THE LIBERTY BELL: from Commodity to Sacred Object

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THE LIBERTY BELL From Commodity to Sacred Object

◆ ROBEY CALLAHAN University of Pennsylvania

Abstract The Liberty Bell stands today as one of the most prominent and widely recognized symbols of America. As a cultural biography of this national artifact, this paper focuses on the four main media through which the Bell has over time gained the exposure needed for its consecration in the public mind. The media of presenting the Bell include (1) the changing ways in which it has been exhibited in Philadelphia for the public and (2) the many train journeys across the United States the Bell took from 1885 to 1915 to visit various industrial expositions. The media of representing the Bell include (3) the many mid- to late-19th-century mythic stories that portray it as a key ﬁgure in both the American Revolution and the early 19th-century anti- slavery movement in the United States and (4) the post-1876 growth of the use of its image in advertising and tourism.

Key Words ◆ advertising ◆ commoditization/singularization ◆ iconology ◆ Liberty Bell ◆ national monuments ◆ tourism

Proclaim Liberty throughout All the Land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof. Inscription on the Liberty Bell

INTRODUCTION The Liberty Bell stands today as one of the most prominent and widely recognized symbols of America (Figure 1). It has appeared on both

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common and commemorative coinage and served as the symbol and name for a number of American space capsules (French and Zeller, 1978: 135, 143; Reichhardt, 1987: 25–8). As a tourist attraction, the Bell brings millions every year to Philadelphia and serves also as a sign of that city. Like the American ﬂag (cf. Firth, 1973), it means different things to different people. It has been used by a wide range of social and political groups within the United States, from genealogical societies to survivalists and white- supremacist groups (Pen- rose, 1974; Lowe, 1985: 12; Waas, 1986: 17). Its image can be found in advertisements for everything from FIGURE 1 The Liberty Bell today insurance to butter, cos- metics to beer, sports apparel to board games (Wollett and Wollett, 1987: 27; O’Meara, 1994: 2144, 2271, 2671, 3315). In this paper I shall analyze the rise of this national artifact from its early days of obscurity to its current fame. What is the nature of this fame? Today an image bearing the merest outline of a bell with an evident crack proceeding upward from the base will lead most Ameri- cans immediately to think, ‘the Liberty Bell’. How did this arise? Any analysis seeking to plot the winding path by which an object such as the Liberty Bell has come to hold for Americans such instant familiarity will benefit from consideration of two concepts: Panofsky’s iconology and Kopytoff’s singularization. Panofsky (1982[1955]) defines ‘iconology’ as the study of the social conditions under which images obtain their conventional meaning. This conventional meaning exists at the level of recognition and hence differs from ‘deeper’ meanings that may be associated with the object or its representation. An icono- logical study of images of the Liberty Bell would thus involve consideration of the historical factors involved in the establishment of two

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key features (the bell-shape and the crack) as the only elements essential to invoke recognition in onlookers of the referent ‘the Liberty Bell’ (Figure 2). For Kopytoff (1986) an object is only a pure commodity at the point of exchange. In most cases a given object remains a potential commodity after its exchange – that is, it can with greater or lesser difﬁculty be con- verted back into a pure commodity. Some objects, however, become more and more singularized over time or by the decree of some auth- ority and are removed altogether from the possibility of future exchange. One concomitant of this processual scheme is that objects possess indi- vidual histories analyzable in biographical terms. In my biography of the Liberty Bell, I shall focus mainly on the various media through which the Bell has over time gained the exposure that has secured its transformation in the public mind to a sacred object. The media of presenting the Bell include (1) the changing ways in which it has been exhibited in (what is now) Independence Hall and in the Liberty Bell Pavilion and (2) the many train journeys across the United States the Bell took from 1885 to 1915 to visit a number of the country’s industrial expositions. The media of representing the FIGURE 2 The Bell in neon Bell include (3) the many mid- to late-19th-century mythic stories that portray it as a key ﬁgure in both the American Revolution and the early 19th-century anti- slavery movement in the United States and (4) the post-1876 growth of the use of its image in advertising and tourism. The sections that follow are organized with attention to strict chrono- logical time, and so I shall address each of these four media as it appears relevant to that sequence. In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to the Liberty Bell as we know it today simply as ‘the Bell’ throughout the greater part of the paper.

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I. OBSCURITY AND COMMODITY/POTENTIAL- COMMODITY STATUS: THE BELL’S FIRST CENTURY This section of the paper deals mainly with the period from the Bell’s manufacture, through its early years of use in the State House, and to its retirement from service in 1852. An extended quotation from one of the modern tourist guides (Kimball, 1989: 7, emphasis mine) will set the stage for the discussion that follows: The Liberty Bell is not only our nation’s most famous and venerated object, it has become a world-wide symbol of freedom.... As befits such a famous object, much is known about the bell’s origins. We know why it was made, who made it, how much it weighed, how much it cost, and when it was finally hoisted up and hung in the steeple of Penn- sylvania’s State House (Independence Hall). After 1852, when, cracked and useless it was taken down from the steeple and put on display in the Assembly Room of the Hall, we know its every famous visitor, its every famous move. But strangely, for the ninety-nine years between 1753 when it was raised to the State House steeple, and 1852 when it was lowered again, we know relatively little about it. During those years, it rang in anonymity. It was simply one of several bells in the city. The historical record seldom tells us when the bell rang and no contemporary that we know of bothered to note when the now famous crack first occurred. Ironically, it was during those years of obscurity that a quiet yet significant transformation took place. Gradually, this State House bell of debatable quality evolved into an enduring symbol of freedom. I shall argue that, rather than ‘during those years of obscurity’, the ‘significant transformation’ began to take place in the early 1850s. Before that time, but after its initial purchase, the Bell was effectively a potential commodity in Kopytoff’s terms. There have been many retrospective attempts to obscure its status as a potential commodity during its first century, but these attempts rely mainly on wishful thinking and flawed interpretations of historical data. I begin with the Bell’s founding, re-founding and its early journeys and then proceed to an examination of the possible origins of the name ‘The Liberty Bell’.

