I suppose you’re right. I don’t think I’d like to be a person sharing a name with certain disgraced US politicians and related figures just now.
But if we had a disgraced major pol named Smith I suppose the other Smiths would have safety in numbers. Nobody would be likely think their neighbor Smith was related to that Smith.
Free associating madly, it occurs to me that as the immigrant demographics of the US continue to change, Anglo-Saxon names like “Smith” that were dominant in the e.g. 1880s should be an ever-shrinking percentage of the US total here 150 years later. I wonder what will displace “Smith” from the top spot and when?
A bit of searching came up with this cite although I can’t vouch for its data:
It suggests Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, and Garcia are the top 6. Also interestingly, Smiths are overwhelmingly white, whereas Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones are a plurality of white with a lot of blacks too. Williams in fact is very close to 50/50 white & black. Color me surprised at these differences.
Obviously Garcia is substantially 100% Hispanic. And could plausibly pass Jones for the #5 spot in a few years. But Smith outnumbers Jones almost 2:1 and Garcia about 2.5:1. So Smith has the top spot clinched for a very long time to come. Longer than I’ll be around to care about it.
Think “Americans with German ancestry” for the same rough proportion of people (not quite 1/5 for Americans with German ancestry).
Most people would think it ridiculous to experience anxiety over your German great-grandfather because somebody in Germany did something terrible. Even in WWII, we didn’t really panic over having so many German-Americans, even if some precautions were taken for recent immigrants.
The difference is there’s no surname that’s anywhere nearly so common in the US. Even Smith does not represent 1% of the population. So, not even 1 in 100 people. And that’s for the MOST common. For less common surnames, it’s less than 1 in 1000 people or worse.
When it’s 1 in every 5 people you meet, sharing the same name does not have anywhere near the same impact.
And there’s a bit of a cultural thing going on here as well. Though the pronunciation may be the same, for many names, there are different clans with names pronounced the same but use different hanja (the old ideograms taken from China). For example, there are dozens of different ‘Kim’ clans though only one historic ‘Moon’ clan. The family leading North Korea is descended from one of them (the Jeon-ju Kims - Jeon-ju being the South Korean city where the clan seat is and where coincidentally my mother grew up).
But historically, even having a surname at all was really for royalty or nobility and eventually spread to for generally the upper and middle classes. Even at the turn of the 20th century, half the population (mostly low caste/class) did not have surnames at all and only had a given name but were then allowed to take one. And when they did (during the Japanese occupation), they unsurprisingly most commonly took the names associated with royalty and high nobility (Kim, Park, Lee). So, sharing the name ‘Kim’ especially does not mean much by itself in Korea.
Smiths are even more numerous when you add in names like Kovacs, Kowal/Kowalski, Herrera, Gow/Gowan/McGowan, Ferarro/Ferarra, Lefebvre, Schmidt, Goff, and Haddad, all of which mean “smith” in their original languages. “Smith” names are in the top ten most common surnames in pretty much all European language communities.