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SALUTES
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SALUTES: February
Many sculptures in Manhattan are linked to important dates in U.S. or world history. Here are a few for February.
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February 16, 2006: Speaking of blizzards ... (Roscoe Conkling and the Blizzard of 1888)
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February 17, 1778: Marquis de Lafayette Does Not Invade Canada
February 3, 1811: Birth of
Horace Greeley
* Horace Greeley, by John Quincy Adams Ward, 1890. Bronze, on a granite pedestal by Richard Morris Hunt. City Hall Park, northeast of City Hall, near the City Hall subway entrance.
Horace Greeley made his name in publishing as founder (in 1841) and editor of the New York Tribune. The Tribune, known for its national and international reporting, featured such prominent writers as Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana and Karl Marx. Greeley’s editorials railed against slavery, poverty, suppression of women’s rights, capital punishment, tobacco, alcohol and marital infidelity, and promoted peace movements, vegetarianism, labor rights and high tariffs. Read any history of the Civil War, and you’re likely to come across Greeley's frequent, often contradictory exhortations to President Lincoln. Through the Tribune, Greeley became so well known and well liked that in 1872 he won 43% of the vote in the presidential election against incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.
Greeley grew up on a farm in Amherst, New Hampshire, and given recent weather in New York, I can’t resist including this selection from his Recollections of a Busy Life (1868): "I well remember the cold summer (1816) when we rose on the eighth of June to find the earth covered with a good inch of newly fallen snow, - when there was frost every month, and corn did not fill till October. Plants grew very slowly that season, while burrowing insects fed and fattened on them. My task for a time was to precede my father as he hoed his corn, dig open the hills, and kill the wire-worms and grubs that were anticipating our dubious harvest."
And here are his first impressions of New York, when he arrived on August 17, 1831: "New York was then about one third of her present size; but her business was not one fourth so great as now; and her real size - counting her suburbs, and considering the tens of thousands who find employment in and earn subsistence here, though sleeping outside of her chartered limits - was not one fifth that of 1867. No single railroad pointed toward her wharves. No line of ocean steamers brought passengers to her hotels, nor goods to her warehouses, from any foreign port. In the mercantile world, her relative rank was higher, but her absolute importance was scarcely greater, than that of Rio [de] Janeiro or San Francisco is today. Still, to my eyes, which had never till yesterday gazed on a city of even 20,000 inhabitants, nor seen a sea-going vessel, her miles square of mainly brick or stone houses, and her furlongs of masts and yards, afforded ample incitement to a wonder and admiration akin to awe."
Incidentally, Greeley didn’t say “Go west, young man,” although he did advise, “Do not lounge in the cities! There is room and health in the country, away from the crowds of idlers and imbeciles. Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory.”
Greeley originally stood in a niche on the Tribune building near the Brooklyn Bridge. It and the Benjamin Franklin now in front of Pace University are reminders of the time when Park Row was Publishers Row.
For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
February 9, 1886: Death of
General Winfield Scott Hancock
* General Winfield Scott Hancock, by James Wilson Alexander MacDonald, 1891. Hancock Square, where Manhattan Ave. and St. Nicholas Ave. meet at 124th St.
At Fredericksburg in December 1862, "Hancock the Superb" and his Second Corps were sent as the second wave against the Confederates on Marye’s Heights. To reach the Heights, Union solders had to run uphill while being hammered by dozens of cannon on top of the Heights, and then face the fire of 2,000 Confederate riflemen entrenched in a sunken road behind a shoulder-high stone wall. General Burnside sent fourteen brigades (about 50,000 men) against the Heights in four separate attacks. At the end of the day, not a single Union soldier had made it over the wall, and some 9,000 lay dead and wounded on the slope.
Burnside was capable of sending thousands of men to their deaths, and Hancock was capable of leading them - even of making them proud to be part of the effort. But given the rapid advances in artillery and rifles in the Civil War, the problem wasn’t finding generals who could send or lead men to glorious deaths. It was finding leaders who could achieve glorious victories and still preserve their men to fight again. Lincoln didn’t find that sort of leader until Grant and Sherman rose to prominence.
