A backlash has erupted over last month’s removal of a statue of President James A. Garfield from a small plaza in Wilmington, with several state lawmakers and transparency advocates demanding it be returned from its new location in small-town Ohio.
City Councilman Nathan Field has also called for a formal investigation into the move. (Uh, why?) Field met with Mayor John Carney’s office on Friday to discuss the statue and said he is working on a plan to return the monument to a new location in the city.
In response to the calls to bring back the statue, City Councilwoman Shané Darby — who led its relocation push as part of a revitalization effort for the Concord Avenue area it had occupied — said, “No, it’s gone. Not coming back.”
Last month, a contracting crew took down the statue from its perch along Concord Avenue and 23rd Street, where it had stood for 110 years. Mayor John Carney had authorized the removal.
City officials then shipped the monument on to Hiram, Ohio, where Garfield attended college and later served as principal for the school.
On Memorial Day in 1895, a group of Wilmington civic leaders and Union veterans — called the Garfield Monument Association — first dedicated the statue at a location along Delaware Avenue, near downtown Wilmington.
By 1918, the city moved it north to Concord Avenue at a location that became known as the Garfield Triangle. In recent years, the statue sat mostly unnoticed in the small neighborhood plaza.
In February, Darby led the push to relocate the statue as part of her larger plan to revitalize the area, according to a blog post she wrote on the matter.
“This was never simply about removing a statue. It was about addressing neighborhood concerns, investing in a neglected public space, and ensuring that residents have a voice in shaping their own community,” she wrote.
In the post, Darby asserted that Garfield had no “significant documented personal connection to Wilmington or Delaware,” while Hiram, Ohio, has a direct historical tie to the former president.
She’s right about that. Now, Rutherford B. Hayes, I could understand. He, at least, was born in Delaware. Delaware, Ohio, but still…
Democrats flipped more than 500 state legislative seats and won control of at least a dozen legislative chambers, establishing new governing trifectas in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nevada. They captured legislative chambers in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina — states long dominated by Republican lawmakers. And they picked up even more legislative seats in deep blue strongholds like New York, California and Illinois.
The scale of the victory is historic. In New York, Democrats are on track for their biggest state Senate majority since 1846, when they were running against the Whigs. In Texas, they won the state House for the first time since 2002. Arizona will have its first Democratic trifecta since the 1960s. And Democrats flipped Georgia’s House, the first chamber Democrats have taken back in the Deep South in the modern era. Altogether, the party won more seats than in any year since the post-Watergate campaign of 1974.
The gains represent the most seismic change in state capitals since Republicans shellacked Democrats nationwide in 2010, picking up nearly 700 state legislative seats and flipping 20 chambers. They used that power in the ensuing years to entrench conservative policies and redraw legislative maps in their favor in wide swaths of the country.
Another Great Ad From Scott Colom. ‘Where’s Cindy’ indeed.
I’ll be back with more a little later. Time to visit my granddaughter.
What do you want to talk about?
Nathan Field just entered the competition for Delaware’s dumbest politician, and his debut makes a splash.
Just so I have this straight, he’s upset that the city spent money to ship out the statue – so he wants to spend more trying to bring it back.
Pro tip, Nate: It’s not constituent service if nobody gives a fuck in the first place. Take that message back your Shané-hating handlers.