Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments

The edifice for the toppled statue of U.S. Grant in Golden Gate Park

The early summer of 2020 brought a wave of iconoclasm to America and San Francisco. Locally, the statue of Christopher Columbus on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill was vandalized and preemptively removed. Statues of Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra and Ulysses S. Grant were toppled. A statue of Manuel Cervantes was also vandalized.

Erin L. Thompson's Smashing Statues examines both the reasons for erecting and toppling public monuments. For Thompson "monuments aren't history lessons"; they come into existence to serve the interests of the powerful in society. She also opines that the vandalism and destruction of these monuments "happens when people who lack the power to change a political regime attack its symbols."

She devotes a good deal of space to the post-reconstruction proliferation of Confederate monuments in America's South. These were transparently commissioned and created as weapons to enforce the violence of segregation and inequality. Thompson describes them as "hatred hardened into marble and bronze." She advocates for their removal noting that it is not enough to add contextualizing language or supplement them with additional artworks as a counter-balance.

But she does present a different perspective on these monuments from John Guess Jr., the CEO of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. He reminds us that they are evidence of past wrongs telling Thompson that "I like to keep the evidence," because "down the road, people might suggest there was never a crime."

It's also an oversimplification to view monuments as only statements made by the powerful. Many San Francisco monuments were actually the result of nationalistic sentiments of immigrant communities who were unsure about their position in society. We have written elsewhere about the statues in Golden Gate Park of Ludwig van Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi that were the efforts of the City's German-American and Italian-American communities, respectively. The vandalized Manuel Cervantes statue there was likewise commissioned and dedicated by the City's Spanish-American community.

That brings us back around to Christopher Columbus to whom Thompson devotes a chapter. She traces the origins of the myth-making around Columbus (who never set foot in the United States) to the desire of a young nation to sweep away its own problematic colonial origins and search for an alternative hero. America today has a difficult time ascribing heroism to Columbus's actions in the "new world" and places him at the head of a different origin story that resulted in genocide and the destruction of indigenous cultures.

The proliferation of Christopher Columbus statues in the United States resulted from benign intentions. Italian immigrants to the United States found themselves stuck in the margins of acceptable society and were themselves subjected to discrimination. They saw in their countryman Columbus the opportunity to align themselves with mainstream America and began agitating for Columbus Day as a holiday and organizing Columbus Day parades.

The empty edifice of the Christopher Columbus statue on Telegraph Hill.

This was a new edifice dedicated during Willie Brown's term as Mayor (1996-2004) with the participation of representatives from Genoa and Liguria, Italy) 

The statues of Columbus were a natural outcome of these efforts even though the depiction of Columbus was problematic. Thompson notes that there are no authentic portraits made of the explorer. Any representation of his features is guesswork.  

Over time Mr. Columbus became the fulcrum of two equal and opposite impulses. He embodied the desire of Italian immigrants to represent themselves as assimilated, ennobled and fully American. At the same time, indigenous Americans see Columbus as a tormentor who stole their land. The Italians sought the assimilation that indigenous Americans explicitly reject and fight against.

Thompson met with Mike Forcia, a native American activist who struggled for years to have a statue of Columbus removed in St. Paul, Minnesota. The protests following the murder of George Floyd in June 2020 provided him the opportunity to organize a crowd to pull the statue down. This was a criminal act and he was charged with a felony. The prosecutors decided not to press on with the charges if Forcia agreed to perform 100 hours of community service in the interest of repairing the harm and trauma that the statue represented. As he put it: "once it [the Columbus statue] hit the ground, those conversations started happening."

That act of iconoclasm opened up the public sphere to education and dialogue. But this was not due solely to the act of forcibly removing the statue but also due to past presence of the statue. Once the 100 hours were completed and the injurious symbol was removed, the space for continued conversation was diminished.

Thompson brings up the very excellent point that for concerned citizens like Forcia there are not yet established orderly, democratic ways of removing public monuments. But given all of the contention and competing interests in American society it could be difficult to reach a consensus about the fate of our public art and monuments. Smashing Statues is an excellent introduction to issues that underlie this dilemma.

Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments by Erin L. Thompson (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).