Relying largely on his reputation as a courageous and dependable leader, Hancock ran for president in 1880 against James A. Garfield. On election night Hancock went to bed without waiting to hear the results. Learning of his defeat from his wife the next morning, he commented calmly, “That is all right. I can stand it.”
Hancock was described by a French nobleman serving as a Union staff officer as “one of the handsomest men in the United States Army,” and in photographs of the Civil War era he cuts a very dashing figure. His appearance in this bust reflects the sedentary course he was forced to take later in life. At the Battle of Gettysburg General Hancock was shot in the thigh while astride his horse, and the field surgeon, poking about with a bare forefinger, removed several pieces of wood and a nail. Months later, after the wound failed to heal properly, surgeons excavated eight inches into Hancock’s leg and removed a minie ball and a plug of wood from the his saddle.
It's unusual for a soldier to be represented without his uniform, and I’ve read no reasonable explanation of why Hancock is without his – indeed, without any costume at all except the sash that represents military honor.
February 15, 1898: Explosion Aboard the Maine
*
Maine Monument, by Attilio Piccirilli (architect H. van
Buren Magonigle), 1901-1913. Marble pedestal 44 feet high, with over-lifesize
gilded bronze group on top and 9 over-lifesize marble figures at the base.
Central Park at Columbus Circle (West 59th St. and Central Park
South). Faces southwest: best seen soon after noon on a sunny day, when
all that glitters really is gold.
At 9:40 p.m. on February 15, 1898, five tons of gunpowder aboard the USS Maine exploded, virtually obliterating a third of the ship and killing 266 of the 350 men on board. “It was a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume, largely metallic in character,” reported Captain Sigsbee. “It was followed by heavy, ominous metallic sounds. There was a trembling and lurching motion of the vessel, a list to port. The electric lights went out. Then there was intense blackness and smoke. The situation could not be mistaken. The Maine was blown up and sinking.” Nearby Spanish vessels rushed to pick up survivors, but many of the crew died instantly as they slept.
The cause of the explosion aboard the Maine has never been proven, despite thorough investigations at the time and as recently as 1976. Some authorities say it was caused by a mine, others that the ship’s coal supply spontaneously combusted and set off the gunpowder.
But the New York sensational press didn’t wait for formal investigations. Leading the pack was the New York Journal, run by William Randolph Hearst and his minion Arthur Brisbane, which published drawings of Spanish saboteurs fastening a mine to the underside of the Maine. Frederic Remington, later famous as a painter and sculptor of the American West, cabled his employer Hearst, “There is no war. Request to be recalled.” Hearst replied, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” The Journal devoted eight pages a day, every day for weeks, to the Maine story. Other New York papers, striving to equal the Journal’s circulation, matched the Journal’s sensational fury. Soon Americans were shouting, “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain.”
The Maine had been sent to Havana in January 1898, when riots between pro- and anti-independence factions led to concern for the safety of American citizens in Cuba. That war was declared in April 1898 was due more to the rabble-rousing of the New York tabloids than to any proof of Spanish guilt in the Maine's explosion. When the Spanish-American War ended in August, Spain ceded to the United States Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. The United States had lost only 460 soldiers in battle, although thousands had died of disease. A friend of Theodore Roosevelt described it as “a splendid little war.”
The Monument’s complex allegorical program reveals as much about the America at the beginning of the 20th century, when it became a world power, as it does about the tragedy aboard the Maine. Crowning the Monument is a woman, Columbia Triumphant, drawn in a seashell chariot by three seahorses. (The figures were cast from bronze recovered from the guns of the Maine.)
