In the early morning hours of March 23, a huge crane lifted a statue of Christopher Columbus 60 feet in the air and gently set it down in the middle of the piazza of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just a stone's throw from the White House.
It marked the six-year journey of artist Tilghman Hemsley and his son Will in their quest to resurrect the statue of Columbus that had graced Baltimore's Inner Harbor since 1984.
The statue was toppled and thrown into Baltimore Harbor during the George Floyd riots of 2020. Originally created by the Italian sculptor Mauro Bigarani, it stood in Baltimore's Little Italy as a sign of Italian pride and heritage until the Visigoths showed up and tore it apart.
The statue was commissioned by the Italian American Organizations United (IAOU) of Maryland. The same organization paid the Hemsleys to rebuild the statue and create replicas using the salvaged Carrara marble.
“It was almost six years from the time we pulled it out of the harbor to the time it sat there,” Hemsley said. “It was very climactic and it was very fulfilling.”
Hemsley and his son, along with another Baltimore-area resident, Jeff Bayer, drove the statue to Washington, D.C., where they had to wait for hours to be vetted before the statue was installed.
“It was this huge crane that was for the other statue, but they used it for ours as well,” Hemsley said. “They were able to pick it up like 60 feet in the air and then just place it down into the piazza at the Eisenhower Building on the north side, and it fit beautifully in there.”
The artist said the placement complemented the surrounding architecture and exceeded expectations.
“It just really looked really well done there,” he said. “It was surreal.”
The installation follows years of controversy surrounding the original statue, which was toppled and dumped into the harbor during protests in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. Supporters of its removal cited Christopher Columbus’ treatment of Indigenous people.
Hemsley and his team later recovered pieces of the statue from the harbor and completed the replica in 2022. The sculpture then remained in storage for several years as organizers searched for a permanent home.
“We had it in storage for probably three years, four years,” Hemsley said. “But it was very fulfilling.”
We had several articles on these pages about the war on Columbus statues by braindead, mindless barbarians who need to destroy the past lest any unsuspecting child learn something nice about a bad person. We saw it with the Columbus statues, as well as with the statues of Confederate leaders. There is no compromise with people who have no balanced perspective on the past — or present, for that matter.
I wrote this during the height of the Columbus hysteria:
We judge people throughout history by weighing the good against the bad, the meaningfulness of their accomplishments versus the foulness of their deeds. Certainly, on any rational scale the balance tips unfavorably for Saddam, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Che.
But Robert E. Lee? Jefferson Davis? If you’re going to condemn those men for holding racist, white supremacist views, then the memorials to Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and anyone else born before 1960 should be destroyed. That includes all the great white men and women of history who weren’t “woke.”
Instead, the mobs are picking and choosing whose memory should be wiped clean from history. Anyone a majority of Americans admire and look up to needs to be erased unless they’re black and relatively non-controversial. I imagine some Black Lives Matter protesters even look with a jaundiced eye on Martin Luther King, who reportedly treated women like dirt and did not support gays and lesbians.
Just recently, we learned that liberal icon and civic saint Cesar Chavez assaulted women and, worse, had sex with little girls. There has been a wholesale effort on the left to erase Chavez from history, hurrying to rename parks and buildings, even changing the name of the holiday that was created in his honor.
I disagree with this. History is history. Why not make note of Chavez's sins on memorials and buildings instead of renaming them? Same for his holiday. In history, perspective is everything. And the left has abandoned historical perspective to engage in witch hunts and the erasure of history instead of accepting the whole person, warts and all, in figures like Chavez (or Columbus, Lee, Davis, or anyone else who has been canceled).
"Columbus is easily one of the most unlovely of heroes," I wrote in 2020. "He was vain, arrogant, opinionated, and was apparently such a tyrant toward his crews that they marooned him on one of his trips back to the New World." He also murdered and enslaved Native Americans.
"And yet, he ventured where no European or Muslim or Oriental dared to go: across the ocean to the land between what became known later as the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Is that enough to make up for his numerous sins? Do the scales even come close to balancing?"
I believe they do. And that's why I'm celebrating Donald Trump's "uncanceling" of Columbus.
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