EDITORIAL: San Francisco breaks out the air brushes and scalpels

In his 1997 book, “The Commissar Vanishes,” David King presents a photographic record of Joseph Stalin’s penchant for consigning to the shadows of history those who had fallen into disfavor with his authoritarian regime.

“Photographs for publication were retouched and restructured with airbrush and scalpel to make once-famous personalities vanish,” Mr. King writes in his introduction. “Paintings, too, were often withdrawn from museums and art galleries so that compromising faces could be blocked out of group portraits. Entire editions of works by denounced politicians and writers were banished to the closed sections of the state libraries and archives or simply destroyed.”

Decades later, the urge to whitewash history in service to ideological extremism still burns deeply in some souls. The latest example comes from San Francisco, where the school board recently voted 6-1 to erase nearly four dozen names from campuses — names that include George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere.

The list of offenses by these historical suspects generally reflects the failure of mortal men and women of centuries past to comport with modern standards of racial and social “justice.” But the move smacks less of a serious discussion about how to reconcile the reality of great achievers and their flaws than an example of woke preening.

School board president Gabriela López called the change “an opportunity for our students to learn” about new and old school names. That’s utter bunk. There is indeed an important discussion to be had about honoring tainted historical figures, but that discussion was absent in The City by the Bay.

Rather than offering kids a chance “to learn” about the history of school names, the board adopted the recommendations of a “blue-ribbon panel” that included no input from historians and little feedback from residents or students, notes Joe Eskenazi of the Mission Local news site.

“We’re being confronted with all-or-nothing choices when it comes to our founding history, monuments or school names,” Washington biographer Alexis Coe told Mr. Eskenazi. “That’s not how history works, or our lives work or how anything works.”

Meanwhile, as it toils to scrub every “offensive” moniker from schools, the board has done little to get most students back into the classroom. Priorities and all.

Reason.com reports that a petition to stop the renaming push has 10,000 signatures. “I don’t know anybody personally who doesn’t think it’s embarrassing,” one parent told The New York Times. It’s “a caricature of what people think liberals in San Francisco do.”

But it’s not a caricature if it’s not an exaggeration. History will not look kindly on those who demand perfection in exchange for honor. And there’s a certain delicious irony in that.