They’re back! Just as the city begins to recover from the Great School Renaming Debacle, officials are embarking on another self-righteous crusade to ferret out people and things that don’t “align with San Francisco’s values.”
This time, the campaign is aimed not at canceling the public schools named after malefactors like Abraham Lincoln and John Muir — a ludicrous “progressive” exercise that made the City by the Bay an international laughingstock — but at cleansing San Francisco’s collection of monuments and memorials of supposedly objectionable works.
One hopes that this $3 million monument cull, funded entirely by a Mellon Foundation grant, will not be as historically illiterate as the crackpot school-renaming campaign, but it is equally wrongheaded, an exercise in virtue signaling that will do nothing to improve social justice but, rather, will diminish the city’s historic and aesthetic texture.
San Francisco started down this path to civic stupidity in 2018, when officials, bowing to pressure from Native American activists, removed a large statuary group called “Early Days,” a crucial part of the 1894 Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center. “Early Days” was deemed objectionable because it shows a Spanish missionary looming above a seated, overwhelmed-looking Native Californian (inaccurately depicted as a Plains Indian). After Indian groups criticized the work as degrading, the city had it hoisted away.
Then came the nationwide June 2020 protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. In San Francisco, mobs rampaged through Golden Gate Park, tearing down statues of Francis Scott Key, Junipero Serra, and President Ulysses S. Grant and vandalizing other works. Mayor London Breed and other city officials gave these actions their imprimatur, removing the three toppled statues, as well as a large depiction of Christopher Columbus.
Breed justified the removals by declaring that the monuments did not “reflect San Francisco’s values.” In the black-and-white moral fervor of the moment, the fact that Grant briefly owned an enslaved man named William Jones (whom he emancipated rather than sold for profit) outweighed the fact that he led the Union armies to victory in the war that ended slavery in the United States.
If city officials had stopped there, major damage to San Francisco’s historic fabric would already have been done. Lost in the self-congratulations over the removal of “Early Days” was the fact that the statuary group included a debonaire vaquero — making it, as far as I know, the only 19th century monument in San Francisco to the Spanish-speaking Californians whose dispossession by the Americans was a founding injustice of the state.
Also ignored was the fact that it is far from clear that the work depicts the Spanish padre in a positive light. “Early Days” is a fascinating, ambiguous work, which the city could have curated and used as a teaching tool to discuss both the tragic destruction of Native peoples and cultures and the little-known Californio/Mexican era. Instead, the city removed it.
‘By its very nature, this “equity audit” will be an absurd powerwashing of history.’
Unfortunately, San Francisco did not stop there. After removing the four other monuments, officials doubled down on their sanctimonious monument-cleansing crusade. Breed formed a 13-person Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, whose charge was to “examine the history of monuments in the public realm in San Francisco, the individuals, events and ideals they venerate, and how the narratives associated with these monuments align — or do not — with San Francisco’s values today.”
In 2023, that commission duly recommended that the city undertake an “equity audit” of the 98 public works of art in its collection. That audit will be carried out by an outside firm, which will hold three public workshops in October and issue its final report in January. Based on its recommendations, the City Arts Commission will decide whether each monument will be replaced, relocated, or receive additional curation.
Just which of the 98 works the city will deem unworthy of its “values” or failing to contribute to “equity” (whatever that means) is unknown. (Educated guess: Anything commemorating the Spanish-American War had better watch its bronze back.) It is also possible that monuments that have been removed will be restored.
But one thing is certain: By its very nature, this “equity audit” will be an absurd powerwashing of history. As the school-renaming debacle and ridiculous cancellation of Grant demonstrate, the effort by ideologues to weigh long-dead human beings with contemporary moral scales is a fool’s game.
But beyond the silliness of trying to figure out whether Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza or his “narrative” “reflect San Francisco values,” there’s a more foundational question: Why do a city’s public monuments need to align with its contemporary values?
The entire memorial-renaming campaign rests on the assumption that all city-owned monuments, no matter how old, represent a permanent endorsement of the people, events, or ideals they commemorate. That assumption is questionable at best. A memorial may initially constitute an endorsement, but that endorsement fades over time. Monuments represent a record of what people in a city at a given time thought was worth commemorating.
What people in 1894 thought about “Early Days” is not what we think now. Indeed, the very gap between the historic beliefs enshrined in a monument and what we believe now is part of that monument’s richness and aesthetic appeal. This is why they are excellent teaching tools, a function that can be enhanced with curation. The Dewey Monument in Union Square, to choose just one example, is a perfect candidate for a new plaque discussing the imperialist nature of the Spanish-American War and the brutality of the succeeding Philippine-American War.
To quote Vice President Kamala Harris: “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” When a city erases parts of a shared and often painful past, it impoverishes us all.
A city obsessed with cleansing itself of monuments that it deems retrograde is a diminished city, a shrill and moralistic city, one that does not trust its citizens to “read” it intelligently. San Francisco has always prided itself on being both swashbuckling and smart. Its pursuit of moral purity is timorous and dumb.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling books “Cool Gray City of Love:49 Views of San Francisco” and “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” His award-winning column now appears on his Substack, Kamiya Unlimited.