The progressive cancel culture is canceling our culture
The NAACP, faith leaders, actors, and alumni wrote this week to the chancellors of the University of Wisconsin campuses at Madison and Oshkosh and to Gov. Tony Evers to restore the good name of a real-life civil right activist.
Or, as academic John McWhorter puts it “repeal the tarring and feathering of an alumnus of the school, the renowned actor Fredric March.” McWhorter also marvels over the banishment of the glacial erratic Chamberlin Rock in “The University of Wisconsin smears a once-treasured alum.”
Fredric March won an Oscar for maybe the greatest American film, Best Years of Our Lives. It was his second such award. March, a native Wisconsinsite, won a Tony Award for originating the role of the father in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway and played the classic Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
No mistake forgiven, no matter how innocent
But as a youth in 1920, he formed with fellow underclassmen a campus club they called “Ku Klux Klan.” Their club appears to have had no connection to the notorious Klan favored by Woodrow Wilson. No evidence its members engaged in racial harassment. The name was quickly changed before the real Klan came to campus in 1922. The naming of March’s Ku Klux Klan “seems to have been an accident,” McWhorter concludes. “Clumsy, probably.”
McWhorter recites the the actor’s many years of civil rights advocacy. “He was one of the white people who spoke on a national broadcast the NAACP sponsored in 1964 celebrating the 10th anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education. This is a Klansman?”
March in Seven Days in May. John McWhorter UW Chancellor Blank
Off with their names!
Didn’t matter. March’s name was stripped from student theaters on the Madison and Oshkosh campuses at the insistence of social justice warriors. Even though their feckless chancellors knew better! Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank commissioned a study that reported the naming was the naive mistake of underclassmen. McWhorter writes:
Oshkosh’s chancellor, Andrew Leavitt, acknowledged this history too, and said “there is no evidence to show that the UW-Madison group March belonged to was linked to the national movement of the Ku Klux Klan in its time.”
Throughout, there was apparently little or no investigation of what the man actually stood for.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Isn’t that the very definition of cancel culture? Our universities no longer tolerate sifting and winnowing. Thanks to a noisy bunch of Woke totalitarians and spineless academics it’s all winnowing and no sifting.
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
One would have hoped that Tommy Thompson might have instilled, imposed or compelled some type of fair minded critical thinking upon the university system and at least try to slow down their liberal woke nonsense but, I have not seen it as of yet.
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No wonder the D卐M☭CRATS want to cancel their culture, … if I shared their history and culture of racism, segregation and failure, I’d want it ethnically-cleansed and cancelled, too.
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Maybe they need to do better research on the history they want to banish or they deliberately are focusing on such items because they know most people are not going to check out the history of the 1920s -1960s to see what Frederic March actually did. They are capitalizing on the ignorance of the”woke
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Dave,
If Thompson will take an appointment with you, how about asking him yourself?
My considerable ire is not for the ignorant woke cultists because that would be like getting mad at a 7th grader for unsophisticated thinking, but rather the good-for-nothing academic honchos earning enormous tax funded salaries/benefits so they can make a mockery of what institutions of higher learning are supposed to be about. Disgraceful.
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Squire, sorry to break the news but Tommy isn’t going to “put a stop” to any of this.
If he was going to, he would’ve done it when he became system president, not on his way out. He is what? In his late 70’s.
Older Boomers in leadership positions aren’t going to “put a stop” to any of this. They are either too tired, or actually support the “tear it all down” B.S. (as long as their house, neighborhood, bank account, investments, and comfortable retirements aren’t adversely impacted).
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Tommy should restore the boulder to its original place on Observatory Drive and charge Freedom, Inc. and BLM for removal and retrieval, the proceeds deposited into state coffers.
He can also issue a directive restoring Fredric March’s name above the door to the Play Circle. Further, the sjws involved should be asked to apologize to Mr. March’s heirs and if they don’t, be suspended from the University.
I can dream, can’t I?
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And let us not forget alumnus Porter Butts, whose name no longer graces the Main Gallery, although his professional accomplishments are presented in an interactive kiosk. He also was maligned for being part of a social group that had nothing to do with the real Ku Klux Klan haters.
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This sucks!
First they take Chamberlin Rock off the university campus. (I remember climbing on that rock when I was a kid when I first came to Wisconsin.). Now they want to remove the name of Fredric March from any university function as an organization he belonged to has a name attached to it as a racist one.
Well, I for one am surprised by this as an organization that I used to belong to, (the FFA, Future Farmers of America), was and probably still is, made up of white people like me.
Does that make me a racist? Does that make me a mean person?
In my line of work I serve many different people. I do so gladly as I have a calling from Almighty God to serve others in need. I do so gladly for anyone of any class or color or culturural identity.
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Yoiks,! SO: If Frederic March BRIEFLY joined a popular pseudo fraternal organization in his early 20’s, then how many others (remember 15% of the populace were members) also NEED TO BE EXCORIATED & be scourged from fame & honor? How hypocritical if they some how elude the spotlight of Cancel Culture.
Below are some facts for the many “Richard-May-I-Calls-Ya-Dicks” who lurk this bastion of hope. Regular readers of this blog can skip it.
WIKI: The KKK: Beginning in 1921, it appealed to new members as a fraternal organization, of which many examples were flourishing at the time. Within the first six months of the Association’s national recruitment campaign, Klan membership had increased by 85,000. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. The main group’s membership had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s.
Also from WIKI: Frederick March was a member of an inter-fraternity society composed of leading students formed at the college in 1919 named the Ku Klux Klan. The fraternity organization was not affiliated with the national Ku Klux Klan.
WIKI: The Controversy: The fraternity, that March briefly was a member of, was not affiliated with the KKK.[5] When the collegiate organization was named, the (later national) KKK was a small regional organization. As the national KKK became more well known, the collegiate organization CHANGED ITS NAME. In contrast to the views of the national KKK, March was an outspoken proponent of the civil rights movement and worked with the NAACP.
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Older I get the more stupid I realize I have been.
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Thompson is just another old grifter; just like Gableman.
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Your statement is so stupid it does not require refutation.
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Institutions of higher learning are PRECISELY where the tolerance of sifting and winnowing should be occurring. It’s where young people SHOULD be exposed to new ideas and challenging old ones. What a shame.
“Our universities no longer tolerate sifting and winnowing. Thanks to a noisy bunch of Woke totalitarians and spineless academics it’s all winnowing and no sifting.”
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It won’t be TT that stops it, it will be big donors like John Morgridge coming to their senses.
But I won’t hold my breath for them to turn off the spigots.
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