Purging old heroes drives us further apart | Opinion

The National Forest Service is considering changing the name of Wayne National Forest, three separate areas in southeastern Ohio, to Buckeye Forest. “Wayne” refers to General Anthony Wayne, nicknamed Mad Anthony, a tribute to his aggressive leadership in the Revolutionary War, who defeated the Northwest Indian Confederation at Fallen Timbers, south of today’s Toledo, in 1794.

Wayne was an “Indian fighter.” Once considered a great American hero, his victory, with the Treaty of Greenville the next year, “opened much of the present state of Ohio to white settlers,” as a monument at Fallen Timbers, erected in 1929, puts it. Another plaque at the site, dating from 1994, commemorates “All the American Indians who gave their lives at this place,” including members of the Miami, Shawnee, Wyandot and more. Over the years, the meaning of the battle has changed, although a figure of Wayne still dominates the scene.

According to Wayne National Forest manager Lee Stewart, some 40 Indigenous peoples have ancestral ties to the area of the forest, and he has been receiving letters for years asking that Wayne’s name be dropped. Why not?  If some of the pain of loss and displacement among the First Nations of Ohio can be alleviated with a new designation, let's do it.

Yet there are bigger issues at hand. Across the country, names of Confederate generals have been removed from military bases and schools, for example. But there are still plenty of “Indian fighters” memorialized in the Midwest.  At least 16 Wayne counties exist around the country, including in Ohio. We also have Waynesville, Wayne Township, Wayne Trace Road and much more. Michigan has Wayne State University and Hamtramck (after a colonel who fought under Wayne), an enclave within the city of Detroit, which is itself in Wayne County. Fort Wayne, Indiana, will probably not change its name. Twenty-two counties (one in Ohio) are named after Andrew Jackson, once the hero of a massive victory over the Creeks of Alabama — as well as of the Battle of New Orleans, 1815, which ended British invasions of the U.S.

What about Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco and more mission sites in California? The early Spanish friars enslaved Native peoples there and worked them to exhaustion and sometimes death.

Revolutions often bring changes in names of streets and towns and remove old statues. We seem embroiled in another American revolution, in which previous heroes become anti-heroes. A statue of Theodore Roosevelt stood for many years outside the Museum of Natural History in New York. It was removed in early 2022 because influential people saw it as a symbol of racism — two shirtless Native fighters flanked Roosevelt, who towered over them on a stalwart horse.

Meanwhile, statues of Anthony Wayne remain at Fallen Timbers; outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, complete with prone Indians; in Waynesville, Indiana; and in other places.

Besides the difficulty of judging who must go and who can remain immortalized in metal or stone, the selective purging of old-time heroes is driving Americans further apart. To remove Wayne’s monuments would be to tear down other people’s prized history. The victors do not necessarily write history today. In the academic world and in the minds of a good many Democrats, the people who lost land must now be recognized above others.

This trend is not going over well in red states, and it helped turn Virginia from blue to red in 2021. Statues, place names and critical race theory, which few understand or care to learn about, become entangled for some voters. This connection helps explain Donald Trump’s continuing popularity: almost 60% of Republicans support him for the party’s nomination in 2024, a Wall Street Journal poll has just found, while another poll by that newspaper finds that Trump remains neck and neck with President Joe Biden in the presidential scrum.

Another problem is that, although the Northwest Indians fought bravely to defend their lands, “ancestral ties” are hard to establish. The name Shawnee has something to do with the south or coming from the south. Shawnee were found in the 1790s from Georgia and the Carolinas to Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Miami, who contributed fewer warriors at Fallen Timbers than other Indian nations did, are not found on maps or in records for Ohio before the 1750s. Various Indigenous peoples migrated in and out of the territory, which was largely a hunting ground.

As Anthony Wayne and his small army marched north from Cincinnati in 1793-94, he did hope to gain much new land for white settlement. His mission was also to stop the random and terrifying killings on both sides, as white Kentuckians raided into Ohio and Native people from there carried out their own lethal forays.

History has been unfair to countless nations. Victory of one people over another, always involving tragedy, has been a basic story around the world at least since biblical times. It would be good to teach the complexity of Ohio’s “Indian Wars” without valorizing and one side over the other, much as many people’s sympathies might lie with the dispossessed.

But maybe we can all accept Buckeye National Forest.

Robert W. Thurston is Emeritus Professor of History at Miami University.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Purging old heroes drives us further apart