The Cornell University library has removed a bust of Abraham Lincoln and a plaque of the Gettysburg Address, which had sat in its Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections since 2018. The details surrounding the removal are murky, but a biology professor told the College Fix that the display was taken down following “a complaint.” It’s not the first time Lincoln’s name has been scrubbed from an institution in the fervor of post-2020 iconoclasm. I’m reminded of this passage from Russell Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles”:
It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.