Fifty-Fifty – Or Fight!

Robert Mueller just spoke. The word IMPEACH, is in the air. You can not arrest a sitting President for crimes. But, you can hold a Kangaroo Curt and put a dead Senator on trial. Where are Benton’s accusers – and their testimony? This is not putting history on trial. This is putting a MAN on trial. How many Bills did Benton author that were made into the Law of the Land? Have any of them been overturned?

When laws are broken, there are consequences. Taking Benton’s name off two buildings is a way to punish Benton – and his kin? Who decided this punishment did not go far enough? Whose idea was it to place a Perpetual Punishment Device in each building. Is this a device made to escape the idea censorship is not happening?

Ed Ray, there will be consequences if you do the following. You have forfeited all rights to own any of my family history. Fork it over! Send it UPS. I have communicated with an attorney.

“Beginning this academic year, we will develop public educational materials that will share the histories of these three buildings and their previous namesakes. These public displays will be within each of these buildings. As well, we will provide similar information within Gill Coliseum and Arnold Dining Center – two buildings whose names last fall I announced would not change. In the years ahead, OSU will document and display the history of all university buildings within each respective building, on the university website and within a mobile app.”

Seven states (Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington) have counties named after Benton. Two counties (Calhoun County, Alabama and Hernando County, Florida) were formerly named Benton County in his honor. During Reconstruction, Benton County, Mississippi, was misrepresented by residents as being named after Benton. Bentonville, Indiana was named for the senator,^[17] as were Bentonville, Arkansas and Benton Harbor, Michigan. Additionally, the fur trading post and now community of Fort Benton, Montana, for which bentonite is named, was named after Benton.^[18] In July of 2018, the president of Oregon State University, Ed Ray, announced that three campus buildings would be renamed due to their namesakes’ racism. One of these buildings, formerly known as the Benton Annex after Benton, became the Hattie Redmond Women and Gender Center.^[19] The choice to rename it after Redmond was made to recognize her efforts as an Oregonian suffragist.^[20]

Uniquely, Benton has been the subject of biographical study by two men who later became presidents of the United States. In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt published a biography of Benton.^[21] Benton is also one of the eight senators profiled in John F. Kennedy‘s Profiles in Courage.^[22]

Below is the official study that begins thus;

“The historical reports on OSU building namesakes show that people who lived in the past were complex. In some cases, it may not be easy to make cut and dry conclusions about whether these building namesakes held or acted on exclusionary views.”

The historical reports on OSU building namesakes show that people who lived in the past were complex. In some cases, it may not be easy to make cut and dry conclusions about whether these building namesakes held or acted on exclusionary views. The lack of primary sources, disagreement among sources, and contradictions in individuals’ own behaviors, result in many “grey areas” where the evidence is inconclusive. The research team members refrained from making recommendations about building names. It will be up to the OSU community—faculty, students, staff, administrators, and Corvallis residents—to discuss and debate the legacies of these historical figures. It is our hope that the historical reports will generate an honest, open dialogue about the past, and about OSU’s present mission and values.

In August 2017, the Building and Place Names Evaluation Workgroup began the process of generating historical reports on four OSU campus buildings and their namesakes under consideration. These buildings/namesakes were Arnold Dining Center (Benjamin Lee Arnold), Avery Lodge (Joseph C. Avery), Benton Hall and Annex (Thomas Hart Benton), and Gill Coliseum (Amory T. “Slats” Gill). The purpose of these reports was to gather and analyze historical evidence to explore, reveal, and contextualize the lives and viewpoints of the namesakes, and the histories of the buildings.

Research Team Dr. Stacey L. Smith (OSU history department) assembled a research team made up of scholars from OSU and the broader Oregon community and coordinated the research with the OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC). The research team scholars were chosen for their extensive professional credentials in history or related disciplines, their strong record of high quality research and publication, and their expertise on the eras in which the building namesakes lived or the controversies surrounding them. The research team included:

Dr. Thomas Bahde (Arnold Dining Center): Thomas Bahde earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, with an emphasis in the 19th-century United States and comparative slavery. He teaches in the Honors College at Oregon State University and is the author of The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Ohio University Press, 2014).

