The fact that the quill of David d’Angers’s statue of the third US president broke during the nation’s 250th anniversary provides more than an irresistible symbolic trope.
In late May, the quill held by David d’Angers’s 1834 statue of Thomas Jefferson, exiled from the New York City Hall since 2021, broke while the piece was being moved from the New York Historical’s library into a gallery space for the new exhibition Democracy Matters. The quill was repaired with Lascaux 498-X adhesive two weeks later, but the fact that this happened during the nation’s 250th anniversary, with democracy under assault, provides more than an irresistible symbolic trope. Jefferson’s language of equality has long inspired democratic, labor, and socialist movements and given them a basis to expand their demands for justice. In a bold maneuver, Mayor Zohran Mamdani could use this incident to reclaim the city-owned work for public life and place it within New York’s history of social struggle.
Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people, exploited children in Monticello’s brutal nail factory, and fathered children with Sally Hemings while holding her in slavery. Uncritical celebration is impossible. But confronting this record need not mean abandoning his symbolic force within the American political tradition. The left still wields Jefferson’s rhetorical weapons, but it has weakened its connection to the history of Americans who used his words against oligarchy. If democratic socialists led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani are to win national power, they must learn to mobilize democratic symbols capable of reaching Americans still committed to the civil religion of the founding. Reclaiming the city’s Jefferson would be a dramatic gesture toward bending those symbols against MAGA and Silicon Valley authoritarianism.
The statue was always conceived to mine Jefferson’s symbolic value. In 1832, while in France, Uriah Phillips Levy, a Jewish naval officer and Jacksonian Democrat, commissioned the work as a private citizen from the master sculptor David d’Angers. Levy revered Jefferson’s defense of religious liberty as an expression of democratic equality and called Jefferson an “absolute democrat.” He presented the bronze cast to Congress and the painted plaster model used in its production to New York City, which formally accepted the gift in 1834.
The statue entered City Hall as New York workers were turning Jefferson’s democratic promise into a weapon against oligarchy. Only in the Jacksonian era had New York dismantled most property barriers to votingfor White men (while preserving a prohibitive property qualification for Black men). Historian Sean Wilentz has shown how 1830s New York became a center of efforts to extend this newly broadened political democracy into economic life. The Working Men’s Party, founded in 1829, brought mechanics and laborers into organized politics amid a broader culture of labor newspapers, mass meetings, tavern organizing, and strikes. That insurgency flowed into the Equal Rights Party, better known as the Locofocos. Its leading writer, William Leggett, turned Jefferson’s doctrine of equal rights against banking power, monopoly, and concentrated economic privilege, a tradition later carried into George Henry Evans’s land-reform movement.
In the early 20th century, trade unionist Eugene V. Debs cast socialism as a continuation of America’s founding revolution. In 1912, he declared that the Socialist Party of America, which he helped found, was committed to “industrial and social democracy” and insisted that “everything embraced in ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is wrapped up in this issue.” Decades later in the 1970s and 80s, Michael Harrington, a founder and founding chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, drew on the tradition of “industrial democracy,” associated with Debs and social activist and writer Upton Sinclair. This concept translated the republican ideal of independent and equal citizens, associated with Jefferson’s agrarian vision, into a modern economy by giving workers economic power and a voice over working conditions. In his theoretical writings, Harrington distinguished democratic socialism from Soviet communism and presented it as an extension of American republicanism.
Mamdani’s rhetoric of “collectivism” needs this democratic scaffolding to gain national force. Reclaiming Jefferson’s language of equality in a continuation of the Mayor’s Fourth of July address, and countering the neoliberal cultural elevation of elitist Alexander Hamilton, could furnish vocabulary and rhetorical weapons needed to confront oligarchic fascism. Defeating the threat requires more than policy arguments or denunciations of Donald Trump. It requires a public language presenting equality, worker power, pluralism, and resistance to oligarchy as expressions of the nation’s deepest traditions.
When Democracy Matters ends in November, Mamdani should return the sculpture from New York Historical’s ticketed galleries to a well-considered location in City Hall rather than permit another internal relocation. Mamdani could unveil it with a landmark address on democratic equality and the battle against racism and economic domination. The point would be not to absolve Jefferson, but to pick up his broken quill and recast his words for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.
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