Lightfoot, if you don’t want Lincoln statues, here’s someone who does
The president of Lincoln College in central Illinois has a message for Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her secretive committee of politically troublesome public art, which has targeted statues of Abraham Lincoln for “review.”
“I’ll gladly take them,” said David Gerlach on “The Chicago Way” podcast.
He’ll take all of Chicago’s Lincoln statues that are now considered problematic and subject to removal following a review by Lightfoot’s woke statue committee.
He’ll take the Standing Lincoln, located in Lincoln Park and considered “the most important sculpture of Lincoln from the 19th century,” according to Choose Chicago. Lincoln’s only grandson was there for the unveiling.
He’ll take the Seated Lincoln in Grant Park, which took sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens 12 years to complete.
And he’ll take Lincoln the Rail-Splitter, located in Garfield Park, which Irish immigrant and artist Charles J. Mulligan created to express “the president’s humble beginnings in New Salem, Ill., where he held various odd jobs, even working as a rail-splitter for a brief period of time,” according to the Chicago Park District.
Forty-one statues are up for “review” including those of the Viking Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus, President Ulysses S. Grant and America’s greatest president, Lincoln.
If Chicago is thickheaded enough to get rid of its Lincoln statues, then Lincoln College, about 35 miles north of Springfield with a racially diverse student body, will happily give the unwanted Lincolns of Chicago a place of honor.
“I’ll send my maintenance team up and we’ll find the money to carefully transport them to Lincoln College,” Gerlach said in an interview on podcast that I co-host with WGN-AM producer Jeff Carlin.
“And I will plant them on this campus,” Gerlach continued. “I’ll gladly take them. ... Here President Lincoln is appreciated, and I think not only for what he did for civil rights but for his character.
“His honesty, integrity, humility, civility and courage, perseverance and personal responsibility. These are the things we should all aspire to.”
It makes no sense to most people that Chicago would even consider canceling Lincoln in the Land of Lincoln.
But Lightfoot, who is of the left, is like many big-city Democratic Party politicians these days. She’s trying to out-woke her own ravenously progressive flank to survive. And therefore, even Lincoln is threatened.
I don’t think it’ll happen. Lightfoot said as much when pressed about it. But the fact that she had to be pressed about it is troubling.
Her supersecret statues committee reportedly has been pulling the shades down on the very transparency that Lightfoot once said she supported. According to the Better Government Association’s investigator and former Tribune reporter David Jackson, the mayor’s Monuments Project Advisory Committee promised “open and inclusive public dialogue” about the future of the city’s public art.
Yet during its first six months of work, Jackson reported that Lightfoot’s committee held secret deliberations. The BGA was told the committee was not a public body and therefore not subject to disclosure under the Illinois Open Meetings Act.
Sounds like weasel words to me.
“What’s said here, stays here” was the message from City Hall, Jackson reported. So much for transparency.
“Even if they are not subject to the Open Meetings Act, there is the question of voluntary transparency, especially with something like this,” Benjamin Silver, attorney for the Citizen Advocacy Center of DuPage County told the BGA. “They have now flagged 41 monuments. And whether anyone agrees or disagrees with those choices, I think there is a public interest in knowing how they reached that decision.
“With closed meetings, it’s not possible to do that,” Silver added. “It’s for the city to answer why they would want to do this behind closed doors.”
Why? Because Lori Lightfoot felt like it, that’s why.
I’m all for public discussion of public art. And I don’t want Confederate generals honored in public spaces.
But erasing presidents, Christopher Columbus and a Viking is about zealotry.
Gerlach also welcomes public discussion of public art. Why? Because he’s a thoughtful academic, not some wild-eyed zealot.
Lincoln was indeed flawed. So was the entire world at that time by today’s standards. And guess what, it still is flawed.
But he also signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freed the slaves, fought the bloody Civil War and fundamentally changed the nation. And while fighting the South, he also was dealing with the deadly and inevitable conflict between westward bound settlers and Native Americans.
Hard to believe, but a great man’s life doesn’t fit neatly on some virtue signaling tweet. It’s complicated. It’s called “history.”
In our interview, Gerlach quoted the Black scholar and leader W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote these thoughts of Lincoln:
“And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”
“Lincoln was not a perfect man,” Gerlach said. “But this befuddles me. It angers me. It’s shocking. … So, if Chicago doesn’t want the Lincoln statues, I’ll send our maintenance crews up.”
And he’ll take them off our hands.