Rich Lowry

Sometimes Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again.

Back in 2020, during the spasm of violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, vandals in Baltimore, Maryland, tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus.

They shattered the figure of the iconic explorer and tossed the pieces into the Inner Harbor, including the severed head.

That seemed to bring to a decisive end a statue that had stood since 1984.

This act of iconoclasm, though, has a happy ending. A replica now stands in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, courtesy of a White House committed to the memory of the great navigator.

The assailed statue found a friend in a local artist and fisherman named Tilghman Hemsley. He got divers to fish out the pieces, and then his son, Will Hemsley, set about creating a replica, a painstaking, expensive effort.

Columbus is worth it.

The famous explorer is hardly the monster of the left’s imagining. There’s no doubt that he was flawed and a product of his time, a 15th century that was red in tooth and claw.

Columbus was wrong on a fundamental question, thinking that he’d discovered Asia, when he hadn’t come close. He enslaved natives and could be highhanded, although he wasn’t exceptionally cruel by the standards of the day. The devastation of native populations was a terrible tragedy owing to the spread of disease, not deliberate policy.

His worst failing was that he was an abysmal administrator. At one point, Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains to answer for his misgovernance.

The other side of the ledger is truly epic. How many people have played a central role in knitting together two hemispheres, and doing it at considerable personal risk?

What Columbus pulled off was the equivalent, in today’s terms, of traveling to Mars in a jerry-rigged spacecraft, without proper navigation or any sense of what might await on the Red Planet.

Right before Columbus made landfall during his first voyage, the crew of the Santa Maria was ready to mutiny; he came close to having to turn around.

After making landfall in the Bahamas, Columbus barely made it back to Europe. Repeatedly hit by brutal storms, he tossed a bottle overboard with a description of what he had found in case he didn’t make it.

His feats of navigation and exploration were extraordinary; he, and other explorers of his era, catalyzed advances in map-making and geography; and he made an outsized contribution to forging the Atlantic bridge between Europe and the Americas that was one of the keys to the creation of the modern world.

The maritime historian Lincoln Paine writes, “This era was unprecedented not only because extraordinary floods of people, ideas and material wealth, as well as flora, fauna and pathogens, were unleashed around the world, but because Europeans were for the first time in the vanguard of world change.”

It is this epochal development — considered a disaster by the woke left — that is at the root of the campaign to dethrone, and even decapitate, Christopher Columbus.

Since the inception of cities, there have been statues to honor heroes and to establish the values and history that define a place. These choices are fraught with meaning — the public display of a historical figure in marble isn’t merely a decorative element in a park or traffic circle, but a statement about who we are.

This is why the restoration of the Columbus statue is so gratifying. In this instance, an act of destruction carried out by revolutionaries seeking to change our public landscape and the story we tell about ourselves has been resisted and reversed.