Monumental Politics in New York City

The Indictments

From among hundreds owned by the city, the Commission focused on three statues and one plaque that had reportedly been subject to two or more years of “negative public reaction”:

Few were surprised at the indictment of Columbus. He has long been associated with the enslavement and genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Teddy Roosevelt was another matter. The trust-busting president and pioneering environmentalist seemed the very model of the progressive reformer. But in his Big Stick diplomacy, which allowed him to push through the Panama Canal, he appeared among Caribbean and Latin American peoples as the arch-bully of the Western Hemisphere. In addition and not to be dismissed, Roosevelt supported eugenics, a movement that viewed the rapid growth of purportedly inferior colored populations as threatening the superior white race. Indeed, the statue depicting Roosevelt aboard a mighty steed, flanked by a striding African warrior and a Native American chief, each bearing one of his rifles, suggested white dominion over submissive colored people.

Marshal Petain may have been a celebrated hero of the Great War, but as head of the collaborating pro-Nazi Vichy government during World War II, he presided over the roundup of thousands of Jews and others who perished in concentration camps. Was his plaque to remain in the “Canyon of Heroes”?

The least well known but most vilified among the figures under review was Dr. J. Marion Sims. Sims developed surgical techniques that won him recognition as the “father of American gynecology.” But his experimental operations, undertaken before the Civil War in a makeshift Alabama hospital, were performed without anesthesia and without the informed consent of his patients: enslaved African American women.

The Mayor’s Commission, headed by Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, set for itself the formidable task of “reckoning . . . with the legacy of racism, colonialism, ableism, sexism, prejudice, and inequality” (p. 9).

Hearings were scheduled in each of the city’s five boroughs so that opinions both for and against keeping the monuments might be heard. From the Internet came three thousand responses to questionnaires (p. 5). In the final report, the Commission explained that it was essential to take public feelings regarding the monuments into account to ensure that those entering the public spaces where the monuments were displayed might feel “welcome” (p. 10). But the Commission also promised to give due consideration to the historical context which had allowed the monuments to be erected in the first place. By balancing public opinion against what it called ‘nuanced” and “complex” (pp. 2, 4) historical understanding, the Commission hoped to achieve a measure of “collective reconciliation” even among bitterly divided groups (pp. 9, 29).

These hopeful sentiments aside, the Commission acknowledged that when it came to actually deciding whether a monument or the plaque should stay or go, the decision would most likely be “political in nature” (19). That proved something of an understatement. Even before the Commission convened, blood red paint had been splashed on the Sims and Roosevelt monuments. Melissa Mark-Vivitro, then City Council Speaker, along with the mayor’s wife, Charlene McCray, demanded that Sims be removed. The Mayor himself had apparently promised State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (representing a heavily Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish district in Brooklyn) that Petain would be the first to go. Then in a nod to progressive-minded groups, the mayor promised to keep an open mind regarding the disposition of Columbus. But the mere possibility that the statue might be moved from Columbus Circle forced the Mayor into a confrontation with a jeering Columbus Day crowd.

So even before getting together, the Commission’s eighteen members may have appreciated that without a political base, Sims and Petain could be dealt with rather freely, while Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt might be hard to budge. Columbus was supported by, among others, many of the city’s 650,000 Italian Americans while the formidable American Museum of Natural History, which Teddy’s father helped found, stood literally at TR’s back.

The Verdicts

Columbus would remain at Columbus Circle. The Commission proposed that while the statue stood as a painful symbol of slavery and destruction of indigenous peoples, it also represented the pride of Italian Americans and many others across the country (p. 29).

As to Roosevelt, about half the Commission members suggested that before they could make a decision, more historical background would be needed regarding his purported racism. Many of the other commissioners felt that the statue should be moved, but where exactly—inside the museum or elsewhere?—they could not decide. In the end, the statue would remain in place.

Surprisingly, the Petain plaque would also stay. The Commission pointed out that a sidewalk marker was no “honorific,” but simply one entry among many block-by-block listings of ticker tape parades dating back to 1886 (p. 23). Several commission members felt that all the markers should be removed—Petain was not the only monster among the heroes—but the majority felt that the historical record of the parades should not be tampered with.

Commission leaders had promised to act boldly; now they appeared to be proceeding with an abundance of caution. With Sims, however, they may have seen an opportunity to demonstrate in a conspicuous way, their professed willingness “to contend with racial and other intersectional forms of injustice” (p. 9). In the Commission’s words, Sims represented “a legacy of oppressive and abusive practices on bodies that were seen as subject, subordinate and exploitable in service to his fame” (p. 21).

