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Outrage as University Strips Name of Lillian Gish from Campus Theater

The “First Lady of American Cinema” Lillian Gish has had her name removed from a university theater and it’s not sitting well with many movie buffs. More than 50 film industry leaders ranging from Martin Scorsese to Helen Mirren to James Earl Jones are protesting the decision of Ohio’s Bowling Green State University to remove the name of actress Lillian Gish from a campus theater because she appeared in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

The letter accuses the university of making “a scapegoat in a broader political debate.” Lillian Gish is considered a pioneer of film acting. Her career spanned 75 years, beginning in 1912 in silent film shorts. The Whales of August in 1987 was her last film. She was called the First Lady of American Cinema, and for more than 40 years, the theater at Bowling Green has honored Ohio-born actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish with its name.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/06/ ... h-theater/

As the house lights dimmed and the orchestra struck up the score, a message from director D.W. Griffith flickered on the screen: "This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today."

But its effects on race relations were devastating, and reverberations are still felt to this day.

The Birth of a Nation is three hours of racist propaganda — starting with the Civil War and ending with the Ku Klux Klan riding in to save the South from black rule during the Reconstruction era.

"[Griffith] portrayed the emancipated slaves as heathens, as unworthy of being free, as uncivilized, as primarily concerned with passing laws so they could marry white women and prey on them," Dick Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America's Civil War, tells NPR's Arun Rath.

Griffith, looking at what he saw as history, was motivated by artistic ambition, Lehr says.

"He wanted to do something very big," says Lehr. "He was a man of the South from Kentucky. His father had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. What bigger story to tell as a breakout, epic film than the story of America's Civil War and its aftermath?"

Griffith's understanding of the past was based on a twisted account, and today it's easy to imagine that a movie like his would flop and be forgotten. But The Birth of a Nation, far from falling into oblivion, led to the birth of Hollywood.

The film's initial success drowned out the voices of those who tried to protest. The civil rights movement was still quite young at the time; the NAACP had just incorporated a few years earlier. So the Los Angeles screenings were successful in spite of the outrage, as were New York City's. It even became the first movie ever to be screened at the White House. Woodrow Wilson reportedly called it "history written in lightning."

But in Boston, newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter organized protests that involved the Boston branch of the NAACP. He organized mass demonstrations where several thousand protesters, mostly black, turned out to say the film was not accurate.

Trotter was arrested at a demonstration in front of a theater where the movie was playing.

"For me, as an author and a researcher reconstructing this great drama," Lehr says, "I kept scratching my head going, 'What year is this?!' This is 1915, but it's so 1960-ish in terms of its protest strategy."

Immediately after the film's release, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a surge in membership, and it continued to use the film as a recruiting tool for decades after that.

And while civil rights leaders in 1915 tried to get the film banned entirely, The Birth of a Nation is still taught in film schools. For all its repulsive imagery, the film stands as a massive leap in cinema.

"He did things that hadn't been done before in terms of close-up, zooming the camera in on faces, crosscutting in dramatic Civil War battle scenes, not just taking a single, static shot — all of which heightened the power, the impact, the drama, the emotion," Lehr says.

Griffith was also the first to host test screenings of his works-in-progress. And he moved his filmmaking operation from the East Coast to Southern California to take advantage of its routinely pleasant weather. The rest of the industry would later follow suit, and Hollywood — at least as a metonym — was born.

Problematically, “Birth of a Nation” wasn’t just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality. It’s tempting to think of the film’s influence as evidence of the inherent corruption of realism as a cinematic mode—but it’s even more revealing to acknowledge the disjunction between its beauty, on the one hand, and, on the other, its injustice and falsehood. The movie’s fabricated events shouldn’t lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn’t lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of “Birth of a Nation,” even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realization of blatant propaganda.

The worst thing about “Birth of a Nation” is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment—together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).

Griffith’s art offers humanly profound moments, whether graceful and delicate or grand and rhetorical, that detach themselves from their context to probe nearly universal circumstances, such as the blend of shame and pride in the face of a returning Confederate soldier when he comes home in tatters and finds his sister in tatters as well, or the stalwart antics of a Union girl (Lillian Gish) as she sends her brothers off to war before collapsing in tears when they’re just out of view. The breathtaking shot that starts close to a huddling mother and children, high on a hillside, and then moves to the advance of Sherman’s army, seen from the family’s elevated refuge, poignantly depicts the intimate ravages of war. The shot of a former slave-owner, under siege by a posse of freedmen for his son’s membership in the K.K.K., holding his grown daughter by the hair and raising his pistol above her head—he’s preparing to kill her if the blacks breach the door—has a harrowing and exalted grandeur that surpasses the film's specific prejudices to achieve a classical moment of tragedy. The cavalry charges of the K.K.K., done with moving cameras that hurtle backward at the speed of the gallop, are visually exhilarating and viscerally thrilling, despite the hateful and bloodthirsty repression that they represent; it's it's the kinetic model for a century of action scenes.

