What is in a name?

For a long time Saint Paul Public Schools did not name schools after people, living or dead. When schools were significantly rebuilt they were given new, geographic names. Van Buren became Dayton’s Bluff, Deane became Parkway, Harrison became Phalen Lake. They refused to recycle an already used name [Mechanic Arts] for what became Arlington High school.

Then things changed. I think the first was allowing the new elementary school in the old Johnson building to keep Governor Johnson’s name. Quickly after came naming existing schools after the almost-dead Bruce Vento and the newly dead Paul and Sheila Wellstone. There was a lot of emotion in all three of these renamings.

Now we are learning that we might rename Webster School in honor of either Barack Obama or both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, both of whom are very much alive.

Whenever we rename something which has been named for one person to naming it for somebody else, one has to wonder why we are removing the name. Have we learned something about Daniel Webster which speaks ill of him?

We also need to remember that naming something after a living person poses risks. In 1962 and 1963 John Glenn was the great American hero. Schools, streets, and parks around the republic were named after him. I suspect that if President Kennedy had not been killed so soon after Glenn's orbits that many more things would have been given the Glenn name, but there was suddenly a big movement to name new things after the slain president. How many people would have guessed that they were naming something after a future politician? I don’t mean that there is necessarily anything wrong with politicians, but how many Republicans must have bit their tongues while they went into polling places at schools named “John Glenn” as they cast their votes?

Likewise, there were a lot of schools and other places named for Richard Nixon while he was the president.

I doubt that President Obama will do anything as embarrassing as Tricky Dick did and I know that there is some appeal in being the first [or at least first in the area] to jump on the let’s-name-something-after-Obama bandwagon, but maybe we could wait a bit.

Tom Conlon is not always right and if the DPP quotes him correctly, ["I can't think of any precedent where we named it after a living politician."] he is mistaken on this a bit since BruceVento was still living but he was terminally ill when East Consolidated was named after him, but in a way Conlon seems to make sense.