WHAT’S NEXT

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced plans to remove its statue of George Whitefield, a famous eighteenth-century British preacher, due to his condoning slavery. What was the statue, made by R. Tait McKenzie in 1919, doing at Penn? Whitefield was a lifelong friend of Benjamin Franklin, the founder of the university. Moreover, as the Penn website notes: “Franklin chose the Whitefield meeting house, with its Charity School, to be purchased as the site of the newly formed Academy of Philadelphia which opened in 1751, followed in 1755 with the College of Philadelphia, both the predecessors of the University of Pennsylvania.” Apparently Franklin, who published several of the preacher’s texts, was more tolerant than his successors. But the mob has its own reasons, or in this case putative reasons, for Penn’s action appears to have been preventative. Whitefield had to go. But what’s next? Architecture often assumes a commemorative function, must it, too, be cancelled in this misbegotten attempt to rewrite history? If Jefferson and Washington are suspect, what about their homes, Monticello and Mount Vernon. To make matters worse, the houses were built with slave labor. The architecture of both was influenced by the prevailing eighteenth-century fashion for Classicism, a style that originated in ancient Rome and Greece. Both were slave-owning societies, so no doubt temple pediments and Ionic columns will sooner or later be called into question, too.