A Conundrum for Columbus Day

As Monday is Columbus Day, I assume we will hear some discussion about continuing to celebrate that day as well as about removing statues of Columbus which some people find offensive.  I’m sure there will be plenty said about the pros and cons of Columbus and his legacy, so let me instead pose some additional thoughts about the removal of historical statues and documents more generally.

Here is a conundrum, posed to me by someone with far more knowledge of history and its preservation than have I.   Many people advocate for statues and other relics of history that are offensive to be removed from general public view and placed in museums.  This seems like a way to stop the material from being a constant reminder or upsetting aspect that interferes with one’s daily peace of mind while at the same time preserving it as an historical relic so as not to sanitize history.  Sounds good, right?  But, what if the museum in which the relic is placed fails to preserve it or bows to pressure that even as a part of an historical exhibit the relic is too upsetting to be displayed?   What does that do to our history?  What do we lose when we cannot find our history anywhere?

This puzzle is demonstrated most recently by the removal of the Dr. Seuss drawing in a Dr. Seuss museum (see my post dated 10/6/17).   The drawing, a caricature of a Chinaman, was found to be offensive.  The drawing appeared in the 1937 book And to Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street.  This is the first children’s book of Dr. Seuss and as such one would think that it would have historical significance, especially in a Dr. Seuss museum.  Yet, it is not welcome there.

The complaint about the drawing described it as “a jarring racial stereotype of a Chinese man, who is depicted with chopsticks, a pointed hat, and slanted slit eyes.  We [those complaining] find this caricature of the Chinaman deeply hurtful, and have concerns about children’s exposure to it.”  (You can see a picture of the offensive drawing at the end of this post)

This drawing is presented in the context of a children’s story in which a child uses imagination to describe a world of things seen on the way home from school on Mulberry Street.  The child sees a cart and horse and imagines the horse as a zebra, a reindeer, an elephant and then adds giraffes.  The cart becomes a chariot, a sled, and a band cart.  This all becomes a parade with confetti from an airplane and includes a number of dignitaries and other figures including a Chinese man, a magician pulling rabbits from a hat and a man with a 10 foot long beard.

The reception for the book when first published was enthusiastic.  A review in The Atlantic described it in part “as original in conception, as spontaneous in the rendering as it is true to the imagination of a small boy.”  It was compared to a Goethe poem because it was “about a father and a son and about the exigencies and power of the imagination.”   These do not seem like such bad things to me and, while the drawing is a caricature of sorts, it has not been called offensive for 80 years.  Taken in context, it is part of a child’s imaginary creation; in my thinking, such imagination is something to be encouraged, not condemned.

The drawing is to be replaced in the museum by drawings from later books which are apparently not considered offensive.  But what happens when those drawings are deemed to be offensive at some time in the future?  And, here again, is the problem with eviscerating history because what once was not offensive today offends someone. The museum’s statement included the following: “This is what Dr. Seuss would have wanted us to do.  His later books … showed a great respect for fairness and diversity.  Dr. Seuss would have loved to be a part of this dialogue for change.”  Now, I am really not sure how the museum is privy to what Dr. Seuss would have wanted in regard to this drawing, but I suggest that if he wanted dialog then the drawing should remain so that it could add to the understanding necessary for true respect of fairness and diversity as well as true dialog.

“Museum” is defined as: “a place in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited.”  We need the unpleasantries from our past whether they are a drawing from an author’s first book placed in a museum dedicated to that author, or whether they are statues of people once considered heroes but now seen in another light. These relics are necessary to our understanding of the present and to our betterment of our future.  Yet if even museums cannot understand this and carry out their role to preserve even the offensive aspects of history, then in the end we will have no history and no basis on which to better our future.