A. FOUNDINGS AND EARLY JOURNEYS A brief survey of the founding and re-founding of the Bell will be suf- ﬁcient to prove its initial status as a commodity and early status as a potential commodity. It was ﬁrst cast in England as the result of an order placed in 1751 by the Assembly of the Province of Pennsylvania. The language used to refer to the Bell during this period is, quite under- standably, the language of the world of commodities. For example, the order of the Assembly for 16 October 1751 reads:

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That the Superintendents of the State-house provide a bell of such Weight and Dimensions as they shall think suitable; That the said Superintendents do apply to the Trustees of the General Loan Ofﬁce for an immediate Supply of such Sums of money as they may judge necessary to remit to Great Britain for the Purpose aforesaid; And that the Payment made, in Pursuance of this Order, shall be allowed by the Committee of Accounts in their next settlement with the said Trustees, who shall have a Copy of this Order delivered to them, signed by the Clerk of this House, if required. (quoted in Rosewater, 1926: 5)

The Bell arrived in Philadelphia on 1 September 1752. It was rung a few days later for testing and cracked almost immediately. Two Americans, John Pass and Charles Stow Jr, were charged with recasting the Bell, a task they had to perform twice because their first casting produced an unacceptable tone. Isaac Norris, the chairman of the Superintendents and the man who had ordered the Bell from England and its recastings in America, took a disliking to the Bell and soon arranged for another to be sent from England. He had initially thought to send the Bell back to England to be recast, thereby saving the cost of the metal. Instead he decided to have a new bell delivered and to reclaim part of the cost of the new bell by returning the Bell as scrap should the need or desire arise. In the end he opted to retain both for the State House, placing the Bell in the steeple and the new bell in the cupola belfry (Rosewater, 1926: 14–16). Accounts for these transactions, including money paid and insurance secured, are readily available and further attest to the manner in which the Bell was first considered. The Bell was initially used primarily to call the Assembly together. Given that those members who arrived later than half an hour from the time of the Bell’s tolling were fined heavily for their tardiness (Rose- water, 1926: 29), it is probable that the Bell’s tintinnabulation inspired something akin to the reverence one gives to an alarm clock at six-thirty in the morning. In addition to its secular activities, the Bell was occasionally called into religious service when no other bells were available. Such is a func- tion fitting for a device whose historical associations in the West have for centuries rested on the balance between the ecclesiastic and the civic. Let us now consider some of the mythic stories that paint the Bell’s early years in quite a different light. In 1847 a man named George Lippard wrote a series of stories on the theme of ‘Fourth of July, 1776’ for the Saturday Courier magazine (quoted in Rosewater, 1926: 113–18). One of the stories tells of a flaxen-haired boy who, upon hearing that the Declaration had been approved, calls to the old bell-keeper in the State House steeple to ring the Bell. So popular was this story that it began to appear in history books in the guise of fact. Examples include Lossing’s Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution,

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Headley’s Life of George Washington (Rosewater, 1926: 119, 122), and McCabe’s The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition ...(McCabe, 1876: 52–3). An early tourist guide (Belisle, 1859: 81–2) also treats the legend as historical truth. Rosewater’s (1926: 62–6) quotations from contemporary newspaper accounts relating to the reading of the Declaration of Independence from the State House on 8 July 1776, make no mention of the Bell. Ingram (1876: 53), however, provides us with quite a different account:

... on the afternoon of the memorable Fourth [sic] of July, 1776, [the Bell] announced, with iron tongue, the result of the momentous deliberations of Congress, by ringing out the joyful annunciation for more than two hours, its glorious melody ﬂoating clear and musical as the voice of an angel above the discordant chorus of booming cannon, the roll of drums, and the mingled acclamations of the people.

