A bronze Marcus Whitman statue in the Washington state Capitol building weighs over 9,000 pounds with its stone base. (Jacquelyn Jimenez Romero/Washington State Standard)
For nearly a year now, state officials have been wrestling with a surprisingly difficult question: where do you put a 4-ton bronze Marcus Whitman?
The statue, which occupies the north portico of the Washington state Capitol, is so heavy it threatens the integrity of the building. Moving it outside exposes it to the weather and vandalism. Finding a new indoor space requires costly structural engineering. And placing it next to the forthcoming statue of Billy Frank Jr. is appropriately off the table.
But after months of meetings, alternatives, and six separate location proposals, the state is still circling around the same flawed assumption: that the Whitman statue must be saved.
It doesn’t.
If we want to be honest about how we commemorate our past, Washington should consider an option officials haven’t yet put on the table: dismantling or otherwise retiring the statue.
This isn’t about erasing history. It’s about stopping the long-running mistake of elevating a myth.
A manufactured legacy
Whitman’s story is familiar to anyone who passed through the Washington public school system before the last couple of decades. The missionary-doctor who “saved the Oregon Territory” through a heroic ride east, an early frontier morality tale.
But generations of historians have undercut that myth. The story wasn’t merely exaggerated; it was manufactured. It was deployed to justify white settlement, minimize Indigenous sovereignty, and frame American expansion through a Christian nationalist lens.
The statue in Olympia was installed for that purpose. The program for its 1953 dedication spells out the message in stark terms: Washington’s political leaders openly used Whitman to elevate a factually wrong, racially exclusionary narrative of the region’s past.
The object itself embodies that propaganda campaign. Keeping it upright on our state Capitol grounds, no matter where it’s placed, keeps the old story upright as well.
Part of this quandary exists because the state never established a clear process for removing outdated monuments.
In 2022, state Sen. Sam Hunt proposed a thoughtful framework that would have given the Department of Enterprise Services clear authority to relocate or retire statues under conditions such as structural necessity, modern cultural evaluation, or legislative direction.
That bill didn’t pass. As a result, agencies are now improvising a process with committees, stakeholder groups, public comment, and months of studies. The result is we’re spending time and resources trying to preserve an object we have no public obligation to maintain.
Letting go
Statues are tools of commemoration, not historical records. We don’t honor someone in bronze so future generations can learn about them; that’s what museums, archives, books, and classrooms are for. We honor someone in bronze because we want them to literally loom over our civic space.
Whitman can and should remain part of our historical record. But the argument that removing a statue “erases history” has it backwards. Leaving a monument built to support a discredited myth actually obscures history. It keeps the lie visible and the truth buried in specialist texts.
The Legislature recognized this when it voted in 2021 to replace Washington’s Whitman statues with representations of Billy Frank Jr., whose leadership on treaty rights, salmon recovery, and environmental justice shaped modern Washington. The question now is not whether Whitman should continue to serve as a symbol of the state. The Legislature already answered that.
The question is why we are still trying to find him a place of honor.
This post was originally authored and published by Emmett O’Connell from Washington State Standard via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
