Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts Author(s): Erika Doss Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 237-270 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669736 Accessed: 28-11-2016 15:01 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Winterthur Portfolio This content downloaded from 129.74.116.6 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:01:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts Erika Doss Dedicated in 1887 in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Puritan is a large bronze statue of a menacing figure clutching a huge Bible. Commissioned as a memorial to Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), The Puritan was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and erected in an urban park surrounded by factories and tenements. After repeated vandalism, it was moved “uphill” to Springfield’s cultural quadrangle in 1899. Contextualizing The Puritan in geographic and affective terms, this essay argues that the statue’s public disavowal was conditioned by Saint-Gaudens’s general disdain for New England’s seventeenth-century founding fathers and in particular their fraught relationships with American Indians. EDICATED IN 1887 in Springfield, Massa- Puritan is forbidding and menacing, a Gilded Age chusetts, The Puritan is an oversized bronze version of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931)orDarth D statue of a righteous religious man covered Vader in the Star Wars trilogy (1977–83). He is also from head to toe in stiff, heavy clothes: buckled stee- sternly disapproving. As a critic in the Art World re- ple hat, voluminous high-collared cape, multibut- marked in 1917, “The very pose of his feet expresses toned doublet, baggy breeches, and thickly ribbed the rigidity of his views concerning other forms of hose (fig. 1). Clutching a huge Bible in his left hand Protestantism, of the Scarlet Woman, of backsliders and a gnarled wooden staff in the other, this impos- and those wallowers in uncleanliness and ignorance ing icon of New England patriarchy is captured mid- the Indians.”1 stride, tenaciously tromping through a New World The 8½-foot statue was commissioned as a me- wilderness represented by a few branches of ever- morial to Deacon Samuel Chapin (1595–1675), one greens near his sturdy, thickly shod feet. His lips of Springfield’s founding fathers and prominent are pursed in a frown; his eyes obscured by the brim Protestant layman who died shortly after Algonqui- of his hat. Placed high atop a granite pedestal, The an Indians burned the town to the ground during King Philip’s War, the bloodiest conflict of the early Erika Doss teaches in the Department of American Studies at colonial era. Designed by American artist Augustus the University of Notre Dame. Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), the well-known sculp- Versions of this essay were presented at the Metropolitan Museum tor of the Shaw Memorial (1884–97), the Sherman of Art’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Sympo- Monument (1892–1903), and the controversial sium (October 9, 2009), the Newberry Library’s Seminar in American 1891–93 Art and Visual Culture (October 16, 2009), and the Addison Gallery of nude figure Diana ( ), The Puritan was origi- Art’s Coming of Age: A Symposium Celebrating a Century of Art and Artists nally erected in Stearns Square, a small plat of lawn from the Collection of the Addison Gallery of Art (November 4, 2006). The located near the train station, tenements, and facto- author thanks Michele Bogart, Sarah Burns, Joseph Carvalho III, Alice ’ Levi Duncan, Elizabeth Lee, Cynthia Mills, Ellen Skerrett, Jerome ries of Springfield s industrial downtown. The archi- Tharaud, and Thayer Tolles for their constructive criticism, and staff tect Stanford White, Saint-Gaudens’s close friend at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, MA, and and frequent collaborator, was commissioned to re- Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH, for their research assis- ’ tance. The author thanks especially student assistant Felicia Caponigri. configure the park s landscaping and design the stat- Research for this essay was supported by grants received from the In- ue’s pedestal. In 1899, after repeated episodes of stitute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, vandalism, The Puritan was removed and rededicated University of Notre Dame. B 2013 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1 “Saint-Gaudens and His Work,” Art World 1 (February 1917): Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2012/4604-0002$10.00 302. Springfield locals call the statue “the flasher.” This content downloaded from 129.74.116.6 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:01:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 238 Winterthur Portfolio 46:4 Fig. 1. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, Springfield, MA, 1883–86 (dedicated 1887). Bronze, with granite pedestal designed by Stanford White; H. 8′ 7½00. (Photo, Nova Seals.) This content downloaded from 129.74.116.6 on Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:01:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan 239 near the city’s newly built art museum, uphill and Statue Mania about one mile away from Springfield’s dirty, crowded urban center. The 1887 unveiling of The Puritan took place during Removing public art is not uncommon in Amer- a ceremony attended by Springfield’s leading politi- ica, and iconoclastic assaults on memorials and cians and businessmen and members of the Chapin monuments considered offensive and inappropri- family. The Reverend Aaron L. Chapin, president of ate have a long history, from the destruction of Beloit College in Wisconsin and a lineal descendant statues of British monarchs during the War of Inde- of Deacon Chapin, delivered an address praising The pendence to the defacement of Confederate me- Puritan’s “manly stature” and proclaimed, “The no- morials today. Memorials are typically moved, and blest and best features of our nation were derived occasionally destroyed, when the histories and from its Puritan founders.” After detailing the deacon’s ideologies they embody are deemed illegitimate history, including his flight from “tyranny and perse- and invalid. They are most often vandalized during cution” in England to his arrival in Springfield in the times of significant political and social change, 1640s, the reverend recited a poem specially com- when various publics angrily contest and attempt missioned for the statue’s dedication: to revise the origin myths and symbolic figures that Again there strides beneath the wintry sky, shape and direct the terms of both local and national 1776 With ancient aspect, lordly, stern and grand, identity. In , for example, rebellious colonists This man of iron will and iron hand; … pulled down an equestrian statue of King George III Above his head the storm-clouds darkly fly, in New York’s Bowling Green. In 1900, unknown The solitudes press near with awful moan; parties defaced an elaborate granite canopy hous- The strange and witch-like shadows of his day ing Plymouth Rock, the venerated (and entirely About him, like his cloak, are weirdly thrown. fabricated) landfall of the Mayflower Pilgrims in We know thee, Puritan, and feel thy sway Massachusetts. (The Pilgrims actually first landed Where narrow bound of empire vast have grown; further north, at Cape Cod.) In 1969 members of From thought and deed thou passest not away. Students for a Democratic Society blew up a monu- 3 ment erected to policemen in Chicago’sHaymarket (George Pinckney) Square; in 1970, just weeks after the statue had been At the conclusion of his remarks, several Chapin repaired, members of the Weather Underground children removed the large US flag that had hidden 2 blew it up again. the statue from viewers, prompting a “spontaneous In late nineteenth-century Springfield, The Pu- burst of applause” from the crowd.4 ritan incited similarly angry feelings among the Saint-Gaudens’s authoritarian bronze is a per- working-class publics who lived near the memorial fect example of Gilded Age “statue mania,” an epi- and viewed it as a threat to their claims on urban demic of public statuemaking that erupted in late public space. Their disavowal of the statue was nineteenth-century America (and Europe). Con- conditioned by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’sown current with the City Beautiful premise that urban conflicted feelings about the privileging of Puri- ills and immorality could be remedied by designing tans and Puritanism in Gilded Age America. Seem- harmonious and well-ordered civic centers, statue ingly an unambiguous memorial dedicated to mania was informed by aspirations of aesthetic Springfield’s first deacon, The Puritan’s menacing decoration, social control, and nation building.5 impression was inflected by Saint-Gaudens’s general Especially after the divisiveness of the Civil War, disdain for New England’s seventeenth-century founding fathers and in particular their fraught re- 3 Reverend Aaron L.