However, given that the steeple of the State House was in serious disrepair and that the Bell had, as a result, been silent the previous two years, it is doubtful that it joined the majority of the city’s bells in drawing the attention of the citizenry to the recent happenings (Kimball, 1989: 33). If indeed it had been rung, it is unlikely that at the time that much thought was given to the Bell beyond its utility as a medium of communication to the masses. The real message of the day was, after all, the Declaration itself. But the sense that the Bell’s inscription1 carried with it an element of prophecy has, for nearly a century and a half, remained prominent in some of the more romantic accounts of its participation in the Ameri- can Revolution. For instance, Belisle, in his tourist guide to Indepen- dence Hall (1859: 85), writes of this event: ‘To that gentleman [Isaac Norris] is ascribed the honor of having originally suggested the motto, “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof,” which the bell contains, and which proved so prophetic of its future use.’ Charles A. Keyser (1893: 7) writes that ‘[i]ts prophetic inscription [was a] warning through a generation to the government of Great Britain’. Gudehus and McOwen (1904: 7) claim that Isaac Norris and the other Superintendents of the State House ‘... desired merely a good bell ... of about 2,000 pounds weight and some $500 cost ... [a]nd yet the vision of some prophetic seer shines through their ofﬁcial routine ...’. Eighty-ﬁve years later, Kimball (1989: 31, emphasis in original) likewise refers to the Bell’s ‘prophetic “Proclaim Liberty” inscription’. Now I move to an analysis of the stories that have arisen around the Bell’s removal to Allentown in September, 1777, to protect it from the advancing British army. Stoudt’s account (1930: 71) of this event, itself a source of potent mythologizing, begins tellingly thus:

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That the bell, revered as the symbol of the nation’s birth, should become the subject of legendary tales was inevitable. Its prophetic inscription has invited fanciful interpretations and has shrouded it with an air of mystery. That its removal from the State House, a little more than a year after it had fulfilled to the letter the Mosaic injunction to the Children of Israel engraved in its very structure, and its return again to its rightful place in the tower of the State House, should become the object of conjecture and speculation is quite natural. The reason that the Bell was moved, along with the majority of the bells in Philadelphia, was to keep the advancing British from melting it down to convert it into cannon (Kimball, 1989: 37). The Americans had another motive for removing the bells: they had intended, should the need arise, to turn them into cannon themselves. Most historical accounts and tourist guides, however, claim that they were taken only to keep them safe from the British (e.g. City of Philadelphia [1904: 9]; Oregon Society, Sons of the American Revolution [1915: 3]). In a work celebrating the sesquicentennial of that event, Stoudt (1927: 14–15) presents us with part of a diary entry of Sally Wistar dated 23 September 1777 that reads: ‘[a]ll ye bells in ye city are certainly taken away’. Later, in the same book we encounter a quotation from Sheetz, then State Treasurer and officiating officer at the unveiling of a 1908 plaque at the Allentown Zion Church, in which he asserts poetically: Twas this man [John Jacob Mickley] who was selected as one of those who helped save the Liberty Bell, which by its ringing on the fourth [sic] of July, 1776, proclaimed liberty and independence to the people of the thirteen colonies. This act, no doubt, was offensive to the British and endangered the safety of the bell. So in September, 1777, by order of the executive council of Philadel- phia, the bell was removed from the belfry of the state house – also the bells of Christ Church and St. Peter’s Church – and being placed upon wagons used by the Continental army, were brought to Allentown.... (Stoudt, 1927: 43–4, my emphasis) Here, truly, lies the goal of Stoudt’s rhetoric: to paint the removal of the Bell as somehow akin to a holy mission; to transpose myth into the same key as history. As we shall see in the following sub-section, the claims surrounding the origin of the name ‘The Liberty Bell’ are borne of this same set of assumptions.

B. ON THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME ‘THE LIBERTY BELL’ Many modern tourist guides assert that early 19th-century abolitionists were the ﬁrst to use the name ‘The Liberty Bell’ to refer to the Bell, which had previously been called ‘The State House Bell’ and later ‘The

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Old State House Bell’ (Division of Publications, National Park Service, 1982: 53; National Historical Park, Philadelphia, 1991: 1). One (Kimball, n.d.: 3) such account claims:

[In 1837] a stylized but recognizable drawing of the bell, with ‘Proclaim Liberty’ and ‘All the Inhabitants’ emphasized, appeared as a frontispiece in Liberty, the magazine of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Soon, the abolitionists had named it the Liberty Bell and adopted it as a symbol of their cause.

This sequence of events is the result of an essentially presentist attitude toward history. A closer look at the publications of the Friends of Freedom (from 1839 to the early 1850s), as well as an early book/tourist guide on Independence Hall (Belisle, 1859) and other historical frag- ments, is in order. The Friends of Freedom were one of a number of anti-slavery groups active in the decades before the Civil War. Since their major publication, produced annually from 1839 to the early 1850s, was called The Liberty Bell and since images of a bell apparently resembling the Bell were used throughout (Figure 3), the Friends of Freedom may be held to be the abo- litionist group most relevant to my arguments. While the Friends of Freedom do appear to have been initially inspired by the Bell’s inscription, I hold that they did not intend to rename the Bell ‘The Liberty Bell’ and that in fact they soon ‘forgot’ the source of their inspiration. Even when they did ‘remember’ it, there is no evidence that they were actually referring to the Bell in their works. That they were inspired by the Bell’s quotation from Leviticus is evident in the brief introduction to the ﬁrst poem in the ﬁrst issue of The Liberty Bell. Mary Clark (Clark, 1839: 1) notes that her sonnet was ‘Suggested by the Inscription on the Philadelphia Liberty Bell’. Her reference to the ‘Philadelphia

FIGURE 3 One of the illustrations of bells in The Liberty Bell, the journal of the Friends of Freedom anti- slavery group

