To be candid, we had something more interesting than this planned for today but decided to wait a little bit before posting it. Instead we are focusing on a tempestuous teapot of an issue.

Post-Dispatch reporter Jack Suntrup asked a few days ago if there will ever be a portrait of Governor Eric Greitens hanging along with portraits of Missouri’s other governors at the Capitol.  The answer is, yes, there should be one.

The hanging of official portraits has been an irregular sort of thing.  Several recent governors’ portraits were missing until the Missouri Academy of Squires (as we remember the story) paid to have them painted.  Matt Blunt’s portrait does not appear between the portraits of Roger Wilson and Jay Nixon. Neither he nor anybody else has commissioned one.

There are no doubt some who think the circumstances of Greitens’ departure should prohibit his portrait from being placed in the building.

We respectfully disagree.

Refusing to allow a Greitens portrait amounts to trying to erase history.  He was elected.  He did serve.  He quit.  We cannot deny that by some arbitrary decision that his portrait doesn’t belong among portraits of statesmen.  And spies. And traitors. And drunks. Human beings are elected to the governorship.

Let’s consider Trusten Polk, Sterling Price, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke for example.

Polk, who served the shortest time as governor, became a U. S. Senator and was expelled from the Senate for disloyalty at the start of the Civil War when he cast his lot with the South. His portrait is in the collection and we’ve never heard anybody suggest it should be removed.

Sterling Price was a Confederate general during the Civil War and once led an army that threatened to try to capture Jefferson City by force of arms.  His portrait shows him wearing his Confederate uniform.  We’ve not heard anybody say he shouldn’t be recognized.

Claiborne Jackson was the governor who fled from Missouri when a U. S. Army general rejected his efforts to keep federal troops out of the state. Jackson set up a Confederate government in exile in Arkansas, where he died. He, Price, and Polk had taken oaths to defend the United States Constitution but then took up arms against their state and nation.

John S. Marmaduke is somewhat different.  He was a Confederate general who was nevertheless chosen by the people twenty years after the end of the Civil War to be the Governor of Missouri.  Haven’t heard any objections to his portrait being at the capitol.

James Wilkinson, twice a Revolutionary War General who was involved in shady deals and kicked out of the Army later became a general again and was involved with Aaron Burr’s plot to foment a western frontier revolution. He was a spy for the Spanish government when he was the governor.

Robert M. Stewart was known for his drunken escapades, one of which involved riding his horse into the governor’s mansion and feeding it from a sideboard that is in the present mansion.  He was a bachelor who sometimes employed female prisoners to work at the mansion. No, we don’t know what they did while they were there.  But nobody has suggested that character issues should keep his portrait from being provided.

Guy B. Park, a product of the Pendergast political machine of Kansas City, was just a Platte County Circuit Judge three weeks before his election as governor.  When the Democratic candidate died, Park was plucked from his bench, put at the top of the ticket, and won by a big margin.  His ties to Boss Tom Pendergast were supposedly so strong that the mansion became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

But his portrait is in the capitol.

These and other governors were humans, political animals of one stripe or another, who did what they had to do to get elected and to serve, or get elected to a lower office and move up to the governorship when the job became vacant for one reason or another.

The portraits are not intended to provoke unwarranted admiration for the men who have held this office. They are there to mark Missouri history.

So it is with Eric Greitens. He deserves some wall space because he was elected to fill some office space. Somebody, some day, will paint his portrait.  There won’t be a historical gap in the images of our governors.   People can look at his portrait as they look at the portraits of other governors and perhaps wonder what he did.

Or, most likely, they’ll glance at it and then move on to something more interesting—the big map of Missouri soils or the stagecoach or the big kettle used by the Boone family to boil salt water.