I’m old enough to remember when the Democratic Party Founders Day Dinner was called the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, named for Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, whom the party traditionally calls its founders. The Republican Party’s equivalent is usually called a Lincoln Dinner, Reagan Dinner, Lincoln–Reagan Dinner, or Lincoln–Reagan–Trump Dinner. Because of controversies over Jefferson’s slaveholding and Jackson’s policy toward Native Americans and the Trail of Tears, Democratic Party organizations have been removing Jefferson and Jackson from the titles of party fundraisers. State Democratic Parties are renaming their iconic Jefferson-Jackson dinners to embrace a more modern identity.
Now Cesar Chavez is the latest to have his legacy quietly cancelled by the modern left over decades-old abuse allegations that were not a secret even when Chavez was alive. Events honoring labor leader Cesar Chavez are being canceled across California, Arizona, and beyond, with statues draped or slated for removal and calls mounting to rename streets, schools, and the state holiday bearing his name, after a New York Times investigation detailed decades-old allegations that he sexually abused women and girls while leading the United Farm Workers union. The revelations have prompted swift action from the same organizations and Democratic strongholds that once celebrated Chavez as a civil rights hero. The United Farm Workers, which he co-founded, announced it would skip all Cesar Chavez Day events and set up a channel for victims to come forward.
Democrats and progressives seem to face similar reckonings regularly. Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic president and progressive icon, had his name stripped from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs in 2020 after the board concluded his racist thinking and policies, including segregation of the federal workforce and praise for the Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation, made him an inappropriate namesake. The university also renamed Wilson College to First College. We are still waiting for the 16th Amendment to be cancelled over Wilson’s racist past.
Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood and a champion of the early 20th-century birth-control movement aligned with progressive causes, had her name removed from the organization’s flagship New York City building in 2020. Planned Parenthood distanced itself from her documented support for eugenics, which included racist undertones about improving the human race by limiting births among certain groups.
Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs — a five-time presidential candidate whose labor activism and ideas profoundly shaped the Democratic left — has been scrutinized for early statements in the 1890s supporting racial segregation on trains and keeping Black workers out of certain jobs in the South.
A similar dynamic has played out with civil rights icons, though cancellation has been far less pronounced. Malcolm X, the influential Black nationalist leader and onetime Nation of Islam spokesman, had a well-documented criminal background in his youth as “Detroit Red,” including running gambling rackets, dealing drugs, committing burglaries, and working as a pimp in Boston and Harlem — activities that landed him in prison before his religious conversion and transformation. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Democratic-aligned civil rights giant, faced posthumous revelations from FBI surveillance tapes and historical research of extensive womanizing, including repeated extramarital affairs during his travels and allegations of sexual misconduct at gatherings.
The right has long argued that cancel culture, once aimed mainly at conservatives and long-dead historical figures and founding fathers, now consumes the left’s own pantheon when inconvenient histories surface and they are once again forced to destroy one of their own at the altar of progressivism, which allows no opportunity for nuance or historical consideration.
For now, the rapid response to the allegations against Chavez fits a broader trend: Even icons once embraced by the left and Democratic Party are not immune when their pasts clash with modern progressive standards.