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Liberty Bell’ is often taken as the first instance of the use of the name ‘The Liberty Bell’ to refer to the Bell (Stoudt, 1930: 59). If, however, in the unlikely event that Clark had intended to rename the Bell, she certainly did not make much of an effort. The introduction to her poem was the sole explicit link to the Bell until some years later when another lone reference to its inscription appeared introducing yet another sonnet. Anne Weston’s (1852: 1) poem is introduced with the phrase ‘Suggested by the inscription on the Bell in the Hall of Indepen- dence, Philadelphia’. However, none of the poems in The Liberty Bell, including the two sonnets mentioned above, ever refers to any recognizable historical, or even mythical, event associated with the Bell. What is happening here? First, the resemblance between the Bell and the bells appearing in the publications of the Friends of Freedom does not extend very far. As with the bell shown in the New York Anti-Slavery Society’s magazine Liberty, the only similarity is in fact the inscribed quotation from Leviti- cus. At this point, one might object that the Biblical inscription alone is sufficient to show that the Friends of Freedom were calling the Bell ‘The Liberty Bell’. Such would appear to be the logic behind the interpretation of the modern tourist guides; however, it is in error. What are essentially tangled webs of historical possibilities have been ignored in favor of the more convenient interpretation noted above and promoted in the tourist guides. While it may be reasonable to accept that the abolitionists had been inspired by the Bell (or, as noted above, perhaps more by the inscription upon the Bell) in their creation of their own bell(s), there is no case for the assertion that they themselves renamed the Bell ‘The Liberty Bell’. Although many of the introductory poems within the journal The Liberty Bell are likewise entitled ‘The Liberty Bell’ and contain references to ‘LIBERTY’S blessed BELL’ (Bowring, 1843: 3) and ‘the bell of liberty’ (Madden, 1847: 2), never is the claim made that the bells noted actually refer to the Bell. Indeed, the content of the poems is well in keeping with the religious and, at times, mystical flavor of the group’s other published materials condemning slavery. ‘Liberty Bells’ (Hempstead, 1851: 1–2) reads (partly) thus:

Steepled far from human hands On the rocky height, And in grottos low, Where no step may go, And the spar and wreathing gems are bright As fairy wands ...

The use of the plural ‘bells’ throughout the poem, along with the tran- scendental status accorded these bells, renders any claim that this work

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is in fact referring to the Bell untenable. After all, the Bell itself (as we understand it now) is really just one bell. And it has never been ‘[s]teepled far from human hands’. But this poem, like all of the other relevant entries in The Liberty Bell, can be taken as finding its inspiration in the Bell itself or, more obliquely but probably ultimately more truthfully, in the same source that gave birth to the Bell (i.e. the traditional use of a bell to signal religious and secular events and a biblical quotation that is a particularly fitting encap- sulation of the spirit of the age). One further piece of data from The Liberty Bell will serve to strengthen this last point. In the 1845 edition, a short political essay by S. J. May (1845: 159) begins tellingly thus: ‘Although we ring the “Liberty Bell,” we are not of the “Liberty Party,” so called in the political world.’ Here May reveals his appreciation of the metaphorical use his organization was making of the idea of the ‘Liberty Bell’. The ‘Liberty Bell’ he and his associates ‘ring’ is the journal itself. In addition, his perceived need to dissociate the title of the journal of the Friends of Freedom from the Liberty Party clearly indicates the very real possibility that audiences at that time might well make such an incorrect association – an association probably based upon the goal of abolition shared between the Friends of Freedom and the Liberty Party (cf. Reichley, 1992: 105). What is significant here is that, since we are granting at least an initial link between it and the bells of the ‘Liberty Bell’, we see that the Bell by the early 1850s had not yet assumed much in the way of its own singular character. The Friends of Freedom were never referring to the Bell in their literature, but rather to the idea of a bell or bells tolling ‘Liberty’. In the vast majority of the dozens of histories and tourist guides written for the Centennial Exposition and housed in the City of Philadel- phia Archives, the Bell is not referred to as the ‘Liberty Bell’. ‘Indepen- dence Bell’ or ‘bell of Independence’ are its commoner names in 1876. Indeed, ‘Independence Bell’ was one of the acceptable names for the Bell at least until 1903 when Levering published his History of Bethlehem (quoted in Stoudt, 1927: 19). Given the evidence, it is clear that the succession of events presented in the tourist guides regarding the naming of the Bell is in error. As to the question of why it is in error, it appears that the process of the singularization of this particular object would seem to require a great deal of retrospective tinkering or historical ignorance. In a world where the Friends of Freedom, in their crusade against the abomination of slavery, embrace the Bell as their symbol and christen it ‘The Liberty Bell’, we can rest assured that some sort of controlling design, slowly revealing itself over time, underlies history. Thus Gudehus and McOwen (1904: 6), in a move firmly situated in this world of singularization, write that ‘... [w]hen procuring it from

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England, prior to Revolutionary days, its sturdy Pennsylvania pur- chasers, with prophetic prescience, caused to be inscribed upon it the Biblical quotation enjoining the proclamation of liberty throughout the land.’ And thus a World Wide Web page for the Independence Hall Association (1995), with a similar regard for historical accuracy, claims that:

During the Civil War the Bell achieved an iconic status when abolitionists adopted the Bell as a remarkably apt metaphor for a country literally cracked and freedom fissured for its black inhabitants. This is the same world in which a flaxen-haired boy shouts ‘Ring!’ and the old bell-keeper announces with the tolling of the Bell the dawn of American independence; a world in which the Bell is secretly hidden in the cellar of a church in Allentown in a sacred mission to protect it from defilement by the advancing British army.

