What makes a monument ‘problematic’?
Consider Chicago’s Haymarket Riot Monument
In the midst of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus from Grant Park and established a commission to review all the city’s hundreds of monuments. In February, the Chicago Monuments Project Advisory Committee released its list of 41 “problematic” statues, a list that carried the names of conquerors and enslavers like Columbus and Washington as well as a fascist general and the chief justice of the Supreme Court that enshrined Jim Crow in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson.
Along with these unsurprising candidates for cancellation were others that left many Chicagoans puzzled. Lincoln? Didn’t he free the slaves? Franklin? Wasn’t he president of the first abolitionist society in America? Generals Grant, Logan and Sheridan? Didn’t they fight against the Confederates? Goddess of the Republic? Don’t we want to live in a Republic?
To their credit, the monuments committee released the criteria they used in selecting candidates for removal. For the most part, these principles are clear and appropriate for a city attempting to make its landscape reflect our national consensus that condemns racism, sexism, and genocide. Most people today would probably agree that those monuments that promote “white supremacy,” demean American Indians or celebrate individuals “with connections to racist acts, slavery and genocide” need to be rethought.
However, the monuments committee went further and also red-tagged those statues that they deemed to represent “over-simplified, one-sided views of history” or that did not “sufficiently” include “other stories” of “women, people of color, and themes of labor.” They then created a paradox of Orwellian proportions by adding a final standard for public monuments: that monuments not create “tension between people who see value in these artworks and those who do not.” Apparently, the committee members didn’t appreciate that the less a memorial was “over-simplified” and “one-sided” the more “tension” it would inevitably generate.
One statue included in the committee’s target list highlights the difficulty of applying these standards, the Haymarket Riot Monument, which apparently made the list by breaking rule 4 (being one-sided), rule 5 (for not sufficiently including the story of labor) and certainly breaking rule 6 (by creating tension) since it has been bombed twice. The committee describes it as “a symbol of the polarized debate around labor activism and policing.” (It is unlikely the statue is condemned on the grounds of advancing white supremacy as Chicago was one of the first Northern cities to hire a Black police officer in 1872 and by 1930 had the second-largest number of Black police officers behind only Philadelphia.)
Cast in bronze by the Danish sculptor John Gelert in 1889, the Haymarket Monument was intended to honor the seven Chicago police officers killed by an anarchist bomb three years earlier. Gelert chose officer Thomas “Toon” Birmingham as his model for Toon’s slightly plump ordinariness (perhaps as a protest against his patron’s rejection of his original lyric design of a woman holding a law book above her head). Leaders of the Union League that raised the funds later complained that Toon looked “too Irish.”
Toon Birmingham was promptly forgotten, the target of pigeons rather than violent protest. In 1896 a newspaper editor bemoaned that the great monument was neglected to the point of ruin. There was surprisingly little opposition when, at the urging of Haymarket Square business owners, it was relocated miles away to the entrance of Union Park. In 1958 after being knocked over by a streetcar, it was returned to its original site in Haymarket Square, where it stood peacefully and uncontroversially until 1969 when it was blown up (twice) by the Weathermen. Rather than risk a third attack, Mayor Richard J. Daley moved Toon Birmingham to the wellguarded lobby of the police training center.
The dynamite bomb that toppled Toon Birmingham was cooked up from household chemicals following instructions provided by DuPont in a helpful publication they sent to anyone for $6, “The Blasters’ Handbook” (whose first page was emblazoned, “From America’s oldest explosive company come the newest explosive ideas!”). One of the Weathermen later explained that they wanted to blow up the Haymarket statue because to them it was a symbol of police repression of free speech and government injustice.
There is an analog of our present moment to be found in this history. How this forgotten statue that neither its creator nor its sponsors particularly liked suddenly became charged with meaning amid mass public protests (in this case the Days of Rage rather than Black Lives Matter) should remind us that monuments don’t possess meaning — they only mean what the living think of them as meaning. To the generation that erected the Haymarket Monument it was meant to memorialize the slain officers and the importance of the rule of law. To the youth of the 1960s, it represented police repression of protest, a problem with which they were well acquainted.
When the Haymarket Monument was dedicated in 1889, most Chicagoans had little doubt that the fallen police officers were victims of an anarchist plot to overthrow the republic. In 1969, a new historical consensus coalesced that viewed the four anarchists hanged for the Haymarket bombing as innocent victims of the nation’s first red scare. Both perspectives contained large portions of both truth and myth. Given the complexity of the events that created it, the Haymarket statue cannot easily be labeled as “selective,” “over-simplified” or “one-sided”.
While some edifices such as the Haymarket monument seem to poorly fit the committee’s own standards, there are others not on the list that abundantly do.
Take the Samuel Gompers statue located in Gompers Park, for example. Samuel Gompers organized and led the American Federation of Labor through its formative decades when the labor federation accepted member unions with whites-only memberships and Jim Crow practices. Gompers himself actively campaigned for the racist exclusion of Chinese immigrants and fought to keep any Black unions from having a voice in the AFL.
Why does Gompers’ statue not amount to “memorializing individuals with connections to racist acts”? A fair judgment of history is that Gompers did far more to promote white supremacy than Abraham Lincoln or any of the Union generals in the monument committees’ crosshairs.
As Chicago decides what stories it wants to tell through its public monuments, it needs to be mindful that the business of deciding what is a “one-sided” view of history, or what is not “sufficiently including of other stories” is tricky and rests uneasily on who is doing the viewing.