“Committed Genocide”: A Philadelphia Monument, Graffiti and How the Park Service Answered

In June 2020, during protests for racial justice, someone spray-painted "committed genocide" beside the statue of George Washington on Philadelphia's Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier. Independence National Historical Park removed it and posted about it on social media, drawing a heated debate across hundreds of comments. The question the episode raised, how the National Park Service should respond to challenges to the commemorative landscape it safeguards, especially sites that celebrate heroic figures who also perpetrated racial oppression, was taken up on June 17, 2021 in a virtual public program, "The Lives of Monuments." The moderator was Dr. Emma Silverman, and the speakers were Park Ranger Bill Caughlan, architectural conservator Rachel Adler and the American Studies and art history scholar Dr. Erika Doss.

The inscription and eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the Revolutionary War (National Park Service).

The monument

The tomb stands in Washington Square, a 6.5-acre plot at the southwest corner of Independence National Historical Park. Founder William Penn planned it as one of five open spaces in the city. For more than a century it was pasture and a potter's field for people considered undesirable: the poor, suicide victims, executed criminals, Catholics, Native Americans, and free and enslaved Africans. It also took the bodies of American and British soldiers who died in the battles of Princeton, Trenton, Brandywine and Germantown and during the British occupation in the winter of 1777-78. Burials stopped after the yellow fever epidemic of 1794. No one knows the number buried there, but it is in the thousands. The square became a promenade, and in 1816 it was renamed for Washington, who had lived in the city while President.

In the 1950s, local businessmen funded a memorial to the unknown soldier as part of a redesign of the square. It was dedicated in 1957 with a monument designed by G. Edwin Brumbaugh: a bronze replica of Houdon's standing Washington on a granite pedestal over a marble sarcophagus holding an unknown soldier's remains exhumed from the square, backed by a limestone wall of inscriptions. An eternal flame was added in 1976, and flagpoles carry the flags of the original 13 states and the first American flag. Wreaths are laid on Memorial Day, Veterans Day and Washington's birthday. Built at the height of the Cold War, the memorial is celebratory.

The graffiti on the monument (National Park Service).

The graffiti and the response

The painting was unsigned, so it is unclear whom it accused, though the ranger reasoned it was aimed at Washington. He pointed out that Washington enslaved over 570 people at Mount Vernon and used no influence to end slavery, and took part in, and at times led, the removal of Native Americans from their lands. Another tag, "ACAB," was added.

Cleaning took professional conservators. The limestone is soft and porous, some paint had sunk in, and a special solvent was needed. Many people offered to clean it, but the job needed professional conservators. It took weeks, and the graffiti is now nearly gone.

The ranger said the incident made staff look again at their interpretation. For the Park Service, interpretation is preservation, since people support protecting places only when they understand why they matter, and for years large parts of the nation's history were left out. The park has widened its stories to include people of different genders, sexual orientations, races, religions and nationalities, though there is more to do.

Park Service policy on graffiti

Rachel Adler explained that graffiti afflicts every park unit, not only urban ones or in times of unrest. In summer 2020, with so many parks and private owners facing it, staff gave a training in removal, and its documentation advice focused on evidence for crimes. Protest-related graffiti is treated like a teenager's tag: removal as soon as possible, since studies suggest graffiti draws more graffiti. Methods used on city buildings, like sandblasting and pressure washing, are not options for historic stone.

What is graffiti and what is an inscription depends on time and message. At Capitol Reef National Park, early settlers' names carved in a canyon wall are protected, and the Park Service restored the graffiti left at Alcatraz during the Native American occupation of the island, with Native Americans taking part in the final steps. Both pre-date the sites joining the Park Service; for graffiti made on existing park land, policy says remove it without asking whether it will matter to later Americans.

A small group of employees therefore developed a way to record modern graffiti digitally, in the public NPGallery database, so future historians can judge its meaning. Staff are encouraged to record all of it, not only protest messages, to spare them from making that call, since any choice reflects bias. It is voluntary, and limited by staff and funds; some parks see too much to record it all.

The monument after the cleaning treatment (National Park Service).

Why people deface monuments

Erika Doss placed the Philadelphia act in the 2020 wave of protest after the police killing of George Floyd, which also targeted the Lincoln Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Shaw Memorial in Boston and statues of Andrew Jackson, Washington, Columbus and Frank Rizzo, some removed. Vandalism is usually seen as criminal, with connotations of violence and disrespect, and many saw defacing a war memorial as civic disorder. But she called such cultural vandalism an expression of rage, pain and mourning, a public declaration that something is wrong in America, comparing how street art such as Banksy's is prized while graffiti on a monument disturbs people. Monuments hold symbolic capital, and attacks on them reveal contested meanings of national memory.

Sources

• National Park Service, The Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier: Graffiti and the Legacy of the Founding Fathers, from the June 17, 2021 virtual program "The Lives of Monuments," Independence National Historical Park; the scholars' remarks are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.