II. THE ELEVATION OF THE BELL TO SINGULAR STATUS: FROM THE LATTER HALF OF THE NINETEENTH TO THE EARLY PART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In 1846 the Bell was permanently silenced by a crippling hairline crack that proceeded from the tip of an earlier, repaired crack. For the previous sixty-odd years, it had been tolled to mark numerous ceremonial occasions. However, after its return to Philadelphia from Allentown in 1778, it never enjoyed the almost daily presence it had had when it was used regularly to call together the Assembly (Keyser, 1893: 27–9). Some short time after its removal from the steeple of the Pennsyl- vania State House, it reappeared as a minor exhibit in a series of rooms also containing, among other things, Benjamin Franklin’s office desk, John Hancock’s chair, ‘the original stamp imposed under the celebrated Stamp Act of Great Britain in March, 1765, which led to the Revolution’ (Ingram, 1876: 53), and various statues and paintings of Revolutionary War heroes. The Bell’s early ‘need’ for the ‘support’ of other national symbols is evident in its days of incipient relic-hood in the 1850s. In its first incarnation as a relic, it rested on a pedestal draped in American flags. It was identified by a plaque referring to it as ‘The Old State House Bell’. And it had a stuffed bald eagle perched upon it (Belisle, 1859: 80–8). Today, the Bell possesses enough recognition value2 of its own to reside unadorned within its own shrine, but it did not achieve this ‘maturely’ singular status overnight. A variety of souvenirs – from salt shakers to sauce dishes, from perfume bottles to inkwells – were manufactured in quantity to celebrate the Centennial and portrayed the Bell in association with American flags

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and eagles (Wollett and Wollett, 1984: 32, 1985a: 33, 1985c: 32, 1986: 29; Rausch, 1985: 44). Many of these objects, in addition to promoting the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, also advertised local banks and insurance companies (Wollett and Wollett, 1987: 27). In addition, the Bell appears in printed advertisements in several Exposition tourist pam- phlets. It never, however, appears on its own in these ads. For example, in advertisements for John Stilz and Son, Philadelphia clothiers, it is borne by an American eagle through clouds from behind which stream the stars and stripes as ‘rays’ of sunlight. In the dozen or so pages of a tourist pamphlet produced by a pharmaceutical company (Simmons’ Liver Regulator, 1876: 2), the ‘Independence Bell’ appears as one among several national symbols and is surrounded by the words ‘Proclaim Liberty throughout All the Land, unto all the inhabitants thereof, and Freedom from All Dis- eases, if you take Simmons’ Liver Regulator’. After the Centennial the Bell’s image began appearing more and more on its own. Most of the souvenir brochures celebrating the train journeys of the Bell to several of the country’s expositions show it on its own. In one such brochure (Oregon Society, Sons of the American Revol- ution, 1915: 2), the complete text of the Declaration of Independence is presented in the shape of the Bell. This playful fusion of the Declaration and the Bell, however, must be understood cotextually – that is, in relation to associated textual elements. On the cover of the brochure is a detailed and realistic drawing of the Bell. On the inside page opposite the Declaration/Bell image is a short history of the Bell. The year is 1915, and there are still many years to come before such playful treatments of the Bell’s image can exist on their own. In the ﬁrst decades of the 20th century, the Bell’s image also found its way onto commemorative spoons of war (Krumhotz, 1986: 73–5). During the Sesquicentennial it reappeared upon a host of useful and dec- orative objects (Wollett and Wollett, 1985b: 29). The major difference in the uses of the Bell’s image on souvenirs between the Centennial and the Sesquicentennial celebrations is one of emphasis. During the Centennial, the Bell’s image was often placed alongside those of the American eagle and of the ﬂag. By the early 1900s it no longer needed the ‘support’ (previously noted) of other, more established national symbols because it had become an established symbol in its own right. By the First World War, the Bell’s image could be used on its own to advertise the Liberty Loan (Rosewater, 1926: 189). And by the Sesquicentennial, its image regularly and very ‘naturally’ appears alone on trinkets and souvenirs. Let us now examine the Bell’s various train journeys. In the years after the Civil War, it was generally felt that the nation was in need of healing, and the Bell was one of the instruments drafted into service. In addition to its use in the Centennial and later celebrations in Philadel- phia as an emblem of that city, the Bell was to serve as an emissary of

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peace and unity on a number of train journeys to several parts of the United States – ﬁrst to New Orleans to attend the 1885 World’s Indus- trial and Cotton Exposition. Over the next 30 years, it traveled to industrial expositions in Chicago; Atlanta; Charleston, SC; Boston; St Louis, MO; and San Francisco (City of Philadelphia, n.d.: 15). As its fame grew, itineraries were printed detailing every stop the Bell would make on its later journeys. Rosewater (1926: 153) notes that, stopping at towns along the way, the Bell received great attention:

The popular ovation accorded the Bell at every point of its journey surpassed all expectation. From the outset, the sight aroused in those who were viewing it a feeling of mingled ecstasy and awe, a regard for it as something truly sacred, a desire to touch it, yes, to kiss it, to press against it some coin, or ring, or trinket, or ﬂower, to be kept as a memento.

