Yabbut surnames versus given names have different degrees of perceived importance at different times and in different societies. We speak of the scientist “Galileo” when we mean Galileo Galilei, son of the musician Vincenzo Galilei, for example, because he referred to himself by his first name and considered surnames secondary.
By Washington’s time when practically every other male in Anglophone societies was named John, William, James, George or Thomas, you needed surnames to have a hope of correctly identifying people.
(Christopher Columbus is an interesting case that I’d have to research more. He was an approximate contemporary of Vespucci so presumably he would likewise have been more first-name-forward during his own lifetime. But IIRC the American craze for naming stuff after him was more of a 19th- and 20th-century thing, so his surname got emphasized. Will look into this and report back.)
Hmm, Columbus does seem to have used as his signature a form of what we would consider his first name. Although he often spelled it in a weird Greek-Latin hybrid representing “Christo-Ferens” or something like that (literally "bearer of Christ, which of course is what the name means).
“Far more particular”? No way. I suspect that 80% of the public can’t tell you what the Audubon Society does beyond, “Aren’t they birdwatchers?” and that’s what they’d get from the Seattle Birders Association. For the folks who are involved enough with the Audubon Society to know what they do beyond birdwatching, a large number will be involved enough to hear about this name change.The number of people who would lose information from this name change, and for whom that loss of information would have any effect on their lives, is vanishingly small. And the people best positioned to understand those numbers are, you guessed it, the board members making this change.
This whole objection is really a stretch, and it’s an old stretch, akin to the folks who don’t want to knock down those shitty cheap Confederate Daughters of America statues because that’d bury history. No the hell it wouldn’t, and no the hell this won’t confuse people.
So the further you go back in time the less hurtful it is to descendants of slaves? Time heals all wounds or something like that? Say to them they’ll get over it just give it time.
I’ve wondered since about 12 why the Audobon Society was named after James, not because of his racism or slave-owning status of which I was ignorant until today, but because of his actions with birds.
In those days, long before color photography, how do you suppose he could paint such beautiful, detailed images of birds. He killed 'em and stuffed 'em. Seems odd for a bird conservation society to riff off of.
I don’t have a reference handy, but I’ve also read that his paintings of gorgeous birds also led to a fad of using exotic feathers in hats and other decorative garments, and thus directly lead to a massive increase in the hunting of the birds he painted.
When it comes to the John Birch Society and the Knights Of Columbus, neither group sees anything wrong with their namesakes. They either see nothing wrong with what was said and done by them, or they are pretty much in complete denial.
Well, yes, which is why I said that the folks who DO have a better sense of it are the folks who are making this decision.
This particular name change can’t be part of a kind of name change if it doesn’t have the single characteristic you’re using to describe the kind of name change. If it’s not a bad idea, it’s not part of the kind of name change you’re talking about, I don’t think.
Or, for a number of Italian-Americans re Columbus as with a number of not-consciously-racist white Southerners re the Confederacy, it’s much more about their own feelings of personal importance and pride than it is about any historical realities, or about how historical realities affect anybody else’s feelings.
I mean, sheesh, the KoC was founded nearly four centuries after Columbus lived. The founders were just looking for some kind of cultural symbol to validate their “Americanness”, not embodying any actual continuous historical tradition of Columbus-veneration. (Which I guess would qualify as a variant of your “in complete denial” category.)
Yeah, I’m having trouble coming up with examples—at least if you’re just looking for groups specific to the U.S. that are named directly for people.
I can think of groups that exist in the U.S. and elsewhere that are named after people (e.g. religious groups like the Franciscans or the Lutherans), and groups that are named after something that’s named after a person (e.g. all the groups that have “American” in their name).
There is no way in life to get around that problem, if “problem” is what it is. Moral standards and historical perspectives are going to change over time. People who in one generation or century would have no objection to being associated with the name of a particular historical figure will find the association revolting and outrageous in the next generation or century.
That’s just one of the realities of living in an imperfect world, and I don’t think we can duck it by decreeing that official names and other commemorations can’t change over time as ethical/moral views change.
Your statement hinges on your use of the passive voice. “Considered totally innocent” by whom? I promise you that the men, women, and children whom he confined and threatened with torture unless they labored for him did not think his actions were “totally innocent”; nor did the many, many members of the active abolitionist movement that he was certainly aware of.
There aren’t many things in world history that deserve comparison to the Holocaust, but chattel slavery is one of them, and enslavers were real fuckin bad. Again, every single enslaver was holding people captive and threatening them with physical and psychological torture unless they provided unpaid labor; if those three elements (captivity, torture, unpaid labor) weren’t present, it wasn’t slavery. This isn’t like, “Oh no, are future people going to think I’m a bad person for not tipping my mail carrier?” This is one of the great atrocities of history, and at the time there were plenty of people saying that.
I don’t think it works that way. For all we know, a century from now, we might be removing Harvey Milk’s name from everything because homosexuality is once again seen as a mental illness or morally wrong. And what’s considered sexist changes over time. People watch the original Star Trek today, look at the uniforms the women were wearing, and tut tut because it was obviously sexist. But at the time, a lot of women found those uniforms liberating. Changing the names of institutions to keep the people in line today isn’t a compelling argument.
But you don’t need a compelling argument. Organizations have the right to change their names for whatever reason they wish. We as a people have the right to change the names of our institutions if we’d like. If we’re uncomfortable with being associated with a person who held values we find repugnant, well, that’s that.