Editorial: Why Henry Hyde's name should stay on the DuPage County courthouse

History often is complex and resistant to simple narratives. So are people.
So it is a needlessly divisive mistake for DuPage County Board Chair Deborah Conroy to push for her fellow board members to remove the name of the late Henry J. Hyde, longtime Republican congressman, from the county courthouse. The board is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the issue.
Hyde represented DuPage, which until recent years was a Republican power center, in Washington for more than three decades, retiring in 2007. During that time, Hyde wasn't some low-profile lifer in Congress. He was one of the House's most prominent members, even when he was serving in the minority, which is to say most of his career there.
Conroy's rationale for removing Hyde's name from the court building is that the staunchly anti-abortion politician was responsible for the Hyde Amendment, the provision in federal law that for decades barred spending federal taxpayer money on abortions with exceptions for rape, incest or endangerment to the life of the mother. 'It's strictly because of the Hyde Amendment, and it's very difficult for so many women to walk into the courthouse and see (his name),' she told the Tribune.
Abortion rights is an issue that only has grown more intense since Hyde died 10 months after his retirement. We understand the symbolic argument. But to strip his name from the building would be akin to removing Richard J. Daley's name from the courthouse in the heart of the Loop over a single issue — say, the police beating of protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention on his orders, the culture of corruption that the Daley machine fostered or his brutal segregationist policies.
Even many ardent Daley critics wouldn't suggest doing so. Why is that? Because Daley is a singularly important figure in the history of Chicago and to rename the Daley Center or Daley Plaza would be to try to negate that history.
Like Daley, Hyde was a complicated figure and far more than the name adorning a famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) piece of legislation. Memories are short, of course, but for most of his career Hyde was an intellectual heavyweight on the Republican side of the aisle. Agree or disagree, but when Hyde took the floor to speak, people listened.
And for good reason. He was a thoughtful conservative. Consider this: Hyde stepped down in 1981 from the advisory board of the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee after Executive Director Peter Gemma Jr. identified incumbent lawmakers the group planned to work to defeat. Hyde objected to targeting officeholders over a single issue.
Much the way the DuPage board is considering doing Tuesday.
Would the Democratic majority on the DuPage board consider themselves in favor of reasonable gun regulation? If so, against the consensus of his party, Hyde in 1994 voted for President Bill Clinton's ban on assault weapons, demonstrating that he could be persuaded to change his mind on a monumental issue of the day. Just three years earlier, he had voted against the same ban. Hyde reversed himself after reading detailed accounts of gun victims in Chicago, provided by Democratic Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois. 'At the end of reading this list of bloody crimes, I had to conclude these guns have no purpose but to kill a lot of people very rapidly,' Hyde said. 'It wasn't like falling off a horse on the road to Damascus. But like many things complicated and emotional, you don't dwell on them unless forced to.'
Hyde's change of heart induced Illinois Rep. Bob Michel, then GOP minority leader, and dozens more Republicans to vote for the ban. Such political courage is almost impossible to imagine on today's Capitol Hill.
Of course, four years later Hyde led Clinton's impeachment proceedings on behalf of the House before the Senate, leading critics to disclose Hyde's yearslong extramarital affair decades earlier and accusing him of hypocrisy. Hyde admitted to cheating on his wife but claimed Clinton's alleged wrongdoing was about Clinton's cover-up attempts rather than his actual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The public didn't buy it, and Hyde paid a reputational price in the process.
All of this is to say that Henry Hyde was complicated. Just like most people.
But what is indisputable is that he was one of the most important political figures to emerge from DuPage County. Ever. His name should stay on that courthouse.
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