If Muriel Bowser, Washington, D.C.’s mayor, gets her way, there will no longer be any school trips to visit our nation’s capital. No one wants to see Washington, D.C. without the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the countless other historical symbols and tributes to the men who founded our great nation.
A committee she assembled has issued a report with recommendations for a number of drastic changes to the city, including the advice that the federal government “remove, relocate, or contextualize” the Benjamin Franklin Statue, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, and the Washington Monument.
Mayor Bowser tweeted her enthusiastic support for the report, saying she looks “forward to reviewing and advancing their recommendations.”
Across the board, conservatives have correctly and understandably expressed indignation about the absurdity of the commission’s recommendations. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s tweet gets it exactly right: “Hey, D.C. – they’re not your monuments to rename or remove. They’re America’s monuments.”
But is it possible this commission raises a good point? Maybe it is time that we, as a nation, had a serious conversation to “contextualize” (let’s borrow their word) these monuments and the men for whom these monuments were built.
To start, let’s contextualize Thomas Jefferson. He is the Left’s favorite boogeyman these days. A slave-owner, Thomas Jefferson is a complicated man in our nation’s history. He penned the beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence, including the dramatic assertion that “all men are created equal.”
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His personal failure to abide by those words serves as a reminder of something the founding fathers never forgot – that human nature is deeply flawed. Despite those flaws, humans are capable of the most extraordinary endeavors, and the Declaration of Independence is most appropriately viewed as the greatest political document ever written. How about that as part of the “contextualizing” conversation?
It is not merely Jefferson’s slaveholding past that presents a problem for the Left, however. Jefferson was also an unapologetic believer in defined and objective “truths.” The words “We hold these truths to be self-evident” stand in stark contrast to the “personal truths” language today’s liberals prefer.
As long as we are offering context to the men behind D.C.’s greatest monuments, let’s take a look at George Washington, our nation’s first president. Mayor Bowser finds offense at the prominent Washington Monument on the National Mall, but Americans can find something else in his legacy. Washington, as commander-in-chief, resigned his commission to Congress, ending his military service and marking his return to civil life. In doing so, he established the American tradition of civilian control of the military – a fundamental aspect of American governance and a sharp break with the historical tradition of military control.
This act, to the modern American mind, may seem insignificant, but if we contextualize the incident, we come to understand what the artist John Trumbull saw. He called it “one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world.” Trumbull was so moved by Washington’s action, in fact, that he gave us the famous painting General George Washington Resigning His Commission, which hangs in the U.S. Capitol building.
Civic literacy is at an all-time low in America. Overwhelming majorities of Americans are unable to identify the rights we enjoy in the Bill of Rights or to name the Constitution as the law of the land. Perhaps we are overdue for a “contextualizing” discussion to explore American greatness.
In my new book, Capitol of Freedom, I seek to do just that. I address the fragility of our republic, and the responsibility we each carry to ensure our nation’s future success. Benjamin Franklin’s famous statement that we have a “republic, if we can keep it,” is more than a witticism from a founding father; in truth, it’s a call to action. Incidentally, the illustrious D.C. council includes Benjamin Franklin’s statue on its target list for removal. The irony is lost on the D.C. commission.
Our founders never took America for granted or assumed the nation was immortal; and neither should we. Mayor Bowser reaches all the wrong conclusions, but let’s take her up on the offer to contextualize and frame our history. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and all of our founding fathers were true radicals who threw off the old system of political oppression and gave birth to a new political experiment. They gave us the words “We, the people,” and the political agency to breathe life into those words.
And we, the people, are just fine with America’s monuments located in D.C.
Ken Buck is a member of Congress from Colorado. He serves on the House Judiciary Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee, and is the author of "Capitol of Freedom."
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