Photo by Kari Frey, courtesy of Tower Grove Park
The Christopher Columbus bronze in Tower Grove Park
October 8 looms. In South Dakota, it’s Native American Day. In 2016, Vermont’s governor proclaimed it Indigenous People’s Day. Oregon avoided Columbus Day altogether until last year, when it made Indigenous People’s Day official. A long list of cities have done the same.
Here in St. Louis, the bronze Christopher Columbus in Tower Grove Park stands waiting, inscrutable, as tension mounts: Will graffiti appear again, marring the statue to protest its presence? Meanwhile, a commission of stakeholders (Native Americans and Italian Americans, historians and artists) has begun meeting regularly to consider the statue’s fate—and forge enough consensus to make recommendations.
Why the fuss? Columbus was just an explorer who discovered the Americas.
Except that he didn’t “discover” them. He got lost, came to shore in a thriving and peaceful society, and bent its members to his will, mainly in hope of bringing him gold. The historical record documents Columbus enslaving indigenous people in the West Indies and using forced labor and violent coercion, even parading dismembered bodies to discourage insurrection.
“The settlement of America was basically an invasion,” says St. Louisan Galen Gritts, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. “You had millions of people living here as they had for thousands of years. You kill them, you give them smallpox, you take their land, you force them into situations they’re not prepared for. It was the largest ethnic cleansing in the history of the world, and it happened from 1492 to 1890, when the frontier closed. Indians like to say, ‘Party like it’s 1491,’ because in 1492, it all goes to hell.
“It’s a story that makes us extremely uncomfortable,” Gritts continues, “so we overlaid it with a series of lies. Columbus represents the most basic of those lies—and the amnesia about it.”
What questions should we ask when we reexamine his statue—or any monument?
Architectural historian Michael Allen, senior lecturer at Washington University, says the first step “is to learn the intention of those who built and designed and erected the monument. That’s very telling.” What was the context at the time? What is represented and how potentially repulsive or offensive is it today? What perspective on history does it bring to bear? Is there language; is there symbolism; is there an ideology or narrative that’s being reinforced?
Is the Columbus debate essentially just a repeat of the controversy over the Confederate Memorial?
Allen sees a distinct difference. The bronze is a simple representation of Christopher Columbus, put up by Henry Shaw to educate people and to honor Italian-American contributions to American culture. The Confederate Memorial included a Confederate flag and an inscription about the noble heroism of the Confederacy. “Monuments that are more literal representations of a figure—as polarizing as that figure might turn out to be—I don’t think they are an injury necessarily to the public in the same form as monuments that have overt ideology or inscription or symbolism,” says Allen.
Timing and context matter, too. The United Daughters of the Confederacy had the monument created to honor their families’ fallen soldiers, but it was approved many years after the end of the Civil War, at a time when African-Americans were moving north and white supremacists were panicking, clinging harder to Jim Crow segregation. The city council initially refused permission, but the business community pushed for approval in order to strengthen trade ties with the South.
“The Confederate monument was welcomed by a lot of pro-Union people because it symbolized their tolerance: The punitive days were over, and everyone was drawn back together in the common bond,” says Allen. “That was not what it meant by the ’60s, and it’s definitely not what it means after Ferguson.”
What prompted the debate over the Confederate Memorial?
Bridget McDermott Flood, executive director of the Incarnate Word Foundation, got lost in Forest Park one day. She noticed a monument she’d never really paid much attention to and, late already, took a minute to read the inscription. It was an impassioned tribute to the Confederacy’s noble Lost Cause.
The next morning, she called the mayor’s office to ask what this memorial was doing in Forest Park. The mayor asked Flood to put together a panel to explore that very question. They recommended that the memorial be removed. The United Daughters of the Confederacy claimed ownership and transferred that ownership to the Missouri Civil War Museum. “The city’s point was, ‘You can’t just put it out and say, 'This is great.' It has to be put into historical context,’” Flood says. “That’s where discussions broke down.”
Mark Trout, director of the Missouri Civil War Museum, says the memorial's future could have been resolved much sooner without that prerequisite: “The government has no business telling a museum what to display and how to interpret it.”
The museum now has the memorial in storage; it will eventually be installed at a Civil War museum, battlefield, or cemetery, but will not be displayed anywhere in St. Louis city or county.
Allen was glad to see the memorial removed from Forest Park, but it troubles him that rather than put it elsewhere, with interpretive context, it has vanished into storage: “Fifty years from now, it might be in the middle of Missouri with a bunch of Klansmen standing around worshipping it.”
Who gets to decide a public monument’s fate?
Until now, the commons has been dotted with monuments sanctioned “by the people who have the financial wherewithal,” says Flood. “I’d appoint a committee that included ordinary people. If only the elite of St. Louis decide, you’re looking at it through only one lens. If we are building a more inclusive society, how do we hear the other voices?”
