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Home , Columbus Park (Brooklyn), Henry Ward Beecher, John Quincy Adams Ward

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15 (IN)FAMOUS Contemporary Lessons from History’s Heroes

Jennifer Wingate

This chapter grew out of conversations with my American art students at St Francis College, over a decade of teaching about two in downtown , , and visiting the monuments in different seasons, political climates, and physical conditions (before, during, and after conservation). Ongoing debates about historical public in the present an occasion to re-evaluate the Beecher statues as ‘teachable monuments’, monuments that can promote dialogue about public history, memory, and the legacy of racial inequality. Here I highlight student responses to the Beecher monuments to emphasise the need for didactics, programming, and curricula that provide historical context and link related public monuments to one another. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was a minister and reformer during the Civil War era who gained fame in the 1850s for his sermons at Plymouth Church, in , where he used the pulpit to advocate for the abolition of slavery and held mock slave auctions to purchase the freedom of slaves. Tourists took ferries, dubbed ‘Beecher boats’, from to Brooklyn to hear Beecher’s famous sermons. Today, many students at nearby St Francis College also commute to the neighbourhood from other parts of New York. However, if they notice the sculptures, few recognise Beecher, or know why Brooklyn was, and is, proud to call him their own. When asked to look more closely, and to conduct research about the first pastor of Plymouth Church, many identify the sculptures’ contradictions, ones rooted in those embodied by the man himself, and in nineteenth-century politics and social mores. Few students deny that Beecher’s support of is worth remembering today, and few object to the maintenance costs paid by to clean and preserve the monument erected in Brooklyn’s Columbus Park in 1891.1 The sculpture, which underwent conservation treatment in 2016 and 2017, is one of a select group of major older New York City monuments whose maintenance is funded by the city’s Adopt- a-Monument programme (Figure 15.1).2 At rededication exercises in June 2017, Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams exclaimed, ‘We must become what this statue represents. This statue is renewed and we are renewed.’3 Beecher’s vocal support of a divisive cause and the way he stood up to the riotous crowds in Manchester, England, when he was on a speaking tour in 1863, make

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Figure 15.1 Henry Ward Beecher (1891), Ward. Columbus Park, New York, USA Source: Photo credit Jennifer Wingate.

him an apt symbol of the progressive borough of Brooklyn. Yet a significant percentage of students who visit the monument, modelled by sculptor (1830–1910), with a pedestal by architect (1827–1895), observe that it appears to contradict precisely that which is worth remembering about Beecher’s life and work. The sculpture does not communicate to contemporary audiences an image of Beecher as an unassailable force of good, but projects both the good intentions and the patronising racism of nineteenth-century moderate abolitionist sentiment. Like most historical figures, Beecher the man was more complex than history cares to remember. At the unveiling of the restored monument in 2017, his biographer, , called him ‘a man of great passions and contradictions’.4 Just two months after the Beecher monument rededication exercises in Brooklyn, white supremacists protested the proposed removal of a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. The violent events that transpired intensified an ongoing period of reckoning with racist histories immortalised by public statuary around the United States.5 Re-evaluations of certain public sculptures had begun much earlier, in some instances as early as the time of their creation. However, Americans started urgently

