What began as an effort to add female representation to the statues in Central Park has turned into a racially and politically charged exercise in iconoclasm. Now, a New York painter is lobbying to tear down a statue of a poet for the crime of being male.
At a recent City Hall hearing in New York City, Hank Willis Thomas, who serves on Bill de Blasio’s Public Design Commission, argued, “There are what, five or six [male] statues that I think could easily be replaced by individual statues of each of these women.”
Unsurprisingly, he targeted Christopher Columbus, who among the tastemakers has long since fallen from the status of renowned explorer down to the harbinger of genocide. But Thomas’ iconoclasm didn’t end with blameworthy men. It extended to old heroes whom he suggested should be torn down for merely being a man. For starters, poet Robert Burns.
“I don’t think that there are many people who will miss the Burns statue,” Thomas said.
Burns is credited with writing “Auld Lang Syne,” and his poem “To a Mouse” lent John Steinbeck’s American classic Of Mice and Men its name. “Burns is a national hero,” the NYC Parks website says, and “his works are unmatched by any other Scottish artist as a source of national pride.”
But in our age, the accomplishments of a dead white male are valued very little.
Thomas’ demolition aspirations stem from a dispute over which suffragettes to honor with a statue in the park. Originally Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were both selected, eliciting cries of racism. So the commission added Sojourner Truth, and soon they were running out of space.
The commission had already gotten a scalp. Dr. J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” had statues erected to him after he opened the first hospital just for women. De Blasio and his commission tore them down in 2018 in light of the doctor’s experiments on enslaved black women.
The new picks are promising, but who knows what objections could arise? Susan B. Anthony, after all, is currently revered by many as a pro-life hero, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called abortion “infanticide.” Sojourner Truth was a devout Christian who extolled the power of prayer.
De Blasio’s commission thinks they have a plan to remake the park according to contemporary mores, but navigating the identity politics of iconoclastic cancel culture can be perilous.
“The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” often go awry, Burns wrote, leaving us with “naught but grief an’ pain” for promised joy.