Throughout the film, Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions. The very essence of his realism is open frames, complex stagings, and multiple planes of action, all of which suggest far more than Griffith’s descriptive title cards, and his stunted politics, would themselves allow.

For instance, a scene of slave-owners and their Northern guests amiably passing by cotton fields while slaves toil in the background presents, as if in a documentary, the obvious connection between the white Southerners’ gracious ways and the hard, enforced work of slaves that makes it possible. This was not Griffith’s intention, but it’s the effect. He shows a summary trial by the K.K.K. of a black man whose sexual advances toward a white woman induced her to leap to her death. That trial and the delivery of the victim’s corpse to the doorstep of the mixed-race lieutenant governor are meant to seem just, even heroic, but come off as obscene and horrifying. The splendid festivities to celebrate the Battle of Bull Run, intercut with the eerie flare of a bonfire, suggest a dance of death, the bonfire foreshadowing the burning of Atlanta. Despite Griffith’s beliefs, the arrival of the Klan, pointing rifles at unarmed blacks who merely seek to vote, appears unjust and cruel.

The movie’s perspective on the events of the plot is rich, broad, and deep enough to provide the material for its own contradiction. That’s the very definition of Griffith’s realism, the founding of a cinematic manner that flourishes to this very day, in a wide range of varieties and refractions, and that reflects filmmakers’ confidence that filmic representations, however artificial or contrived, make direct contact with the world of their experience. Griffith doesn’t hide behind interpretive ambiguities or assume that the facts speak for themselves; he makes a world after his own mind, stoking the events vigorously and skewing them decisively with the equivalent of a first-person voice (as in the title cards, adorned with his signature, throughout). He filmed a world that was made to embody his point of view—but the detail and scope that he considered necessary to simulate the reality of that vanished world was inherently multitudinous and polysemic. (And the scenes that aren’t—such as those, in the state legislature, depicting black legislators as leering slobs—are ridiculous and cartoonish.) The one-word definition of Griffith’s realism—and of the best of the generations of movie realism that followed in its wake—is “more.” Despite his best (or, rather, worst) efforts, his movie escaped him.

More than 50 prominent artists, writers, and film scholars are supporting the immediate restoration of the names of the Gish sisters, Dorothy and Lillian, to the film theater that was established more than forty years ago at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Among those signing their names are James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese, George Stevens Jr., Bertrand Tavernier, Peter Bogdanovich, Malcolm McDowell, Lauren Hutton, Annie Ross, Joe Dante, Douglas McGrath, and Taylor Hackford (past president of the Directors Guild of America); author Ann Louise Bardach and poet Tess Gallagher; three former presidents of the Writers Guild of America, West: David W. Rintels, Victoria Riskin, and Howard A. Rodman; and film scholars/historians from Rutgers University, Hunter College, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, Southern Illinois University, Boston University, San Francisco State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Berkeley. The removal of the Gish sisters’ names was the result of a student protest over D. W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, in which Lillian Gish had a supporting role. Representatives of the Black Student Union and others argued that the university was condoning racism by keeping the name of the Gish Theater. The signers of the statement below strongly disagree with that decision.

Lillian Gish’s legacy as one of the cinema’s greatest actresses is internationally acknowledged. Her seventy-five-year film and television career encompassed many of the classics of the screen, including Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm, The Scarlet Letter, The Wind, The Night of the Hunter, The Whales of August, and the original live TV production of The Trip to Bountiful. She was a pioneer in film preservation and endowed scholarships and a collection of her papers and memorabilia at Bowling Green, as well as the prestigious Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize, given to (in her words) “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” The twenty-five recipients of the prize include many of the world’s great artists, including six African Americans.

The complete list of supporters and some of their major credits follow this statement, in alphabetical order.

Lillian Gish (1893-1993) is one of the greatest artists ever to grace the motion picture screen. So we were disappointed to learn that Bowling Green State University in Ohio has decided to strip Miss Gish’s name – and that of her sister, Dorothy, another prominent actress and fellow Ohio native – from its Gish Film Theater and Gallery.