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rethinking the influence of Confederate flags and monuments after the 2015 Emanuel African Episcopal Church massacre in Charleston, . Municipalities and communities took newly pressing steps to remove public representations that serve as reminders of unjust pasts, in particular those perceived as leaving a legacy of inequality and oppression for today’s audiences. In September 2017, New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio convened an Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. He tasked the commission with making recommendations for how New York ‘should address city-owned monuments ... particularly those that are subject to sustained negative public reaction or may be viewed as inconsistent with the values of New York City’, a place that ‘prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion’. In their January 2018 report, commissioners articulated specific criteria for selecting monuments for evaluation. Eligibility should include two years or more of ‘sustained adverse public reaction, large-scale community opposition (as part of larger cultural/political concerns)’, recommendations by the local community board, and instances of ‘egregious historical oversight and/or revelation of new, significant information about the monument and what or whom it represents’.6 The short-lived commission did not choose the Beecher monument in Columbus Park for its 2017 review, nor did it choose sculptor Emma Stebbins’s Columbus statue (c.1867), located in the same plaza as Beecher, even though the commission did evaluate and offer suggestions concerning the Columbus Circle monument in Manhattan. These exclusions point to unstated criteria for selecting eligible monuments, such as political expediency and concern over the city’s image. This chapter examines the pedagogical function historical monuments serve, such as those, like the Columbus Park Beecher monument, that visualise ideologies offensive to contemporary audiences but are not deemed problematic enough (using the commission’s criteria) to evaluate for relocation, or those for which removal is not considered politically expedient. The Beecher monuments in Brooklyn are extraordinarily complex both because of the man they represent and how they represent him. I maintain that educators, art historians, public historians, community members, and city employees must work to better contextualise these artefacts. Anything but self-explanatory, the Beecher monument in Columbus Park is no longer appreciated by the public, if it ever was, on a purely aesthetic level as the last major monument by ‘the dean of American sculpture’, John Quincy Adams Ward (see Figure 15.2). The sculpture requires on-site didactics, links to online information, and curricula for use in local schools to explain the sculpture’s narrative in a nineteenth- century context. While the Beecher monument dedicated nearby in 1914 at Plymouth Church, is less ‘public’, and better contextualised by its location and by signage at the church, both monuments would benefit from efforts to link and activate them for contemporary audiences. In my classes, I assign preparatory reading for historical context.7 In addition, classroom discussions of Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial (Washington, DC, 1876) and other examples of nineteenth-century sculpture prepare students for the hierarchical visual language of the statue. Perhaps because they know what to expect, and because they have read laudatory information about Beecher, only a minority of my students directly express a strongly negative reaction to the Columbus Park Beecher monument when they complete their on-site worksheets. They nonetheless have described unsettling experiences of the sculpture. ‘Despite the role that he played, I stood in front of the monument feeling dominated’, one student wrote.8 Another student, over four years before the events in Charlottesville, that would prompt the removal of racist monuments across the country, wrote, ‘I believe the sculpture should be put in a museum rather than a public park.

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Figure 15.2 Henry Ward Beecher (1914), . Plymouth Church, New York, USA Source: Photo credit Jennifer Wingate.

Columbus [Park] should have a monument in which African Americans are seen as equals instead of being placed at the foot of a white man.’9 Other students more recently wrote, ‘It looks like it contradicts what Henry was all about’, and ‘Henry was a man who did a lot of good for African Americans and this statue portrays him as being above them. A more accurate statue would have them all on the same level.’10 However, public monuments are only accurate in so much as they represent contemporary power structures. Equality between white New Yorkers and freed slaves was not a reality when Ward designed his sculpture. ‘Fundamentally’, as Applegate writes of Beecher’s lifetime, ‘most white Americans harbored a deep core of what can only be called racism’.11 Not only was Beecher ‘one of the most hated men in the Confederacy’, but most Northerners ... blamed him and people like him for inciting the Rebellion’.12 Art historian Kirk Savage further explains the sculpture’s hierarchy in an interview with historian and curator, Paul Farber:

The reasons why African Americans started to appear in sculpture only as subordin- ate or subservient figures to white heroes [are] ... complex ... But it all returns to

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the same basic issue of white supremacy ... the idea that African Americans them- selves played a significant part in their own liberation at this period of time is something that really wouldn’t be grappled with seriously until the mid to late 20th century.13

