Judging historical people on today's social standards. . .

[Rob Wick]

Quote:Who gets to determine what flaws cause rejection?

Each generation writes its own history based on its own experiences. The same is true for people today as it was for James Randall or Ida Tarbell after World War I. What one generation sees as trying to erase history, the next sees it as trying to tell the entire truth about it. The problem with many of the "flawed" individuals of the past is that those "flaws" are often downplayed or completely ignored. Henry Ford was a virulent Anti-Semite who printed the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the Dearborn Independent. In several articles, Tarbell praised his business acumen, yet never discussed his viewpoint on Jews. That would lead one to ask "did she accept those views?" The answer is no. I found a newspaper ad that Tarbell signed that was supportive of Jews. Would I have preferred that she come out strongly against Ford for his viewpoint? Yes, I would have.

Tarbell decided to compartmentalize things, which might have worked for her, but was a flawed judgment in its own right. It's not enough to say "everybody did it" back then, because everybody didn't do it. When Randall wrote his "The Blundering Generation" paper in which he said slavery wasn't enough of a factor in precipitating the Civil War, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., objected. In a paper I presented to the Conference on Illinois History in 2011, I wrote the following:

Schlesinger argued that the revisionists—that all historians for that matter—were obliged to pronounce moral judgments on actions that ran counter to the democratic ideals that America’s founding documents pronounced, although he warned that that obligation was no license for forgetting that individuals were prisoners of their own times and societal pressures. In Schlesinger’s view, the error of the revisionists was to bend over so far backward to avoid easy and smug moral judgments on historical actors that they renounced any need to consider moral issues in history at all.
In his conclusion, Schlesinger demanded an acknowledgement that every historian “imports his own set of moral judgments into the writing of history by the very process of interpretation….” Whereas Randall had no problem in expressing what Schlesinger termed his “moral feeling” that the abolitionist’s attitude was “unctuous” and “intolerant” Randall (in Schlesinger’s reading) could not express any moral feeling about the cause of fighting to free the bondsman. It was a severe indictment indeed.
Although Schlesinger was not questioning Randall’s personal integrity, he did argue that anyone claiming to understand what he termed “the great conflicts of history” must acknowledge that there are some issues worth the shedding of blood, and to fail to accept that slavery was one of those issues is a failure either to acknowledge or to understand that slavery was “a betrayal of the basic values of our Christian and democratic tradition.” Like a logjam, a great moral wrong such as slavery sometimes required violence and force to expel it permanently from our society.

Mike, I found it interesting that you mentioned Wagner. In college, I wrote a paper on Cultural Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, focusing on both Wagner and Heinrich Von Treitschke, who wrote "The Jews are Our Misfortune." I was a deep admirer of Wagner's music (During the writing of my paper, I listened to the entire Ring cycle, which took up about 20 or so albums, if I remember correctly. I never want to hear it again). Yet after reading "Jewishness in Music" I never saw Wagner the same way again. I still listen to his music, but I also realize that when I talk about him, it is incumbent upon me to mention his Anti-Semitism.

Best
Rob