In late May, the quill held by David d’Angers’s 1834 statue of Thomas Jefferson, which had been kept out of New York City Hall since 2021, snapped while the work was being transferred from the New York Historical’s library to a gallery for the new exhibition Democracy Matters. Two weeks later, the quill was restored with Lascaux 498-X adhesive. The timing, during the nation’s 250th anniversary and amid attacks on democracy, carries more than an irresistible symbolic charge.
Jefferson’s language of equality has long fueled democratic, labor, and socialist movements, giving them a foundation for broadening their demands for justice. In a decisive move, Mayor Zohran Mamdani could seize on this moment to bring the city-owned sculpture back into public life and place it within New York’s history of social संघर्ष.
Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people, exploited children in Monticello’s brutal nail factory, and fathered children with Sally Hemings while keeping her in slavery. A celebratory reading of his legacy is impossible. But acknowledging that history does not require surrendering the symbolic force he still holds within the American political tradition.
The left continues to use Jefferson’s rhetorical tools, yet it has grown less connected to the tradition of Americans who once turned his words against oligarchy. If democratic socialists led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani hope to win national power, they will need to mobilize democratic symbols that can still speak to Americans attached to the civil religion of the founding. Returning the city’s Jefferson to public view would be a striking gesture, one that bends those symbols against MAGA and Silicon Valley authoritarianism.