The same sculptor who made Brooklyn’s Beecher had modelled a heroic figure of a freedman (under two-feet tall) in 1863. Ward’s subject has a shackle on one wrist and is seated on a tree stump, looking as if he is about to lift himself to a standing position. The sculptor wrote to a patron, ‘I intended [the statuette] to express not one set free by any proclamation so much as by his own hour of freedom.’14 If, as Savage says, historians did not consider seriously the idea that African Americans played a significant part in their own liberation until the late twentieth century, Ward was ahead of his time for depicting a freedman as an agent of his own emancipation, even in a statuette not intended as a public monument. Ward’s tribute to Beecher made almost 30 years after The Freedman statuette, is an ideological regression. The portrait statue in Columbus Park features an over life-size and stern Beecher, wearing an overcoat and clutching his signature fedora at his side. Mrs Beecher sent both items of clothing to Ward’s studio when the sculptor was preparing his clay model. Beecher’s family also had invited Ward to the preacher’s deathbed to make a death mask, and along with photographs, the sculptor used these items to guide his portrait. In response to early concerns that Ward’s model did not represent an accurate likeness, the secretary of the Beecher Statue Fund defended it by writing, ‘Mr. Ward has represented Beecher as the public man, and had in mind, I believe, somewhat of the expression which must have appeared on Mr. Beecher’s countenance when facing the mob at Manchester. This may strike some as severe.’15 In other words, Beecher is shown looking stoically ahead as he mentally prepares to speak to ‘the most hostile audience he had ever seen’ in a huge hall in Manchester during a two-week speaking tour of the United Kingdom. Historians credit his British speeches for bringing him international fame and, along with his sister ’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for preventing the United Kingdom and France from supporting the Confederacy.16 The formidable figure is not in and of itself what makes this monument so much less progressive than Ward’s earlier statuette. Three figures adorn the stepped pedestal on which Beecher’s towering form stands: a freedwoman laying a palm frond at his feet on his proper right, and two orphan children, a boy and a girl, decorating his pedestal with a garland of oak leaves on Beecher’s proper left. Ward reportedly described the woman as a ‘genuine Virginian negress’ whom he modelled from life.17 ‘The face is upturned in awe and wonder at the great man who has done so much for her race’, wrote a journalist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1890. ‘Both her face and figure’, the article continued, ‘are typical of the ignorant negro of the plantation in slave days rather than of the quick-witted wide-awake negro of the cities today ... The success of the effort is beyond question.’18 The author of Ward’s catalogue raisonné, Lewis Sharp, justified the presence of the freedwoman and children as representing ‘gratitude for the role he played in the abolitionist movement’ and ‘an expression of Beecher’s devotion to children’, respectively.19 This is how admirers have interpreted the figures ever since the model was first displayed in Ward’s studio. There are today, however, additional factors to contemplate when considering the meanings and impact of this sculpture in a public plaza in . First, while Henry’s sister, Harriet, is still a well-recognised name, due to the role her popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin played attracting support for the abolitionist movement, one cannot

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assume that passers-by will recognise Henry or know that he supported the abolition of slavery.20 As of this writing, there is no plaque on the iron railing that surrounds the monument in Columbus Park. The sculpture itself bears only this inscription on the back of its granite pedestal: ‘Henry Ward Beecher/1813–1887/The grateful gift/of multitudes of/all classes creeds/and conditions/at home and abroad/to honor the great/apostle of the/ brotherhood of man.’ Second, students in recent years have singled out the figure of the freedwoman to support their interpretation of the Beecher sculpture as contradicting the humanitarian actions for which he is remembered. One wrote: ‘The statue reflects a view that slaves were helplessly waiting for a white savior like Beecher to help pull them out of their misery.’21 Another explained:

The monument ... shows [Beecher] as someone who is respected and honored by African Americans and Caucasians alike ...... he is looking on a new horizon. However, there is a shadow of the ‘White Messiah Complex’: white man frees black slaves ... The children and black woman seem to be honoring him, decorat- ing his sculpture. However, the black slave seems as though she was looking at someone who is larger than life, thus undermining her worth as an African American.22

Students in the fall of 2017, in the context of a more heated political climate and greater discourse about the controversial nature of historical monuments, made specific references in their writing to how current politics inform perceptions of the sculpture and the need for didactics:

This statue was made to honor him [Beecher] but here in this time of the world it seems to put him on a pedestal. Being treated like he was a god in the statue. The sculptor decided to put the people below him ... My advice is take the women and kids off because ... they look like they are worshipping him ... Also put a plaque saying what he has done.23

