John Muir Is Canceled. Who’s Next?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/john-muir-is-canceled-whos-next/The cancel culture has now reached into every nook and cranny of life. Eskimo Pie, the chocolate-covered ice-cream treat that has been around for a century, will be renamed after critics said the name was insensitive. What’s next?
We have a partial answer. Last week, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.
The Sierra Club is “celebrating” the event in an unusual way. It is dumping any association with John Muir, the “father of the national parks” who founded the Sierra Club back in 1892.
Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director, tells members that “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments.” Brune says members must now “reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”
The Sierra Club is dumping John Muir. He founded the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club should cancel itself.
But in a form of guilt by association that would make a McCarthyite blush, Brune goes on to rebuke Muir’s for his friendship in the early 1900s with zoologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who, twelve years after Muir’s death in 1914, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people as inferior. Notice that the founding of the society followed Muir’s death, but he still must be held accountable for it.
Many Sierra Club members with whom I spoke are privately appalled at the group’s attempt to erase its history. A few years ago, the club itself published a study that noted Muir was considered a progressive for his era and never advocated any discriminatory policies.
Indeed, Muir later lived among various Native American tribes. “He grew to respect and honor their beliefs, actions, and lifestyles,” wrote scholar Richard Fleck, in the journal American Indian Quarterly. “He, too, would evolve and change from his somewhat ambivalent stance toward various Indian cultures to a positive admiration.”
In an interview with the California Sun, Donald Worster, a professor and noted biographer of Muir, says the attack on Muir is completely devoid of context:
He saw the effects of white immigration and the diseases that came along, wiping out whole populations; the presence of alcohol and its effect; trade relations that were not good for the Indians. He wrote a diatribe against the white invasion. He said this is something the government should be up here doing: taking care of and protecting these people from being exploited, from being hurt and dying from all this. . . . It wasn’t just the Indians who got him saying unflattering things. The white population, the people who were invading — the frontier types, the miners — he thought they were uncouth, savage, brutal, dirty, given over to alcohol. His writings are full of those descriptions. Nobody gets upset about that.
John Muir was a progressive in his days. Someone progressive in their days is not considered progressive today or in the future.
