The reversal of the plan to topple the statue of William Penn at Philadelphia’s Welcome Park is an opportunity to dilate on what an important American he was. As scooped by the Sun, a proposal from President Biden’s National Park Service had mulled excising Penn in the name of creating a more “welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience.” The irony is that few have done more than William Penn to make America more welcoming and inclusive.

Of Quaker stock, Penn was granted by Charles II land that comprised what is today Pennsylvania and Delaware. The inhabitants acclaimed him as their proprietor. This man who had served spells at the Tower of London on account of his conscience would call for the union of the colonies. His charter for Pennsylvania would serve as inspiration to those who gathered at the city he founded to write the Constitution.

Penn called Pennsylvania his “Holy Experiment.” The gift from the Crown made Penn the largest non-royal landowner in the world.  The name of his holding meant “Penn’s Woods.” Penn could have devolved into a despot. Instead, he built an Arcadia of acceptance, with Jews, Catholics, Amish, Mennonites, and sundry sects finding refuge in the territory. It would not be too much to call him a Founding Grandfather of religious liberty. 

The man whom Mr. Biden’s minions would have expunged was also an accomplished constitutionalist. His “Framework for Government” pioneered the advance of amendments, introducing a flexibility and dynamism to sacred parchments. In his preamble to the “Framework,” he demonstrates a homespun  and tolerant wisdom. “Governments,” he writes, “like clocks, go from the motion men give them.”

The Park Service announced that the “preliminary draft proposal, which was released prematurely and had not been subject to a complete internal agency review, is being retracted.” It is more than welcome relief.  Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, is taking credit, a promising sign of which way the winds are shifting when it comes to this craze for iconoclasm. Still, it would have been better for this retreat not to have been required.    

Penn was a man of his age. He owned and traded slaves. He died 147 years before abolition without having fully grappled with America’s original sin. Yet he treated fairly with Native Americans, and Voltaire himself, at faraway Paris, is reported to have described one accord struck by Penn as the “only treaty between those people” — Indians and Europeans — “that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed.”

We grasp that the park surrounding the statue of Penn has fallen into disrepair. Few who visit find it inspiring. The answer, though, is not to forget Penn, but to recommit to his spirit. America will be a quarter of a millennium old in a year and a half, old enough to turn away from such silliness as punting Penn but sufficiently young to not lose him to the mists of time. For a son of Scranton, Mr. Biden ought to have known all this without a backlash.