The Corn Latitudes

Disputes about how and for whom to name state buildings are trivial in the larger scheme but in my case covering the trivial was the perfect marriage of talent and topic.

 

In a 2010 column titled “A school by any other name” I explored the changing fashions in naming public buildings. I noted that public officials eager to not be caught endorsing anyone who might later be revealed as odious have quit naming public buildings after worthy public people as well. The tricky bit is, who is a public citizen worthy of remembering? And who decides?

 

The General Assembly recently reminded us why the job should not be left to legislators. Acting in the waning days of this General Assembly on a suggestion mooted last August by Mr. [Patrick] Quinn, lawmakers in both houses agreed to a joint resolution designating the Illinois State Museum’s main building at Spring and Edwards the Alan J. Dixon Building of the Illinois State Museum.

Recent legislatures have usually been too wise to act on Quinn’s suggestions and they would have been wise to ignore this one. Sure, Al the Pal was a nice guy, but in a forty-year career in politics and government he did nothing, said nothing, stood for nothing. His success owed to working very hard to never offend, his achievement was to never lose an election until the one that retired him. As a U.S. senator, he comported himself like an alderman. Public honors should be commensurate with public accomplishments; too bad they closed the café in the statehouse basement—an Alan Dixon Pork Tenderloin would have been a perfect addition to the menu.

Whether any of the members who voted for it reflected on the aptness of naming a major building after Dixon in a capital city that has not even a minor building named for such heroes of Illinois government as Thomas Ford or Henry Horner cannot be known, but even if they did, it evidently was not enough to give them pause.

If you’re going to go around naming stuff, the stuff you name should at least bear some relation to the accomplishments of the people you name it after. This was done handsomely when they named Springfield’s newer publicly owned power plants after V. Y. Dallman, the newspaperman who’d advocated the creation of CWLP. Ditto the Ogilvie Transportation Center in the west Loop; Governor Ogilvie had made transportation a major state government priority by establishing IDOT and pushing passage of the $900 million Transportation Bond Act of 1971 (then the largest in Illinois history) to fund highway, air, and public transit improvements.   

In the case of the State of Illinois’s museum of anthropology and natural sciences, the honoree should be a stalwart legislative defender of public science or one of the museum administrators who built the institution or the scientists who filled it with treasures. The museum did that itself when it honored Thorne Deuel, the director from 1938 to 1963, by naming the building’s auditorium after him. The legislators didn’t take the hint, but then I doubt many of them have even set foot in the place.

At least the lawmakers named only the museum’s building after Dixon and not the institution itself. In 2003 the State Library was renamed the Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library. The honoree in that case at least had a connection to Illinois literary culture but seemliness was obtained at the cost of confusion. Is the Gwendolyn Brooks state library merely one in a system of state libraries? Is the Gwendolyn Brooks State Library the state library that is devoted to the works and life of Gwendolyn Brooks?

State lawmakers will always be tempted to flatter themselves by attaching the name of one of their own to public property, and slapping the name of one of their own on something the state has already paid for is cheaper than commissioning a statue. Such gestures are perfectly expressive of the culture—clubby, sentiment, insular—of every provincial and mostly male legislature. Unfortunately they are not a perfect way to name public buildings. This form of commemoration amounts to official graffiti, scrawled on public buildings to celebrate the gang when no one is looking.

How to do it better? I say auction off the naming rights to every state-owned facility. The state needs the money, and letting the rights go to whomever has the most money would at least honor those Illinoisans who excelled in the only way that excellence is measured these days. We could start with the Bruce V. Rauner Illinois Executive Mansion. His money put the man in it; it might as well be used to put his name on it. ●