[The old Hollywood actor and civil rights champion’s reputation
has been tarnished by accusations of hate and racism. This calls for
some sifting and winnowing.]
[[link removed]]

FIRST THINGS FIRST: THE TRUTH ABOUT FREDRIC MARCH  
[[link removed]]


 

December 14, 2022
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The old Hollywood actor and civil rights champion’s reputation
has been tarnished by accusations of hate and racism. This calls for
some sifting and winnowing. _

Fredric March in a publicity still for the 1938 film ‘Trade
Winds.’, Bill Lueders

 

On the wall of Bascom Hall at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
hangs a plaque that famously proclaims
[[link removed]]:
“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we
believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever
encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which
alone the truth can be found.”

These words are taken from an 1894 ruling by the UW Board of Regents
in defense of a professor named Richard Ely
[[link removed]], then-director of the
university’s School of Economics, Political Science, and History.
But the words did not end up on Bascom Hall, where the university
brass is located, at the UW–Madison’s instigation. Rather, this
happened due to the efforts of others
[[link removed]] including
Fred MacKenzie, managing editor of _La Follette’s Magazine_,
now _The Progressive_, acting on a suggestion from the legendary
muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens.

MacKenzie passed this suggestion on to the senior class of 1910’s
memorial committee, which liked the idea, especially given the
Regents’ recent censure of a UW–Madison sociology professor for
inviting anarchist Emma Goldman to speak to his students. The
committee’s chair inexpertly fastened the letters to a piece of
plywood and had the plaque cast, at a cost of $25.

[766597214_0abaa41db9_b.jpg]

The famed “sifting and winnowing” plaque that hangs on the Bascom
Hall exterior at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where Fredric
March’s name has been removed from a performance space he helped to
create.  (Spencer9/Flickr)

But, according to a 2019 UW–Madison article
[[link removed]], “The
Regents rejected the plaque, saying the students had been influenced
by radicals.” While the plaque “moldered” in the building’s
basement, committee members launched a pressure campaign that included
placards on Madison streetcars, chiding the Regents’ stance. Others
took up the cause.

“What is there in this declaration that can embarrass this
university in the light of day?” asked the _Wisconsin State
Journal_ in an editorial, “Let the Regents answer.” In 1915, the
Regents relented and the plaque was installed
[[link removed]],
exactly where it hangs today.

The 1894 case involved a complaint lodged
[[link removed]] against
Ely, known
[[link removed]] for “his
progressive views and interest in social reforms and organized
labor,” by state schools Superintendent Oliver E. Wells. Wells had
alleged, in a letter
[[link removed]] to _The
Nation_, that Ely encouraged strikes and boycotts and taught students
socialism and other “vicious theories.”

In a four-day trial, the Regents heard testimony from prominent
academics including Brown University President E. Benjamin Andrews,
who said getting rid of Ely “would be a great blow at freedom of
university teaching in general and at the development of political
economy in particular.” Ely also weighed in
[[link removed]]: “If I am
slaughtered, others in universities will perish, and what will become
of free speech, I do not know.”

The Regents cleared Ely unanimously, issuing its eventually famous
“sifting and winnowing” statement. The words are often interpreted
to mean that a university should let all points of view be heard. But
there is another, equally important message: that “the truth can be
found” through honest inquiry, and that finding it matters. This is
where the University of Wisconsin, hardly alone among institutions, is
failing miserably.

Exhibit A: the UW’s disgraceful treatment of Fredric March.

March, a star of stage and screen who died in 1975 at age
seventy-seven, was in his day “as central in the old Hollywood
firmament as Tom Hanks is today,” according to
[[link removed]] one
writer in _The New York Times_. He starred in films
including _Inherit the Wind_, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and the
original _A Star Is Born_. He is one of only two actors
[[link removed]] (along with Helen
Hayes) to win two Oscars and two Tonys, including one for his stage
portrayal of James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s _Long Day’s
Journey into Night_.

In 1919 and 1920, while he was a senior at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, March was a member
[[link removed]] of
an honors society of students called the Ku Klux Klan.

That, of course, sounds terrible, and has been treated as such. But,
as _The Hollywood Reporter_ put it in a recent article
[[link removed]],
getting to the truth “requires interested parties to dig deeper than
a tweet or a blog post.” It calls for some sifting and winnowing.

In October 2017, after the discovery that March and another prominent
UW alum for whom facilities in the student union were named belonged
to this group, the UW–Madison chancellor at the time, Rebecca Blank,
appointed an ad hoc committee to look into the matter. It met several
times before issuing a thirty-one-page report
[[link removed]] in
April 2018 which found “no evidence that this group was ever
affiliated with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” or engaged in
violence. Indeed, when an actual campus chapter of the Knights of the
KKK launched in 1922, after March had graduated, the group to which he
had belonged promptly changed its name to Tumas, whose multiple
meanings include, fittingly enough, “truth.”

Citing the university’s stated commitment to “fearless sifting and
winnowing,” the committee members, which included several people of
color, rejected arguments that anyone who belonged to a group called
the Ku Klux Klan should be either banished or absolved. They
acknowledged the shock that this name and its history evoked, but said
“we resist the impulse to resolve this sense of shock by purging the
names from our campus.”

