The only sensible replacement would be a statue of Abigail Scott Duniway, Harvey Scott’s older sister and a champion of women’s rights. Viola Boley Coe who, with her husband, had donated most of the statues that were vandalized and who was the President of the women’s suffrage movement in Oregon was a medical doctor, as was her husband. She is likely the first female Dakota territory resident to become a medical doctor. This is one of the people some were demonizing during the vandalism, seeking to justify the damage inflicted on some statues through relation to the donors. Those people likely knew little of Viola Coe who appears frequently in photographs with Duniway and is seen in the famous photo where Duniway signs the document signifying women’s right to vote in Oregon; Viola Coe stands as a witness to her right, while Governor Oswakd West appears on her left.made a sincere effort to have a memorial of Abigail Scott placed where the Campbell fire memorial in W. Burnside is located but the firemen wanted the same spot and overruled her. Duniway’s grandson, David C. Duniway, served as the first state archivist from 1946 to 1972. David was a son of Clyde Duniway, a historian and university president.
I’m referring to the location on Mt Tabor where the guerilla giant plasticine bust of York appeared after Harvey Scott was toppled. It was then vandalized and destroyed as well (as was a statue at the Univerdity of Portland campus (so much for demonstrations of alleged socual justice ).
Ironically, and although the monuments committee and the city discarded the city survey with 5,000 responses from citizens claiming it was “flawed”, they proceeded without public input to impose their own plan to work with the guerilla artist to have the York bust remodeled and cast on bronze. So while Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Roosevelt - all statues the public wanted repaired and restored remain in a warehouse, the uncommissioned bust of York is on display on the second floor if the Portland Art Museum where the public pays $24 to enter and view it.
There is a new questionnaire which does not appear to be any more professional than the last one (although said to have been designed by PSU) seeking to discover where the people who respond to it think the statue should be installed. They had no plan when hurriedly casting it. One of the questions having to do with disability seeks to stress the fallacy that nobody knows about York’s part in the Lewis & Clark corps of discovery when there are books, articles, multiple statues of York already in Portland as well as a giant mural in the side of the Oregon Historical Society which can be admired from the park blocks. The survey’s term for the inferred disability is “invisibility.”
The Portland City Council, during the mayoral regime if Vera Katz, officially recognized York Street in the Pearl District as referencing York. 35 members if the Lewis & Clark corps if discovery received no individual mention in the Lewis & Clark journals but York is mentioned by name more than once and some of his activities and interactions with the native people described. Charles Russell famously painted a depiction of a chief seeking to try and rub off his color, thinking it was paint.
The money spent having a new statue created and cast in bronze while older monuments languish is troubling.
Thus fast tracking and excluding the public is insulting, out of control and sets a troubling precedent and example.
Steve Holgate is a Lincoln impersonator and has been for years. He was part of a group I put together when I headed the Lincoln Bicentennial in 2009. We performed a Lincoln "show" across the state and had fun doing it. At the end of our tour, we had a bronze plaque placed at the base of Lincoln's statue, with the city's permission. I don't know what happened to the plaque, but it is still there. Holgate will be performing his act, I beleive at the Oregon Historical Society in an effort to urge the City to put Abe where he belongs, plaque or not.
Lincoln was once offered the Territorial Governorship of Oregon, but his wife, Mary Todd, refused to accompany him, so he declined. Lincoln's best friend, Edward Baker, was appointed Senator for Oregon and later served as a Colonel in the Civil War, but died at the Battle of Balls Bluff; the Lincolns named their firstborn after him. Regarding the hanging of the natives, the original list was for 100 to be hanged. Lincoln reduced the list to 38 who his staff said were in the attack.
I am reposting this comment that originally appeared with Fred Leeson's September 5 piece on the same topic:
Portland says its plan to put Abraham Lincoln on a much lower base reflects years of community input. But the city has not shown that Portlanders were ever asked whether they wanted the statue removed from its historic pedestal.
The public response we do have points the other way. In the city’s 2024 survey, 82 percent of about 5,000 respondents wanted Lincoln returned. The city instead relies on listening sessions, partner organizations and a symposium attended by about 100 self-selected people. The symposium discussed monuments, public memory and the city’s values in general. It did not ask participants to choose between restoring Lincoln to his pedestal and placing him near the ground.
City staff took comments gathered through these carefully framed events, selected the themes they considered important, and turned them into supposed public authority for a design the public never approved. The decision was announced in June even though PSU was still analyzing the project’s public-engagement work and the final report was not scheduled until later in the year. Now the city is holding a “public conversation” after announcing what it plans to do.
