The Welcome Wagon? Wants What?

America on the Come

"We have to win in November," exclaimed Trump at a rally the other day, "or we're not going to have Pennsylvania." You may think he meant to say, "We've got to have Pennsylvania, or we're not going to win in November," and got confused.

            No. He went on: "They'll change the name. They're going to change the name of Pennsylvania."

            The pretext for this startling charge was a plan by the National Park Service to remove a statue of William Penn -- who founded Pennsylvania -- from a park in Philadelphia.

            What sort of fiendish diversity-pushing was this? Were the feds attempting to weaponize the venerable Keystone State's very name? Just because William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania, happened not to have been, like, a trans woman of color or something?  "Another sad example," declared a Republican legislator, "of the left in this country scraping the bottom of the barrel of wokeism."

            Turns out that’s not exactly the case.

The park where the statue stands is Welcome Park, named for the ship called Welcome, which in 1682 first brought Penn and some sixty-five mostly Quaker colonists from England to what is now Pennsylvania.

            So the park was not named for the man in the statue.

Neither, strictly speaking, was Pennsylvania!