Philadelphia un-cancels William Penn

It turns out pushback works.

Philadelphia’s Welcome Park will not be “rehabilitated,” in the words of the National Park Service. The federal agency had announced it would remove the statue of William Penn, the man after whom Pennsylvania is named, that had been standing in Philadelphia’s Welcome Park since 1982.

The trouble is Penn was a slave owner back in the 1600s. That one fact effaces everything else about Penn’s role in the history of Pennsylvania.

But the people of Pennsylvania pushed back. The National Park Service on Monday announced Penn’s statue will remain in Welcome Park after all. The plan to efface Penn was “released prematurely and had not been subject to a complete internal agency review.”

Translation: The people of Pennsylvania found out about the plan prematurely — that is, before the NPS could drag away Penn’s statue, leaving the people with no recourse.

“Upon completion of all the necessary internal reviews,” NPS said in a statement, “the park looks forward to engaging in a robust public process to consider options for refurbishing the park in the coming years.”

By which they mean, “We'll try this again another time.”

That time won’t come if every time these “rehabilitators” of history attempt to expunge the past and overwrite it with a new history, the public pushes back with the same intensity that has kept William Penn's statue standing in Welcome Park.

Give in to American history’s enemies, and you will give away everything. Their demands will never end.

Note their use of the word “rehabilitation.” One does not "rehabilitate" a park. One landscapes it. But rehabilitating how people think is another matter. A political matter. It’s the sort of thing we might associate with countries such as North Korea, China, and the old Soviet Union, where wrongthink was a crime against the state. One punishable by “rehabilitation” or “re-education.” Often in a camp.

We're not quite there yet, but we are getting close. The National Park Service wanted to “rehabilitate” Welcome Park in order to “provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors.” The idea is that William Penn’s statue is somehow unwelcoming and not “inclusive.” The remedy was to get rid of the statue — thus disconnecting the “experience” of the park from the history of the man who was largely responsible for the state’s founding.

How long will it be before history’s enemies turn their attention toward rehabilitating that?

They obviously won’t stop with Penn’s statue, just as they haven’t stopped with Confederate monuments in southern states and at Arlington National Cemetery. So don’t be surprised when the statue-demolishers try to change the name of the state named in Penn’s honor. Don’t be shocked when they demand the bulldozing of George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or that their faces be sandblasted from Mt. Rushmore.

How long before the Washington Commanders (née Redskins) also require “rehabilitation”?

How about rehabilitating Washington itself? How can the nation’s capital continue to bear the name of that old white slaveholder? Never mind that without Washington the man, there would be no Washington, D.C. There might not even be a country.

The left’s mode of rehabilitation has no end, which is why it must be stopped before it ends everything we love. Don’t think for a moment that compromise is possible. A middle-ground approach that allows for a balanced view of American history might be a reasonable outcome. But these are not reasonable times.

The history of the country must be effaced.

By removing statues and, inevitably, other public acknowledgments of the role played by the flawed men who founded the United States, the country no longer has a history.

History is complex. So are the men who made it. Nobody’s perfect. William Penn certainly wasn’t. Neither was Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves even as he professed to abhor slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr., was unfaithful to his wife and likely plagiarized swaths of his doctoral dissertation.

But we take the history of these men in toto. We do not obliterate them from the history books because of some things they said or did that were less than admirable or even abhorrent.

A balanced standard no longer seems to apply to those needing “rehabilitation.” They must be effaced — the history of the past must be effaced — so that a new country can arise from the forgotten memories of the old.

But even these new, politically correct memories will prove ephemeral — destined to be "rehabilitated" in their turn as the winds of politics shift and what was doubleplusgood today becomes crimethink tomorrow.

Just ask George Orwell. Until, of course, he's been obliterated, too.