By Chris Powell
Maybe it won’t be enough if the statue of Major John Mason is removed from its niche above the north steps of Connecticut’s Capitol building. For the other day the Connecticut Post’s Ken Dixon provided a wonderful compendium of the political and moral defects of the other state heroes memorialized with statues and plaques around the building.
Mason, without whom European settlement of Connecticut probably would have failed, is the target of “cancel culture” because he led the attack on the Pequot Indian fort in Mystic in 1637, which nearly exterminated the tribe — men, women, and children — with gunshot, fire, and sword. It may have been the most horrible thing ever to have happened in the state. But those who would take down his statue fail to acknowledge a few things.
There was a war on. The Pequots had started it with their own massacres. Two Indian tribes that also had been threatened by the Pequots — the Mohegans and Narragansetts — allied with the Europeans and joined the attack on the fort. The Pequot warriors were sheltering among their noncombatants. Each side saw the other as savages.
Indeed, the Europeans had come to Connecticut from Massachusetts in part because they were invited by tribes seeking allies against the Pequots.
That is, the massacre didn’t happen in a vacuum, and such things are committed in war even by the more civilized side when there seems to be no alternative. While they also were packed with civilians, the cities infamously leveled from the air during World War II — Hamburg, firebombed in 1943; Dresden and Tokyo, firebombed in 1945; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atom-bombed in 1945 — were as much military targets as the Pequot fort was in 1637.
It would be fun to send today’s cancel culturists back in time to try to negotiate with the Pequots of old and to report back — if they lived.
The Post’s Dixon notes that some of the heroes memorialized at the Capitol were slaveowners or tolerated slavery. One apparently even helped to prosecute witchcraft. Another is known mainly for being an imperialist.
But the slavery issue distorts everything and isn’t so relevant, for the whole world, not just the United States, was and remains implicated in slavery. The practice goes back beyond biblical times, and nearly all Black slaves from Africa were first enslaved and sold by other Black Africans.
The more relevant questions about heroes from history are whether they provided some essential service to the state or society or were way ahead of their times in a moral sense, and whether their imperfections were only common to their times or peculiar to them individually and thus more disqualifying.
Remove people too much from the context of their times and there may be no more heroes.
After all, none of the people memorialized at the Capitol is known to have endorsed same-sex marriage. Even today’s secular saints on the left, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, were opportunistically slow on that issue.
All the people memorialized at the Capitol probably deplored homosexuality, which Connecticut didn’t decriminalize until 1971. None thought men could be women or vice versa, nor acknowledged singular personal pronouns other than “he” and “she.”
If any of them ate only wholesome organic food, it was not because of virtue but only because pesticides and monosodium glutamate hadn’t been invented yet.
And all might be disqualified as fascists insofar as Connecticut didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939, still needing some prodding from the totalitarians then taking over Europe and Asia.
No man, as the saying goes, is a hero to his valet. But despite their faults some people still perform heroically now and then, and the country always needs heroic examples, especially now, when public life has become so hateful, tawdry, corrupt, and politically correct and people are less able to see that the country’s great and hard-fought trend always has been toward greater democracy and liberty and away from oppression.
With luck that trend will continue so that future generations will look back with some appreciation as well as bemusement over how quaint their ancestors could be.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 