Here, somewhat condensed, are a few choice excerpts from what a Washington and Lee University graduate wrote in response to plans by that institution’s trustees to suppress salient legacies of its two eminent namesakes. His letter deserves broad circulation:
“I can not tell you how disappointed and appalled I was to read about the proposed changes to the life and character of our university.
“I recently read an interesting book about the history of the English monarchy. Almost one thousand years of history that includes rogues, villains, murderers, thieves, usurpers, bastards, and bigamists. Do you think the British people have removed the portraits of these characters from the walls of their institutions or pulled down the countless statues that have existed in their cities for generations? Absolutely not. It is their history, like it or not. They have done what all thinking individuals would do. They recognize the good and the bad. Have the Egyptians ever considered destroying the pyramids, one of the most monumental monuments to slavery in all the world?
“I have tried to live my entire adult life following a principle that I attribute to General Lee who said that a man needed only one rule to guide his life. ‘Live your life as a gentleman.' I cannot be proud of a university with a storied and historic past that willfully chooses to turn its back upon its own history, to pick and choose what history it will display to the world, to erase its significance in the history of American education.
“We all have a past. I can not change mine to make myself more presentable to you. Neither can a university. They should embrace their past, recognize and examine it as historians do, accept and acknowledge its importance in the lives of so many, capitalize on that rich history.”
Before a friend sent me a copy of this letter, I had resolved to take a furlough from the monuments and memory issue. But that issue obviously has reached a madcap pitch everywhere — including even W&L, where I taught as a professor of journalism and humanities in the 1990s. W&L’s long heritage is traditionally, one might say necessarily, southern, given its origins. George Washington bequeathed valuable canal stock to Liberty Hall, its struggling 18th century predecessor. General Lee’s presidency (1865-70) saved it from near collapse. His legacies are many, including Valentine’s fine Recumbent Statue in Lee Chapel. It is now to be discreetly concealed by trustee command during most exercises.
Another sentence in the letter (“Leave the paintings of the founding fathers but change the wardrobe”) alludes to an especially fatuous trustee mandate. On either side of the stage in Lee Chapel hang elegant portraits of the founders, in military dress — both were, after all, professional soldiers, although much else. Lee’s engineering skills saved the St. Louis harbor from ruin in the 1830s. Washington’s services to the nation are, or once were, familiar to every schoolboy. Both founders may now continue to be portrayed — but only in civilian dress!
The mind of any history-conscious person boggles at such foolishness — as at the statement of a former UNC chancellor that Silent Sam should be torn down. Perhaps Yale, where the madness is also afoot, felt it necessary to scrub John C. Calhoun’s name from one of its colleges, even if he was once vice president of the United States. But it is characteristic of untempered revolutionary zeal that it is addictive and recognizes no limit — not even drawing a line at radical manipulations that threaten the very identity of distinguished and historic seats of learning. That is not, perhaps, an immediate threat at the nation’s oldest public university. But W&L, a fine old institution that once valued my teaching and treated me with generous hospitality, is nearing that dangerous and possibly suicidal line.
