News last week that the San Francisco Board of Education—a group of seven elected commissioners charged with shaping policy—had voted, 6–1, to rename forty-four San Francisco schools came with the shock and panic of an unexpected quiz. Some of the names on the Board’s verboten list, meant to prune symbols of racism and white supremacy, merit the scrutiny. Thomas Jefferson—of Jefferson Elementary School—was a President and an early architect of this country; he was also, famously, a slaveholder who preyed on his slaves. These two facts are weighed in most assessments of his legacy. Other concerns are more roundabout. Clarendon Elementary, named for Clarendon Avenue, on which it sits, will lose its name because, as the Board of Education explained in a spreadsheet, the name “can be traced to a county in South Carolina, one of the 13 Colonies named for Edward Hyde Earl of Claredon [sic] impeached by the House of Commons for blatant violations of Habeas Corpus.” Robert Louis Stevenson, of Stevenson Elementary, gets the black spot for once publishing what the Board describes, no doubt fairly, as “a cringeworthy poem.” Everyone’s a critic now.
The list of blighted namesakes includes Union officers, Spanish missionaries tied to California’s colonization, and people who are probably quiz-night answers more than household names. (Two points to anybody who has heard of Frank McCoppin, a mayor of San Francisco for two years in the late eighteen-sixties.) Onlookers have been up in arms. Abraham Lincoln, of Lincoln High School—“not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations,” the Board of Education says—got the boot, to the shock of blue voters. The conservative columnist Ross Douthat described such “radical projects” as the early stages of a mission-confused power grab by the left. It does not help that the Board seems to have been working off wrong information about the namesakes it axed. (Paul Revere, of Revere K-8, was blackballed for “the colonization of the Penobscot,” apparently due to confusion about his role in an eponymous battle with the British.) Nor did it help that no one offered better names. Alarmed activists have been trying to drum up support to recall the Board, and the city’s mayor, London Breed, has wondered publicly whether it doesn’t, perhaps, have some more important stuff to do.
Institutional renaming—the kind meant to acknowledge injustice, as opposed to the usual kind, meant to acknowledge a check—began as a focussed endeavor about five years ago, with a flurry of activism on liberal-arts campuses. Most targets then, such as slaveholders, were hard to defend, and the reëxamination was fair game, because rethinking and attention to the roots of things are meant to be what universities are all about. Last month, as part of a defense bill, the Senate approved a requirement to retitle military bases that take their names from Confederate leaders. That, too, seemed like a no-brainer: the military is based on loyalty and the upward flow of authority, and it’s weird to be saluting in a fort that honors someone who fought violently against the nation that you serve.
But loyalty, deference, and awareness are not always qualities in great supply among fourteen-year-old kids. (Many millennia in, it remains unclear what qualities are in great supply.) Do Lowell High School students lie awake fretting about James Russell Lowell, the nineteenth-century poet who, according to the Board of Education, was an abolitionist, but maybe the wrong kind? One’s hunch is that the kids know what adults on both sides of this conflict seem not to, which is that, barring major embarrassments, the random-seeming dead guy or gal with a name on your school is less important than your biology test tomorrow, or the prom upcoming, or the principles by which you’ll live your life. The years of basic education are relentlessly forward-looking: students, whatever their orientation, want to get on, get out of here, get into the world, where, they possibly sense, their energy is needed. It’s adults, haunted by the things they have or haven’t seen, who turn themselves to raking over fine points of the past.
The fruit of that attention is—and ought to be—a changing harvest. In their grander moments, journalists speak of their work as “the first draft of history.” (This idea seems to have sprung from the mind of George Fitch, a popular newsstand writer around the turn of the twentieth century.) The corollary rarely noted is that history has no final draft. The reëvaluation of character, conduct, and legacy isn’t a onetime corrective to past error—it’s the heart of all historical work. Historiography, the study of how the past is written, is important not because everybody did it wrong the first time but because ideas about the right way are perpetually changing, and the movement of those goalposts says as much about an era as the points put on the board.
On the matter of the San Francisco schools, there are those, like Douthat, who appear to think that figures in the historical firmament, such as Paul Revere, ought to remain there, as fixed as Polaris. And there are others, some apparently on the Board of Education, who think that swapping an admirable name for a present-day dud will permanently turn off the error light. (Otherwise, why bother? Schools would be obliged to rename themselves every few years, like ill-starred coffee shops.) History smiles on neither view. As with art or parenting, rethinking our national past is a game of always being better, never being best.
In fact, the way that the San Francisco school names are being talked about, fretted about, and competed over seems to have little to do with history at all. It has more to do with another realm of public life: celebrity. This is where admiration of an individual bears the hopes and dreams of a group. It’s where solo figures—names—get levered up onto pedestals, knocked off them, or left behind. The reputational part of fame has become such a sensitive throttle that the pedestals themselves are wobbling from all the leaps and dives. A figure like James Comey can go from being a pariah to a righteous fist of the people, and back, in months. Amanda Gorman, at an age when most modern poets are molting, trying to find the new, hard edges of their art, was created overnight as the voice of a country, and now every utterance she makes will echo as the Word (a prospect that will earn no envy from people who recall themselves at twenty-two). As famous names trend across social media, we wonder whether they are dead, sex predators, or, in the way of Dolly Parton, this month’s new redeemers of the earth. What makes America the great celebrity nation isn’t that we respect fame more than the next place; it’s that we load up famous people this way with our national need, like horses bearing jockeys. And we cheer and boo them as they run an ever-shorter course.
Somehow, that race has blurred into the real work of society-making. We’re perpetually recruiting superheroes, even though most of the urgent tasks at hand—environmental responsibility, communication across difference, basic decency—are chores fit for daily life. It’s as famous people, not historical figures, that the school namesakes in San Francisco now seem to be evaluated—a process that the Board of Education describes as researching “the backgrounds of the individuals or places that are namesakes” and analyzing them “under the panel’s established guiding principles.” But the principles seem to be applied inconsistently, in many cases among complex legacies. Most of the dispute isn’t about whether we should actually devote such focus to the one-line reputation of those who are dead and gone. It’s about whether Honest Abe—the name, the icon—carries enough Superman standing right now.
We don’t need heroes, though. (As Brecht put it: pity the country that does.) And we don’t need to enlist the dead to our shared cause. The overemphasis on individual actors, this angel or that demon, shows how little confidence American society has in its own shared process of change—the kind that isn’t going to be driven home by a famous person having a good day, the kind that we can all work on whether we went to George Washington High School or Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts or the Mark Zuckerberg Basic School for Tall and Technically Gifted Children. (You laugh now.) Rebuilding that confidence is a long project, and a hard one. Naming is the easy part. It’s what comes next that will take everything we’ve got.