The Bell’s trips to the South appear to have elicited equally enthusiastic responses from the crowds of well-wishers who gathered to witness its progress. The ‘national healing’ theme re-emerges in a summary of the Bell’s journeys that appears in a souvenir pamphlet celebrating its trip to San Francisco (Anonymous, 1915: 7):

The enthusiasm of the loyal Southerners, displayed upon the New Orleans trip, was doubled when the Bell was taken to Atlanta in 1895, to become part of the Cotton States and International Exposition held there, and thousands stood in silent admiration of the symbol of that liberty which the South helped so largely to achieve in the dark days of 1776–80.

The Bell’s central location in the Pennsylvania building of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago clearly reveals its new importance as a symbol of both Philadelphia and the nation. Soon after the Bell’s return to Philadelphia, it made another journey – this time retracing its earlier, 1777 journey to Allentown. These various journeys may be taken as inverted pilgrimages of a sort – instead of people trav- eling to Philadelphia to see the Bell, as many do today, the Bell traveled the nation to make itself known to people in their home towns or to visi- tors to the industrial expositions of the period. The character of the Bell’s exhibition in Independence Hall, mirror- ing in emphasis the use of its image in advertising and tourism, under- went a transformation in these years. First, it was itself surrounded by other, more established national symbols in a room likewise containing other national relics. Then, in 1873, it was moved into the south end of the vestibule, suspended from its original beam and scaffolding, and adorned with a notice of the upcoming Centennial celebrations and an extended biblical quotation relevant to its own inscription. Shortly after- wards, it was removed to the West Room so that passers-by could see it through the window (Rosewater, 1926: 139); by 1895, it had been placed

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in a glass case devoid of other national symbols. Twenty years later, it was removed from its case so that passers-by might more closely inspect it. Today, it resides as a sacred object alone in its shrine apart from Inde- pendence Hall. What is responsible for the Bell’s transformation to fully ﬂedged singular status? Again, it would appear that the medium is the message, so to speak. The four media of presenting and representing I noted in the introduction are keys to this puzzle. The manner of its exhibition to the public – from the 1850s to the present day – continues to add to the sense that it is a special object. Taking advantage of the nation’s growing rail networks, the Bell made many pilgrimages, stopping at small towns and cities on its way to one industrial exposition or another and increas- ing its fame along the way. The 19th-century circulation of myths of its early years to an ever-expanding popular readership portrayed the Bell as a principal player in the drama of the American Revolution and the anti-slavery movement. Finally, as a servant to the interests of the developing industries of modern advertising and tourism, the Bell has beneﬁted from a great deal of free publicity. Let us now examine more closely the latter phases of the Bell’s singularization.

III. SINGULAR STATUS SECURED: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY I begin this section with a consideration of signs and meaning, with special attention to the uses of the Bell’s image in modern advertising and tourism. While throughout this paper I present some of the possible ‘deep’ meanings the Bell has had and continues to have for a variety of people, here I shall focus mainly on the iconographic features that allow those people ﬁrst to recognize a representation of it as ‘The Liberty Bell’. As these changes parallel up to a point the changes in the actual Bell’s presentation, reference will also be made to the manner of the actual Bell’s display. As noted, the early days of the Bell’s appearance in advertising and tourism were marked by the association of its image with other national symbols. Later, it developed the ability to stand on its own (again, a process mirrored in the changes in the ways the actual Bell was exhibited). Now, we may say, its image not only stands on its own, but only two iconic clues appear essential to produce instant recognition in most American onlookers: the merest outline of a bell and a crack proceeding from its base. It is fair to characterize this movement from highly detailed to minimally marked iconicity in terms of Peirce’s (1932) theory of signs and Putnam’s (1975) theory of the meaning of ‘meaning’. I have claimed that the media involved in the transformation of the

