Rachel Manteuffel, a Washington Post staffer who some months ago broke the story about the Washington DC monument to Martin Luther King with the bowdlerized quote, tried for a follow-up hit this week, searching out several other monuments that she thought needed to be fixed.
The ones she places in that category, however, while interesting to read about, just don't measure up on the error scale to the MLK case. Mostly, these choices are just quirky, or look odd from a certain angle, or have fallen afoul of changing societal norms -- nothing to raise eyebrows a hundred years ago when they were conceived and erected, but a bit shocking to modern-day viewers when we are confronted with how things used to be.
But they don't need "fixing." The MLK monument did, because it was factually incorrect.
In the monument business, as in others, it seems to me that it's a waste of time and money to fix something that "ain't broke." Luckily, most of these B-list monuments will ultimately disappear without ever needing expensive corrections. They'll be removed over time to moulder in some used-monument yard in Alabama or Colorado, with no one the wiser.
Manteuffel's story does raise one interesting point: Several of these monuments appear to have been proposed/ordered/designed/erected not by any civic authority, but simply by some private individual or business, probably on the basis that they offered to pay for it. (The "Temperance Fountain" which I've never seen, is a notable case.) Accepting gifts from private patrons is probably not, in my view, the best way to decide who or what gets memorialized.
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