Allen Guelzo on Cancel Culture and Historical Complexity

If you feel like your head starts spinning when you hear of the efforts to rename institutions, colleges, and streets in the past year and a half, you’re not alone. While some feel a knee-jerk protectiveness of the names that they’ve grown accustomed to, others feel relief that they no longer have to think about the names or see them connected to their alma mater. One striking example is the effort to remove the name of someone who has been so eminently honored as George Washington because of his association with slavery. 

What are we to make of such changes in our culture? It is, no doubt, tricky. Part of the reason is that everyone we might honor suffers from weaknesses, sins, and failings. There’s a reason to remove anyone’s name from a building. But fallen creatures—to use the theological term—nonetheless accomplish deeds worthy of recognition. Sifting through this messy mixture of fallen heroes presents us with legitimate challenges. 

In that light, we should acknowledge that some calls for removing names from a building are worth heeding, while others are not. Allowing the pressures from special interest groups that are currently in vogue to determine whose name stays and whose name goes is not the most objective approach.

Thankfully, esteemed American historian Allen Guelzo—a Lincoln expert—has laid out some helpful criteria for weighing whether one should remove a name or not. I’m struck by his discussion of the efforts to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from schools for his alleged mistreatment of Native Americans. As Guelzo points out, the details of these allegations must be reviewed for a fair assessment—and in Lincoln’s case, the allegations are weak when understood in the full context of his life and the particular situation under consideration. 

For those trying to make sense of these renaming campaigns—or even those in the midst of weighing whether something should be renamed or not—I recommend Guelzo’s article “What’s in a Name?,” published at Law & Liberty. As he argues, his guide “will not automatically solve all questions or end all debates, but it will allow us to discuss the real historical issues, not the emotional and political ones, in a sober and directed fashion, in a world where retouching the past is of much less worth than writing a better present.”