After intense pressure from Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), the Biden administration rescinded its plan to remove a statue of William Penn from National Park Service land Monday. But the continued preservation of our nation’s history should not be dependent on a state’s governor sharing the same political party as the current occupant of the White House.
Congress should act to stop such historical destruction.
If it is not stopped, what or who is next? Removing the statues of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln from the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials? Renaming the Washington Monument as the “Nation’s Big Tall Obelisk”? Or is obelisk a no-no because the ancient Egyptians used a lot of them?
With scant explanation, the National Park Service announced it would take down the statue of Penn and a model of his iconic house from Welcome Park, an open space expressly set aside to honor Penn’s life. Named for the ship Welcome, on which Penn took 136 mostly Quaker souls in a harrowing oceanic journey to the New World in 1682, the park is a tribute in grass and trees, fresh air, and architecture to one of the most admirable of all the early Americans.
Peace-loving and honest, Penn was famous for his warm relations with Native American tribes and for scrupulously abiding by the terms of contracts he signed with them. He ensured Native Americans had the right to fair trials against settlers. Penn also was the author of the Charter of Privileges, a worthy forerunner to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that protected religious liberty and property rights and established the consent of the governed as a guiding principle of civic order.
Yet to left-wing activists with whom Biden has populated his administration, European settlers in the Americas are guilty of the twin offenses of being white and of creating homes on land where tribes roamed. Honoring settlers and this nation’s founders is anathema to these crusaders, who regard European history as evil per se and want it to be expunged. The only excuse the National Park Service offered for removing the Penn statue is that it wants an “expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia” while it “provide[s] a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience.”
Accurate? What kind of accuracy can a park have if it expunges history by eliminating physical memorials to the man in honor of whom the park was built? Philadelphia was built on lands used by Native Americans but without rancor from those peoples. The city itself was an entirely European creation. What, then, is the “Native American history” of a city they didn’t build?
Nowhere does the National Park Service explain why paeans to Native American culture and their cooperation with Penn cannot be added to the park without removing Penn from it. How can a park honoring Penn be “inclusive” if it excludes the park’s very reason for being? For that matter, there is the simple absurdity of trying to erase the man whom the state itself is named after. There is no limiting principle on the Left’s cultural and historical vandalism, so we can expect agitation soon for the renaming of the state.
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Rabid insistence on replacing real history with performative homages to “oppressed peoples” has become a desperate contagion. It’s part of a Trotskyite effort not just to learn from history and move on from it but to erase it altogether. In this nihilistic campaign, no memorial is safe, not even that of the most admirable of men or of causes. Thus, we have seen the race agitators pushing the idea that “all dead white males are evil,” even in forcing the removal of statues of the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin, who headed a society for the abolition of slavery.
While the preservation of Penn is welcome news, Congress should not wait for the woke activists in the Biden administration to choose their next target. Congress should pass a new law requiring concurrence from Congress before any other monument or statue on federal land can be renamed or removed. This isn’t to say all memorials should be sacrosanct. The onus, however, should be on those who would tear them down rather than on those who would maintain what we have inherited from earlier generations.