It came as no surprise then that the Commission could, without dissent, recommend that the Sims statue be removed. By order of the mayor, the New York City Parks Department on April 17, 2018, lifted the statue from its substantial base and trucked it to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn where it was to be installed near the Sims gravesite (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Dr. J Marion Sims heading down Fifth Avenue to Brooklyn. Photo by Marcus Santos/NY Daily News via Getty Images.

Sims Reconsidered

The Commission had promised to explain why figures such as Sims, now considered reprehensible, were once cast in a heroic mold. But in this case, the Commission apparently felt that no explanation was necessary perhaps because two prestigious institutions located on Fifth Avenue right across from the statue, the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Academy of Medicine which could draw on their own substantial sources relevant to Sims, had unequivocally called for removal. So too, Planned Parenthood of New York, since the days of Margaret Sanger a champion for the advancement women’s reproductive health, was now calling for banishment of the memorial to the father of American gynecology.

In the end, the Commission reported that “no person or group wrote or testified to request that the Sims monument remain” (p. 20). But was there nothing to be said in his favor? In the first place, it might be noted that every practicing obstetrician and gynecologist—even those who may never have heard of Sims—was utilizing the eponymous “Sims speculum,” the basic instrument which Sims helped develop for conducting vaginal and uterine examinations. Also, the historical record pointed to Sims’ remarkable success in establishing institutions of particular benefit to women. After moving from Alabama to New York in 1853, he founded the nation’s first hospital for treatment of women’s diseases. And when women suffering from cancer were denied entry to that hospital (it was feared that cancer was contagious), Sims stepped forward to help establish a new hospital, the forerunner of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Sims was a notorious self-promoter, but few denied his personal and professional courage in advocating controversial research into infertility and artificial insemination. Upon election to the presidency of the American Medical Association in 1876, he outraged puritanical reformers by calling for an end to the arrest and harassment of prostitutes to encourage them to be treated for venereal infections. ²

We can now begin to understand why a decade after Sims’ death in 1883, New York physicians and surgeons banded together to assume the considerable expense of casting that larger-than-life statue. What no memorial could obscure, however, was the damning charge that Sims had conducted excruciatingly painful experiments on defenseless enslaved women.

While no gynecologist or obstetrician testified for or against Sims, Dr. L.L. Wall of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis, writing in The Journal of Medical Ethics, had published a defense of Sims on medical and ethical grounds. Wall explained that Sims’s major achievement was in developing techniques to close holes in the vagina, which developed from the stretching a woman endured during obstructed child labor. If those fistulas, especially the tears between the vagina, the bladder, or intestine were not repaired—and prior to Sims the operation was not feasible—then a woman, unable to stop the flow through the vagina of urine and sometimes fecal matter, would be unable to control the stench resulting from her extreme incontinence. She would become a social outcast. ³

Wall conceded that Sims operated on slave women without anesthesia and without their informed consent. But Wall pointed out that given their desperate condition, few would have objected to undergoing a procedure from which they might obtain relief. Wall also pointed out that it would have been practically impossible to operate on a resistant woman. Also, since anesthesia was in the early stages of development, it was unreasonable to expect that Dr. Sims or other surgeons would have known how to administer it. The repair of fistulas, following Sims’ approach, would afterward become routine except in developing countries where upward of two million women today still suffer from the disorder. That is why Dr. Wall traveled to sub-Saharan villages to perform the needed operation, and why he established the Fistula Foundation to address the problem worldwide. Dr. Wall concluded that Sims’ path-breaking work credibly established him as the father of American gynecology. And notably, the techniques pioneered by Sims now disproportionately benefit women of color. ⁴

The Mayoral Commission failed to reference either Wall’s article or the distinctly different scholarship of Deirdre Cooper Owens in her recent Medical Bondage. In contrast to Dr. Wall, Cooper Owens, a history professor at Queens College of the City University of New York, focused on “enslaved women . . . helpless to resist the medical practices performed on their bodies” (p. 44). Cooper Owens pointed out that like other doctors of the day, Sims believed that since black women were stronger and “relatively impervious to pain” compared to whites, that they stood a better chance of surviving experimental surgery (p. 44). By his own account, Sims “ransacked” the Alabama countryside seeking enslaved women suffering from vaginal fistulas (p. 36). From 1844 to 1849, he operated on about a dozen women. His first patient, Anarcha, endured some thirty operations. Sims also recalled the heroic Lucy, who suffered “extreme agony” (p. 112) while undergoing gynecological surgery. So much for African American women being impervious to pain. Readers of such accounts can appreciate the outrage felt especially by East Harlem/El Barrio women viewing in their own neighborhood the larger-than-life statue of Sims.