Lillian Gish set the standard for nuanced, eloquent film acting in her silent-era classics Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter, and The Wind, and she played memorable roles in many talking pictures, most notably The Night of the Hunter and The Whales of August. Her nine-decade career also encompassed landmark successes in theater, including as Ophelia to John Gielgud’s Hamlet, and television, such as in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, about which William S. Paley declared, “Television came of age last night.”

Gish was a warm and caring human being who worked tirelessly to champion the causes of film preservation and film as a medium to promote universal harmony.

She established through her will in 1994 the prestigious Dorothy & Lillian Gish Prize for “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” Recipients have included Bob Dylan, Frank Gehry, Pete Seeger, Maya Lin, Laurie Anderson, Chile’s Isabel Allende, Nigerian author-diplomat Chinua Achebe, and African American artists Spike Lee, Ornette Coleman, Bill T. Jones, Anna Deavere Smith, Lloyd Richards, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

When Spike Lee accepted the Gish Prize in 2013, he said, “Would you believe, two of the most important films that impacted me while I was studying at NYU starred Miss Lillian Gish. Those films were D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. Isn’t it funny (sometimes) how life works? And how ironic life can be? God can be a trickster. Peace and love to the Gish Sisters. . . .”

In 1976, Bowling Green opened The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater (the joint title was Lillian’s choice). The university accepted a gift from Lillian as part of an endowment to provide scholarships and support the theater; she also donated memorabilia to the university. Bowling Green gave her the honorary degree of Doctor of Performing Arts. But in May 2019 the university decided to remove the Gish name from the theater and call it “The BGSU Film Theater,” while retaining the endowment and Lillian’s personal memorabilia.

This action was taken because of Lillian’s supporting role in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, one of more than a hundred appearances she made on the screen (it’s worth noting that Dorothy Gish didn’t even appear in that film but is simply collateral damage in this controversy). Lillian has been recognized with an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, and an honorary Academy Award, so her legacy as a film artist remains secure. But removing her name and that of her sister from the university theater is a disservice to film history and to the university itself.

Griffith’s film takes an indefensible, racist approach to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. But as even the university admits in its task force report on the theater’s name, Lillian was no racist. Her work in many films, such as Griffith’s own Intolerance (1916), a dazzling four-part overview of world history in which she plays the symbolic mother figure rocking the cradle of humanity and tolerance; Griffith’s deeply moving 1919 interracial drama Broken Blossoms; the 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, in which she plays a beatific protector of endangered children; and the 1967 film of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, in which she challenges Haiti’s dreaded secret police and demonstrates her outspoken belief in universal brotherhood among races and nations.

This controversy detracts from the great legacy Gish left us in her extensive and varied career. For a university to dishonor her by singling out just one film, however offensive it is, is unfortunate and unjust. Doing so makes her a scapegoat in a broader political debate. A university should be a bastion of free speech. This is a supreme “teachable moment” if it can be handled with a more nuanced sense of history.

We call on Bowling Green State University to restore the original name of The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater. Since some inadequate language in a wall display at the theater helped provoke the university’s action, a more informative and artful display should be created to acquaint students and others with the full context of Lillian’s legacy in all its varied facets. Screening her films and holding discussions on campus about film history would foster the themes and ideals Lillian Gish advocated throughout her illustrious lifetime.

Signed:

– Ann Louise Bardach, former contributing editor at Vanity Fair, journalist for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico; author of several books on Cuba, including Cuba Confidential (2002 and 2004), Without Fidel, and Killed: Great Journalism: Too Hot to Print

– John Belton, film historian, author of American Cinema/American Culture, Movies and Mass Culture, and Widescreen Cinema; and professor emeritus of English and film, Rutgers University

– Peter Bogdanovich, director, Targets, Directed by John Ford, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Saint Jack, They All Laughed, Mask, Texasville, The Great Buster; actor in The Other Side of the Wind and The Sopranos; author of books on Orson Welles, John Ford, Allan Dwan, Pieces of Time, and A Moment with Miss Gish

– Robert Carringer, film historian, author of The Making of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction; and professor of film and English

– Mike Clark, former film critic and home entertainment columnist for USA Today and former American Film Institute Theater Director/film programmer

– Jay Cocks, screenwriter of The Age of Innocence, Strange Days, Gangs of New York, and Silence; former film critic for Time

– Jon Davison, producer, Airplane!, White Dog, RoboCop and RoboCop 2, Starship Troopers

– Joe Dante, director, Gremlins, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Matinee, The Second Civil War, Small Soldiers, Masters of Horror: “Homecoming”

– A. J. Eaton, director of David Crosby: Remember My Name

– Illeana Douglas, actress, Goodfellas, Guilty by Suspicion, To Die For, Action, Six Feet Under, Easy to Assemble; host on Turner Classic Movies

– David Ehrenstein, author of The Scorsese Picture and Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000, and co-author of Rock on Film; critic for many publications, including L.A. Weekly, The Los Angeles Reader, Rolling Stone,The Advocate, and the Criterion Collection

– F. X. Feeney, author of books on Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Michael Mann; screenwriter of Frankenstein Unbound and The Big Brass Ring; critic and journalist for publications including L.A. Weekly, Vanity Fair, and Written By

– James E. Frasher, personal manager for Lillian Gish

– Anne Farley Gaines, fine artist, muralist, and independent curator; 1980 MFA Graduate in Painting from Bowling Green State University

– Tess Gallagher, poet, essayist, short story writer, and teacher; author of books including Is, Is Not: Poems, Moon Crossing Bridge, Portable Kisses, Midnight Lantern, The Lover of Horses, and The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories

– Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming for New York’s Film Forum; founder, Rialto Pictures

– Shep Gordon, music manager, executive producer of The Whales of August and numerous other films, subject of Beth Aala and Mike Myers’s documentary Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

– Taylor Hackford, director, An Officer and a Gentleman, White Nights, Dolores Claiborne, Ray, Love Ranch, The Comedian, and former president of the Directors Guild of America

– Philip Hallman, film studies field librarian, Department of Screen Arts & Cultures/Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan

– Mike Hodges, director, Get Carter, Pulp, The Terminal Man, Flash Gordon, Black Rainbow, I’ll Sleep When I”m Dead

– Lauren Hutton, actress and model; with films including Paper Lion, Little Fauss and Big Halsey, The Gambler, Welcome to L.A., A Wedding, American Gigolo, Hecate

– Larry Jackson, producer of Bugs Bunny Superstar and Steal Big Steal Little; former executive at Samuel Goldwyn Company, Miramax, and Orson; developer and programmer, Orson Welles Cinema

– Harlan Jacobson, film critic, WGBO Jazz 88.3, former editor-in-chief Film Comment, former staff writer at Variety and USA Today

– James Earl Jones, actor, the Star Wars films, The Great White Hope, Dr. Strangelove, The Comedians, Claudine, Roots: The Next Generations, Paul Robeson, Field of Dreams, Jefferson in Paris, The Lion King

– Mike Kaplan, producer of The Whales of August, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead; marketing strategist for Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange) and Robert Altman (Short Cuts), Hal Ashby; director, Luck, Trust & Ketchup and Never Apologize

– Steven Kovacs, cinema professor, San Francisco State University; former production executive for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures; and director of ‘68 and Oscar-nominated producer of Arthur and Lillie

– Robert Lesser, film and theater actor, New York Shakespeare Festival and Yale Repertory, in such films as David Holzman’s Diary, Hester Street, Die Hard, and Best Wishes for Tomorrow

– Rod Lurie, writer-director, The Contender, Nothing but the Truth, Straw Dogs, Killing Reagan, and The Outpost; creator of TV series Commander in Chief

– Joseph McBride, biographer of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg; author of three books on Orson Welles; co-writer, The American Film Institute Salute to Lillian Gish; professor of cinema at San Francisco State University

– Malcolm McDowell, actor, If . . ., A Clockwork Orange, O Lucky Man!, Time After Time, The Company, Evilenko, Star Trek Generations, Never Apologize, and the TV series Mozart in the Jungle

– Joe McElhaney, author of The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli and Albert Maysles; film professor, Hunter College

– Douglas McGrath, screenwriter of Bullets over Broadway; director of Emma and Infamous; and political commentator for The New Republic

– Patrick McGilligan, biographer of Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, George Cukor, Oscar Micheaux, Clint Eastwood, and Mel Brooks

– Russell Merritt, film historian and adjunct professor of film, University of California, Berkeley; former film professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison; author of numerous critical studies of D. W. Griffith and co-author of Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney and Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies

– Dame Helen Mirren, actress, The Queen, O Lucky Man!, Hamlet, Excalibur, The Madness of King George, Some Mother’s Son, Gosford Park, The Last Station, Trumbo, and the TV series Prime Suspect and Elizabeth I

