Who Gets Done in Stone and Bronze? What Our Monuments Tell US About America — at Different Times and in Different Places
The City of Boston was offered a memorial plaque commemorating two of the most famous names of the 20th century a long time ago. But city leaders and state leaders, the powers that be, did not wish to display it and would not accept the gift — even though the sculptor was Gutzon Borglum, responsible for the four presidential busts on a mountain side in South Dakota.
It languished. It languishes still. More on the fate of this memorial later.
The enduring truth about public monuments, whether statues or plaques, is that they tend to represent the values and narratives of the dominant powers in the societies that erect them.
Walk though the civic heart of Boston, the city that stirred up the Revolutionary passions that led to the founding of the United States, and who do we find memorialized? Start across the street from the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston’s civic heart and public showplace. and who do we find in this place of pride? A mounted George Washington: Boston celebrates the great national leader who safely piloted an infant nation. He’s probably the only memorialized figure in the in the city’s celebrated Back Bay neighborhood whose stature remains inarguable.
The Commonwealth Avenue Mall is a trail of memorials executed in widely varying styles and backed by a wide variety of what today we call “interest groups.” The first is an 1865 statue of Alexander Hamilton, a sign that in the 19th century Boston was still celebrating its role in the founding of the American republic. But before Hamilton was claimed and re-purposed as a rediscovered Immigrant Hero, his role in Washington’s government has long been seen as controversial and divisive. In his own time he was a friend of big money and an enemy of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation in which “all men are created equal.”
Jefferson, of course, was a slaveholder. But Hamilton’s success in persuading the new government to make good on all Revolutionary era borrowing led to a feeding frenzy by the governing class’s 1 per-centers, who bought up poorer Americans’ loan notes at rock bottom prices, cheating them and making a killing for themselves.
The new American government, that is, began with an insiders’ scam.
A second 19th century figurative sculpture also memorializes another Revolutionary War hero, John Glover, whose name is probably unfamiliar to anyone who’s not a history freak. Another example of local pride reaching back to the nation’s beginnings.
The third memorial commemorates Patrick Andrew Collins, an Irish immigrant who became Boston’s mayor in 1902. Even if we don’t recognize the name, no one fails to understand that a memorial recognizing a prominent Irish American pays tribute to, and reflects, the new power of a once widely despised ancestral nationality. With the Irish controlling local politics, the statue went up shortly after Mayor Collins’s death.
A bronze statue of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison erected after the Civil War is a reflection of local figure’s importance in the great national struggle. But an abolitionist could only be popular with the powers that be after a war to end slavery had been fought — and won. Before the war abolitionists were unpopular in Massachusetts, as they were throughout the country, for ‘rocking the boat,’ and Garrison was more than once threatened by mobs.
The most moving memorial is Vendome Memorial, recognizing the loss of nine Boston firefighters battling a hotel fire in 1972. The nine stones depicts the firefighters’ boots and fire hat, and the empty places where these men’s lives should have continued. City workers and unions had a role in getting this one built.
Next we come to one of my least favorite choices for commemoration, the statue of historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the 1960s in what must have been intended as a Cold War anti-Communist gesture. Morrison’s statue is the state’s “old guard” speaking by recognizing a prominent Boston Brahmin WASP, who indulged in degrading slur-words for African Americans in his accounts of slavery and Civil War history, preposterously contending that the institution of slavery caused more suffering for other social classes than it did for African Americans. He also wrote sympathetically of the Gilded Age robber barons who worked to crush America’s fledgling labor movement. After documenting that factory workers wages had declined for a dozen years, Morrison still defended the Plymouth Cordage Company’s decision not to give its workers a raise, prompting a strike in 1916.
In another sign of the times — this one much more recent — the 21st century speaks out in a 2003 monument recognizing the significant contributions of three women with local connections: Phillis Wheatley author of the first book published in America by an African writer. Abigail Adams, everybody’s favorite Revolutionary era feminist. And Lucy Stone, an influential abolitionist and suffragist who inspired others to take up the latter cause after her death.
Then two near-imponderables: a formally posed statue of Domingo F. Sarmiento, a 19th century president of Argentina who modeled his country’s education system on Boston’s. Even if nobody knows who you are, if you have a government behind you, apparently, you can always get a piece of public space.
‘Somebody with money’ is the only explanation for why a statue of Leif Eriksson is located at the south end of the mall where at one time you could see the Charles River. While lacking evidence, Eben Horsford, the man who paid for the memorial, believed that Eriksson’s Vinland was located on the Charles. The unhappy subtext here is the late 19the century racism that sought to upstage America’s ‘discoverer’ Christopher Columbus with a Nordic explorer — because the racial pseudo-science of the time taught that Northern Europeans were superior to Southern Europeans.
Things could, of course, be a lot worse.
Other cities make starkly different choices over who or what to memorialize. You won’t find statues of John or Abigail Adams, and especially not of their son, abolitionist (and sixth President) John Quincy Adams, south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The public memorials in the cities of the old, slave-holding Confederacy speaks to a different power structure. These monuments to the heroes of a failed rebellion were not erected by a grateful nation celebrating its Revolutionary heroes, because of an inconvenient truth in the Confederacy ‘heritage’ narrative: The South lost the war. It would be more accurate to say that the slave-holders lost the war. For nearly two centuries, however, white Southerners have persuaded themselves that their ancestors — great generals and ordinary privates alike — fought in a noble cause.
