A visitor wandering the deeper recesses of Brooklyn’s sprawling Greenwood Cemetery may happen upon a marble structure that, at 17 feet tall, towers over nearby gravestones and mausoleums. It depicts a muscular male nude, sword in hand, standing astride two writhing female forms on a pedestal that once functioned as a fountain. A plaque explains that the sculpture once stood in more prominent locales: first, outside of Manhattan’s City Hall, and later, near Queens Borough Hall. It originated as a Progressive Era allegory of “Civic Virtue” overcoming “Vice” and “Corruption” (the trampled female figures). When I first came upon Civic Virtue, its base was scrawled with recent graffiti that declared: “This Oppresses Women.”
The vandal’s sentiment echoes those of suffragette activists a century ago who protested the monument’s misogynistic symbolism even prior to its installation at City Hall in 1922. Reformist Mayor Fiorello La Guardia shared feminists’ antipathy to Civic Virtue, referring to it as “Fat Boy” and complaining about having to see its buttocks every day when leaving work. He managed to have it demoted to the newly built Queens Borough Hall in 1941. It continued to attract criticism there, especially after the postwar resurgence of feminism. It remained in Queens, neglected and deteriorating, until 2012, when it was consigned to a little-visited corner of Greenwood Cemetery — a belated recognition of its status as an aesthetic and political relic.
The trajectory of the hapless Civic Virtue encapsulates many of the themes of Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments. Thompson, a historian and an expert on art crime, sets out to establish a broad historical context for the demands for the removal of statuary that came to a head during the protests following George Floyd’s death in 2020. As she demonstrates and as Civic Virtue illustrates, the embattled status of public monuments is nothing new: Statues have elicited objections, protests, and vandalism throughout U.S. history. But even unloved edifices also have a way of overstaying their welcome, as if their sheer physical heft produces a requisite political inertia.
While some hated statues now languish in obscure places, others have met more dramatic ends. Such was the case of America’s first equestrian monument, a tribute to King George III placed in Manhattan’s Bowling Green in 1770, to the disgust of many colonists who detested the monarch’s colonial policies. As Thompson recounts at the outset of the book, it lasted there only six years. After the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, an unruly crowd of New Yorkers pulled it from its pedestal and dismembered it. Loyalists managed to save the statue’s head and a few fragments, but the rest was melted down and forged into 42,088 musket balls that were then deployed by the Continental Army against the British in the Revolutionary War.
The lesson of this and of many similar stories, Thompson tells us, is that “monuments are about power.” “As soon as humans started making monuments to glorify rulers,” she writes, “others began tearing them down to show they didn’t want to be governed by them.” The destruction of the Bowling Green monument stands at the beginning of our national history, and disputes over public statuary have reflected broader political and cultural shifts at every stage of it. For instance, the prominent sculptor Horatio Greenough’s 1850 Rescue, a depiction of the subjugation of American Indians placed outside the Capitol building, was celebrated during the era of Manifest Destiny. But as early as 1939, a congressional resolution demanded its dismantling and destruction due to its message of racial hierarchy. By 1958, it was removed.
The recent wave of monument removals that reached a climax during the protest wave of 2020 began over the prior decade with a partially successful campaign to retire Confederate statuary from public spaces in the South. Thompson examines how Southern states first came to honor the losing side of the Civil War symbolically decades after the conflict was over. Confederate monuments functioned, she argues, as part of regional elites’ campaign to blunt the threat of interracial populist alliances that surged in the 1890s. Confederate monuments reasserted racial hierarchy, but they also instilled values of obedience and submission among restive poor whites who might be tempted to join labor unions and vote for anti-establishment parties. This story is a key illustration of her argument that monuments always serve specific political agendas, even if they are later seen as vague emblems of “history” and “heritage.”
The propagandistic power of public monuments resides in their capacity to serve as a neutral backdrop of civic life and project an aura of immutability. Massive statuary manages to emanate an eternal solidity even when its origin is relatively recent and marred by ignominy. In a darkly comic chapter, Thompson reviews the history of Georgia’s Stone Mountain, funded in part by a Ku Klux Klan pyramid scheme, as well as the checkered career of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor initially hired to complete the enormous relief carving of Confederate heroes. After going over budget and falling out with those who hired him, Borglum destroyed his own models and left Georgia in disgrace. (He failed upward, later receiving the commission for Mount Rushmore.)
Thompson’s aim is not only to reveal the sordid backstories of some notable monuments and the forgotten agendas that drove their construction. She also mounts a critique of monumentalism as a whole. “Our monuments,” she writes, “were put up by people who wanted to freeze American society into place.” She views the civic monument as a mode of historical commemoration that conceals powerful interests behind a facade of anodyne reverence.
The recent wave of protests succeeded in toppling some monuments, but as Thompson notes, it also produced a backlash, with new obstacles to the removal of monuments imposed at the federal and local levels. Thompson argues that legislation should lead in the opposite direction, toward “clear, transparent processes around our public art,” including the ability to “lodge complaints and see that our responses to monuments are really being considered by people with the power to take action. Otherwise, we will only see more unofficial toppling of statues.”
In Thompson’s view, “communities should have the power not only to decide whether a monument stays or goes, but what happens to it.” But such an appeal to “community” risks implying the sort of consensus that the turbulent history of monumental statuary has shown does not exist. Those who erected the statues and those who continue to honor them today may represent narrow interests, but the same is often true of the activists who protest them. Just because a group can get ropes and balaclavas and tear down a monument does not mean it is acting in the interests of “the people” and against power. Meanwhile, regardless of a monument’s origins, average people may also assign value and importance to it that exceed the initial propagandistic intent of those who built it. Hence, monuments will continue to be flashpoints for conflict, within and across communities.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