– James Naremore, film historian of books on Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, film noir, and Charles Burnett; and chancellors’ professor emeritus, Media School, English, and Comparative Literature, Indiana University

– Joanna Ney, co-curator, Dance on Camera Festival; former curator, Special Projects, The Film Society of Lincoln Center

– Carolyn Pfeiffer, producer, Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare, Choose Me, The Whales of August, The Moderns, Children of Giant

– David W. Rintels, screenwriter of Clarence Darrow (adapted from his Broadway play), Fear on Trial, Gideon’s Trumpet, Andersonville, and Nuremberg; former president of Writers Guild of America, West; winner of the WGA Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television

– Victoria Riskin, screenwriter-producer of My Ántonia; former president of Writers Guild of America, West; activist in Human Rights Watch; First Amendment Award winner from American Civil Liberties Union; author of Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir

– Howard A. Rodman, screenwriter and novelist; films, Joe Gould’s Secret, Takedown, Savage Grace, August; author, Destiny Express and The Great Eastern; former president of Writers Guild of America, West; professor and former chair of the writing division at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts

– Carl Rollyson, biographer of Susan Sontag, Rebecca West, Marilyn Monroe, Walter Brennan, William Faulkner, and Sylvia Plath

– Annie Ross, singer and actress; member of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross; actress in Pump Up the Volume, Short Cuts, and The Player and onstage in Side by Side by Sondheim and The Pirates of Penzance

– Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Discovering Orson Welles, Moving Places, Movies as Politics, Movie Wars, and Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia; former film critic for The Chicago Reader and now freelance critic for numerous international publications

– Alan Rudolph, director, Welcome to L.A., Remember My Name, The Moderns, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Breakfast of Champions, Ray and Helen

– Martin Scorsese, director, Mean Streets, Italianamerican, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Blues: “Feel Like Going Home,” The Departed, Hugo, Silence, Rolling Thunder Revue, The Irishman

– Anthony Slide, film historian, author of more than seventy books and editor of 150 more; with books including Early American Cinema, Early Women Directors, The Silent Feminists, and Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History; co-director of the documentary The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors

– George Stevens, Jr., producer (including of The American Film Institute Salute to Lillian Gish); former director of the Motion Picture Service of the United States Information Agency; founder of American Film Institute; former producer of the Kennedy Center Honors

– Kevin Stoehr, film historian, author of Ride, Boldly Ride: History of the American Western Movie and co-editor of John Ford in Focus; and associate professor of Humanities, Boston University

– Bertrand Tavernier, director of The Clockmaker of St. Paul, The Judge and the Assassin, Mississippi Blues, ‘Round Midnight, and A Journey Through French Cinema; co-author of Fifty Years of American Cinema and author of American Friends: Interviews with the Great Auteurs of Hollywood

– Laura Truffaut, French translator and tutor; human rights activist; actress and crew member, Small Change; daughter of director François Truffaut and co-administrator of his estate

– Robert B. Weide, director of Curb Your Enthusiasm and documentaries on Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, the Marx Bros., Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen

– Armond White, film critic for National Review and Out; former critic for New York Press; author of Rebel for the Hell of It: The Life of Tupac Shakur and New Position: The Prince Chronicles

– Tony Williams, film historian, author of books on Vietnam War films, horror films, Italian Westerns, Jack London, Robert Aldrich, and Larry Cohen; and professor of English and area head of Film Studies, Southern Illinois University

To erase “Birth of a Nation” is to erase not only repulsive propaganda but to erase an essential part of film history and American history both good and bad. To focus only on the propaganda and its horrible after effects is an error. This focus has largely ignored the significant protests against it that occurred at the time. Ignoring its merits as essential film history causes one to miss out on why it had such negative effects.

It may be a great "work of art" but this type of film belongs in the holocaust section of an American museum along with images of black lynchings, statues of confederate leaders and pictures of Jesse James and other famous American racists. A bit like the Nazi photographer/film producer Leni Rifienstahl who is one of the most talented film makers in history but her Nazi films should be treated with care and the main characters aren't made into statues or win film festival awards (I am sure her films still inspire a new generation of the US tikki torch brigade who hold romanticised views of the Nazi era).

My undergraduate alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, recently agreed to remove a mission bell donated years ago by a local women’s club.

The university ceded to the wishes of one Valentin Lopez. He is the chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.

Val brought forth concerns to us about the symbolism of the bell. He spoke of the historical injustices and oppression that the bell represents to the Amah Mutsun and indigenous populations. It was such a compelling statement of impact and I am pleased we have been able to work in partnership with them on the removal. Our students have also given voice to the need to remove the bell.