That is not community decision-making. It is a decision by city staff followed by an effort to give it the appearance of community support.
The city’s own Lewis & Clark report warned against exactly this. It said public engagement is merely performative unless people can see how their views affected the result. It called for alternatives not limited by a predetermined outcome and a clear explanation of the final decision. Where is the Lincoln-specific report showing who chose the lower base, what alternatives were considered, and why the original pedestal was rejected?
The appeal to “accessibility” is also unconvincing. Accessibility normally means providing an accessible path, viewing area and interpretive material. It does not require lowering the subject of a historic monument. The real purpose is plainly to change Lincoln’s symbolic standing—to make the monument less reverential and to cut him down to size.
Behind this is an ultra-progressive reading of history that holds Lincoln personally responsible for American expansion as an episode of settler colonialism. Because he signed the Homestead and Pacific Railway acts, he is faulted for failing to reject one of the basic policies of nineteenth-century America. This is an absurd standard. It amounts to condemning Lincoln for failing to abolish nineteenth-century America while he was preserving the Union and abolishing slavery.
Lincoln’s treatment of the Dakota deserves honest discussion. But even there, the usual account omits that Minnesota authorities wanted 303 men executed and Lincoln commuted 264 of those sentences despite enormous pressure for mass vengeance.
Lincoln and Roosevelt are historic monuments, not proposals for new public art. They are grandfathered. Portland may commission all the ground-level, interactive and non-reverential monuments it wants. It may add interpretation to the old ones. It should not redesign historic works to express the current preferences of arts administrators and then claim that “the community” made the decision.
Restore Lincoln to his pedestal. Add accurate historical context. And stop using curated community engagement to disguise decisions the public was never allowed to make.
This is an excellent analysis of the process. Last night's official "conversation" about plans for the Lincoln statue was a contorted effort to demean Lincoln while claiming the new placement had been made for reasons of security and accessibility. The audience showed no respect for what Portland's leading arts ambassador (Thomas Lauderdale, sitting in the front row) called "a dog and pony show.
For the record, if nothing else, it would be beneficial to have the names and CVs of the individuals most responsible for ratifying the mob violence of 2020 with their own ideologically aligned manipulation of the arts bureaucracy.
At 5:15 p.m., before the 6 p.m. panel discussion inside the adjacent
Masonic Temple (Portland Art Museum) Building, actor and author
Steve Holgate will do his Lincoln presentation and press
conference. He'll answer questions.
I heard the Peacocks are pressing for a statue of Rosa Luxemburg....
The only sensible replacement would be a statue of Abigail Scott Duniway, Harvey Scott’s older sister and a champion of women’s rights. Viola Boley Coe who, with her husband, had donated most of the statues that were vandalized and who was the President of the women’s suffrage movement in Oregon was a medical doctor, as was her husband. She is likely the first female Dakota territory resident to become a medical doctor. This is one of the people some were demonizing during the vandalism, seeking to justify the damage inflicted on some statues through relation to the donors. Those people likely knew little of Viola Coe who appears frequently in photographs with Duniway and is seen in the famous photo where Duniway signs the document signifying women’s right to vote in Oregon; Viola Coe stands as a witness to her right, while Governor Oswakd West appears on her left.made a sincere effort to have a memorial of Abigail Scott placed where the Campbell fire memorial in W. Burnside is located but the firemen wanted the same spot and overruled her. Duniway’s grandson, David C. Duniway, served as the first state archivist from 1946 to 1972. David was a son of Clyde Duniway, a historian and university president.
I’m referring to the location on Mt Tabor where the guerilla giant plasticine bust of York appeared after Harvey Scott was toppled. It was then vandalized and destroyed as well (as was a statue at the Univerdity of Portland campus (so much for demonstrations of alleged socual justice ).
Ironically, and although the monuments committee and the city discarded the city survey with 5,000 responses from citizens claiming it was “flawed”, they proceeded without public input to impose their own plan to work with the guerilla artist to have the York bust remodeled and cast on bronze. So while Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Roosevelt - all statues the public wanted repaired and restored remain in a warehouse, the uncommissioned bust of York is on display on the second floor if the Portland Art Museum where the public pays $24 to enter and view it.
There is a new questionnaire which does not appear to be any more professional than the last one (although said to have been designed by PSU) seeking to discover where the people who respond to it think the statue should be installed. They had no plan when hurriedly casting it. One of the questions having to do with disability seeks to stress the fallacy that nobody knows about York’s part in the Lewis & Clark corps of discovery when there are books, articles, multiple statues of York already in Portland as well as a giant mural in the side of the Oregon Historical Society which can be admired from the park blocks. The survey’s term for the inferred disability is “invisibility.”