Rather, the committee members advised, “the history the UW needs to
confront was not the aberrant work of a few individuals but a
pervasive culture of racial and religious bigotry, casual and
unexamined in its prevalence, in which exclusion and indignity were
routine, sanctioned in the institution’s daily life, and
unchallenged by its leaders.” They called on the university to do
“a great deal more than [purge] unpleasant reminders.” Instead of
renaming facilities, they urged “substantial institutional change to
address the legacies of this era.”

Slim chance of that.

The release of the ad hoc committee report prompted some UW–Madison
students to file
[[link removed]] a
“hate and bias report” with university officials. The university
in May 2018 covered up
[[link removed]] March’s
name from a performance space that he had played a role in creating,
along with that of the other alum from an art gallery in the same
building; both names were later removed. In 2020, UW–Oshkosh
officials also purged
[[link removed]] March’s
name from its campus theater.

These decisions have come under deserved criticism, in large part due
to the efforts of George Gonis, a UW–Madison alum who thinks it
ought to matter that March was actually not a member of a national
hate group but rather a lifelong champion of civil rights.

Gonis, a Milwaukee-based journalist and historian, has unearthed
records showing that March as a teenager gave an anti-white-supremacy
speech; was a primary sponsor of Marian Anderson’s historic 1939
concert at the Lincoln Memorial (held after she was denied
[[link removed]] use
of a smaller venue due to her race); met with Harry Belafonte and
Martin Luther King Jr. and a few dozen others for a strategy session
at a New York apartment in 1963; joined James Baldwin, Ossie Davis,
Sidney Poitier, and others in sending a telegram criticizing President
John F. Kennedy’s failure to protect the rights of the nation’s
Black citizens; and delivered the keynote speech at the NAACP’s
celebration, in 1964, of the tenth anniversary of the _Brown v. Board
of Education_ decision.

March is, Gonis says
[[link removed]],
“one of Hollywood’s greatest racial justice activists ever.”

A letter
[[link removed]] written
by Gonis calling on the UW–Madison to reverse its decision
was signed
[[link removed]] by
thirty prominent individuals in 2021 and another two dozen in 2022.
The signatories include actors Louis Gossett Jr., Mike Farrell, and
the late Ed Asner, Langston Hughes’s biographer Arnold Rampersad,
and Fighting Bob La Follette biographer Nancy Unger.

“We ask and urge the return—with all possible dispatch—of
Fredric March’s name to a place of honor on both the UW–Madison
and the UW–Oshkosh campuses,” the letter says, adding that the
“creed” of sifting and winnowing “demands both admitting and
then correcting mistakes.”

“The name of the campus’s Ku Klux Klan seems to have been an
accident,” John McWhorter, a Black opinion writer for _The New York
Times_ and Columbia University associate professor, wrote
[[link removed]] in
a column last year. “The students who got March’s name taken off
those buildings made a mistake, as did the administrators who [were]
seemingly too scared of being called racists to take a deep breath and
engage in reason.”

This fall, Turner Classic Movies celebrated March’s 125th birthday
by airing several of his films along with a video
[[link removed]] by
TCM host Ben Mankiewicz calling on the UW–Madison to reexamine the
allegations that caused “unfair damage to his reputation.”

But the university is unmoved. Completely.

“There are some things in our country’s history that are so toxic
that you can never erase the stain, let alone merit a named space in
our student union,” Blank wrote
[[link removed]] in
a 2021 letter to _The New York Times_. “Membership in a group with
a name like that of the K.K.K. is one of them.”

John Lucas, a university spokesperson, recently told
[[link removed]] _The
Hollywood Reporter_, “There are no plans for the institution to
revisit the issue.”

There should be. If the sifting and winnowing “by which alone the
truth can be found” matters, and it does, then the truth itself must
matter, too. Reality is more important than perception, for seekers of
the truth. All the folks at the UW–Madison need to do is read the
writing on the wall. 

_Bill Lueders, former editor and now editor-at-large of The
Progressive, is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin._

_Since 1909, The Progressive has aimed to amplify voices of dissent
and those under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of
championing grassroots progressive politics. Our bedrock values are
nonviolence and freedom of speech.  Based in Madison, Wisconsin, we
publish on national politics, culture, and events including U.S.
foreign policy; we also focus on issues of particular importance to
the heartland. Two flagship projects of The
Progressive include Public School Shakedown
[[link removed]], which covers efforts
to resist the privatization of public education, and The Progressive
Media Project [[link removed]], aiming to diversify our
nation’s op-ed pages. _

_You have the power to make a difference at THE PROGRESSIVE by
giving us the strength to grow—allowing us to dig deeper, hit
harder, and pull back the curtain further to hold accountable those
who abuse power!  THE PROGRESSIVE, INC. IS A 501(C)(3) AND ALL
DONATIONS ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW._

* Academic Freedom
[[link removed]]
* Cancel culture
[[link removed]]
* anti-racism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]