This student suggested removing the sculptures from the pedestal to ameliorate the sculpture’s racism.24 There is precedent for Ward’s Beecher sculpture serving a commemorative function without the pedestal figures. When alumni of , Beecher’s alma mater, dedicated a second cast of the Beecher statue, overseen by sculptor Daniel Chester French (after Ward’s death), on the college’s rural Massachusetts campus in 1915, the alumni committee in charge of the commission, which included architect William R. Mead, eliminated the pedestal figures, presumably to save money and time. Whether or not there were additional reasons for eliminating the figures, the result was satisfactory to George A. Plimpton, Amherst alum and trustee, who wrote, ‘I was in Amherst last Sunday, and I was tremendously pleased with the setting of the Beecher statue. I tell you, it is stunning! It looks infinitely better than it does in Brooklyn.’25 Two students, writing about their visits to the monument, moreover, made specific references to the potential for misinterpretation by passers-by due to lack of accessible information about Beecher:

This monument, in my opinion, projects Henry Ward Beecher as one [who] is actually for slavery, rather than a man who opposes it ... A woman approached me and was saying that her son was asking her if this guy was a slave owner,

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meanwhile he [Beecher] advocated for the complete opposite. So a plaque with info would provide people with the correct info.

After all of the controversial statues being pulled down recently, I looked at it, and saw a young African American girl at his feet and thought he was a slave owner ... People, like myself, just assume it’s another statue that could possibly be controversial.26

These reflections show how the sculpture’s message can be misleading. Moreover, recent controversies over Confederate monuments have made audiences more aware that historical public sculptures should not be taken at face value. Audience reception and the neighbourhood of downtown Brooklyn have both changed in tangible and intangible ways since 1985 when Sharpe wrote the catalogue raisonnée of Ward’ssculpture,butmuchmorehaschangedsince1909whenartcritic Montgomery Schuyler applauded the sculpture in Putnam’sMagazine.Intheearlyyears of the twentieth century, modernist public art had not yet overshadowed figurative sculpture and Ward was upheld as a master of the still revered portrait genre. Of his Brooklyn Beecher, Schuyler wrote,

Few men, indeed, have so much ‘nature’ as Beecher had, and few portrait statues so much as this one ... the expression of the attributes is carried into the heart and defiant pose of the burly figure, so that the statue is a ‘character-image’ apprehen- sible as far away as it can be seen.27

It is true that students, upon noticing this imposing statue as they walk north from St Francis through Columbus Park, recognise that Beecher was a man of charisma and power. Even Schuyler, though, expressed reservations about portrait sculpture as a genre:

No doubt the vocation has its drawbacks as an art. Our desire to do honor to our dead is intense ... when they are just dead. Hence such immortalization as the duration of perennial bronze can give to persons of importance in their day ... the next generation, will gird and question.28

Even if art historians perceive the quality of the modelling of a particular portrait sculpture as absolute, the reputation of a portrait statue’s subject is vulnerable to changing opinion. In the case of the Beecher monument, the formidable bulk of this bronze portrait statue clearly articulates the man’s important role in Brooklyn’s history. However, the pedestal figures speak of nineteenth-century moderate abolitionism, preventing us from idealising the actions of this principled man. At the same time, we must exercise caution in how we judge historical personages. Beecher’s biographer speaks to the question of changing perspectives when she writes,

20th-century critics later belittled ... Beecher’s antislavery work as sentimental, unsystematic, and pandering to white prejudice. But such criticism misreads the mind of the average American of the 19th century. It was a radical thing indeed to persuade free whites to feel a genuine kindship with enslaved blacks (or even free blacks, as Henry later did). This imaginative emotional exercise was crucial to rec- ognizing blacks as fellow citizens.29

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Applegate herself does not idealise Beecher: he ‘was no ’, she writes.

