It's never pleasant watching politicians try to manipulate history. Whether it's an ex-president blocking release of incriminating White House tapes, the Russian government closing a KGB archive to foreign researchers or Japanese officials forcing a school textbook author to excise references to World War II-era atrocities, the public's ability to learn the truth about historic events is hobbled.
The imminent removal from the U.S. Capitol of a statue of Thomas Starr King, a charismatic San Francisco minister and orator credited with helping keep California in the Union during the run-up to the Civil War, hardly qualifies as a major crime against history. Yet the successful effort by California Republicans to replace him in the National Statuary Hall Collection with a larger-than-life sculpture of Ronald Reagan is troubling nonetheless.
King has adorned the statuary collection, a sort of national hall of fame, since 1931. In a June 3 ceremony, a 7-foot-tall figure of Reagan will replace King's bust, which will be shipped to Sacramento for display in the state Capitol.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who says the Gipper inspired him as a boy, orchestrated the move to bump King. No doubt the congressman and other Republican stalwarts feel they can honor their hero by strewing the land with as many smiling likenesses of him as possible.
But although Reagan arguably has been sufficiently memorialized (with an airport, a museum, highways, courthouses, post offices, state office buildings and parks named after him, and his own postage stamp), King needs all the exposure he can get.
Fair-haired and small-framed, the Unitarian Universalist minister arrived in San Francisco in April 1860, a year before the Civil War erupted and as the state was embroiled in the slavery issue.
Californians had banned slavery in their 1849 Constitution, partly from moral revulsion but mostly because gold miners didn't want to compete with slave labor. But many transplanted Southerners viewed California as ideal for slaves and hoped to split off Southern California and turn it into a slave state. Meanwhile, wealthy Southern California landowners, angry at state taxes, wanted to break away and form their own separate republic.
