{"id":14306,"date":"2020-06-25T12:04:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/?p=14306"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:53:13","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:53:13","slug":"decision-time-the-centennial-columbus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2020\/06\/decision-time-the-centennial-columbus\/","title":{"rendered":"Decision Time: The Centennial Columbus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
Christopher Columbus Statue at the Centennial Exhibition, 1876. (PhillyHistory.org\/Free Library of Philadelphia)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

No one had a clue as to what Christopher Columbus actually looked like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No matter, American artists from Benjamin West onward invented images of Columbus in a host of biographically inspired settings that played both into and off of the truth. Washington Irving\u2019s best-selling biography first issued in 1828 would go through 39 American and 51 international printings popularizing, fictionalizing, mythologizing all the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans, Thomas Schlereth explains, \u201cconfigured and contested Columbus differently as a national symbol\u201d in an expanding nation determined to revise, augment, justify and glorify its founding narrative. Columbus served a purpose, appearing again and again, in everything and seemingly everywhere from \u201cpainting and philately, monuments and sculpture [to] civic iconography\u2026 national coinage, pageants and plays.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nineteenth-century America, you might say, discovered Columbus. And in a very real way, writes Schlereth, this century-long, re-creation of Columbus enabled and informed a \u201clarger, many-sided quest for an American national character.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the earliest American monument to the idea<\/em> of Columbus came in the form of a 40-foot tall obelisk dedicated in Baltimore in 1792, 19th-century Americans would come to expect representations of the person Columbus in the form of statues and busts populating \u201ccity parks, civic spaces, and government buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1844, Congress dedicated the \u201cfirst piece of statuary that was ever purchased by the government,\u201d according to William Eleroy Curtis. Luigi Persico\u2019s Discovery of America presented Columbus \u201cclad in a totally inaccurate suit of European armor\u201d carrying in his right hand an orb (\u201cAmerica\u201d) beside \u201ca semi nude Native American female, the Indian princess of colonial America, [who] crouches awkwardly by his side, ready to flee.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Discovery of America, also known as The Discovery Group, 1844. Marble sculpture by Luigi Persico originally at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Wikipedia)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

While some accepted the Persico\u2019s sculpture \u201cas an appropriate symbolization of their nation\u2019s manifest destiny and racial supremacy,\u201d as Vivien Green Fryd tells us, others debated the sculpture\u2019s merits, its meaning and its message. Here was another example of \u201cthe nation\u2019s perennial search for self-identity.\u201d This time, and in many to follow, it came in a fictional form, figure and face of the so-called \u201cDiscoverer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the 400th anniversary of 1492, Schlereth points out, American cities, including Philadelphia, would have 28 monuments to Columbus\u2014more than any other country. Columbus appeared \u201catop pedestals, fountains, triumphal arches, socles, and freestanding columns.\u201d And for the most part, these depicted Columbus as \u201cindependent, destined, and triumphant; he invariably appears as a young, clear-thinking conqueror, the prescient visionary of the first voyage, not the beleaguered mariner of the last expeditions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Columbus was no longer abstract; no longer an idea. He was, as Claudia Bushman points out discussing the Persico group at the Capitol in Washington, embodied in a Caucasian male representing racial domination, a statement in stone that, among other things, \u201cunderscored and supported the government\u2019s Indian removal policy.\u201d And in the context of the other sculpture flanking the same staircase at the Capitol, Horatio Greenough\u2019s sculpture of a violent encounter between a hatchet-wielding Native American warrior and a Caucasian pioneer family (The Rescue<\/a><\/em>\u2014popularly known as Daniel Boone Protecting His Family<\/em>), the pair of statues became the target of ongoing controversy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both sculptures, according to Bushman,\u201cproved offensive to Americans\u201d and in 1939 a joint congressional resolution proposed \u201cthat The Rescue be \u2018ground into dust, and scattered to the four winds, that no more remembrance may be perpetuated of our barbaric past, and that it may not be a constant reminder to our American Indian citizens\u2026\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The resolution failed to pass. But in 1958, \u201cwhen the capitol building was to be extended, the government removed all the sculptural works in the vicinity. Most of the art works were later returned to their placed, but the two offending works\u2026disappeared forever.\u201d Word has it they reside in a Smithsonian storage facility somewhere in Maryland. And, since a crane accident in 1976, The Rescue<\/em> is reduced to a \u201cpile of fragments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for The Discovery Group<\/em>, its figures stare into the empty space of a warehouse that presumably looks something like the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em>. Will Philadelphia\u2019s Columbus have a similar fate? Should it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Sources: Bushman, Claudia L. America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero<\/em> (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992); William Eleroy Curtis, \u201cThe Columbus Monuments,\u201d The Chautauquan<\/em>, Vol 16, Oct 1892-March 1893; Vivien Green Fryd, \u201cTwo Sculptures for the Capitol: Horatio Greenough\u2019s \u2018Rescue\u2019 and Luigi Persico\u2019s \u2018Discovery of America,\u2019\u201d The American Art Journal<\/em>, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring, 1987); Thomas J. Schlereth, \u201cColumbia, Columbus, and Columbianism,\u201d The Journal of American History<\/em>, Dec. 1992, Vol. 79, No. 3.<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one had a clue as to what Christopher Columbus actually looked like. No matter, American artists from Benjamin West onward invented images of Columbus in a host of biographically inspired settings that played both into and off of the truth. Washington Irving\u2019s best-selling biography first issued in 1828 would go through 39 American and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}