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NY Times Op-Ed, June 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
This Monument to White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight
By Richard White
(Mr. White is a professor of American history.)
Monuments are symbols, and in times of trouble they prompt symbolic
action. They went up as political statements, and they come down as
political statements. But it is far easier to topple a monument or
change a name than to eradicate racism or counter its long legacy.
In the East, Confederate monuments are the target, but in the West,
protesters attack explorers, their sponsors, missionaries, soldiers and
settlers. In the past week the California Legislature with uncommon
alacrity banished statues of Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus.
Ulysses Grant and Junipero Serra have come down in San Francisco.
But some monuments escape notice. Activists in Marin County, California,
have demanded the renaming of places commemorating Francis Drake, an
English explorer and naval hero as well as a slave trader and pirate.
But so far they have not yet targeted Drake’s Cross (also known as the
Prayerbook Cross).
It stands nearly 60 feet tall, sits in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
and honors Drake. His slave trading has understandably gotten him in
trouble, but what Drake is doing in Golden Gate Park is the more
interesting question.
In 1894 Episcopalians commemorated Drake’s landing in California and
what they saw as the first Protestant service in North America by
erecting a giant sandstone cross — a “sermon in stone” — intending it to
be visible from ships entering the Golden Gate. Trees gradually grew up
around it; many of its inscriptions have weathered and some have
disappeared. But the cross — a denominational symbol in a public park —
has a lot to tell us.
The invisibility of Drake’s Cross may make it the most fitting monument
to white supremacy in the country. Quite unintentionally, the sandstone
cross records the persistence of racial ideologies and their decline,
their viciousness and their vacuousness, the horrors they condone and
the ridiculousness of what they commemorate.
It is an attempt to enshrine Anglo-Saxonism, which is a
late-19th-century variant of white supremacy. It carries us back into a
putatively Anglo-Saxon America, when, with deep worries about the racial
identity of a heavily immigrant city, many Californians became crazed
over the long-dead Drake. They enlisted him to shoulder the white man’s
burden.
Drake’s Cross actually commemorates a nonevent. Francis Drake neither
sailed into San Francisco Bay nor set foot on the site of San Francisco,
although he very probably landed somewhere nearby in 1579.
He spent a month somewhere in California (or maybe Oregon) repairing his
ship before crossing the Pacific. Californians named things after him
and built monuments to him.
Now, along with people in California, Black Lives Matter has made Drake
a target in Plymouth, England, where Drake began and ended the
round-the-world voyage that brought him to California.
The inscriptions on the cross — those that still can be read — celebrate
Drake as part of the beginning of a Protestant Anglo-Saxon America. He
was the first Protestant, the first Englishman, the first missionary on
“our” coast, in “our” country, on “our” continent.
The story that the cross commemorates is a testimony to American
credulity. After robbing, raping and murdering his way up the Pacific
Coast, Francis Drake reached California and called it Nova Albion (New
England). California became the first New England, the place where the
United States began. Drake supposedly inspired Walter Raleigh to found
Roanoke, which led to Jamestown and then the second New England, which
led to the American Revolution, which eventually produced American
expansion that came full circle to California. The Gold Rush
Forty-Niners were not invaders; they were just coming home.
All this was pretty bold talk and a heavy burden to put on an Anglican
pirate who spent a month on a beach patching a ship. The story claimed
that the beginning of California was white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and
peaceful rather than mestizo, Catholic and violent; that Anglo-Saxons
did not conquer California in an imperial war and displace its Native
and Mexican population; that Native people had already freely given
their territory to Drake and, supposedly, just disappeared. In The Los
Angeles Times in 1930, George Wycherley Kirkman underlined the cross’s
declarations, celebrating Drake as “the first Anglo-Saxon” to see
California, the first English speaker and the first booster who wanted
to plant an English colony in the future state.
Today California is a majority-minority state, and the “our” of the
monument — Protestant and English — encompasses a fraction its
inhabitants. But that was always the point. In 1896 the “our” was meant
to exclude an immigrant and largely Catholic city. When Americans today
long for unity, the cross reminds us what the old terms of unity were.
Follow the Drake story through the 20th and 21st centuries and it
becomes both ridiculous and dark. Confidence men and women latched on to
Drake’s voyage to claim he left his fortune to an American heir. They
created a Ponzi scheme, selling shares with guaranteed dividends to
finance the heir’s court battle to gain title. Ordinary Americans fell
for this, but the University of California at Berkeley was no more
skeptical. For years it displayed Drake’s Plate, supposedly left by
Drake at his landing place and fortuitously rediscovered in the 1930s.
It was crude forgery and a prank.
The claims of Anglo-Saxonism sucked in the credulous and the supposedly
sophisticated. The Americans who consumed them became the joke.
An “Anonymous Narrative” seems to be the only one left by a participant
in the voyage. It records that when he left the West Coast, he took with
him the “Negro wench called Maria” and two unnamed black male slaves he
had captured in the Spanish colonies. Maria was “afterward gotten with
child between the captaine and his men.” Drake eventually put the two
male slaves and the pregnant Maria ashore with some provisions on an
uninhabited island in the Molucca Sea on the other side of the Pacific.
Here was Anglo-Saxon paternity but in the form of rape, abandonment and
probably murder.
The construction and demolition of monuments are history, but monuments
themselves are not history. They are useful windows on history. They
disclose stories we would now like to disavow, but if we look carefully,
we can also find what the monuments were intended to hide. In the name
of remembering, we don’t want to forget.
Richard White is an emeritus professor of American history at Stanford
University and the author, with the photographer Jesse White, of
“California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History.”
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