Folks, the cause of the Civil War was the protection of slavery — the basis of the South’s ruling class’s wealth. Ordinary, often quite poor, white Southerners were motivated to fight in the war because slave-owners told them their ‘country’ was being invaded by ‘another country.’ This is demonstrably untrue. Their country was the United States of America.
How did they forget this? Have they ever remembered?
The widespread, and only lately controversial, presence of monuments to Confederate generals, politicians, and the founders of the Ku Klux Klan owe their existence to political currents in the late 19th and early 20th century. Secessionists and former slave-holders were on the political outs following their lost war and the Reconstruction period in which elected offices were held by newly enfranchised African Americans and whites who had opposed the war. It was not until the 1890s and the following decades that white-only political movements gained a firm control of local governments and began erecting monuments to celebrate the ‘heritage’ of a failed attempt to create a nation founded on slavery. (That foundational purpose is clearly stated in the Confederacy’s Constitution.)
The importance of clinging to the defenders of slavery as a symbol of local pride and regional identity — that is, to discover one’s ‘heritage’ in a war to protect the endless domination of one ‘race’ by another — has long struck me as an odd choice. The question on my tongue has always been, “So do you people consider yourselves Americans or not?”
And, further: “Do you regard yourselves as a conquered people?”
If so, maybe you can express your dissatisfaction by migrating to somewhere more in keeping with your values. The Union of South Africa? Rhodesia? Whoops, missed your chance with those two.
So, to bring this discussion back to my starting point: Public civic monuments are erected to express the values and celebrate the significance of those possessing sufficient political and social power (or, sometimes, mere wealth) to get them built and displayed.
And, given the fallibility of the wisdom of those in power, some monuments (and proposals for monuments) should truly not be built.
But this is not the case of a particular memorial created by an internationally famous sculptor that was first offered to city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts in the late 1920s.
The sculptor was Gutzon Borglum, best known for creating the Mount Rushmore National Memorial depicting the heads of four important Presidents. The work he created for Boston was a memorial plaque for Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and political radicals who were convicted without evidence of a capital crime they did not commit in a trial marred by racial prejudice on the part of the court, the jury, and the general public of that time. The trial took place during an era of political hysteria over the largely imagined threat of Communism known as “The Red Scare.” and at a time when Nativist prejudice against Southern Europeans — especially Italians, then the most numerous group of new immigrants — was openly expressed and unchecked.
The case drew international coverage, it was widely seen as a blatant example of the persecution of the poor and weak by the strong and wealthy. The court’s sentence of execution was fought by Sacco and Vanzetti’s supporters, funded by contributions from all social classes, for six years, but when all legal avenues failed they were executed in 1927. Their funeral march through Boston drew crowds estimated at 200,000, the city’s largest public gathering of the 20th century.
Yet city and state officials refused for decades to accept Borglum’s bronze memorial, depicting profiles of the two men in low relief and these words from Vanzetti’s last letter: “What I wish most of all in this last hour of agony is that our case and our fate may be understood in their real being and serve as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom so that our suffering and death will not have been in vain.”
It took 50 years for any further official notice of the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, seen as martyrs by the left and ‘criminal immigrants’ by the right, to take place in Massachusetts.
In 1977, the 50th anniversary of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, the state’s governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring that the two men had had not received a fair trial, that the state’s handling of the case had been marred by prejudice, and that the names of the two men should forever be cleared of the ignominy of criminal guilt. The proclamation called on all citizens “to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires.”
Former Governor Dukakis recently attended and spoke at the annual commemoration of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution on Aug. 22, held this year in Cambridge. Why is it, Dukakis asked, that human beings can believe such terrible things about people who are another color or have a different religion, or are simply from a different country?
That question of course, as the governor noted, has a terrible relevance today.
In the 19th century, Dukakis pointed out, the prejudice against outsiders was directed against the Irish. The Chinese were the banned by the exclusion act of 1882. Today, it’s the Muslim travel ban.
But in the early 20th century, he said, returning to the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the anti-immigrant bias was directed toward the flow of immigrants from “Southern Europe,” he said. “Italians, Greeks, and Portuguese.”
That’s a powerful indictment of America’s history of anti-immigrant bias. (I would add to the governor’s list, for the record: Jews, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and all other peoples of Eastern Europe.)
Reluctance to displaying the Sacco-Vanzetti memorial in a prominent public place, unsurprisingly, is politics as usual. The dominant powers of any political unit, city, state or country, do not wish to see public monuments pointing out their mistakes.
For that reason I don’t expect to see the cities of the Old Confederacy replace their statues of the heroes of a infamously bad cause with copies of Boston’s moving figurative memorial to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment of the United States Army, the first black regiment to fight for the Union cause in the Civil War. (This moving work by Augustus Saint-Gaudens is displayed on the Boston Commons, facing the Statehouse.)
But even if other cities fail to realize the wisdom of removing memorials to bad causes and racial domination — and even if Boston insists on keeping Leif Eriksson on Commonwealth Avenue — I do believe that Boston can find a decent public space somewhere to display the modestly sized Sacco and Vanzetti memorial plaque.
The case that resulted in their wrongful execution is too big an injustice to ignore. And its immigrant connection — what Vanzetti called its “true aspect and being” — is too powerful.
Especially in times like these.