So said Sarah Latham, vice chancellor for business and administrative services at UCSC.

The triumphant Lopez added, “These bells are deeply painful symbols that celebrate the destruction, domination and erasure of our people. They are constant reminders of the disrespect our tribe faces to this day.” Latham offered no clarification about the definition of “students have also given voice,” in terms of numbers of students or votes. Neither the taxpayers of the state-funded institution nor the alumni were surveyed. Apparently, no one wondered, while considering the list of impediments to the progress of Native Americans, just how high an offending bell at UC Santa Cruz ranks.

About the same time, at San Francisco’s Washington High School, it was announced that an 83-year-old mural chronicling George Washington’s life was slated to be removed, destroyed, or covered up, owing to “accusations of racism.”

Yet the artist, Victor Arnautoff, was a leftist who in 1936 had sought to offer a realistic view of what he thought was a flawed American history. No matter. The school board caved to the objections of one Virginia Marshall, apparent spokesperson for “the Alliance of Black School Educators,” who demanded the removal: “It is a racist mural. My history should not be racist but it is. I came from slaves.”

Apparently thus spoke Zarathustra. And, presto, the board of education then caved, vowing to find the $375,000 to $825,000 to Trotskyize the mural and please Virginia Marshall.

No one meekly suggested that perhaps 20 to 30 annual tutors might be hired for the same sum to address any perceived asymmetries in comparative school achievement. A cynic might add that there are greater challenges to achieving parity for black public-school students than a historic mural.

These examples of destruction or removal could easily be multiplied. My graduate alma mater and current employer, Stanford University, recently removed the name of Father Junipero Serra from two buildings and a mall on campus. Yet to avoid too much disruption (and perhaps to allay fears of alumni donors), it did not erase all things referencing the now odious Serra from other more recognizable streets and places.

As Stanford put it, describing the deplatformed and defriended Father Serra: As founder of the missions of early California, he was responsible for “harmful and violent impacts of the mission system on Native Americans, including through forced labor, forced living arrangements and corporal punishment.”

Epidemics of iconoclasm (from the Greek “breaking of icons”) erupt often throughout history, usually but not always in a religious context. And is not political correctness our era’s version of religion?

In our own time, we remember the Taliban’s recent destruction of the monumental sixth-century “Buddhas of Bamiyan” statues in Afghanistan, or the torching of priceless manuscripts in Timbuktu by Mali Islamists. The arguments for such destruction were not unfamiliar to American leftists and identity-politics activists: Such icons were hurtful to particular marginalized groups and an affront to their dignity and therefore must vanish.

The destruction of pictures, books, statues, and icons occurred periodically during Byzantine, Catholic, and Protestant church history, and was usually marked spurts of religious fanaticism, intolerance, and fear. Indeed, in early Byzantine history, iconoclasm was in part driven by frontier Christian towns, terrified that Constantinople’s use of ubiquitous symbols of Christ and Church fathers might provoke their neighboring Muslim adversaries into violence. We forget the role of fear and cowardice in iconoclasm, ancient and modern.

Politics of the day of course often determined who or what was defaced or destroyed. Yesterday’s deified Roman emperor was today’s persona non grata. Recently deceased Roman grandees suffered damnatio memoriae (damnation of memory) and so, Soviet-style, had their faces erased from stone imagery — albeit sometimes bodies were left intact as a money-saving gesture, in perhaps history’s first example of the efficacy of interchangeable parts.

French revolutionaries, like our modern iconoclasts who topple statues of Confederate soldiers in the night, often went wild destroying monuments, portraits, and names affiliated with the Ancien Régime and the Catholic Church. Like frontier posses who stormed jails to lynch detained suspects, such gangs often relied on numbers and darkness.

When I lived in Greece, it became a parlor game in my Athenian neighborhood to count how many time nocturnal political vandals would chop off the bronze head of the Harry Truman statue. His apparent sins at that time were that, years earlier, he had funneled American money to war-torn impoverished Greece and thus curtained its chance of enjoying the benefits of Soviet Communism with its Balkan neighbors of the era. Since then, poor twelve-foot bronze Harry has been guillotined, graffitied, painted, bombed, and toppled, according to the current anti-American gripe of the day.

So iconoclasm of the past and our current social-justice statue-topplers, aggrieved name-changers, and angry image-removers are often predictable. Here are a few of the rules of their ancient and modern wars on the past.

