Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[J]ust what, some fellow once asked, is in a name?
A relevant question in Vermont these days.
The University of Vermont has formed a committee to study whether to rename campus buildings honoring men who might have been connected to the shameful eugenics program, in which hundreds of Vermonters were sterilized in the middle decades of the last century.
Whatever the university decides is its business. But the process raises questions that transcend UVM and the names of a couple of buildings.
One of the buildings is Perkins Hall, which is named for George Perkins (1844-1933), a long-time geology professor and dean at the university.
Perkins apparently had nothing to do with the eugenics project. His son, zoology professor Henry Perkins (1877-1956), had a great deal to do with it. He started it and he led it.
Did Papa George bear some responsibility for what young Henry did?
Maybe. But for the last few thousand years one of the basic ethical principles of Western civilization has been that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father … neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20), that people are responsible for their own deeds, not those of their kin.
Another building that might be renamed is the Bailey-Howe Library. Guy Bailey didn’t seem to have anything to do with the eugenics program, either, though as UVM president from 1920 to 1940, he may have known about it.
There also appears to be no connection between eugenics and Free Press publisher David Howe (1892-1969) except that he might have known a few of the eugenics advocates when he was a young man. Holding him accountable for their views sounds a lot like the long-ago-discredited practice of declaring a person a security risk because he had once belonged to the same club as a Communist.
Combined with some out-of-context quotes and inexplicable misinterpretations of her writing, such tenuous connections make up most of the evidence of a link between eugenics and novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958), whose name some people want removed from the state’s annual “children’s choice” literature award.
The State Library Board considered the matter and decided the evidence connecting Fisher with eugenics was weak – “no smoking gun,” Board President Bruce Post said – but then suggested renaming the award anyway because “kids today don’t know (about Fisher) and don’t relate to her,” Post said.
Fortunately, Scott Murphy, the state librarian who will make the final decision about the name, plans to take his time, do more research, and involve a broader range of interested parties.
“I like the idea of reintroducing (Fisher’s books) through various events in local libraries, and working together with other organizations like the Vermont Center for the Book and the Humanities Council,” Murphy said. “Let’s decide as a community.”
With luck, it will be a community that understands literature, which not everybody seems to do. The anti-Fisher effort has been led by Abenaki educator Judy Dow. She attacks many of Fisher’s writings, none more furiously than her 1933 novel, “Bonfire,” which Dow dismisses as “propaganda literature,” and assails because it favorably portrays “the rich, clean, church-going people” and insults the poor as “ignorant, murders, crazy, wild savages.”
Hmm. She must have missed the main character musing, “the only difference between ignorant and dirty people in small weather-blackened shacks and comfortable, well-washed people in large white houses with clean window panes is a difference of opportunity.”
Or that perhaps the least appealing character is a prosperous physician.
“Bonfire” is a magnificent book. Long (at 408 pages, maybe too long), dense, a bit hard to get into, but more than worth it, largely because every character is “a human being with human feelings,” as Fisher wrote to her publisher.
Yes, the book’s “rich, clean” people sometimes speak disparagingly of the poor, and if the poor are also of other races or religions, they disparage that, too. That’s how rich, clean people spoke then (and do now). And yes, some of the poor were violent criminals. So they were (and are; turn on the local news).
A novel is art, which should, as someone said (the same guy who asked what was in a name) “hold a mirror up to nature.” The reflection isn’t always pretty. Good fiction shows the world as it is. An author whose fictional characters use racial slurs is not therefore a racist.
Fisher was anything but. She was devoted to racial equality. As author and literary critic Janice Stout pointed out, Fisher’s 1919 novel, “The Brimming Cup,” concerns a young Vermonter who “wants to move south to show that black people should be treated with respect.”
Stout, who has written several books on 20th century American women novelists (she has a new book about Willa Cather coming out later this year), pointed out that Fisher’s reputation was that of a left-of-center egalitarian.
“She was a socialist, for God’s sake,” Stout said by phone from her home in Texas, “and she wasn’t afraid to say so. I don’t know why people would think she was a racist.”
Judy Dow couldn’t be reached, but perhaps one reason she (and others) misinterpret Fisher’s writing is that there is something abroad in the land these days that seems to require every sub-group to think of itself as put-upon and to see insults where none exist.
Conservative commentators love to associate this reveling in victimhood with the “identity politics” of racial minorities and other liberal circles. But it is omni-ideological. No one practices identity politics more avidly (or more successfully) than the National Rifle Association. Right-wing evangelical Christians are imprisoned by a “resentful, declinist populism,” according to one of their own, conservative writer Michael Gerson, who said “the primary evangelical political narrative is adversarial, an angry tale about the aggression of evangelicalism’s cultural rivals.”
Then there are the Wall Street super-rich whose feelings got hurt a few years ago when President Barack Obama criticized them. One of them compared a move to eliminate a tax loophole to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
It isn’t that there’s absolutely nothing to these complaints. Some educated urbanites do tend to look down on rural folkways, including gun ownership and religious fundamentalism. Being rich is not a crime, and racial bigotry is stubbornly persistent.
So persistent that it is too often obvious. Searching the past for obscure examples seems unnecessary, and, as in this case, can lead to false positives.
By Judy Dow’s literary criteria, the 1940 novel “Native Son” is racist. Its black protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a rapist and a murderer. Its author must have been a white supremacist.
The author, Richard Wright, was America’s first major African-American novelist. Readers retain some sympathy for Bigger, despite his crimes, because, as the introduction notes, the book illustrates how “our society puts Negro youth in the situation of the animal … by making it impossible for him to try to live up to those never-to-be-questioned national ideals, as other young American do.”
The introduction was written by Richard Wright’s friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
