Erin L. Thompson - Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of Americas Public Monuments

ALSO BY ERIN L. THOMPSON

Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors

Smashing Statues

THE
RISE
AND
FALL
OF
AMERICAS
PUBLIC
MONUMENTS

ERIN L. THOMPSON

Copyright 2022 by Erin L. Thompson

All rights reserved

First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact

W. W. Norton Special Sales at or 800-233-4830

Jacket design: Utku Lomlu

Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Lauren Abbate

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Thompson, Erin L., author.

Title: Smashing statues : the rise and fall of Americas public monuments / Erin L. Thompson.

Other titles: Rise and fall of Americas public monuments

Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2022] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021041567 | ISBN 9780393867671 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780393867688 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: MonumentsUnited States. | MemorializationUnited States. | Collective memoryUnited States. | MonumentsUnited StatesPublic opinion. | Public opinionUnited States.

Classification: LCC E159 .T39 2022 | DDC 725/.940973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021041567

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

For Stella

People who imagine that history flatters them
(as it does, indeed, since they wrote it)
are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin...

James Baldwin, The White Mans Guilt (1965)

CONTENTS

P hilip Reeds eyes watered from the smoke and the stench of the horse dung. His back ached from carrying fuel and stooping to tend the low fire. It was late November 1860. Reed had been working seven days a week for nearly five months. He could not relax his vigilance over the drying mold.

In a few days, four thousand pounds of molten metal would be poured hissing into this mold, which had been shaped from a mixture of sand and dung. If Reed did his job perfectly, the mold would break apart when the metal cooled to reveal the bronze torso of a woman, the folds of her robe pulled tight across her breasts.

If Reed failedif the mold overdried into brittleness or retained pockets of moistureit could explode. Red-hot bronze would shoot through the bodies of the fashionable ladies and gentlemen who were coming to the foundry, a few miles outside Washington, DC, to witness the casting of a section of what would become a nearly twenty-foot-tall allegorical statue of Freedom destined to top the dome of the United States Capitol Building.

When Freedom was finally hoisted into place in December 1863, it was hailed as a symbol of the universal liberty the Emancipation Proclamation had declared in January of that year. More than 150 years later, many avowed white supremacists undertook a deadly invasion of the Capitol Building to dispute the results of the presidential election. You might think that a symbol of the liberty America is supposed to offer to all would have dissuaded or at least shamed them. Looking more deeply into Freedom s history reveals why the monument instead inspired them. It is a white supremacist vision of freedom.

Plaster model used by Philip Reed and Clark Mills to cast the bronze statue of Freedom installed on the U.S. Capitol Building in 1863. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Harris & Ewing, LC-H25-3200-A.

The federal government had hired the sculptor Clark Mills to cast Freedom . The government paid the wages of Millss workmen too. Reeds rate was $1.25 per day, a quarter more than any of the other laborers. But he kept only the money he earned on Sundays. Mills took the rest. Reed, the man who played such an important role in creating Freedom , was not free.

Reed was born into slavery in South Carolina. Mills purchased him in Charleston when he was quite a youth, as the sculptor recalled, sensing his evident talent for sculpture.

The charismatic Mills won this commission even though he had never even seen a monumental bronze sculpture, much less made one. He moved north to work on it, meaning that Reed would have lost contact with everyone he had ever known. In Washington, Reed worked hard in a profession that is hazardous enough when everyone knows what they are doing, which was definitely not the case in Millss foundry.

When, after many disastrous failures, the Jackson monument was at last unveiled, it made Mills famous. It was so popular that replicas went up in Nashville, Jacksonville, and New Orleans. Mills received many new commissions, including the one for Freedom . He purchased an estate, where he built a new foundry and a crenellated octagonal workshop. Visitors marveled at his kennels of ferocious bull-dogs and the elk he had procured as a model for a sculpture and kept as a pet.

On that day in November 1860, Reeds molds held. In all, he worked for more than a year, with only a handful of days off, to complete Freedom . Few of those who see her on the Capitol Building know she was made by a slave owner and one of the men he enslaved. Slavery shaped everything about her.

Debates over slavery were already raging in 1854, when the artist Thomas Crawford was commissioned to make the plaster model Mills would use to cast Freedom . Jefferson Davis rejected Crawfords initial design. The future president of the Confederacy was then the secretary of war, charged with overseeing the expansion and decoration of the Capitol Building. Davis made sure none of the new sculptures or paintings for the building criticized the slavery he so vehemently supported.

Davis scrutinized artists sketches for a slouchy hat with a bulbous tip, known as the pileus or liberty cap. It had symbolized freedom since antiquity, when Romans gave it to newly freed people during emancipation ceremonies. Davis rejected any design that included the liberty cap, which he claimed was inappropriate to the people who are born free. He told Crawford, who had sketched Freedom wearing a liberty cap, to replace it with a helmet showing her cause triumphant.

Why was Davis afraid of a hat? He knew the liberty cap symbolized not just freedom but, more specifically, emancipationthe process of becoming free. Davis did not want official federal art to give anyone the idea that people currently enslaved in America could one day become free. He wanted freedom to be reserved for people like himpeople who had never been enslaved. Crawford obeyed, designing headgear for Freedom that looks more suited to a Vegas showgirl than a warrior, with a starry headband topped with feathers sprouting from a popeyed eagle.

Reed probably knew nothing about Daviss millinery-related paranoia, but as he made Freedom , he would have vividly understood the conflict at the heart of Americathe conflict between freedom for all and freedom for some. Reed had never been free, but one of the other people Mills owned had been, if only for a few days. In November 1859, when Crawfords plaster model of Freedom was on display in Washington but before Millss foundry had begun work on its casting, a Boston abolitionist newspaper reported the arrest of a white man who had with him a wagon and provisions, and was accompanied by a colored man and woman, supposed to be en route for a free state. The paper describes the woman as a slave of Clark Mills of Washington.