THE LEFT REVEALS ITSELF WHEN WHAT IT CONSIDERS PROGRESS IS THE DESTRUCTION OF OBJECTS AND WORDS THAT CELEBRATE OUR PAST ADVANCEMENTS IN LIBERTY

National Review

 

National Park Service to Remove William Penn Statue from Historic Site

 

Statue of William Penn in Philadelphia's Welcome Park in 2012(John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)

By LUTHER RAY ABEL

January 7, 2024 8:58 PM

 

The National Park Service (NPS) has announced it will be rehabilitating (via reduction) Pennsylvania founder William Penn’s Welcome Park to “provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience.” Named after the ship that bore Penn to that city of fraternal affection, the park is the site of his former Philadelphia home and the Slate Roof House. As part of this reimagining of Welcome Park, the park service has confirmed that “the Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled.”

 

Needless to say, this is all very stupid.

 

Two things:

 

One, it’s true that Welcome Park is monumentally ugly — if no one said it, I will. It’s a slab of stonework (composing a street plan for Philadelphia) with the approximate footprint of a Division III high-school gymnasium in the middle of a city block and a couple of pedestals. (The one redeeming aspect of the location was that across the street there existed the City Tavern. Pre-Covid, the tavern was a functioning 18th-century focused restaurant made spectacular by the beloved Chef Staib. Unfortunately, lockdowns and BLM protests were the death of the Philadelphia institution whose old-fashioneds or brews may have made even Welcome Park a pleasant tottering destination.)

 

Penn’s plaza could certainly use a rethink to maximize the importance of a location that held the Slate Roof House, an abode in which the Quaker William Penn wrote the Charter of Privileges, a document that would see many of its tenets echoed in the U.S. Constitution, and a domicile that later hosted members of the Continental Congress, including John Hancock and John Adams.

 

Two, just because something might be in need of reinterpretation does not mean that progressive revisionists get carte blanche to “inclusify” benches and fire hydrants with Howard Zinnian signage while deleting the only two items of note — the Penn statue and the model house. Why not rebuild the Slate Roof House and keep the statue in its front entry? Or make a model ship and house, something interactive for kids to mess with while maybe even learning something?

 

The Left (e.g., the Biden administration’s NPS) reveals itself when what it considers success is the expurgation of objects and words that celebrate our past advancements in liberty. One can see the smugness ooze from the penultimate line, “The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled.” Gone, just like that. No possibility of appeal. Just disappeared by the federal bureaucracy.

 

Vile.

 

That said, perhaps we can take some solace from Penn’s letter to Lord Arlington:

 

“Force may make hypocrites, but it can make no converts.”