In 2017, the complex legacies of historical figures are proving impossible to restrain in stone or confine with bronze. All over the nation, statues, memorials, and monuments are giving us big trouble.
Here’s the source of the problem: Our predecessors on this earth did not make it a priority to design and construct a legacy that would please us and make us proud.
And so we are stuck wrestling with a great national paradox: a significant set of our forebears founded a nation that institutionalized the enslavement of African Americans as well as the conquest and relocation of Indian people, while also giving new meaning to the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and self-governance.
With that statement, if all has gone as I planned, I will have succeeded in riling up one sector of society (who will lament my emphasis on the injustices at the bedrock of the nation’s founding), while providing equal irritation to another sector (who will condemn my deference to an idealistic, nation-celebrating creation story).
So I should probably call it a day, and go off to rest on my laurels as a holder of sentiments recognized by all sides as reprehensible.
On the contrary, for my next move I will point out the tragic moral flaws in everyone’s family heritage.
No human being arrives on the planet without a dreadful ancestor or two. To put this another way, people who are hoping to derive their self-esteem from an unbroken tale of family virtue, honor, and harmony had better steer clear of genealogists.
And now we turn to the question, “So what are we supposed to do about with these tangled legacies?”
We imitate the example set by a perfectly wonderful friend of mine who had a perfectly horrible ancestor.
The writer Geoffrey Ward had a great-grandfather who was, by every measure known to mankind, despicable.
Ferdinand Ward took to the corruption and fraud of the Gilded Age like a duck to water. Of his miserable achievements, the one that got Ferdinand a prominent place in the national historical record was his ensnaring of President Ulysses S. Grant in a web of investments, schemes, and scandals.
“Friends don’t let friends plunge into unethical business behavior” was not a slogan in widespread use in the years after the Civil War.
But Ferdinand Ward went way beyond the misbehavior in finance that was commonplace in the United States in those days. He reached the heights of creepiness by trying to steal the inheritance that his wife had left to their son, using techniques ranging from kidnapping to the employment of breathtakingly unscrupulous lawyers.
Rather than trying to conceal, deny, or defend the intolerable conduct of his forebear, Geoff Ward wrote a full-disclosure book, A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age (2012). Since he himself has not the smallest talent or enthusiasm for swindling, Ward knew that his only obligation was to pursue an honest assessment of the past.
Fellow citizens, Geoffrey Ward has set an example that we are perfectly able to adopt for ourselves. Whenever we so choose, we can rescue ourselves from the current downward spiral of draining fights over our shared inheritance from the nation’s past.
Who wants to go first?
Patty Limerick is Colorado’s state historian and faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.
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