To the Editor:
I understand Mr. Cabot’s sense of loss at the renaming of Agassiz Rock (Cricket Letter of Aug.14), perhaps made more acute as one Elizabeth Cabot Cary was Louis Agassiz's wife. The loss evokes the “don't throw the baby out with the bathwater” sentiment...an avoidable error in which something good is eliminated when trying to get rid of something bad, or in other words, rejecting the favorable along with the unfavorable.
The July 30, 2020 issue of the Cricket detailed the consideration and research that went into this decision by the Trustees of the Reservation, and I won’t belabor it here. Suffice to say, they are one of many public and private institutions making this same choice.
I do want to offer a way to appreciate their decision in the larger context of revisionist history and political correctness, a now frequent collision point of this country’s deep structural divide:
* History is not static. It is a living dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new questions, new research, new perspectives gained by the passage of time, and perhaps most important here, new commitment to this country’s espoused values and aspirations. The world is not flat. Women are sufficiently capable to vote, and even to attend Harvard College (as Elizabeth Cabot Cary hoped to prove in 1869). Imagine!
* To ascribe the Trustee’s decision to “political correctness” trivializes it as a fad, and them with it. In 1850 Agassiz commissioned a series of photographs of a slave named Renty Taylor to further his arguments about black inferiority. Agassiz left the images to Harvard. In 2019 Taylor's descendants sued Harvard for the return of the images. The lawsuit was brought by forty-three (43) living descendants of Louis Agassiz, in an effort to "make amends for its use of the photos as exhibits for the white supremacist theory Agassiz espoused,” and have everyone fully evaluate "his role in promoting a pseudo-scientific justification for white supremacy.”
The Trustees have evaluated Agassiz's role in history, and despite his past contributions to the science of geology, found it, in the present, incompatible with their values and their future. I applaud their effort to refresh the bathwater. I worry that for Mr. Cabot to punish their act of conscience serves to deepen the structural divide rather than heal it. Besides, they need money to green our planet.
Sheila Hill, Manchester