The Portland City Council, during the mayoral regime if Vera Katz, officially recognized York Street in the Pearl District as referencing York. 35 members if the Lewis & Clark corps if discovery received no individual mention in the Lewis & Clark journals but York is mentioned by name more than once and some of his activities and interactions with the native people described. Charles Russell famously painted a depiction of a chief seeking to try and rub off his color, thinking it was paint.
The money spent having a new statue created and cast in bronze while older monuments languish is troubling.
Thus fast tracking and excluding the public is insulting, out of control and sets a troubling precedent and example.
Steve Holgate is a Lincoln impersonator and has been for years. He was part of a group I put together when I headed the Lincoln Bicentennial in 2009. We performed a Lincoln "show" across the state and had fun doing it. At the end of our tour, we had a bronze plaque placed at the base of Lincoln's statue, with the city's permission. I don't know what happened to the plaque, but it is still there. Holgate will be performing his act, I beleive at the Oregon Historical Society in an effort to urge the City to put Abe where he belongs, plaque or not.
Lincoln was once offered the Territorial Governorship of Oregon, but his wife, Mary Todd, refused to accompany him, so he declined. Lincoln's best friend, Edward Baker, was appointed Senator for Oregon and later served as a Colonel in the Civil War, but died at the Battle of Balls Bluff; the Lincolns named their firstborn after him. Regarding the hanging of the natives, the original list was for 100 to be hanged. Lincoln reduced the list to 38 who his staff said were in the attack.
I am reposting this comment that originally appeared with Fred Leeson's September 5 piece on the same topic:
Portland says its plan to put Abraham Lincoln on a much lower base reflects years of community input. But the city has not shown that Portlanders were ever asked whether they wanted the statue removed from its historic pedestal.
The public response we do have points the other way. In the city’s 2024 survey, 82 percent of about 5,000 respondents wanted Lincoln returned. The city instead relies on listening sessions, partner organizations and a symposium attended by about 100 self-selected people. The symposium discussed monuments, public memory and the city’s values in general. It did not ask participants to choose between restoring Lincoln to his pedestal and placing him near the ground.
City staff took comments gathered through these carefully framed events, selected the themes they considered important, and turned them into supposed public authority for a design the public never approved. The decision was announced in June even though PSU was still analyzing the project’s public-engagement work and the final report was not scheduled until later in the year. Now the city is holding a “public conversation” after announcing what it plans to do.
That is not community decision-making. It is a decision by city staff followed by an effort to give it the appearance of community support.
The city’s own Lewis & Clark report warned against exactly this. It said public engagement is merely performative unless people can see how their views affected the result. It called for alternatives not limited by a predetermined outcome and a clear explanation of the final decision. Where is the Lincoln-specific report showing who chose the lower base, what alternatives were considered, and why the original pedestal was rejected?
The appeal to “accessibility” is also unconvincing. Accessibility normally means providing an accessible path, viewing area and interpretive material. It does not require lowering the subject of a historic monument. The real purpose is plainly to change Lincoln’s symbolic standing—to make the monument less reverential and to cut him down to size.
Behind this is an ultra-progressive reading of history that holds Lincoln personally responsible for American expansion as an episode of settler colonialism. Because he signed the Homestead and Pacific Railway acts, he is faulted for failing to reject one of the basic policies of nineteenth-century America. This is an absurd standard. It amounts to condemning Lincoln for failing to abolish nineteenth-century America while he was preserving the Union and abolishing slavery.
Lincoln’s treatment of the Dakota deserves honest discussion. But even there, the usual account omits that Minnesota authorities wanted 303 men executed and Lincoln commuted 264 of those sentences despite enormous pressure for mass vengeance.
Lincoln and Roosevelt are historic monuments, not proposals for new public art. They are grandfathered. Portland may commission all the ground-level, interactive and non-reverential monuments it wants. It may add interpretation to the old ones. It should not redesign historic works to express the current preferences of arts administrators and then claim that “the community” made the decision.
Restore Lincoln to his pedestal. Add accurate historical context. And stop using curated community engagement to disguise decisions the public was never allowed to make.
This is an excellent analysis of the process. Last night's official "conversation" about plans for the Lincoln statue was a contorted effort to demean Lincoln while claiming the new placement had been made for reasons of security and accessibility. The audience showed no respect for what Portland's leading arts ambassador (Thomas Lauderdale, sitting in the front row) called "a dog and pony show.
For the record, if nothing else, it would be beneficial to have the names and CVs of the individuals most responsible for ratifying the mob violence of 2020 with their own ideologically aligned manipulation of the arts bureaucracy.