Change is never easy.
Whether it’s leaving home for the first time, finding a new career, or even getting a new haircut, change is inherently disruptive. It is of course easier to hold on to the past and resist change — that is one of my favorite pastimes.
But change, like death and taxes, is inevitable.
A few weeks ago, Boston University decided to remove the name of one of its dormitories, Myles Standish Hall.
If the name sounds familiar, you are either a history buff or a frequenter of Tedesco Street, because there is a Miles Standish Road here in town.
The spelling is slightly different, but both the dorm and the road reference the same man: a pilgrim who sailed to what is now the U.S. on the Mayflower, the subject of a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, and to some, one of the most brutal men of the Colonial era.
In BU’s explanation for the building’s name change, the article cites a truly gruesome story in which Standish “fatally ambush(ed) leaders of the Massachusett Tribe at a supposed peace dinner and display(ed) the severed head of one on a pole for months afterward.”
The Native American whose head was desecrated was a leader named Wituwamat.
In Longfellow’s narrative poem, “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” the captain is a noble and brave person, lacking only in the realms of love. His war strategies are likened to those of Julius Caesar. Though brutal, he is lauded, and his character softens, if only a little, throughout the story.
There will be those who read this article and think that changing the name of anything with “Myles Standish” on it is the only right thing; his brutality and slaying of Wituwamat and his people are enough to justify removing his name.
There will also be those who find removing Standish’s name from buildings and streets is a disservice to history. They might argue that to remove Standish is to remove the significance of what Longfellow wrote about.
I, for one, have always found the tendency to name buildings, streets, fields, etc. after people strange. Humans are all imperfect. Even the people we think of as being the nicest and least controversial will be disliked by someone. I think of myself as a decent person, but I know that “Emma Fringuelli Street” would rub at least a handful of people the wrong way.
The idea of honoring someone through simply putting their name somewhere seems obvious — perhaps because it is so ubiquitous a gesture — but incomplete. It leaves us with some words on a sign, devoid of the good, the bad, and the ugly of that person, whether we think the namesake was a great or horrible person.
After all, I did not learn anything about Standish from the street sign bearing his name. For that, I had to do a lot of reading.
