Andy Young: Changing of the guard at the National Statuary

By Andy Young

The National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C. contains 101 full-body sculptures of important individuals, including two from each state. The 101st is of Rosa Parks, who represents either no particular state or every state, depending on the eye of the beholder.

The National Statuary Hall is in Washington, D.C.
COURTESY PHOTO

The gallery houses a wide variety of statues depicting famous Americans. A likeness of Virginia’s George Washington is there, as are representations of Ohio’s Thomas Edison, Alabama’s Helen Keller, and Dwight Eisenhower of Kansas. Not everyone represented is well-known, though. How many Americans are familiar with Iowa’s Norman Borlaug, Father Damien of Hawaii, Esther Hobart Morris of Wyoming, or Po’pay of New Mexico?

Perhaps surprisingly, inclusion in America’s de facto Hall of Fame isn’t necessarily permanent. Individual states can choose to remove one or both of their representatives and replace them with others, which is why the gallery is about to add a statue of its first professional musician, thanks to Arkansas’s legislature having passed a bill five years ago allowing the state to displace its two previous honorees.

Designating Johnny Cash, who’ll be depicted holding a guitar and a Bible, to take the place of James P. Clarke, a professed racist who served as the state’s governor for two years in the late 1880s, seems like a no-brainer. So does the other half of the 2019 legislation, which designated Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, a civil rights champion and key figure in the contentious but ultimately successful desegregation of Little Rock’s schools in 1957, as the replacement for Uriah M. Rose, who pledged allegiance to the Confederacy and renounced his U.S. citizenship in order to retain his county judgeship during the Civil War.

It’s not just Arkansas that’s changing direction. Thirteen other honorees have been replaced since the start of the 21st century, and Julius Sterling Morton of Nebraska, Philo T. Farnsworth of Utah, and Marcus Whitman of Washington are all scheduled to be supplanted (by Willa Cather, Martha Hughes Cannon, and Billy Frank, Jr., respectively) in the not-too-distant future.

Other recent additions to the Hall include North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham, a replacement for avowed white supremacist Charles Brantley Aycock, who served as the state’s governor from 1901 to 1905, and Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who, in Omaha’s U.S. District court in 1879, successfully argued that Native Americans had civil rights. He occupies a spot formerly held by Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president who spent his twilight years arguing against the teaching of evolution.

Replacements will likely continue coming to the National Statuary. Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, is inexplicably still one of the two Mississippians displayed in the gallery. The other is a fellow slave owner James Z. George, a politician and Confederate military officer.

Two schools of thought exist regarding the replacing of various figures from the National Statuary. On one hand, extracting strident racists, misogynists, ethnic cleansers and other autocratic bullies from the gallery of esteemed Americans seems like a step in the right direction. However, opponents of removing statues of historical figures that spent their lives enslaving and/or oppressing fellow Americans based on race, creed, or gender argue history is still history, and posthumously condemning those who engaged in conduct considered odious today but that was common amongst their contemporaries is counterproductive. Whitewashing history doesn’t change it, they maintain.

Thankfully money has nothing to do with who’s in and who’s out at the National Statuary. But like it or not, next month James P. Clarke’s likeness is going to be removed in favor of a cold, hard Cash. <