The agitators are never democratic and rarely act with any popular mandate or consensus. UC Santa Cruz did not hold a referendum to see whether Valentin Lopez enjoyed majority student, much less community, support. Many in the Latino community, as traditional Catholics, might hold a more balanced view of Father Serra, given the crowds of present-day tourists and worshipers who daily frequent the California missions. That demographic fact may be why an otherwise hyper-political and often unhinged California state government apparently does not dare rename, remodel, or close down the touristy missions.

Instead, in most cases, bureaucrats simply react to the loudest and most bothersome agitation. Their assumption is that political activists can easily smear their résumés, while the silent majority of citizens is mostly too busy to object and will not rally en masse to their sobriety.

When the wild demands of a few are made to destroy this or rename that, the race is on among administrators, bureaucrats, and careerist state officials to appease rapidly, and in the most unctuous fashion, usually by employing bureaucratese such as “harmful” and “hurtful” and “impacts” — without any real research into the complexities of the history in question, which so often is paradoxically tragic rather than simplistically melodramatic. Anyone who has served on a dean or provost’s search committee will be familiar with the embarrassing boilerplate letter from the applicant that references his past progressive dexterity in caving to such demands, the more obsequiously the better for future advancement.

Rarely do the revisionists who wage war on history offer any rational and systematic agenda for their otherwise spontaneous tantrums. Father Serra is a demon because his views of civilization included transforming California from a sparsely populated land of impoverished native peoples into a Catholic outpost of the Spanish Empire, to be supposedly enriched by faith, commerce, agriculture, communications, and literacy — an agenda that included coercive beating and cultural transformation.

But is Father Serra a Hitlerian figure to his contemporary enemies or just a nuisance? Translated, does that mean Lopez is satisfied that he gets credit for removing one obscure bell at UC Santa Cruz, when there are still hundreds of such iconic bells dotting the ancient El Camino Real that joined the missions? Would he be willing to take on much of the working classes of the California Latino community who may feel that Serra’s legacy enhances their religious heritage and whose anachronistic ideas of “progress,” mutatis mutandis, nonetheless helped make California the sort of place that was preferable to, say, Oaxaca and thus worth risking one’s life to cross the border to reach?

Stanford justifies its selective Father Serra name-changing by citing the “violent impacts” of his “forced labor, forced living arrangements and corporal punishment.”

How rich the vocabulary, given that many social reformers of the last 150 years have targeted Leland Stanford himself — maligned as the “robber baron” and “Big Four” schemer, founder and donor of Leland Stanford Jr. University — with precisely that allegation. The usual writ is that Stanford brutally imported Asian laborers as construction workers in his vast railroad archipelago. He wrote freely about their racial inferiority, and he exploited them mercilessly as he built a vast fortune, much of it central to founding the university that now bears both his son’s and, by extension, his own family name.

Note that the university is no more likely to change the name of Stanford to something like Amah Mutsun University to rectify the theft of indigenous peoples’ lands than Yale University is willing to give up the names of its slave-owning founders. The selective outrage is not just because old white Neanderthal alumni love going to Yale or Stanford iconic football games, but rather because tens of thousands of woke nonwhite students and alumni are proud of their tony “Yale” and “Stanford” diplomas. They are not about to destroy their career investments in such a brand name on the altar of systematic and coherent politically correct name-changing.

The new iconoclasm is almost as exclusively progressive in the West as it is reactionary in the contemporary Muslim world. But the common thread, past and present, East and West, to epidemics of name-changing, statue-smashing, and mural-erasing is political opportunism fueled by fear and careerist anxiety.

Certainly — in the age of #MeToo and heightened awareness of the lifelong damage to women from rape, sexual harassment, and asymmetrical sexual relationships fueled by an imbalance of power — no one is suggesting that thousands of local and state boulevards that were renamed Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1970s should now retransition, given recent disturbing revelations that King might have allowed a rape to occur in his presence, was a serial philanderer, and often, under today’s definitions, pressured sex from younger and more vulnerable females.

No one would dare suggest that feminist icon Margaret Sanger’s name be removed from awards, dinners, or monuments, given that by any modern standard she would be classified as a racist eugenicist. She saw abortion on demand, at least partly, as a way of limiting the growth of perceived nonwhite populations. The disproportionate number of African Americans aborted through the agency of Sanger’s legacy, Planned Parenthood, seems a logical consequence of her founding ideology.