“Indigenous people have to be central to the discussion,” Allen adds. “If it’s a small group of white liberals who want to take it down, that’s just perpetuating the white hegemony.”
Lindsey Manshack, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Apache Tribe of Ebarb, says that if the first Americans were the ones entrusted with the ultimate decision, they’d hold a much larger council: “When there’s a decision to be made, you include everyone, even the children of the tribe. And you don’t leave until everyone’s gotten their say.”
If you felt an involuntary twitch of impatience as you read that advice, you’re too modern to sit through all that sifting. “I think there’s a way to merge that traditional approach with modern technology, though,” says Manshack, “maybe even having stakeholders call in to a town hall.”
One group of stakeholders is the city’s Italian-Americans. “Can we honor you in a different way,” Manshack wonders aloud, “and maybe rejuvenate that Italian-American sense of community in an even better way?”
The arguments to retain or remove
Those who’d like to keep the statue in place note not only its importance to Italian-Americans but its 130-year history, its significance in a park that’s a National Historic Landmark, its place in the ordered and harmonious design of Tower Grove Park, and the benign intentions of Henry Shaw when he commissioned it.
They also warn that once we start taking statues down, we hurl ourselves down a sin-slick slope. Most of these monuments represent particular—and inevitably flawed—human beings. Atop Art Hill sits King Louis, a saint who was eager to gallop off to slaughter Muslims. Down toward the golf course stands Edward Bates, who for a time owned slaves. Charles Lindbergh's own wife begged him not to give a speech she considered anti-Semitic. We’re all limited by the ignorance of our times; who decides which sins are most egregious?
Those who want the Columbus statue removed see it as not only the glorification of a lie but the herald of unjust colonization and slavery. His arrival opened the Americas to European markets—and to European greed and plunder. By July 4, 1776, the founders saw no contradiction in calling out the King of England for a “History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations” and just a few paragraphs later, complaining bitterly about “merciless Indian Savages.”
The statue’s presence is painful to many Americans. And, as Flood points out, “This is not Henry Shaw’s park anymore. It’s a city park, and though it has its own board of governors, it does receive public funds.”
Aren’t these statues a part of history themselves?
In the U.S., because we are such a relatively young country, monuments aren’t just historical; they’ve often evoked the very idea of a history, Allen says, helping “to tell, even shape, the story.”
The problem is, the story changes. And the earlier version ceases to be one we want to hold up in public as our shared narrative.
“People feel agency in writing these larger cultural narratives now,” Allen observes. “They’re saying, ‘I have the right to tell my story as an American.’ Maybe that’s confirmation that we have triumphed over the imperial story that Columbus represents.
“The pitfall is, they could decide they can take anything down,” he adds. “To say we are not going to honor him in the same way does not necessarily mean we are going to obliterate him. If the Columbus statue isn’t there 50 years from now, what will spark the same debate on these issues? It shouldn’t be seen as inevitable that if you learn about why things came to be, you will want to destroy them.”
Six alternatives
- Keep the statue in place but add a plaque explaining all we now know about Columbus’ actions and their consequences. “I think in the case of Columbus that would be the best outcome,” says Allen. “It might offend Henry Shaw, or some of the board members might see new signage as garish, but it would be a very helpful acknowledgement that this is a very complex figure and his accomplishments are seen variously.”
- Keep the statue in the park, but move it to a less prominent place, one where visitors would need to seek it out and learn its story, rather than be confronted immediately by a painful reminder of injustice.
- Add rather than subtract: Put up a memorial to the scientific discoveries made by native Americans and tell both stories fully.
- Remove the Columbus statue, perhaps to a private museum or to a setting that puts it in clearer context.
- Destroy it altogether. Which, in Allen’s opinion, is dangerous. “I don’t want to live in a purified world,” he says. “This attempt to try to purify history wipes it away.” We have a Vietnam Memorial, a 9/11 memorial, a memorial at Auschwitz. “The Confederate monument was taken down, and now there’s only grass. That benefits a lot of people who don’t want to talk about slavery, but it doesn’t benefit the truth. I don’t think we can pretend, if Columbus is gone, that America is some shiny place of racial justice and harmony and not a colonizing nation.”
- An especially bad outcome, Manshack says, would be “to just leave the statue and make no attempt to correct the history. What upsets me most about that history is the fact that the U.S. continues to cover it up. So much has been founded on the idea of conquering. People will brag about living in one of the oldest settlements west of the Mississippi, and that pride blinds them. They don’t even know who was here before they were. “Most Missourians don’t think Native Americans even exist,” she adds. “They think we’re all gone.” Yet at the 2016 census, there were more than 30,000 American Indians in Missouri—and between 2,000 and 3,000 in St. Louis.