At the front of the pedestal, on ground level, are two complimentary sets of statuary. The reclining men on the left and right symbolize the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the theaters of the four-month-long Spanish-American War. At the front, a young boy at the prow of a ship holds two wreaths (frequently stolen) symbolizing victory. Behind him, against the pedestal, is a female figure representing Peace, with a male figure of Courage to the left and a female figure of Fortitude to the right. The group is (rather long-windedly) entitled The Antebellum State of Mind: Courage Awaiting the Flight of Peace and Fortitude Supporting the Feeble. At the back of the pedestal is a blind-folded female figure of Justice flanked on the left by a warrior, on the right by a female figure representing History. This group is entitled The Post-Bellum Idea: Justice Receiving Back the Sword Entrusted to War.
The Monument is inscribed on the front: “To the valiant seamen who perished on the Maine, by fate unwarned, in death unafraid.” The names of those who died aboard the Maine are listed above the sculptures of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Hearst’s Journal raised $100,000 for the Monument via donations ranging from hundreds of dollars from wealthy patrons to pennies from schoolchildren.
Piccirilli and Magonigle also collaborated as artist and architect on the Firemen’s Memorial, 1912. The Piccirilli family studio in the Bronx carved (to designs by other artists) those regal lions in front of New York Public Library at 42nd Street, the Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., and the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.
For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
February
12, 2006: Speaking of blizzards ... (Roscoe
Conkling and the Blizzard of 1888)
* John Quincy Adams Ward, Roscoe Conkling, 1893. Southeast corner of Madison Square Park (23rd St. and Madison Ave.)
With little warning, the blizzard of March 1888 dumped over 40 inches of snow on New York City within 36 hours. Temperatures plummeted below zero, and winds gusted up to 48 miles per hour. Along the coast from Boston to Washington, about 400 people died.
In New York, communication and transportation failures led to laws requiring that telephone and telegraph lines be buried, and to replacement of elevated mass transportation trains with the subway system. (See http://www.infoplease.com/spot/blizzard1.html .)
Patriot and poet Jose Marti, who was organizing the Cuban independence movement from a Manhattan office, penned a vivid account of the blizzard that was printed in Buenos Aires' La Nacion on April 27, 1888.
Never in this century has New York seen a storm like the one on March 13. The day before, a Sunday, had been rainy, and the insomniac writer, the ticket seller at the railway station, and the milkman on his cart making the rounds of the sleeping houses at dawn could hear the wind that had descended upon the city whipping in fury against the chimneys and in even greater fury against rooftops and walls, taking off the roofs, demolishing shutters and balconies in its path, clutching at trees, carrying them off, and pitching down the narrow streets with a howl, as if caught in a trap. The electrical wires snapped by its passage sputtered and died. The telegraph lines that had so often withstood it were wrenched from their posts. …
When New York was like an Arctic plain and night was falling with nothing to light it up, and fear was everywhere; when the generous mailmen fell face down, numb and blind, defending the mail sacks with their bodies; when families, gripped by mortal terror, tried in vain to open blocked doors in their search for a way out of houses that had lost their roofs; when the fire hydrants, like the rest of the city, lay beneath five feet of snow, hidden to even the most faithful hand - a raging fire broke out, tinting its snowy surroundings with the colors of dawn, and bringing down three tenements in as many gulps. …(Selected Writings, ed. & trans. Esther Allen, New York: Penguin Books, pp. 225-31)
Roscoe Conkling, a fascinatingly ambiguous political figure (party boss or politician of spotless integrity?), is discussed in my forthcoming Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan. Conkling resolved to walk from his law office in Wall Street to his home in Gramercy Park at the height of the 1888 blizzard. At Union Square he became disoriented in the drifts. When he finally arrived home he collapsed, never to recover; he died a month later.
Friends raised funds for a statue by the eminent John Quincy Adams Ward, requesting that it be placed in Union Square. City authorities replied that the corners of Union Square were intended for statues of four great Americans, and that Conkling was hardly in the same class as Lincoln and Washington. The Park Commissioners instead allotted Ward's Conkling a site in Madison Square.