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Bell to relic-hood were the various forms of its presentation and representation to the public, within Independence Hall (and, now, the Liberty Bell Pavilion) and during its train journeys to industrial expositions across America; the publication of myths of the Bell’s early days; and the appearance of its image in advertising and tourism. This movement from highly detailed to minimally marked iconicity, while an effect of the above-mentioned media, is also the result of one practice common to modern advertising and graphic design in general: what is often called ‘stylization’. Before expanding upon the significance of this artistic practice, let us analyze the Bell’s image with reference to Peirce and Putnam. According to Peirce (1932), any sign that is related to its object by virtue of resemblance is an icon. In this sense a painting, drawing, or photograph of the Bell is an icon of the Bell. Icons can be of three basic types. To keep things simple, I shall only note that the key shift here, which I have called a shift from highly detailed to minimally marked iconicity, is really a shift from iconic sinsign to iconic legisign. The Bell’s image clearly began life as an iconic sinsign (as, for instance, in a photograph or realistic drawing). For all practical purposes the Bell’s image has become an iconic legisign. Any iconic instance of the Bell requires only to have the merest outline of a bell with a crack proceeding upward from the base. These two properties have become law-like and pretty well fixed. This move is evinced in the explosive expansion over time of possibilities for iconic representations of the Bell. At one time the Bell could only be represented as a highly realistic icon. Now, because the Bell’s image has effectively become a legisign, its replicas can run the gamut from the highly realistic to the highly stylized.3 In addition, this movement is partially paralleled in spirit by changes in the manner in which the actual Bell has been displayed for public consumption. It now rests in its own simple shrine stripped of all other physical, symbolic accoutrements of American nationalism. Of course, the Bell itself can only go this far; it cannot itself become less detailed and more stylized, but its current singular/sacred character places it in a position (relative to its duplicates and images) similar to that of a legisign (relative to its sinsigns). Images of the Bell can, however, become further simplified and do. I shall return to this theme after a discussion of Putnam’s (1975) views on the meaning of ‘meaning’. Putnam devises a scheme relating the meaning of a word by means of a ‘normal form description’ which includes such things as syntactic markers (in our case, ‘The Liberty Bell’), semantic markers (perhaps ‘bell’, ‘relic’, or, more specifically within the bounds of this paper, ‘Bell’), stereotype (‘brass’, ‘silenced’, ‘cracked’), and extension (‘The cracked bell in the shrine near Independence Hall’). I have highlighted ‘cracked’ here because this adjective is essential to the meaning of the Bell in Putnam’s

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terms: just as one must know that a ‘tiger’ has ‘stripes’ to know what the meaning of ‘tiger’ is, now one must know that ‘The Liberty Bell’ is ‘cracked’ to know what the meaning of ‘The Liberty Bell’ is. The value of this scheme for the present argument is twofold: it adequately characterizes the Bell’s image as a legisign in its own right; and it provides a detailed framework for characterizing the kind of meaning that Panofsky calls ‘conventional’. The significance of the FIGURE 4 A royal Spanish visitor, Margarita crack in relation to the Bell de Borbon Borbon, with companion Francisco Sánchez de Yebra is played out every day that tourists visit the shrine housing the Bell. Almost invariably those taking pictures of the Bell photograph it so that the crack will appear in their photos. Nelson Mandela’s visit to the Bell on 3 July 1993, would not have been complete had he not touched the crack (and been photographed doing so) (Famighetti, 1993: 69). In the 1970s the blind sister of the King of Spain visited the Bell and likewise was moved to feel its crack (Figure 4). These examples move us toward a consideration of the nature of play in advertising. Advances in the technologies of communication over the past century and a half have led to, among other things, dramatic improve- ments in the reproducibility of images for public consumption as well as in the capacity to manipulate those images. With these changes has emerged a corresponding intensification in competition in the realm of advertising – an intensification that is associated with an increase in artistic experimentation. One main trend in artistic experimentation in advertising is stylization. In stylization certain features of an object are exaggerated in its representation, while others are muted. The practic- ing of this trend in artistic experimentation has succeeded to a large degree in sloughing off much of the ‘unnecessary’ detail in representations of the Bell, such that now the merest outline of a bell with a crack serves to call to mind the Bell. One of the characteristic features of modern advertisements is play.

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This notion of play – based largely on a desire to engage the viewer’s attention long enough to allow for the possibility of a sale in a crowded marketplace – finds expression in the trends and examples noted in the preceding paragraph and in puns (in this case, visual puns). Visual puns based around the Bell in advertising either focus on its shape or, in keeping with the assertion related above as to the essential element (the ‘cracked-ness’) of the ‘meaning’ of the Bell in Putnam’s terms, play upon its defect. Thus we find the Bell’s form incorporated in a number of visual puns (e.g., as a ‘coffee kettle’ for the Bean Scene Cafe and Espresso Bar (Figure 5); the ‘o’ in the ‘6’ of ‘1776’ for the Local 1776 United Food & Commercial Workers; or as having had a bite taken out of it in the logo for A Taste of Philadelphia, a food-distributing company). Likewise, the Bell’s crack provides another site for punning (e.g. as the space between the ‘7’ and the ‘6’ in ‘76’ for one of Philadelphia’s tourist images; as an electric ‘heartbeat’ pulse for a company manufacturing medical instruments; as a ‘mouth’ ‘speaking’ a clock noting the time for D & H Enter- prises, a firm providing lecture courses on employee management; or as the Coca-Cola ‘swirl’ in the logo for the Philadelphia FIGURE 5 Visual pun on the shape of the Bell Coca-Cola Bottling Com- pany). The very fact that such play is now a common part of the use of the Bell’s image in advertising points both to the Bell’s ubiquity as a national symbol and to the establishment of its form and one principal feature (the crack) as essential to its meaning in Putnam’s terms of ‘normal form description’. It also indexes the establishment of the Bell’s image as an iconic legisign. The transformations that gave rise to the Bell’s image’s current status – from its initial mid-19th- century representations in mythic stories of its early days to its use in modern advertising and tourism –

