Monument to stupidity

By cleansing the city of monuments deemed retrograde or offensive, San Francisco's leadership diminishes us all.

They’re back! Just as San Francisco has finally begun to recover from the Great School Renaming Debacle, city officials are embarking on another self-righteous crusade to ferret out people and things that don’t “align with San Francisco’s values.” 

This time, their campaign is aimed not at canceling the names of public schools named after malefactors like Abraham Lincoln and John Muir — a ludicrous “progressive” witch hunt that made the City by the Bay an international laughingstock — but at cleansing the city’s collection of monuments and memorials of supposedly objectionable works. 

This $3 million monument cull, funded entirely by a Mellon Foundation grant, will hopefully not be as historically illiterate as the crackpot school-renaming campaign, but it is equally wrongheaded, an exercise in virtue signaling that will do nothing to improve social justice, but rather diminish the city’s historic and aesthetic texture.

Doesn’t San Francisco have more important things to do than engage in empty, symbolic gestures that proclaim to the world how morally pure it is?

The city started down this path to civic stupidity in 2018, when officials, bowing to pressure from Native American activists, removed a large statuary group called “Early Days,” a crucial part of one of the city’s most significant 19^th century monuments, the 1894 Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center. “Early Days” was deemed objectionable because it showed a Spanish missionary looming above a seated, overwhelmed-looking Native Californian (inaccurately depicted as a Plains Indian). After Indian groups criticized the work as degrading, the city had it hoisted permanently away.

Then came the nationwide June 2020 protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd. In San Francisco, mobs rampaged through Golden Gate Park, tearing down statues of Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra and President U.S. Grant and vandalizing other works. Mayor London Breed and other city officials gave these actions their imprimatur, removing the three toppled statues as well as a fourth, a large statue of Christopher Columbus. 

Breed justified the removals by declaring that the monuments did not “reflect San Francisco’s values.” In the black-and-white moral fervor of the moment, the fact that Grant briefly owned an enslaved man named William Jones (whom he emancipated rather than sold for profit) outweighed the fact that he led the Union armies to victory in the war that ended slavery in the United States. 

If city officials had stopped there, major damage to San Francisco’s historic fabric would already have been done. Lost in the self-congratulations over the removal of “Early Days,” for example, was the fact that the statuary group included a debonaire Californio vaquero—making it, as far as I know, the only 19^th-century monument in San Francisco to the Spanish-speaking Californians whose dispossession by the Americans was a founding injustice of the state. Also ignored was the fact that it is far from clear that the work depicts the Spanish padre in a positive light. “Early Days” was a fascinating, ambiguous work, which the city could have curated and used as a teaching tool to discuss both the tragic destruction of Native peoples and cultures and the little-known Californio/Mexican era. Instead, it removed it.

Unfortunately, the city did not stop there. After removing the four other monuments, it doubled down on its sanctimonious monument-cleansing crusade. Mayor Breed formed a 13-person Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, whose charge was to “examine the history of monuments in the public realm in San Francisco, the individuals, events and ideals they venerate, and how the narratives associated with these monuments align—or do not—with San Francisco’s values today.” 

In 2023, that commission duly recommended that the city undertake a so-called “equity audit” of the 98 public works of art in its collection. That audit will be carried out by an outside firm, which will hold three public workshops in October and issue its final report in January. Based on its recommendations, the City Arts Commission will decide whether a given monument will be replaced, relocated, or receive additional curation.

Just which of the 98 works the city will deem unworthy of its “values” or fail to contribute to “equity,” whatever that means, is unknown. (Educated guess: anything commemorating the Spanish-American War had better watch its bronze back.) It is also possible that some of the monuments that were removed will be restored. (I’ll post a complete annotated list of the 98 monuments, with my predictions as to their fate, on this site soon.)

But one thing is certain: By its very nature, this “equity audit” will be an absurd powerwashing of history. As the school-renaming debacle and the ridiculous cancellation of U.S. Grant demonstrate, trying to weigh long-dead figures, creatures of their time and in their all-too-human complexity, with contemporary moral scales wielded by ideologues, is a fool’s game. 

But beyond the silliness of trying to figure out whether Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza or his “narrative” “reflect San Francisco values,” there’s a more foundational question: Why do a city’s public monuments even need to align with its contemporary values? 

The entire memorial-cleansing campaign rests on the assumption that all city-owned monuments, no matter how old, represent a permanent endorsement by the city of the people, events or ideals they commemorate. But that assumption is questionable at best. A memorial may initially constitute an endorsement, but that endorsement fades over time. Monuments represent a record of what people in a city at a given time thought was worth commemorating. What people in 1894 thought about “Early Days” is not what we think now. Indeed, the very gap between the historic beliefs enshrined in a monument and what we believe now is part of that monument’s richness and aesthetic appeal.

This is why monuments are excellent teaching tools, a function that can be enhanced with curation. The Dewey Monument in Union Square, to choose just one example, is a perfect candidate for a new plaque discussing the imperialist nature of the Spanish-American War and the brutality of the succeeding Philippine-American War. 

To quote Kamala Harris, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” When a city erases parts of our shared and often painful past, it impoverishes us all.

A city obsessed with cleansing itself of monuments that it deems retrograde is a diminished city, a shrill and moralistic city, one that does not trust its citizens to “read” it intelligently. San Francisco has always prided itself on being both swashbuckling and smart. Its pursuit of moral purity is timorous and dumb.

A slightly different version of this piece also appears in today’s San Francisco Standard.