How Statues Become Memory

Statue of the Republic

The story of how the statue came to be and how it came to embody memory is now on the open access Herald website:

The Statue of the Republic

I really liked researching this one. I liked discovering Edith Minturn Stokes, who held up a stuffed bird and a broomstick so Daniel Chester French could sketch out his ideas. I found out about her in the recent biography about French, and then discovered these three articles about her.

There were so many great photos I couldn’t include. I love this one that shows regular people at the fair in scale. It also provides part of the evidence for the mystery of whether she had ivory colored skin that I talk about in the article. In this photo, it definitely looks like pale skin, golden robes and hair.

I liked this photo of the aftermath of the fair, when the Statue of the Republic was standing alone in the ruins. The iron hoops are the support of the intramural electric railway. The photo isn’t very clear, not clear enough for printing in the newspaper. The black arrow is pointing at La Rabida, which I wrote about: The story of La Rabida and how it survived to become an important children’s hospital.

An item I couldn’t include for space and also because it was a bit to indirect was the story of what the fair meant to ordinary people. One of the buildings that survived into the 1920s was the German building on the lakeshore. An old man wearing a Grand Army of the Republic pin would sit each day on a bench nearby. When someone came by, he’d rise and ask them if they knew about the fair. If they were willing, he’d walk them around, telling them about how amazing it was, how much it meant to him. And at the end he’d sink back onto the bench, get out his handkerchief, and wipe away some tears at the loss. People who wanted to celebrate it gathered for a picnic every year in Jackson Park until they were too old and too few to carry on.

Monuments and memory obviously interest me. I went to a number of the public zoom meetings held by the Chicago Monuments Project. I had the feeling at the time that it was just a way to slow down protests—and stop anyone from getting injured by pulling down tons of bronze on their heads. But it was interesting to think about the problems of art and memory and changing cultures that statues represent. The Statue of the Republic was on their list of targets, but it didn’t generate the heat of many of the others. Their recommendation in the end was that it needed more context.

The discussions I attended affected a number of my articles. It’s worth asking what a statue is doing there and what it may or may not be achieving now to those who see it. Messages evaporate through time.

Right now, I wish people could hear the message of the Lessing statue in Washington Park asking for religious tolerance and resistance to hate. Or the message of the Masaryk Monument that government of the people, by the people, for the people is one worth defending.