The Quiet Restoration of Statues Toppled in 2020 Underway

It all seems like a bad dream now. Well, actually more like a nightmare. It was 2020, and the nation was reeling from the death of George Floyd. Everywhere you looked, an outraged individual wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt was present. Angry leftists, under the guise of combatting racial injustice, began to pick away at American history by toppling statues across the country, resulting in hundreds of sculptures being either defaced or pulled down by incensed mobs.

Enter President Donald Trump and Executive Order 13934. The EO calls for the statuary to be returned to public viewing. He pointed out in the order:

“These statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal. They preserve the memory of our American story and stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten. These works of art call forth gratitude for the accomplishments and sacrifices of our exceptional fellow citizens who, despite their flaws, placed their virtues, their talents, and their lives in the service of our nation.”

Slowly but surely, these monuments are being brought back into public view, though often in different locations. To avoid future hassles, many of these statues now occupy private rather than public land. Still others are being repaired.

In June of 2020, three statues of Christopher Columbus were pulled down in three states: Virginia, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. The one in Boston suffered the indignity of being beheaded. Other monuments were broken into pieces, requiring a recovery operation to locate all the missing parts.

Thus far, the restoration of monuments has been slow and painstaking. A Maryland Columbus statue, broken into parts and thrown into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, has been mostly recovered. Still, a replica will have to suffice, as the original is too badly damaged.

Columbus took a beating in 2020 for sure, but it was the statuary related to the Civil War that bore the brunt of the violence. In Washington DC a statue of Confederate General Albert Pike was taken down. Pike was particularly controversial as the only outdoor monument in the nation’s capital honoring a member of the Confederacy. The monument was restored and returned to its place in DC’s Judiciary Square.

As the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary commences, DC appears to be undergoing a bit of a renovation. A statue of a Delaware signer of the Declaration of Independence was removed by protestors and later returned; this time, the monument of Caesar Rodney can be found in the District’s Freedom Plaza.

Other restoration projects dot the nation, including one monument honoring Robert E. Lee in Charleston, SC, and another, which came from Love Field in the Lone Star State, now stands tall in the Texas Rangers ballpark. In a creative twist, Louisiana lawmakers passed legislation allowing them to relocate all the removed monuments to state parks, according to the WSJ.

Statues Represent American History

The argument made by those replacing the statues, one painstaking project at a time, is that they acknowledge the American experience. As Vince Haley, advisor to the president, put it to the Wall Street Journal, “You either celebrate the 250th and the historic people and events and enter into the drama of the heroic choices made by the revolutionary generation or leave it to those who would readily distort our history and use it as a political instrument.”

The counterpoint is that monuments to flawed individuals should not be on public display. Held to that standard, there might never be a single statue erected. Many Americans still believe that these public symbols should explain the American experience, not sugarcoat it. Either way, it appears that we have moved past the violence and hatred of the BLM movement to a place where differing opinions can coexist without aggression. As former Pennsylvania Rep. Melissa Hart asserted in a post on her X account, “Looks like people are coming back to their senses.”