In the early 20th Century, progressives were big advocates of compulsory sterilization. And in the 1970s, progressive foundations promoted the forced sterilization of millions of people in India, as the progressive publication Vox admits.
But today, as colleges go through the “racial reckoning” that followed George Floyd’s death, they are canceling mainstream historical figures as racist, sometimes based on false claims that those historical figures supported compulsory sterilization. Left-wing Middlebury College, which itself promoted forced sterilization generations ago, canceled the late moderate Republican Governor of Vermont, John Mead, a respected physician, businessman, and civic leader. Mead was a large donor to Middlebury, which accepted his generous donation in exchange for naming its chapel for him. Mead supported black suffrage and opposed segregation. But Middlebury stripped his name from the chapel during the “racial reckoning,” based on the false claim that Mead supported coercive sterilization.
Middlebury College is the place where left-wing students violently attacked a think-tank scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The College Fix reports that a judge has allowed the canceled governor’s estate to sue Middlebury:
The estate of a donor to Middlebury College can sue to stop the de-naming of a chapel funded with his bequest, a Vermont judge ruled recently. Judge Robert Mello greenlighted the lawsuit on behalf of Governor John Mead’s estate. The estate, represented by former Vermont Governor James Douglas … argued that the school has a contractual obligation to keep “Mead” on the name of its memorial chapel, in the face of cancellation calls over Gov. Mead’s alleged support for eugenics.
The school removed Mead’s name in 2021.
Judge Mello ruled that there was enough evidence to suggest a perpetual naming rights contract had been created.
He wrote:
So far as the allegations of the complaint go, it is apparent that Governor Mead intended to give Middlebury the funds necessary to construct a chapel, and there is at least some evidence that he intended or requested that it be named the Mead Memorial Chapel. Governor Mead’s initial written communication with Middlebury includes this: “I desire to erect a chapel to serve as a place of worship for the college, the same to be known as the Mead Memorial Chapel.”
Governor Douglas prefers to characterize the ensuing transaction as a contract in which Governor Mead gave Middlebury the funds to construct the chapel in exchange for the right to have that chapel perpetually named the Mead Memorial Chapel. In the alternative, he asserts that the funding was a gift subject to a perpetual condition subsequent as to naming rights.
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether a perpetual naming right was contemplated at all, Middlebury argues that the transaction must be characterized as falling under gift law rather than contract law.
“The court declines to rule on this issue at this time,” Mello stated. “The issue is potentially subtle and will be better addressed on a developed factual record.”
Mead expressed support for studying “the use of a new operation called a vasectomy,” according to the lawsuit. “However, the claim that Mead’s 1912 comments caused sterilizations to happen two or three decades later is factually baseless and legally unjust,” as previously reported by The College Fix…. Middlebury itself had a record, much longer than Mead’s, of supporting eugenics. Legal Insurrection compiled various documents that show the school’s support, including regular courses on the topic of eugenics.
Former university president Paul Moody also chaired a committee on the “racial stock of Vermont,” as reported by the legal blog. “Meanwhile, as the litigation grinds on through the summer, one thing is clear: Middlebury College taught more about eugenics than Mead would ever know,” Jane Coleman wrote on June 15.
Many historical figures have been canceled since 2020.
BLM protesters tore down the statue of Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco on Juneteenth in 2021. Grant is the general who did the most to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. Later, as president of the United States, he appointed black people and Native Americans to office and tried to protect blacks against racist violence in the South, even though keeping federal troops in the South to protect blacks was costly and unpopular in the North. Grant’s contributions to black freedom were so great that he was celebrated by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
The reason for tearing down his statue was that he once briefly owned a slave that he had been given. But he voluntarily freed that slave in 1859, before the Civil War, and long before slavery was abolished.
Grant’s statue was not alone in being torn down. As Newsweek notes, “The statues of St. Junipero Serra, the first saint of the Roman Catholic Church to be canonized in the U.S., and Francis Scott Key, the author of the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ were also torn down at the park on the same day.”
Police in that progressive city allowed it to happen: “Nearly 400 protesters were reported at the scene around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to police, who did not engage with the demonstrators. No arrests were made, NBC Bay Area reported.”
Earlier, a George Washington statue in liberal Portland was toppled, and covered with a burning U.S. flag. George Washington held slaves, but freed them in his will. Authorities in Portland have not reinstalled the statute, saying it caused “harm” to those offended by it.
By contrast, BLM protesters have left alone the Seattle statue of Soviet Communist dictator Lenin, who relied on slave labor and forced labor on a vast scale. As The New Yorker notes:
[Lenin’s 1918] Resolution on Red Terror provided for the “safeguarding of the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolating them in concentration camps.” The idea was to separate, suppress, or destroy “categories of individuals” — priests, landowners, and other “enemies of the Revolution” — and to begin creating a pool of slave labor. Construction began in 1919. By the end of 1920, Soviet Russia had eighty-four camps, with around fifty thousand prisoners; within three years, the number of camps had quadrupled.”
Yet Black Lives Matter protesters are busy defacing or toppling statues of people who made America a more just and equal place. One example is Revolutionary war hero Tadeusz Kościuszko. His will dedicated his property to finance the emancipation or education of black people. Yet his statue was spat and urinated on and spray-painted with the words “F*ck You” and “BLM.”
Protesters also vandalized a statute of Quaker abolitionist John Greenleaf, defaced the statute of abolitionist Matthias Baldwin with the words “colonizer” and “murderer,” and spray-painted profanity and “BLM” on the statue of Union Admiral David Farragut, who helped defeat the South in the Civil War. Protesters also vandalized Jewish schools and synagogues.
