Officials at the National Park Service abruptly withdrew a proposal to remove a Philadelphia statue commemorating William Penn, who founded the colony of Pennsylvania.
The agency had issued a request for public comment last week proposing that Welcome Park, located on the site of the former Penn residence, receive “expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia” in consultation with representatives the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. The planned revision would have included the permanent removal of the statue, but the agency issued another statement on Monday retracting the plans and claiming that the proposal had not been “subject to a complete internal agency review.”
The new version of Welcome Park would have included a “ceremonial gathering space with circular benches” while retaining some elements of the original layout. The site is part of the broader Independence National Historical Park.
William Penn was an influential Quaker who was granted the tract of land by King Charles II in repayment of a debt owed to his father. He founded the city of Philadelphia and protected the free exercise of religion in the colony after he suffered due to his Quaker convictions in England.
Pennsylvania House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler, a Republican, had said in a statement that “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.”
The nixed attempt to remove the William Penn statue came weeks after the Biden administration controversially removed the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery following a recommendation from the federal Naming Commission, which was created after the death of George Floyd to recommend the revision of various public memorials to Confederates. The memorial will be relocated to New Market Battlefield State Historical Park in Virginia.