The rest of Marti's essay on the blizzard is well worth reading for its vivid glimpse of urban life in the 1880s. Marti's essay in Spanish is no longer under copyright, but does not appear to be available on the web. Esther Allen's translation of Marti, being much more recent, is still copyright; the passage quoted above is about the maximum that can be uploaded under the doctrine of "fair use." To read the rest of the essay, you'll have to track down the Penguin paperback. As of 2/16/06, a recorded version in English is apparently available at http://tnbt.org/legacy/NBT010701.html - but I haven't been able to access it. For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
February 17, 1778: The Marquis
de Lafayette Does Not Invade Canada
* Marquis de Lafayette, by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, 1873. Bronze, over-lifesize. Union Square at East 16th St. Faces east: best seen in the morning, and when the leaves have fallen.
In 1777 the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, an extremely wealthy Frenchman dedicated to the ideal of liberty, joined the ranks of the fledgling United States Army as a major general. After serving with distinction on Washington’s staff he was assigned by General Horatio Gates (without Washington’s knowledge) to lead an invasion of Canada.
Arriving at Albany, NY on February 17, 1778, Lafayette found that the expedition was disastrously lacking in money, food and soldiers. Residents of upstate New York (who ought to know) considered it foolhardy to lead an expedition to Canada in the dead of winter, and the British and Canadians already knew of plans for the expedition and were preparing against it. In March the invasion was postponed, with due thanks to Lafayette for his diligence: “That Congress entertain a high sense of his prudence, activity, and zeal and they they are filly persuaded nothing has or would have been wanting on his part, or on the part of the officers who accompanied him, to give the expedition the utmost possible effect.”
The invasion of Canada was still being mooted, this time with the use of French troops, when Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress on November 14, 1778: “Men are very apt to run into extremes; hatred to England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in France; especially when motives of gratitude are thrown into the scale. Men of this description would be unwilling to suppose France capable of acting so ungenerous a part. I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it."
Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) was dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886.
On Lafayette, see www.ushistory.org/index.html . For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
February 25, 1852: Birth of Thomas Moore
* Thomas Moore, by Dennis B. Sheahan. Bronze bust, over lifesize. 1879. Central Park, path leading to the Pond (north of the 60th St. entrance on the east side of the Park).
Read it as if you'd never heard it before:
The Minstrel-boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you'll find him;
His father's sword he has girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him. -
"Land of song!" said the warrior-bard,
"Though all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!"
The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's
chain
Could not bring his proud soul under;
The harp he loved ne'er spoke again,
For he tore its cords asunder;
And said "No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and bravery!
Thy songs were made for the brave and free,
They shall never sound in slavery!"
Thomas Moore (1779-1852), poet, satirist, composer and musician, probably wrote “The Minstrel Boy” to honor three close college friends who suffered for their part in the United Irishmen Uprising of 1798.
In the nineteenth century Moore was as famous as Shelley and Byron, the latter of whom dedicated “To Thomas Moore” one of my favorite poetical toasts:
My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea;
But before I go, Tom Moore,
Here's a double health to thee!
Here's a sigh to those who love me,
And a smile to those who hate;
And, whatever sky's above me,
Here's a heart for every fate!
Though the ocean roar around me,
Yet it still shall bear me on;
Though a desert should surround me,
It hath springs that may be won.
Were 't the last drop in the well,
As I gasped upon the brink
Ere my fainting spirit fell,
'T is to thee that I would drink.
With that water, as this wine,
The libation I would pour
Should be, - Peace with thine and mine,
And a health to thee, Tom Moore.
February
25, 1778: Birth of Jose de San Martin
* Jose de San Martin, by Louis Joseph Daumas, dedicated 1951; reduced copy of an 1862 sculpture in Buenos Aires. Central Park South at Sixth Ave. (Avenue of the Americas).
