George:

In response to your question about renaming Jordan Hall:

As a general principle, I am uncomfortable with the practice of renaming buildings or tearing down monuments; there is something too Orwellian about it. It allows both the good and the evil of the person whose name we have used to be erased and forgotten. And since people most want to rename a building when they discover that the person who has been honored is also attached to some less than honorable deeds, the occasion for exploring that person in all of his or her complexity can be lost.

I think it is better, to use revelations about past heroes as an opportunity for reexamining the era in which they lived, and the total legacy they left -- reflecting on and elaborating their history, rather than erasing or burying it. Eugenics was a part of the curriculum at more than 300 universities around the country. So rather than renaming buildings at UVa. or elsewhere, I would like to see more attention to studying the eugenics era and developing a more complete record of its impact.

I suppose there are exceptions to my preference against renamings. For example, the recent decision to rename the DeJarnette Center in Staunton seems to me to be a reasonable correction to a blunder by state officials. For more than fifty years DeJarnette's name had been honored on buildings near Western State Hospital. In the mid-1990s, when the state replaced the aging DeJarnette facility, it was time for a new name.

Another name would have been particularly apt since by then state officials had known DeJarnette's record for almost 20 years. His contempt for the disabled was recorded in his offical reports to the governor and the legislature. His repeated and extravagant praise for the Nazis and their eugenic sterilization program were widely publicized from the early 1980s onward. There was no credible excuse for ignoring that history when a new facility was built, but it was ignored and DeJarnette's name was used again.

Renaming aside, I think the second part of Delegate Van Yahres campaign to call atttention to our eugenic history is the more important part. That is, we should insure that some long term reminder of the harm done by DeJarnette and others in the eugenics movement is put in place. Our education about the complex motives behind the eugenics movement and the widespread approval of it not only in Virginia but all over the U.S., has only just begun.

In May of 2002, we will mark the 75th anniversary of the infamous (and inaccurate) U.S Supreme Court opinion in Carrie Buck's case, cruelly
condemning her family in the phrase "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Perhaps the repudiation of eugenics (promised by all three candidates for governor) that will follow the Governor's inauguration can be combined with some memorial to the Buck case to provide an appropriate occasion in 2002 for remembering the impact of the eugenics movement in the Commonwealth.

Paul Lombardo (electronic mail, March 25, 2001).

Editor's Note: Paul Lombardo is the director of the program of law and medicine at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia.