Mayor Mamdani Should Reclaim the City’s Jefferson Statue
The fact that the quill of David d’Angers’s statue of the third US president broke during the nation’s 250th anniversary provides more than an irresistible symbolic trope.
In late May, the quill held by David d’Angers’s 1834 statue of Thomas Jefferson, exiled from the New York City Hall since 2021, broke while the piece was being moved from the New York Historical’s library into a gallery space for the new exhibition Democracy Matters. The quill was repaired with Lascaux 498-X adhesive two weeks later, but the fact that this happened during the nation’s 250th anniversary, with democracy under assault, provides more than an irresistible symbolic trope. Jefferson’s language of equality has long inspired democratic, labor, and socialist movements and given them a basis to expand their demands for justice. In a bold maneuver, Mayor Zohran Mamdani could use this incident to reclaim the city-owned work for public life and place it within New York’s history of social struggle.
Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people, exploited children in Monticello’s brutal nail factory, and fathered children with Sally Hemings while holding her in slavery. Uncritical celebration is impossible. But confronting this record need not mean abandoning his symbolic force within the American political tradition. The left still wields Jefferson’s rhetorical weapons, but it has weakened its connection to the history of Americans who used his words against oligarchy. If democratic socialists led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are to win national power, they must learn to mobilize democratic symbols capable of reaching Americans still committed to the civil religion of the founding. Reclaiming the city’s Jefferson would be a dramatic gesture toward bending those symbols against MAGA and Silicon Valley authoritarianism.
