Some may have heard of this recent trend of leaving certain of our “founding fathers” out of history classes entirely. These include Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, and the reason given is that these men were slaveholders.
It is a strange phenomenon within our current culture that we value perfection, complete and absolute, to the extent that we would not teach our children about the very people who desired freedom and fair treatment enough to take on the world’s greatest army, who fought a desperate and seemingly pointless war to gain them, and who then designed the political system that we still rely upon (and take for granted) today. It is strange that we teach our children about Julius Caesar, about Napoleon Bonaparte, about Winston Churchill--all incredibly powerful, incredibly flawed men--and yet refuse to teach them about our own founders because of one particular, culturally sensitive flaw.
It should be noted that the topic certainly came up during the founding of our country, on more than one occasion--most notably at the drafting of the Constitution, when the issue caused such division between the North and the South (yes, even back then!) that several of the Southern states refused to join the Union if slavery were not allowed. A number of reasons have been given in defense of our founding fathers for not enacting emancipation at the founding of our country. Perhaps the most compelling of these is the very real concern they had that freeing the slaves all at once at that time would give people an excuse to turn their old slaves, who could not work anymore, out onto the street instead of caring for them. As their property, a slave-owner was expected to care for a slave’s room, board and health even after they were too old or too ill to work. Other reasons given included a strong reliance upon slavery as an institution to the point where a sudden loss of it would cause an economic collapse, as well as a desire to promote peace and cooperation between the states at this fundamental time in our nation’s history.
The idea held by many of the prominent men of the time, including Jefferson and Henry, seemed to be that slavery was already on its way to working out naturally. In fact it was not much later, in 1807 under Jefferson’s presidency, that the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves was passed, prohibiting (although not always very effectively) the importation of new slaves into the country. Indeed, until the popularity of the cotton gin rose in the early 19th century, this was a reasonable prediction. Even at the time of the founding of the United States, slavery was considered an evil, barbarous institution by the educated, upper-class men who designed our system. Thomas Jefferson has called it “moral depravity” and “a hideous blot,” (though he never freed his slaves) and George Washington’s will provided that his slaves be freed upon the death of his widow (who actually freed them herself about a year after he died). Benjamin Franklin and John Jay both freed their slaves as well.
However, it is not enough to defend these men’s reasons for keeping slavery around. The people opposed to these men in their entirety for their support, active or tacit, of slavery are basing their opposition upon a legitimate point. After all, President Abraham Lincoln faced the same if not more trouble when he suggested emancipation. His was an incredibly difficult battle that left his family in turmoil, turned his body old before its time, and ultimately led to his tragic and untimely murder. Yet he accomplished through all this one of the most important and fundamental changes our country has ever undergone, all because he saw the right thing to do and stuck with it, stubbornly, despite being given every possible reason to let it go. Dr. King is another example of this kind of fortitude, going against an enormous flood of societal antagonism to acquire the rights that so many Americans rely upon today.
Rather than defend our founders’ actions regarding slavery, it seems more to the point to address the issue of flawed humanity. In the time of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, it was incredibly common to keep slaves and incredibly uncommon to free them. A good, educated man was expected to treat his slaves, his family, and his neighbors kindly--but to expect freedom for all people was a very new concept. Even to expect freedom for all white, Protestant men was a fairly new concept. Merely in speaking up for anyone’s right to life, liberty, the pursuit of property and the pursuit of happiness was to be revolutionary, and indeed, those men faced being hung for treason just for doing so. They did not expect to win the war. They tried for many years, in many ways, to avoid war and to come to terms with England as peacefully and politely as possible. It was only in the face of repeated dismissal and mistreatment that they decided war was the only option left to them, and it was an incredibly brave decision, not only of these men speaking and making declarations, but also of every man, woman and child who fought or took part in the war. To take our current ideals and morals and impose them upon history is to have a sore misunderstanding of human nature and of the influence of cultural norms. Given the general sentiment at the time, it is unlikely many of us today would have felt differently in the same situation.
In other words, to expect our own current cultural set of morals out of anyone from another culture, especially in the past, is absurd. On top of this, it is absurd to expect perfection out of anyone. Certainly, if a person claims to be an activist for a particular cause, for example gay rights, but then is discovered to have voted against legal marriage for gay couples, that person might reasonably be dismissed as a hypocrite. But if a gay rights activist turns out to be against abortion--does that disqualify them as great within the realm of gay rights? Such an association makes no sense. Perhaps that person is uneducated and biased to say that a woman hasn’t a right to choose to have an abortion. In 50 years, in fact, we may say so even more assuredly. Yet if that same person is a major player in the fight for gay rights, will future textbooks leave him out of history altogether because of another, separate flaw?
We don’t have to turn to the hypothetical for examples, either--we have seemingly endless numbers of historical figures who had one characteristic or another that would in our modern culture be considered a deep flaw. Winston Churchill is well known to have been alcohol-dependent (if not a full-blown alcoholic). Ghandi felt that Hitler was “not as bad as depicted.” Woodrow Wilson had a positive view of the Ku Klux Klan and advocated for their propaganda film Birth of a Nation. Thomas Edison stole most of his ideas (most notably from Nikola Tesla) and was a cocaine addict. Charles Darwin seemed as intent upon eating every new species he came across as much as he was upon studying them. Yet we still teach our children about every one of these people in school, because every one of them did something great.
When we hold these people to a standard beyond their time and culture, we expect an unrealistic perfection out of humanity. We can guess that in 100 years, teachers might hesitate to tell children about Albert Einstein as he was an absent father and has been accused of plagiarism, and Mother Teresa because she was against birth control and abortion, and Coco Chanel because of her suspected Nazi espionage during World War II, and even that President Obama rode in a vehicle powered by fossil fuels. Yet we ought to consider carefully what we are teaching our children when we do this. Are we really preventing the praise of these negative traits by ignoring them? Or are we in fact missing out on the opportunity to impart a valuable set of lessons, namely that even imperfect people can do great things, and that even great people can do bad things, and that we can better ourselves if we learn about history?
The quotation from Santayana that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” comes to mind when considering this topic. What future are we giving our children if we tell them neither about the good nor the bad of the people who founded our country? What kinds of decisions will they make when they become the leaders of it? Frankness and honesty ought to be the foundations of our address toward the young, that they might develop wisdom from their knowledge and go on to do more great things in the world. We ought to be filling young minds with information about the past, not keeping them from it--however great and however terrible.