He hedged on the question of states’ rights and was given to sudden reversals of opinion – reranking his values depending on the immediate threats. In general, he should be called a moderate. He hated slavery, but he loved the Union more.30

In other words, Beecher, like many public figures today, chose the politically expedient path forward. Just as historical perspective changes the meaning of a sculpture for its audience, so the physical landscape shapes audience perception. The sculpture of Beecher at Plymouth Church modelled for the centennial of his birth by sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941) serves as a foil against which to see Ward’s sculpture in Columbus Park. Visiting both helps students appreciate how location, as well as choices made by the respective artists, convey different ideas about Beecher’s character and influence the sculpture’s reception. The Columbus Park statue is located in a busy plaza, bordered by Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, courthouses, a post office, and a major public transportation hub, and crossed daily by streams of commuters. The steps of Borough Hall are increasingly the site of rallies, ranging from demonstrations of solidarity for Brooklyn’s Muslim community to student-led ‘march for our lives’ gun protests. Though Ward’s sculpture was removed from its original location facing Borough Hall in 1940, and currently presides over Columbus Park from its quieter opposite end, people use the benches that line this tree-lined northern section of the plaza in all but the coldest weather. The Beecher statue erected at Plymouth Church in 1914, though just a short walk from Columbus Park, might as well be in a different world. It is set back from a residential street in a small yard bordered on three sides by church buildings (see Figure 15.2). A waist-high iron fence forms the fourth side, separating the yard from the sidewalk and street. Though passers-by are free to walk through the gates and approach the sculpture, which is situated flush against the street-facing building beside a bronze relief of , students experience how Borglum’s statue of Beecher is far ‘less public’ than Ward’s. Tucked away in a quiet space in the historic district of Brooklyn Heights, audiences read Borglum’s statue within the physical context of the church where Beecher was pastor. Moreover, a plaque on the sidewalk in front of the adjacent sanctuary features a photograph of Beecher and a biographical text. The Plymouth sculpture itself is more ‘welcoming’, just as the setting is more intimate. The face of Borglum’s Beecher is less stern, and his proper right arm is outstretched as if addressing his congregation and the sculpture’s audience. As with the Columbus Park statue, there are sculpted figures on the pedestal of Borglum’s sculpture. Interpretations of these pedestal figures vary, however, showing that this monument is also victim to the vagaries of perception and historical memory. Some students notice that Beecher’s proper left arm is gesturing down toward the figures as he addresses his audience with his right. They correctly interpret them as enslaved children whom Beecher fought to liberate. Borglum, according to newspaper reports in 1912, intended the figures to represent two particular slaves, the Edmonson sisters, whose freedom Beecher purchased by holding a mock auction.31 One girl looks up at Beecher, while the other hides her head in her sister’s lap. Later, the reported on Mrs Rose Ward Hunt’s visit to Plymouth Church in 1927. Rose Ward Hunt (Sallie Marie Diggs), known as ‘Pinky’ for her light complexion, is the best known of all the enslaved children whom Beecher freed in his sensationalist ‘auctions’. When Hunt returned to Plymouth Church in 1927, the Eagle published a photo

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of her standing at the Borglum statue, beside the sculpted pedestal figures, one of which, the caption claimed, represented her.32 Thus, just 13 years after the Plymouth statue’s unveiling, the sculpted figures’ identities had changed to align with the most romanticised story of Beecher’s abolitionist sermons. Borglum’s sculpture is just as potentially controversial as Ward’s, by presenting him as a white saviour with helpless enslaved children cowering at his feet, but the physical context of Plymouth Church, including the nearby plaque, contextualise the statue for passers-by. Borglum and Ward represented Beecher at Plymouth and in Columbus Park as his contemporaries desired to remember him and as those in succeeding decades mythologised him. However, the Plymouth statue’s location protects this monument from the public scrutiny Ward’s sculpture has faced. Ward’s sculpture did not meet the criteria of Mayor de Blasio’s Monument Commission for evaluation for relocation in 2017, but there was speculation that it might. The monument had been relatively free of reported controversy for many years.33 The biggest debates in its early years were over location. Beecher Statue Fund members had hoped to dedicate the monument in . Several newspaper editorials explained why it should be moved, or at least reoriented. The New York Tribune reported that Beecher’s son thought the statue should face away from City Hall (today Borough Hall) because in the original location, facing City Hall with its back to the park, ‘it looked as if his father had his back to the common people, with whom he was always in the closest sympathy’.34 The statue ultimately moved twice, in 1940 and 1960, due to plaza re-landscaping, and continued to garner attention in the press, mostly concerning relocations and maintenance. For many years, the community decorated and held services at the statue on Memorial Day. Though a comprehensive analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception is beyond the scope of this chapter, newspaper records reveal later examples of engagement and critique.35 Public art garners attention during moments of upheaval, and one of those was the period of reckoning after 9/11. On the first anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan, a public art controversy erupted over artist Eric Fischl’ssculptureFalling Woman,installedinaconcourse beneath Rockefeller Center. Because it was criticised as insensitive a year after 9/11 when New Yorkers had witnessed (in person or on TV) people jumping from the burning towers, the city removed the sculpture. A New York Times journalist used the occasion to reflect on changing opinions about public art, and asked readers ‘to nominate a work of public art they would like to see relegated to the dust bin’.36 ABrooklynHeightsresidentnominatedthe Columbus Park Beecher. He wrote,