Cooper Owens in her “Afterward,” unapologetically connects herself to the suffering of enslaved women. She recounts how after being manhandled while undergoing fertility treatments, she realized that even a middle-class professor of history might become, in the eyes of certain physicians, just another black woman who presumably “could deal with pain” better than white women. African American women, she suggests, continue to pay the price for the racial superstitions that since the days of Dr. Sims, hover over American medicine (pp. 123-26).

While Cooper Owens advances our understanding of what enslaved patients endured, Medical Bondage is more than a chronicle of victimization. She points out that when the local white community lost confidence in Sims, his apprentice surgeons quit. Then, quite remarkably, his enslaved patients stepped forward to become nursing assistants. And because they undoubtedly understood the female body in ways that men could not, these enslaved women emerged—as Sims acknowledged and Cooper Owens’ emphasizes—as the mothers of American gynecology.

In casting women conventionally depicted as victims as pioneering nurses, Cooper Owens acknowledges Sims’ extraordinary work. She sees him in the end as neither gratuitously cruel nor sadistic. His basic goal was to restore his patients to health so that they would regain their economic value as breeders and workers in the household, farm or perhaps nurses (p. 41).

Cooper Owens achieves the historical balance that the Mayoral Commission promised but could not deliver. She gives voice and credibility to an enraged community’s demand for condemning or even obliterating the memory of Sims; and then, with the historian’s dispassion, she explains how and what Sims achieved and in doing so she invites us to see young and suffering black women as medical pioneers.

The debate over the Sims statue may have put Cooper Owens in an uncomfortable position. In an interview after the release of the Commission’s report, she argued that it was less important where the statue stood—whether in Green-Wood Cemetery or Fifth Avenue—than that it remain in view to stimulate discussion and to help advance public understanding “of historical accuracy and the context around slavery and nineteenth-century medical history.” ⁵

But perhaps Cooper Owens was being a trifle disingenuous. In Green-Wood, Sims will be largely overlooked among the dozens of headstones and memorials to heroes, saints, and sinners including composer Leonard Bernstein, mobsters Johnny Torio and Joey Gallo, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and “Boss” Tweed. On Fifth Avenue, Sims stood alone, four blocks north of Mt. Sinai’s famed Klingenstein OB/GYN pavilion, and across from the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Academy of Medicine, the venerable institution that had once honored him. ⁶

Additives and Idols

While removing the Sims statue raised the question of what might replace it, the Mayoral Commission’s more pressing concern was how to deal with the inevitable charge that in allowing the Columbus and Roosevelt monuments and Petain plaque to remain, it was covering up the crimes of “great” white men. In response, the Commission proposed that “additives”—signs, markers, art work or statuary—be placed at or near the monuments to set the record straight. Around Columbus Circle then, the proposed additives would most likely indicate that racism and genocide attended the “discovery” of the New World. Signs on Lower Broadway referencing the “canyon of heroes” would be removed. Among the first of the additives to appear was a small sign at the base of the Roosevelt statue cautiously advising: “. . . some see the statue as a heroic group, others as a symbol of racial hierarchy.”

The presumption behind the additives and funding for new statues celebrating the city’s heroic women is that monumental art can advance historical awareness and understanding. That is an uncertain proposition. After all, most public monuments, except really big ones like the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, or Mount Rushmore, are generally ignored. A kid hell-bent on confronting T-Rex at the Museum of Natural History is unlikely to be slowed down on learning that the Roosevelt memorial may (or may not) represent a “distasteful racial hierarchy.” Or consider the proposed Sims’ replacement “Victory Beyond Sims”: an 18-foot tall African-American angel holding an eternal flame in one hand and the staff of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine, in the other. Hidden away in the folds of the angel’s skirt appear the imagined faces in bas relief of young African American women who might be reckoned as either victims or pioneers of obstetrical surgery. The union here of medicine and mythology may be inspirational for some, but for others, the statue will likely appear bewildering.

With the completion of their report, the members of the Mayoral Advisory Commission—having dispatched Sims—may have felt more relief than gratification. As for the Commission’s co-chair, Tom Finkelpearl, the work had just begun. Beleaguered by the controversy over the design of the Sims replacement statue and then a furious debate over which New York City women should be honored with new statuary, Finklepearl resigned as head of Department of Cultural Affairs. And with Generals Lee and Jackson still in the saddle in Charlottesville, we can appreciate the wisdom of Moses and Mohamed in damning all graven images.

The problem is that human beings are still inclined to fashion idols from earth, clay, wood, stone, and bronze. Thankfully, if a passerby notices a graven image at all, then it will likely appear as little more than a decorative perch for pigeons, inspiring neither awe nor anger. Still, we should note in conclusion that there remain a distinct species of idols which even in the great and contentious city simply gladden the heart: