The New York City Council is considering a measure that would demolish or remove iconic statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from their longtime sites in Manhattan.
Never mind that Washington, leader of the American Revolutionary Army and first U.S. president, has been honored for two centuries as the “father of his country”—including having America’s capital named after him. Never mind that Jefferson was the chief author of the Declaration of Independence. Both men owned slaves during their lifetimes. And that was enough for some of New York’s leaders.
Other statues that the council is considering removing from New York’s streets and public parks include statues of Christopher Columbus and Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s last Dutch governor. Historians have accused both of contributing to the abuse of Native Americans by European colonizers.
The city council has already removed—in 2021—a 7-foot-tall statue of Jefferson that had stood in its chambers for almost 200 years. There have also been repeated calls to take down New York’s most prominent statue of Columbus, which stands atop a 76-foot column at Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan. The monument, erected during the 1890s at the behest of the city’s Italian American population, has recently been defaced several times with red paint.
The New York proposals are the latest chapter in an ongoing nationwide movement to remove visual reminders of once-highly regarded historical figures whose deeds and ideas didn’t always comport with contemporary notions of acceptable morality.
It began with attacks on the hundreds of Confederate monuments and memorials erected in public spaces across the South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now viewed as symbols of Jim Crow and white supremacy, so far more than 160 of them have now either been taken down by local authorities or torn down by protesters.
Nearly all of these removals have occurred after 2015, when nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered in a shooting by white supremacist Dylann Roof. The 2020 death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis spurred 110 Confederate statue removals alone.
It didn’t take long for the movement to spread to the North, where the targets were statues of other figures who could be associated with the slave trade or the exploitation of Native Americans. Columbus, said to be the third-most venerated figure in American public sculpture (after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln), with at least 149 public monuments in his honor due largely to efforts by Italian Americans, was the most visible target.
Protesters destroyed, beheaded, or vandalized at least seven statues of Columbus in such cities as Baltimore, Boston, and Houston during the riot-torn summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death. That same summer, the San Francisco Arts Commission removed and put into storage a statue of Columbus atop Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill after it had been vandalized and there were threats to throw it into San Francisco Bay. In Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther permanently removed a statue of Columbus that had stood in front of City Hall for more than six decades. This is in a city specifically named after the Italian explorer.
Junípero Serra, founder of the chain of Spanish missions in California and canonized as a Catholic saint by Pope Francis, has seen the statuary erected in his honor in that state practically erased in recent years, on the charge that he abused his Indian converts. Indigenous activists in 2020 toppled statues of Serra in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the state capital, Sacramento. In Ventura, California, the site of one of Serra’s missions, the city council ordered the removal of two statues of Serra that had stood outside and inside City Hall.
This assault on statuary is an assault on history. It was, of course, gravely wrong for America to even tolerate slavery, and American Indians were often treated in a manner that ranged from indifference to outright cruelty. Yet George Washington was a genuinely monumental figure whose military acumen enabled a ragtag collection of colonies to defeat a powerful nascent empire. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”) was a template for a genuinely color-blind society. Columbus was a genuinely brilliant and farsighted explorer who opened up the first significant contact between the New World and the Old. The statue removal movement asks us to forget all this in the name of punishing figures of the past for failing to conform to contemporary progressive ideology.
But it’s even worse than rewriting history. It’s erasing history. When we start removing the statues of historical figures of whom we disapprove, we have to remove everything else: the streets, highways, parks, universities, and cities named in their honor and even the memory itself. We have to reenact Year One of the French Revolution—or the Cultural Revolution in China, when the Red Guards systematically destroyed every artifact of thousands of years of Chinese civilization that they could find.
But this is the very aim of the statue removal movement: to leave us with nothing except what the movement’s progressive proponents can control.