Dr. Stephen Dow Beckham (Benton Hall): Stephen Dow Beckham is the Pamplin Professor of History, Emeritus, Lewis & Clark College. A graduate of the University of Oregon (B.A.) and UCLA (Ph.D.), Beckham taught for 42 years.  His courses covered U.S. History, the American West, Native Americans, and seminars in research methods.  He is a former “Oregon Professor of the Year” and recipient of the Asher Distinguished Teaching Award, American Historical Association.  He is the author of numerous books, articles, monographs, expert witness reports, and has served as the writer of museums exhibits and master plans from the Library of Congress to the Hong Kong Museum of History.  Beckham and his wife reside in Lake Oswego.  They are heavily involved in the Beckham Estate Vineyard growing and producing Pinot noir wines.

Dr. Marisa Chappell (Gill Coliseum): Marisa Chappell earned her Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University in 2002 and is an associate professor of history at OSU. Her expertise is in post-1945 U.S. history with an emphasis on politics, social policy, and the political economy of race and gender. She has published The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and co-authored Welfare in the United States: A History with Documents (Routledge, 2009). She is currently working on a book about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which organized low- and moderate-income Americans in the last third of the twentieth century.

3  |  SENATOR THOMAS HART BENTON, BENTON HALL, AND BENTON ANNEX   OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Dwaine Plaza (Gill Coliseum): Dwaine Plaza earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from York University, Canada, in 1996. His is a professor of sociology at OSU and Associate Dean of the OSU College of Liberal Arts. His research expertise is on migration in the English-speaking Caribbean, and he has also conducted and published extensive research on immigrant communities in Oregon and the history of race and athletics at Oregon State University. He has received research grants from the Canadian International Development Research Grant and the Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigrants and Settlement. He is also the winner of the Oregon Innovators in Education Award (2000) and the OSU College of Liberal Arts Bill Wilkins Teaching Award (1999). Dr. Stacey L. Smith (Avery Lodge): Stacey L. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2008 and is an associate professor of history at OSU. Her scholarship focuses on connecting the history of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction with the history of the North American West. She is the author of Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), which won the inaugural David Montgomery Prize in U.S. labor history from the Organization of American Historians. She has also published articles in the Pacific Historical Review, the Oregon Historical Quarterly, and the Journal of the Civil War Era. She is currently working on a book on African American abolitionists and civil rights activists in the Pacific West.
Methods and Approaches There is a great deal of information and misinformation circulating about each of these OSU buildings and their namesakes. For this reason, the researchers agreed to adhere to rigorous research standards. Whenever possible, they documented their claims with primary sources, first-hand accounts of historical events, including newspaper articles, oral histories, census records, diaries, letters, and official institutional or government documents. They drew extensively on primary sources in the holdings of OSU SCARC. Archivists Larry Landis and Natalia Fernandez, and graduate student assistant Michael Dicianna, provided invaluable help in locating these sources. Dwaine Plaza and Marisa Chappell also reached out to longtime OSU and Corvallis community members to collect oral histories about Amory T. “Slats” Gill. Susan Hayes, a Corvallis community member, donated her time, expertise, and research materials to help the research team reconstruct the history of the Benton County citizens’ fundraising campaign to build Benton Hall. The research team also relied on secondary sources, accounts written by historians. They avoided non-scholarly secondary sources such as anonymous or crowd-sourced websites, blogs, or nonscholarly history books without thorough citations. They depended, instead, on scholarly books with extensive citations. The researchers also tried to address apocryphal or unsubstantiated information circulating about each namesake. Finally, the research team extensively documented their own research with detailed footnotes. The team strongly encourages readers to examine the footnotes carefully for more information about the historical sources on which the reports are based