I have seen people cringe when they see Beecher, standing larger than life on a pedestal, with a black girl (a freed slave?) at his feet gazing up at him as if he were gold. The statue reflects a view that slaves were helplessly waiting for a white savior like Beecher to pull them out of their misery.37

After another moment of turmoil, the events in Charlottesville in 2017, when news broke in September that Mayor de Blasio was convening a Monuments Commission, the New York Daily News included the Columbus Park Beecher statue in an article highlighting 23 of the city’s monuments to controversial historical figures. ‘With Mayor de Blasio vowing to scrutinize all of them in the coming months’, the article reported, ‘review of the city’s statue list found an astounding cast of historical characters whose heroism masks bloody exploits, racist views and corrupt behavior’.38 In this case, however, the article does not highlight the sculpture’s white supremacist hierarchy. Instead, it notes Beecher’s 1875

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adultery trial as the reason for why his statue was not appropriate for the city’s public spaces. It focused on the potential problem of the ‘who’ of historical monuments rather than the ‘how’, emphasising Beecher’s character flaws over his accomplishments, and not registering the misleading messages that the sculpture projects in contemporary times. In the case of the Beecher statues in downtown Brooklyn, both the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ are complex. Examining these sculptures together, how their individual contexts inform public reception, and how different artistic choices impact perception, is an exercise in learning how public history is made. Students engaging with these teachable monuments learn how to think critically as well to appreciate how history is always understood and constructed through the lens of the present. Encouraging students to recognise contradictions in public monuments is one step, asking them to go further by contextualising the roots of those contradictions and accounting for and analysing how physical environment and changing social mores influence reception is a second step that historical monument site visits can begin to accomplish.

Notes 1 Brooklyn became a borough of New York City seven years later in 1898. 2MicheleBogart,Twitterpost,21April2019,9:10p.m.,https://twitter.com/urbaninsideout/ status/1120132722264084481?s=21. 3 Andy Katz, ‘Henry Ward Beecher Monument Restoration Unveiled in Columbus Park’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 June 2017. 4 Ibid. 5 For a discussion of the reevaluation of Confederate monuments after 2015, see Sarah Beetham, ‘From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of “Black Lives Matter”’, Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 9–33. For perspectives on Charlottesville and the monument removals that followed, also see Catherine Clinton, ed., Confed- erate Statues and Memorialization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). 6 Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, Report to the City of New York, January 2018, www1.nyc.gov/site/monuments/report/commission-report.page. 7 ‘His Statue Is Unveiled’, New York Times,25June1891,8,www.nycgovparks.org/parks/colum bus-park/monuments/102. I also have assigned an exercise where students use an online Brooklyn Eagle database to find articles about the sculpture pertaining to public engagement, reception, relocation, maintenance, etc. At least one class visited the Brooklyn Historical Society to see a scrapbook of hate mail and other correspondence Beecher saved. Henry Ward Beecher papers, ARC.212, Box 41. 8 Student blog post, February 2013, https://wordpress.com/view/fa1420amart.wordpress.com. 9 Student blog post, February 2013, https://fa1420amart.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/the-man-and- the-monument-henry-ward-beecher-at-columbus-park. 10 Student worksheets completed on site during class trip, October 2018, author’s files. 11 Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Image Books, 2006), 224. 12 Ibid., 5–6. 13 See http://monumentlab.com/podcast-1/2018/10/7/episode-02-kirk-savage-7psyb. 14 John Quincy Adams Ward to James Reid Lambdin, 1863, Albert Rosenthal Papers, , Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, cited in Thayer Tolles, catalogue entry 55, The Freedman, in Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 1: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1865 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 140–145 (my emphasis). 15 ‘Affairs in Brooklyn. Defending the Beecher Statue Mr. Hinrichs Says ...’, New York Tribune, 27 December 1889, 3. 16 Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 347–349. 17 ‘Seeing the Beecher Monument’, New York Tribune, 11 December 1890, 10.

