The Nationwide Park Service’s proposed removing of a statue of William Penn from Philadelphia’s Welcome Park turned out to be short-lived. Introduced on Jan. 5, 2024, the proposal was shortly pulled from consideration as a consequence of a public firestorm.
The Republican chief of the Pennsylvania Home of Representatives accused the Biden administration of trying to “cancel William Penn out of complete fabric.” The proposal was, he mentioned, an instance of latest left-wing “wokeism.” The state’s Democratic governor had additionally opposed the plans.
Setting apart debates over whether or not the statue ought to stay in its Welcome Park location or not, nonetheless, you possibly can ask a barely totally different query: Ought to there be a statue in any respect?
Born in London in 1644, Penn spent the higher a part of his grownup life advocating in opposition to the persecution of non secular dissenters. King Charles II granted him an American colony in 1681; he traveled to America the next yr, arriving on the ship Welcome – therefore the identify, Welcome Park.
Penn envisioned his colony as a spot the place civil and non secular liberty might thrive in ways in which have been unimaginable in his dwelling nation. Though he spent simply 4 years in America, he oversaw the founding of the colonial authorities in addition to its capital metropolis, Philadelphia. Since 1894, a 37-foot statue of Penn has graced the highest of Philadelphia Metropolis Corridor; the current controversy needed to do with a 6-foot reproduction of that statue, positioned on the former web site of Penn’s first Philadelphia dwelling.
Having spent the higher a part of 20 years finding out Penn’s life, profession and legacy, one factor stands out to me clearly: The Quakerism that reworked Penn’s life in Eire, in his early 20s, and that he spent the remainder of his life serving and selling, was profoundly hostile to expressions of human self-importance. It condemned something that advised the elevation of 1 particular person or social class over others.
In different phrases, William Penn would possibly nicely have objected to a William Penn statue.
Gregory Zucker, contributed, CC BY
Opposing expressions of self-importance
These egalitarian ideas – expressed via such autos as plain speech and gown, a refusal to take away hats to honor social “superiors,” and a rejection of luxurious attire and worldly titles – precipitated a bitter rupture between Penn and his father when he grew to become affiliated with the Society of Mates – the formal identify for the Quakers – in 1667. In addition they set him on the trail that might lead him to Pennsylvania 15 years later.
Penn made his identify as a defender of such plain ideas. He was fined by the decide for refusing to take away his hat at his 1670 London trial for illegal meeting and disturbing the peace, stemming from his preaching to an unauthorized non secular gathering. As he put it, “I don’t imagine, that to be any respect.” Regardless of quite a few threats from the decide, Penn’s jury discovered him not responsible. The tremendous for refusing to take away his hat, nonetheless, remained in drive. He had earlier provided no fewer than 16 causes in opposition to such “hat-honour” in his pamphlet, printed in 1669, titled “No Cross, No Crown.”
A decade later, shortly after receiving his colonial constitution, Penn took pains to make sure that individuals knew his American colony was not named for him, which might have represented the peak of private self-importance. It was named for his father, a widely known naval commander and pal of Charles II. Although William Penn had proposed “New Wales,” that identify was rejected; when he advised “Sylvania,” the king added “Penn.”
Thus was born Pennsylvania, Penn wrote in a letter to fellow English Quaker Robert Turner, “a reputation the King [gave] it in honor to my father … whom he typically mentions with reward.” Penn even tried to bribe the undersecretaries of state to alter the identify, “for I feared lest it must be regarded on as self-importance in me.”
Members of the Society of Mates have been so dedicated to opposing expressions of self-importance that for a time, each throughout Penn’s lifetime and for years after his demise, they forbade grave markers fully.
Unmarked grave or grand mausoleum?
Penn died in 1718 in England. Philadelphia lawyer George Harrison was deputized by Pennsylvania’s authorities to convey Penn’s stays again from England to Philadelphia in 1882, to mark 200 years because the founder’s first arrival.
However Quakers in Jordans, a village in Buckinghamshire, England, the place Penn is buried, insisted that the exact location of Penn’s stays have been unknown. The assembly – in different phrases, the native Quaker congregation – had determined to put off gravestones fully in 1766. Mates Assembly clerk Richard Littleboy informed Harrison that nobody was fully positive the place Penn rested.
Jordans Mates additionally pointed to the incongruity of Penn being interred in a grand mausoleum, with pomp and fanfare, as Pennsylvania officers deliberate to do, when Mates’ ideas pointed so firmly in the other way.
Littleboy protested “the removing of his stays to a trans-atlantic dwelling, amid the pomp and circumstance of a state ceremonial, accompanied possibly by navy honors and parade,” which he thought-about “completely repugnant” to Penn’s “character and sentiment.”
And so Harrison returned to Pennsylvania empty-handed, and Penn stays to today someplace within the burial floor exterior Jordans Meetinghouse in Buckinghamshire, England.
An engraving by Prior, after Unknown artist, Nationwide Portrait Gallery, CC BY
From Metropolis Corridor to Welcome Park
The statue in Welcome Park pales, in fact, in comparison with the large Penn that stands atop Metropolis Corridor, and which, as an iconic a part of Philadelphia’s skyline for greater than a century, is definitely not going wherever anytime quickly.
The Welcome Park web site extra typically – which additionally features a mannequin of the Slate Roof Home, Penn’s first dwelling in Philadelphia – is a traditionally vital web site that deserves maintenance and interpretive assets applicable to twenty first century issues. There are various methods to perform these duties. It’s value noting that representatives from the Native American tribes consulted by the Park Service on the plan for the park apparently weren’t particularly involved about both the statue or its location in Welcome Park.
The statue itself – in miniature, at Welcome Park, or supersized, on Metropolis Corridor – implicitly poses its personal query: How greatest to commemorate somebody who spent his life guided by the ideas of a gaggle that resisted commemoration?