It's mid-1816, and South America is boiling with rebellion. Jose Artigas, who led 16,000 of his fellow Banda Oriental residents in the Exodus of 1811, and issued the provocative Reglamento provisorio for land redistribution in 1815, is beginning to suffer major defeats. (Even so, he came to be regarded as the first hero of Uruguayan independence, which is why his statue stands at the south end of the Avenue of the Americas, at Dominick St.) The Spanish royalists have reconquered Venezuela, and Bolivar has retreated to the hinterlands of the territory he had liberated only three years earlier. San Martin, on the other hand, is settled in at Mendoza, just east of the Andes, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires or Santiago.
San Martin's stay in Mendoza epitomizes the differences between him and most other leaders of the South American independence movements in the 1810s and 1820s. Born in Argentina but raised in Spain, he served as a professional soldier in Spain and North Africa for 22 years. In Mendoza he was behaving like a professional: recruiting and training troops, collecting armaments and supplies, surveying passes into Chile, gathering information on enemy movements, disseminating false information to the enemy. San Martin proposed reaching Peru (the last stronghold of the Spaniards in America) by way of Chile. After two years of preparations at Mendoza, he moved across the two-mile-high Andes with 4,000 troops and 1,000 support personnel in a matter of weeks, and within four months had fought decisive battles, including the Battle of Maipu (April 1818), the decisive defeat of the royalists in Chile.
In 1820, after two more years of preparation (including assembling a fleet to transport troops and supplies), San Martin set out with over 4,000 Chileans and Argentineans to liberate Peru. Rather than fighting pitched battles with the Spanish royalists (some 23,000 strong), he aimed to inspire rebellion among residents by spreading revolutionary propaganda. Peruvian independence was declared in July 1821, with Lima naming San Martin Protector of a Free Peru. The month before, Bolivar had won the Battle of Carabobo, liberating Venezuela for the third time in ten years (This time it stuck.)
For all his efficiency, San Martin - like Artigas and Bolivar - died in exile. Why? No one's quite sure. In 1821, San Martin sent Bolivar a thousand men to help liberate the province of Quito. In July 1822 San Martin had an historic meeting with Bolivar at Guayaquil. Their discussion is not recorded, but in two months later San Martin resigned as Protector of Peru. In 1824 he sailed for France, where he spent the last 26 years of his life.
San Martin confronts Bolivar at the north end of Avenue of the Americas as he did in real life at Guayaquil. The pedestals mirror each other in height and style: unfortunately, both are too high to allow passersby to see the sculptures. Ironically, Bolivar's pedestal and San Martin's each claim their subject as Liberator of Peru. In terms of New York statues, San Martin is the clear winner: the dramatic pose, with San Martin pointing into the distance on a rearing horse, is much easier to read.
February 26, 1916: Birth of Jackie Gleason
* Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden. Bronze, 6.5 feet. Dedicated in 2000. Stands outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, 8th Ave. and 40th St. The plaque on the base reads, "Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, Bus Driver, Racoon Lodge Treasurer, Dreamer. Presented by the People of TVLand." To see the Gleason sculpture, visit http://www.littleviews.com/home/newyork/port-authority.cfm?KW=&date_range= . (Photo not included on this site for copyright reasons.)
WIN A COPY OF Forgotten Delights: The Producers
When I grew up in the mountains of Pennsylvania our TV set picked up 2 channels, neither one of which carried the Honeymooners. Since then I’ve seen snippets of the show, but I don’t like what I’ve seen of Kramden’s character, and I never know whether the writers meant me to be laughing at him or with him. So I find it interesting but inexplicable that one of the few representational sculptures erected in Manhattan in recent decades was to Brooklyn-born Jackie Gleason playing Ralph Kramden.
So here’s the contest. If you can explain why Ralph Kramden is more deserving of commemoration than such notables as politicians, artists, military men or businessmen, I’ll award you a copy of Forgotten Delights: The Producers and the supplementary photo CD (a $20 value). Five hundred words or less with proper punctuation and grammar, please: no rants. First person to give me a reasonable explanation gets the prize and I’ll add the essay, with acknowledgement, to this Salute.
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