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18 ‘Ward at Work. A Visit to the Sculptor of the Beecher Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 Decem- ber 1890, 1. 19 Lewis Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward Dean of American Sculpture with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 237. 20 Of the 30–70 students who visit the monument(s) for my courses every semester, usually only those who have studied him for other St Francis classes have previous knowledge of Beecher. 21 Student worksheet, fall semester, 2014, author’s files. 22 Student worksheet, undated, 2013 or earlier, author’s files. 23 Student worksheet, fall semester 2017, author’s files. 24 In 2017, some students also perceived the sculpture as especially inspirational and as a symbol of justice: the sculpture is ‘extremely relevant to Americans and people around the world today. We are currently in a place where many groups are divided and a select few are trying to strip rights away from others who have a smaller voice. This monument speaks to African Americans, women, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community. Beecher represents those who are out fight- ing for underrepresented groups, even when faced with a lot of opposition.’ Student blog post, 20 February 2017. An even greater number of students recognised the hierarchy of the sculpture but did not reflect critically on the meaning and impact of that hierarchy, or were unable to inter- pret the sculpture’s contradictory messages, underscoring the need to encourage critical analysis of public monuments. 25 Letter to Frank L. Babbot from George A. Plimpton, 6 March 1915, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Buildings and Grounds Collection, Box 22, Folder 5. 26 Student worksheet, fall semester 2017, author’s files. 27 Montgomery Schuyler, ‘John Quincy Adams Ward: The Work of a Veteran Sculptor’, Putnam’s Magazine VI, no. 6 (September 1909): 649. 28 Ibid., 643. 29 Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 229. 30 Ibid., 224. 31 ‘Beecher Statue by Sculptor Borglum to Be Erected at Plymouth Church’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 September 1912, 26. 32 ‘“Pinky” Posed by Slave Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 May 1927, 5. 33 A thorough overview of changing perceptions of Ward’s Beecher sculpture, including research on audience reception in the second half of the twentieth century through the present, is beyond the scope of the current chapter. 34 ‘Political and Personal’, New York Tribune, 5 February 1893, 21. 35 One Brooklyn newspaper notes a dramatisation of one of Beecher’s auctions as part of a Negro History Week programme at Trinity Parrish House in Brooklyn Heights. A thorough look at avail- able records from local institutions and newspapers would paint a fuller picture of engagement with and reception of the Columbus Park monument. ‘Visit Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 6 Febru- ary 1954, 2. 36 ‘New York Voices’, New York Times, 6 October 2002, 14 (City Section). 37 Ibid. 38 Greg B. Smith, ‘A Look at Some of NYC’s Most Controversial Monuments as City Weights Whether to Remove Iconic Statues’, New York Daily News, 2 September 2017, www.nydailynews. com/new-york/city-remove-nyc-iconic-statues-article-1.3464427; Greg B. Smith, ‘Map: New York City’s Controversial Statues and Monuments’, New York Daily News, 8 September 2017, http://interactive.nydailynews.com/map/nyc-statues.

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