Monuments in Washington, D.C.: Liberty and Justice for All?
Vivien Green Fryd
Professor
Department of History of Art
Vanderbilt University
U.S. Capitol building with statue on dome completed 1863
Thomas Crawford
Statue of Freedom
1855-63
Thomas Walter design for U.S. Capitol
Dome 1855
Paul Revere Liberty 1783
Jennings Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences 1792
Crawford Armed Freedom
1855
Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War said of the liberty cap:
“its history renders it inappropriate to a people
who were born free and would not be enslaved.” “The American
Liberty is original and not the liberty of the freed slave. The cap so
universally adopted is derived from the Roman custom of liberating
slaves hence called freedmen and allowed to wear this cap.”
Relief from ancient Rome
Montgomery Meigs
Drawing of Minerva 1828
Crawford Statue of Freedom 1855-63
Davis suggested that instead of liberty cap,
“armed Liberty” wear a helmet” given “her
conflict is over, her cause triumphant.”
Phidias Athena Parthenos
Ancient Greece
Crawford Statue of Freedom 1855-63
Crawford Statue of Freedom 1855-63
Combines “Liberty,” “Minerva,”
And “America” as Indian Princess with feathers
Martin Luther King Jr “I Have a Dream” speech August 28, 1963
•
•
•
1963 Martin Luther Kind Jr. Dream Speech
In front of the Lincoln Monument with 400,000 people
in attendance
Centennial year of emancipation
Henry Bacon (architect) & Daniel Chester French (sculptor) Lincoln Memorial 1912-21
Referred as “a national shrine” and “sacred national space” that is also “a sacred and
Within the sacred national space of the memorial, activists perfected a complex
ritual of masssite”
politics, one
that exploited the ambiguities
national
(Sandage,
136)of cherished American
Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln Memorial 1911-21
In 1911 Congress created a commission to memorialize Lincoln, chaired by President William Howard
Taft. It is significantly located opposite Robert E. Lee’s former Virginia home to signify national unity.
The Taft commission referred to Lincoln as “the man who saved the Union” twenty times but only the
Emancipator once (Sandage, 141).
Also carved into the walls are the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second
Inaugural Address—the only allusions to American slavery
During the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, Taft, now chief justice of the Supreme
Court, never mentioned slavery. President Warren G. Harding stated that Lincoln “would
have been the last man in the republic to resort to arms to effection . . . abolition.
Emancipation was a means to the great end—maintained union and nationality” (Sandage,
141)
Only one person at the inauguration referred to slavery—Robert Russa Moton at the
Tuskegee Institute, claimed that Lincoln “put his trust in God and spoke the word that gave
freedom to a race, and vindicated the honor of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Sandage, 141).
Significantly during the ceremony African Americans segregated through seating.
Daniel Chester French Portrait of Abraham Lincoln 1920
Daniel Chester French Portrait of Abraham Lincoln
1920
Phidias Zeus ancient Greece
Henry Bacon (architect) & Daniel Chester French (sculptor) Lincoln Memorial 1912-21
Within the sacred national space of the memorial, activists perfected a complex ritual of mass politics, one that exploited the ambiguities of cherished American
Lei Yixin, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial: Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. (2011)
Boulder sliced into three pieces: two sides represent “Out of the mountain of despair;” form of King
emerges from the “Stone of Hope”
The Jefferson Memorial is across from the MLK Memorial. It is as if he looks
directly at it, resulting in the following question: Is he questioning the Declaration of Independence’s line
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.”
In the third paragraph of King’s text in his “I have a Dream” speech, he says that “when the architects of our Great Republic wrote the magnificent
words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” With
this reference to the declaration, there is a clear echo of that other great American speech from 100 years before King’s March on Washington speech:
Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which speaks of America as “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” - For King, the Declaration of
Independence, which he quoted directly from, was a promissory note that the United States would ultimately guarantee for all people “the unalienable
rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As King then said, “It is obvious that America has defaulted on this promissory note.”