In my hometown, I certainly have not demanded that the city council remove what I see as a somewhat offensive statue of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. She is usually portrayed as a hideous clawed mother goddess, decked out in writhing serpents, with a grotesque necklace of dangling human hearts, skulls, and hands. She was an unforgiving goddess for whom tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and especially children, many of them indigenous peoples enslaved by the Aztecs, were sacrificed. Why honor such a monster?

In such a vein, one could argue that the San Diego State “Aztecs” glorify triumphalist imperialist mass murderers, even more than the supposedly offensively named Washington Redskins do. Immigrants from Oaxaca and southern Mexico are as likely to be descendants from Tlaxcala, which resisted the Aztec Empire, as they are descendants of the Aztecs themselves. So they could be the progeny of people targeted for extinction and human sacrifice by a neighboring fascist imperialist bully.

The truth is that once the statue-smasher and name-changer gets a free hand, we should expect no logic, no respite from zealotry and bigotry. He operates from emotion, not reason, and his currency is intimidation, not persuasion, consistency, and coherence — when no official is willing to just say “No!”

The insanity that we are witnessing has little or nothing to do with icons that institutionalize disparities or impede social justice. Iconoclasm is about power — and the psychological lift that comes with exercising it.

Iconoclasm is about power — and the psychological lift that comes with exercising it.

San Francisco will spend up to $600,000 to paint over historical artwork at a public school depicting the life of George Washington, a mural once seen as educational and innovative but now criticized as racist and degrading for its depiction of black and Native American people.

The “Life of Washington” was painted by Victor Arnautoff, one of the foremost muralists in the San Francisco area during the Depression. The San Francisco School Board’s decision to paint over the 83-year-old mural is prompting some to worry that other artwork from the so-called New Deal era could face a similar fate because of changing sensitivities.

In addition to depicting Washington as a soldier, surveyor and statesman, the 13-panel, 1,600-sqaure foot mural at George Washington High School contains images of white pioneers standing over the body of a Native American and slaves working at Washington’s Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.

Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the history project, Living New Deal, said the Washington mural is meant to show the “uncomfortable facts” about America’s first president. For that, it was among many New Deal works of art considered radical when created.

“We on the left ought to welcome the honest portrayal,” Walker said, adding that destroying a piece of art “is the worst way we can deal with historic malfeasance, historic evils.”

Mark Sanchez, vice president of the school board and a third-grade teacher, said students who must walk past the mural during the school day don’t have a choice about seeing the harmful images. “Painting it over represents not only a symbolic fresh start, but a real fresh start,” he said.

Lope Yap, Jr., vice president of the Washington High School Alumni Association and a 1970 graduates, disagreed, saying when he was a student and saw the mural he was “awed by the subtle ways Arnautoff was able to critique American history.” He said the depictions are “treasures, priceless art” and painting it over is tantamount to pretending the history depicted never happened

The mural is a fresco, which means it’s painted on the wall and can’t easily be removed. Painting it over won’t happen immediately. Should a lawsuit or other delay arise, it will be covered up until the issues are resolved. The board plans to digitally archive the mural.

Most of the $600,000 earmarked for the project will go toward a required environmental review and to cover expected legal challenges.

George Washington High School has about 2,000 students. Nearly all are people of color and many come from low-income families. As early as the 1960s, some students argued the mural’s imagery is offensive and racist. Renewed opposition emerged in recent years amid protests in the South and elsewhere over statues honoring Confederate heroes.

Arnautoff, a Russian-born communist and social critic, was hired with Federal Art Project funds as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, a series of government programs meant to help lift the country out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

He was one of a group of artists to paint murals at San Francisco’s Coit Tower that prompted anti-communists to delay the tower’s opening. Arnautoff’s piece, called “City Life,” shows urban workers crowding around a newsstand of socialist newspapers and magazines. The piece faced criticism for failing to include the conservative-leaning San Francisco Chronicle.

“Victor Arnautoff was far ahead of his time, and we have yet to catch up with him in terms of making school curriculum more inclusive and historically accurate,” said Harvey Smith, president of the National New Deal Preservation Association.

Walker and other supporters of the mural worry that painting over it may signal that it’s acceptable to destroy the thousands of other New Deal murals across the country. Activists have been successful in getting a series of New Deal murals at the University of New Mexico covered up. Other New Deal murals in New York and Iowa have been vandalized, as well as painted over and subsequently restored.

It all comes back to the old issue should we not honor anybody from the past since it is likely 95+ percent of them had bigoted ideas or did bad things. Should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame be used for another purpose because of a good percentage of those people were sexist to abusers of women and committed other crimes?