Not satisfied with erasing the memory of the Confederacy and its heroes by renaming anything and everything under Defense Department control that honored Southern heroes, the Biden administration has moved on to erasing the history of American whites in general.
Last week, the National Park Service (NPS) announced that it would remove a statue of William Penn from Philadelphia’s Welcome Park. NPS will replace it with more “inclusive” exhibits about “Native American” history.
The founder of Pennsylvania, Penn was a Quaker opponent of slavery. That doesn’t count for much these days with the leftist revolutionaries who run the Biden administration, or with the doddering old man himself. Then again, he doesn’t know the day of the week.
The Removal
The park in which the statue sits — named after Penn’s ship, the Welcome — was dedicated in 1982 and is inside the Independence National Historical Park. It was built to commemorate Pennsylvania’s 300th anniversary. The site was also Penn’s home and “celebrates the life of the colony’s founder.”
“It was here as Proprietor of Pennsylvania that Penn penned the regulations for city and state government,” USHistory.org continues:
It was here too that Penn promulgated the Charter of Privileges, guaranteeing religious liberty and civil freedoms to the inhabitants of “Penn’s Woods.”
But none of that matters to the NPS. Instead, it will hoke up the largely imaginary contributions of Indians to the Keystone State.
The NPS plan to “rehabilitate” the park, which is in some disrepair, includes an “expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.”
Indeed, the park will be “reimagined,” in the argot of the woke clowns running things these days. “In a separate and future effort, new exhibit panels will be installed on the south site wall to replace the Penn timeline.”
Out with the old, and in with the “reimagined.”
Republicans Fume
Bryan Cutler of Lancaster, leader of the Pennsylvania House GOP, is none too happy, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
“The decision by President Biden and his administration to try and cancel William Penn out of whole cloth is another sad example of the left in this country scraping the bottom of the barrel of wokeism to advance an extreme ideology and a nonsensical view of history,” Cutler told the newspaper:
This issue is also deeply personal to me. The first Cutlers came to Pennsylvania in 1685 on the ship Rebekah, not long after Penn’s arrival in 1682. They came to Pennsylvania because they were Quakers who shared Penn’s view of religious tolerance and peace.
Removing the statue, he told the newspaper, will offer an “absurd and revisionist view of our state’s history.”
Of course it will.
GOP state Senator Scott Martin called it “absolutely disgraceful”:
As the United States and our Commonwealth are planning the coming celebration of America250, for anyone to think doing this to the founder of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia, which was the epicenter of freedom and our nation’s founding, was a good idea, is completely absurd.
What Likely Won’t Be Included
Given that Indian activists are in charge of “reimagining” the park, one can well imagine what’s coming. Expect tales of the Noble Indian bedecked in feathers and deerskin robe, warbling at the Eye of the Night in peace until the white man came with firesticks to disrupt their sylvan idyll.
Alas, the “expanded interpretation of the Native American history” won’t likely include tales of blood-curdling horror when Indians sprang upon peaceful settlers.
Ignored will be the Hochstetler Massacre, in which a mother and two of her children were butchered and scalped and another two taken captive. Nor will visitors hear about the schoolhouse massacre of Enoch Brown and his young pupils in Franklin County.
Francis Parkman detailed the story in The Conspiracy of Pontiac.
After describing Indian depredations at Muddy Creek in West Virginia, Parkman described “an “outrage … unmatched in its fiend-like atrocity, through all the animals of the [French and Indian] war.”
A man passing by a “rude” schoolhouse was “struck by the unwonted silence; and, pushing open the door, he looked in. In the centre lay the master, scalped and lifeless, with a Bible clasped in his hand; while around the room were strewn the bodies of his pupils, nine in number, miserably mangled, though one of them still retained the spark of life.”
The Indians returned home with their trophies, and that one survivor was 10-year-old Archie McCullough, of whom the Indians were unaware because he had the strength to hide in the fireplace after the mayhem, Megan Strait wrote in Enoch Brown: A Massacre Unmatched.
McCullough washed his scalped head at a spring and was rescued.
Later, he gave this account:
Two old Indians and a young Indian rushed up to the door soon after the opening of the morning session. The master, surmising their object, prayed them only to take his life and spare the children, but all were brutally knocked in the head with an Indian maul and scalped.
“Page after page might be filled with records like these, for the letters and journals of the day are replete with narratives, no less tragical,” Parkman continued. “Districts were depopulated, and the progress of the country put back for years.”
Angry Pennsylvanians can offer their two cents about “expanded interpretation” of history to NPS at its website until midnight January 21.
Not that complaints will stop NPS from its mission to erase William Penn from public memory.
