Smashing Statues
The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America.
An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how?
Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park.
Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson (Possession), a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, examines in this trenchant account "the ideologies, hatreds, and ambitions" behind America's public monuments, and the debate over "what we can and should do with them now." Briskly recounting the toppling of a statue of King George III by rebellious New Yorkers in 1776, she notes that "long before American artists ever created a monument, American protesters tore one down." Thompson also reveals that the bronze Freedom statue on top of the U.S. Capitol building was "made by a slave owner and one of the men he enslaved," and that 19th-century sculptor Horatio Greenough, the "father of monuments," enshrined his racist beliefs in statues of George Washington and a clash between white settlers and a Native American warrior. In the 1880s, Southern elites erected monuments celebrating rank-and-file Confederate soldiers for their "obedience" as a means of discouraging poor whites from joining labor unions, according to Thompson. Though she calls for communities to decide the fates of problematic monuments, Thompson concedes that tearing them down is "all too often the only real option." Full of intriguing historical tidbits and incisive cultural analysis, this is a worthy study of a complex and controversial issue. Illus.
