliatives for the living. The same is largely true, I believe, of all memorials and memorializations; and it comes perilously close to being true of all written history. As perceptions, needs, and tastes vary and change among historical populations, so also do their attitudes toward history. Thus all written history must be in a sense provisional, and historical revisionism constant. This does not mean that all historical facts are uncertain. It should warn us, however, that many interpretations of those facts are debatable, and not a few grossly influenced by anachronism and the intellectual predispositions of the historian.
The year 1992, which was among other things the five-hundredth anniversary of the first transatlantic voyage of Christopher Columbus, witnessed a large number of books, colloquia, lectures, and exhibitions relating to that event. I was offered the exciting opportunity to serve as one of the curators of a major exhibition mounted at the Library of Congress. It was entitled “1492-1992: the Ongoing Voyage”. My credentials for this assignment were at best modest, but it was not a chance to be missed. I had a strong interest in the “spiritual milieu” of the late medieval Mediterranean world, in which religion, politics, and a very active international and indeed intercontinental maritime economy stimulated both cultural cooperation and cultural conflict. I had published some essays on Columbus’s religious ideas, which were quite strange and clearly related to a major strain of apocalyptic thinking widespread in the Franciscan Order of his day. The project required a great deal more of me, of course, including wide reading in maritime history and the copious literature of travel and exploration of the European Renaissance.
I was part of a large team, which included many academic types and civil servants. It was in this milieu that I encountered for the first time the attitudes and vocabulary of political correctness at industrial scale. Our view of the person of Columbus remains mysterious, remote, and fragmentary to this day. I conclude that he was both a late medieval mystical autodidact, and one hell of a sailor. But his practical expertise warred with fantastic preconceptions he had inherited from ancient geographers and “nature” writers who had taught him to expect to find, in the world’s distant islands, all sorts of monstruous human life: men with dogs’ heads, cyclopses, assorted weirdos. The prevailing attitudes of 1992 rather reversed things. The monsters were to be found in the Niña, the Pinta, and above all the Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship. The phrase “the discovery of America,” which had been in general use more or less forever, was not merely “Eurocentric” but oppressive to “native Americans”—the word native having for certain scholars overnight changed its etymological and customary meaning in the direction of aboriginal and therefore no longer applicable to the vast majority of Americans born in America.
Trying to understand the meaning of Columbus at the time of the quincentenary of 1992 led me bone up a bit on previous centennial observations. There actually was a tercentenary in1792, though one only modestly noted in a new republic with a great deal else on its mind. For all I know President Witherspoon may have adorned it with a few well-chosen words on the Princeton campus. If so, I have not found them. But the hagiographic celebration par excellence was the Columbian Exposition of 1892-93, which was a whing-ding the likes of which the world had never witnessed. Though officially opening on “Columbus Day” of 1892, the main period of its visitation was 1893. The venue was Chicago, in-your-face Chicago, “a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities” in Sandburg’s famous poem. Within this actual city the town fathers built an ideal one, classical in its architecture and lavish in its expense, with a kind of Venetian lagoon at its center. The ostensible occasion—the four hundredth anniversary of the European discovery of America—was quite obviously a mere front. The real subject was the emergence of the United States as a super-power, industrial colossus, and paradise of the arts and sciences. But of course there was plenty of Columbus, too, and what a Columbus he was. Discovering in Columbus a superspreading genocidal maniac requires some preparatory political softening up, to be sure; but the vision is not wholly removed from subsequent developments in the long history of colonization and emigration in the Americas. Discovering in him a plucky proto-Protestant entrepreneur and self-made industrial baron is another. And that was the Columbian vibe of the Expo of 1893.
In 1892 all the virtues that had been attributed to George Washington in Parson Weems’s famous biography of 1809 (source of the cherry-tree legend, among others) were found vibrant and expanded in the imagined character of a Genoese maritime adventurer. American lexicographers know that in 1892 such racial slurs as wop and guinea were already widely applied by native Americans of the day to Americans of Italian birth; but for expositional Columbus, the olive oil line was breached. The Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, had been founded ten years earlier; but he now became the Italian-American icon par excellence. Meanwhile, for Protestant America the Columbian Exposition really solidified Columbus’s credentials as Yankee hero. Memories of the 1892 Columbus were still vivid enough to moderate some of the recent iconoclastic intentions directed toward the 1992 Columbus, whose popular reputation has by no means improved over the last quarter century. In various places statues of Columbus, prime candidates for erasure, were spared in deference to the possible feelings of the “Italian-American community,” still thought of as having some residual grievance leverage. I doubt that the Scottish-American community has what it would take to rescue John Witherspoon.
One of Faulkner’s characters, speaking of the historical burden of the “Lost Cause” syndrome of the Old South, says: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This pithy sentiment, usually attributed to the novelist himself, is frequently quoted, and for good reason. It’s one of those quotations that sounds really good, quite without the necessity of explaining what it might possibly mean. I, for one, have only the vaguest idea. I have spent the better part of my life studying the past, but I have found it a past, while quite past indeed, demanding of both sympathy and humility in trying to understand and assess it.
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