Celebrate the Founding Fathers, Acknowledge Their Flaws
Our Founding Fathers did great deeds and thought noble thoughts. They also owned slaves. It is time to acknowledge both.
This summer I visited my parents in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Yes, the Muhlenberg County of the John Prine song, I did most of my growing up there, went to school there and didn’t go very far away for college, finally leaving when I became an Air Force officer. And if you listen to the song, all of the places mentioned there are real and I’ve been to all of them.
We grew up largely innocent of our past. Yes, we learned the typical history lessons provided to elementary and high school students in the 1960’s and 1970’s. We also knew that somewhere, far away, blacks were marching, demonstrating, demanding rights that we never imagined them not having. The two black families in our very small school appeared to be integrated. Yes, we told racist jokes, never when they were around. We were also homophobes, most of us were conservative Christians. This was before the Prosperity Gospel of Jesus Christ, Capitalist had really taken off so we were Baptists and Methodists and other, smaller congregations duking it out over whether sprinkling or dunking were the proper way to baptize.
One story from that time stands out: One of the young black boys was working with my sister on a school project and had come to our house to work. Full disclosure, my family is white. Pasty white. The young man asked to use the phone to call his father and report in. Apparently the boy’s father asked where he was and the boy told him. The next thing out of the boy’s mouth was “No, Daddy, I’m not lying.” The father’s disbelief was understandable given the culture of the time.
So fast forward 45 years. While we were in Kentucky, my dad took me to see a small monument under an oak tree in front of a white clapboard church, the kind that came equipped with wooden pews modeled to some alien race’s back and paper and popsicle stick funeral home fans to stir the heat and humidity. There, an historical society had placed a small granite memorial to the slaves who had died building the Rochester Dam of the Prine song, technically Green River Lock and Dam #3. Apparently a barge load of slaves sank, taking over 30 chained slaves with it. Over 30 men died, and, growing up less than ten miles from the dam, we knew absolutely nothing about it.
Innocence of our past could be excused. There were hints of a past involving slavery, a researcher into our family’s genealogy had discovered a will bequeathing something called a “woman tamer” to his heirs. But there was no mention of that past.
I want to be clear: I am neither apologizing nor “whitesplaining.” I am merely recounting how we were brought up as a very long introduction to my main thesis: It is difficult to condemn someone for adhering to the mores of their time.
Conservatives are incensed over teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) even though I would bet that not one in a hundred could define or describe it. Their concern is that teaching the truth about the true history of our country could somehow undermine our sense of patriotism, America’s glory or their own shared cracker vision of 21st century America. Republican legislatures have even gone so far as to ban teaching of CRT in public schools, even though it is a master’s level study of the effects of racism on American law. It’s scary to them and conservatives are largely driven by fear and outrage. But, over time, cultures change. When I was very young, seat belts were options in cars. Today it is a rare individual who does not buckle up before driving off. Likewise, as I was growing up, we smoked. It was tough to quit but I no longer smoke, nor is it culturally acceptable to light up in a restaurant or on an airplane. The jokes we told as children are no longer acceptable. Our cultures has changed.
In 1619 when the first slave ship came to Virginia, slavery was considered acceptable. Even farther back, in the New Testament Jesus Christ told a runaway slave to go back to his master and serve him. Slavery has been accepted practice for most of human history. American slavery was particularly vicious, the slaves of Jesus’s time could save and effectively buy themselves while American slavery was for life. But the important thing to remember, right or wrong, slavery was accepted practice at the time.
I do not apologize for Jefferson, Washington or even the members of my own family for having owned slaves, nor do I attempt to justify it. By our cultural mores, it slavery wrong. Historically it was cruel, degrading, dehumanizing but it was accepted practice. The economics of the time demanded it. At the same time I can’t look at the practice of slavery neutrally. Real people suffered, real people had no choice in their lives and real people died under whips or forced labor and my ancestors were to blame.
So, I offer an humble suggestion: Let’s put Critical Race Theory back where it belongs, in Masters level courses, and simply teach the truth. The United States was founded as a slave state. As Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he worked slaves on his plantation. As Washington led the Colonial Army, he worked slaves on his. As my ancestor eked out a living along the Pond River, he had a “woman tamer” to pass down to his heirs. This is truth and it is not changeable. It is also true that Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and was important in the writing of our Constitution. Washington led the army that defeated the British (although it was largely the French in Europe who drew much of the British Empire’s forces away from the colonies). The Founding Fathers were men who put their breeches on one leg at a time, just as every other man of the times did. They were not godlike, they were not superhuman, they were men of their times who did both great good and great evil.
When I saw that memorial in front of that little white church, I cried a little. I wondered who the men were who went down chained to a barge while building the dam where I fished as a child. I wondered what the “woman tamer” was and how it tamed women — I’ve since learned and it is not pretty. And I thought about the controversy over a subject that should not be controversial at all, that great men are at the end of the day just men, products of their time and their culture, capable of great thoughts and deeds and at the same time capable of cruelties both petty and gross. They are men, not gods, and should not be worshipped. Yes, they should be honored for their thoughts and deeds and condemned for their errors, but also never canceled.
Full disclosure, I hold men like Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, the various politicians of the South who rebelled to keep the right to enslave men and women as irredeemable. As with Hitler, there is no amount of good they could possibly do to offset the evil they perpetrated.
We have to face our truths, no matter how hideous or how glorious and to paraphrase Kipling, treat those two imposters just the same. The Founding Fathers were great men with great flaws, yes, but we do history a grave disservice by ignoring either their flaws or their virtues.
Let’s teach our children the truth. We will be a stronger nation for it.
