Statues and Names

You knew this was going to happen.

With the drive to remove Confederate monuments in the South in full force, New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is calling for the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle to be removed.  The argument goes, after all, that Columbus was a genocidal maniac who exterminated indigenous tribes in the Caribbean and introduced slavery to the New World.  New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has acknowledged that the possible removal of the statue is under consideration, leading Italian-Americans to rally in favor of keeping the Columbus statue there, saying that Columbus had flaws like anyone else and that he represents the presence of Italians in the New World.  (De Blasio, of course, is Italian-American.)

This is just the sort of Pandora's box that many liberals feared would be opened if the monument issue were taken any further than removing statues of the leaders of the Confederacy - the so-called "slippery slope."  The statue of Columbus, erected in 1892 to honor the four hundredth anniversary of his arrival in the New World, was placed there with funds raised by Italian-American groups to celebrate their heritage.  The culture wars are being fought on battle lines drawn along ethnic groups . . . the Italians versus the Puerto Ricans, almost like something out of West Side Story.  Mark-Viverito, a Puerto Rican of partial Italian origin, will probably end up hating . . . herself.

Columbus Circle itself could easily be renamed if the statue comes down.  In Chicago, Columbus Park may not be renamed, but James Dukes, the pastor of the Liberation Christian Center Church on the South Side, is calling for the removal of a statue of George Washington near Washington Park and the renaming of Washington Park, as well as the renaming of nearby Jackson Park, because Washington and Andrew Jackson were slave owners. He proposed that the parks could keep their names, but in honor of other people similarly named - the late Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who lived in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s.  If naming Jackson Park after a living person named Jackson is a problem, Jackson Park could be named after another one of Dukes' suggestions - Michael Jackson.

What?

And now even monuments for Civil War Union generals are under scrutiny, such as the General Grant National Memorial - Grant's Tomb - in New York (and it's under scrutiny by the city, not the National Park Service that operates it) because Ulysses S. Grant is alleged to have been anti-Semitic, a canard that has since been disproved.  So, eh, how are you gong to take down a mausoleum?  And is Chicago going to rename Grant Park while we're at it?

Uh, yeah, this is what Steve Bannon wants.  More identity politics.  There are a great number of reasons to take down Confederate statues, and there may be good reasons to remove Columbus statues, but there is no reason to take down a statue of George Washington, the Father of Our Country and the man who got the Republic up and running, or renaming a park named for him.  Andrew Jackson is a more complicated figure, having driven Indians from their lands and having settled quarrels with duels but also having peacefully settled the question of the sanctity of the Union in the Nullification Crisis of 1832 and having expanded the democratic franchise, albeit selectively, beyond wealthy property owners.  And he defended New Orleans from the British.  Although Jackson didn't give the vote to women and to freemen of color, that would have been too radical for anyone to propose in the 1830s, and many upper-class Americans of Jackson's day found his advocacy for enfranchising the common man radical enough.

We can't really judge historical figures by the standards of our time.  Someone who doesn't seem enlightened now probably was for his or her own time.  In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln believed that the black man was a human being, entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and had the right to be a free laborer instead of laboring for free - all radical statements in 1850s Illinois.  But his ambivalence toward black political rights - an ambivalence he had largely disavowed by the time of his assassination - was in keeping with the attitudes of the times.

Be that as it may, someone torched a Lincoln bust in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood recently - twice.  

Above is the Lincoln bust at 69th Street and Wolcott Avenue, which has since been removed to protect it from further vandalism at the behest of Raymond Lopez, a Chicago alderman, after it was vandalized.  The photo below from 2015 shows it before it was vandalized.

This is all getting crazy.

However, I would not be against other efforts to cleanse public parks and streets of the memories of history's more unsavory figures.  Like the statue in Philadelphia of Frank Rizzo, the racist mayor of the city in the 1970s.  And, back in June 2017, some Chicago kids petitioned the city to rename Douglas Park, named for Stephen Douglas, the nineteenth-century U.S. Senator from Illinois and would-be President, for Frederick Douglass by simply adding an "s" to the name . . . because Stephen Douglas championed slavery.  And he did.  While Douglas was consistent in his position that permitting or prohibiting slavery in a state or territory was for the people of said state or territory to decide - he supported the decision of the people of Kansas to ban slavery against the wishes of his own Democratic Party - he was by no means opposed to slavery itself.  He happened to own a plantation in Mississippi.  And it would also do Chicago good to remove the Balbo Monument on Lake Shore Drive and also rename Balbo Avenue, which honor Italo Balbo, an Italian aviator and military leader who flew a plane from Rome to Chicago in 1933 for Chicago's centennial celebrations.  General Balbo was in fact a minion of Benito Mussolini and a proud fascist.

Awk-ward!

Face it, Italo Balbo is heralded in Chicago simply for flying there from Rome and not crashing.

Anyway, Chicago is not about to rename Washington Park or Jackson Park.  Grant's Tomb in New York is safe.  And a lot of people are tired of hearing about the statue and name controversies that have gone beyond the Confederate monuments - which, again, should be removed, as they honor participants in an armed insurrection against the government - and want to hear more about jobs and the economy. And if the left gets bogged down in controversies over honors for Washington, Lincoln and, say, John F. Kennedy (why not change the name of New York's international airport back to Idlewild, since Kennedy was a grotesque philanderer who lied about his health?), it's never going to connect with voters' biggest concerns.

Me, I'd be happy if they just rename places for things instead of people, because if you name anything for anyone, you're going to offend someone for one reason or another.  Look, London has squares and circles, or "circuses," named for other places in England (Leicester Square, Oxford Circus), so why not name places in Manhattan after other places in New York State?  They could have Albany Square, Rochester Square, and in place of Columbus, Buffalo Circle!  Yeah, put a statue of a bison in the middle of it!

Yeah, they'll sell the naming rights to squares and circles first.  My least favorite  Manhattan place names are the names for squares honoring newspapers, one of which folded decades ago.  "Times Square."  "Herald Square."  Do you realize how ridiculous those sound?