As noted recently in these pages (“Nullifying Calhoun,” Feb. 27), Yale University has decided to remove the name of alumnus John C. Calhoun from the “residential college”—Ivy-speak for “dormitory”—it has graced since the dorm was built in the 1930s. Calhoun, class of 1804, senator, vice president, and full-throated proponent of slavery and states’ rights, was deemed a “white supremacist,” a belief system that evidently flourished under his Yale education.
Left unmentioned was whether Yale has any plans to rename Morse College, the undergraduate dorm that honors Samuel F. B. Morse, class of 1810. Surely the scholars of the university realize that before co-inventing the telegraph, Morse had a career as a Nativist party politician and virulent opponent of immigration, especially from nations composed largely of one particular religious group.
Morse didn’t resort to code to denounce immigrants from Austria, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Ireland and all their Romish ways. In his 1835 screed, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, Morse wrote:
Just imagine what Morse would have said about undocumented Latin Americans crossing the southern border of the United States! So, in the interest of the historical hygiene so important to the modern academy, will Morse’s name be scrubbed from Yale’s walls? If not, The Scrapbook will be forced to conclude that Yale actively endorses anti-immigrant bigotry as long as it’s paired with anti-Catholic bigotry. Harrumph!