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have all occurred at Panof- sky’s level of conventional meaning. These changes are related to the actual Bell’s movement from commodity to sacred object and to the ‘deeper’ meanings associated with that movement. Indeed, the link between the actual Bell and its various representations is clearly FIGURE 6 Tourist trolley one of mutual consti- tution. The actual Bell serves as a sacred referent for its representations, while its representations serve to strengthen the Bell’s renown as a sacred object. Like- wise, the Bell’s image’s status as legisign is maintained through its replicas, and vice-versa. Nonetheless, it is difficult to pin down any one set of ‘deeper’ meanings for the Bell that the majority of Americans hold. As with the American flag (cf. Firth, 1973), we encounter a national symbol that is easily identifiable at Panofsky’s level of conventional meaning, but one that, beyond that recognition, may take on any number of (at times incongruous) ‘deeper’ meanings for different people. For example, if one visits the Bell today, one is treated to a tourist’s history in which the object played almost an agentive role in the eradication of slavery in the US. On one of my own visits, after the guide had given her history of the Bell and we tourists were encouraged to approach it, I noticed an elderly black woman move her hand toward the Bell several times, each time stopping short of actually touching it. She finally did touch it lightly and reverentially. It was clear that she was not touching a potential commodity, but rather an object of a singular, perhaps even sacred, character. Compare this example to the use that certain white- supremacist groups (cf. Lowe, 1985: 12; Waas, 1986: 17) make of the Bell’s image in their promotional materials. Liberty Bell Press is the mouthpiece for one such organization. In 1996 American fast-food chain Taco Bell used the Bell’s image in one of their advertising campaigns. The company jokingly stated that it intended to buy the Bell to help ease pressure on the public purse and rename it the ‘Taco Liberty Bell’. This claim upset a lot of people, presumably for not having treated the Bell with the reverence due a singularized object. For, as we have already seen, the Bell’s image in advertising and promotion has more usually been well received by Americans. While these and other contemporary interpretations of the ‘deeper’ meanings of the Bell certainly differ, we are safe in saying that at the

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level of recognition – at Panofsky’s level of conventional meaning – the Bell is the Bell is the Bell.

CONCLUSION I have sought in this paper, through reference mainly to the media of presenting and representing the Liberty Bell, to trace its journey from commodity status to sacred national relic. I have largely excluded wider political and economic considerations from my discussion, preferring instead to focus only upon those events and actions that had the most direct implications for the Liberty Bell’s career as an icon. The four media of presenting and representing I hold to be the keys to understanding the singularization of the Bell are: the changing manners of its exhibition; its various train journeys; the popularization of mythic tales of its early days; and its representation in advertising and tourism (Figure 6). All of these inﬂuences began at one time or another after 1850. In order to make this argument (itself dependent heavily on estab- lishing a particular sequence of events), it was necessary to undermine the myths themselves and the notion that the Bell had experienced wide- spread veneration before the 1850s – a notion often implied in arguments that assert that the Friends of Freedom ‘named’ the Bell and used it as the symbol of their cause. Rather, these myths should be seen as after- the-fact, hagiographic insertions in the biography of the Liberty Bell. This biography is one of singularization. It also falls into the genre of the self-made hero who, from an early age, shows unmistakable signs of a precocious inclination to follow the path laid out before him as his destiny. As Gudehus and McOwen (1904: 6) remind us, the Liberty Bell did indeed bear ‘... from the moment of its birth, stamped in physical characters upon it, the heaven-born and inspired commission, to “Pro- claim Liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.”’

Acknowledgements Drs Nancy Farriss and Webb Keane were key sources of inspiration for this project, and I thank them. I am grateful to T. McBride of Thomson & Thomson, Inc., for compiling (for free) a Trademark Research Report (McBride, 1994) for this paper. I am also grateful to members of the Peirce list ([email protected]) for numerous helpful insights.

Notes 1. Leviticus 25:10 (with the Bell’s inscription italicized): ‘And ye shall hallow the ﬁftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.’ It is

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often claimed that Isaac Norris chose the inscription for the Bell to celebrate the jubilee year of the granting of Penn’s Charter. 2. It is possible to speak of more than simply recognition value here. The traditional anthropological concept of mana refers to an essence thought in many cultures to exist within objects and to migrate between objects under certain conditions. Such is not an entirely fanciful way to conceive the beliefs motivating the early curators of the Bell exhibit. Benjamin’s (1968[1955]) notion of aura – the perception of an essence inhering within an object and derived from its unique history – may also reasonably be considered here. He argues that the mechanical reproducibility of an object alters the nature of that object’s aura. Although he appears to hold that this aura is depleted by mechanical copies of its object, he also writes of a key component of this aura: ‘[p]recisely because authenticity is not reproducible, the intensive penetration of certain (mechanical) processes of reproduction was instrumental in differentiating and grading authenticity’ (Benjamin, 1968[1955]: 236). Mechanical reproducibility may thus be read as very much implicated in the generation of the singular nature of original objects in general and the Bell in particular. Additionally, although the Bell’s sacred essence is mainly ﬁxed within its physical structure, this essence is also inherent to a greater or lesser extent in representations of the Bell. Profaning an image of the Bell would be an act offensive to the American national consciousness, just as desecrating the actual Bell would invite a hostile response. 3. The inability to recognize this process and its results may lie at the heart of the error of asserting that the Friends of Freedom’s bell was meant to represent the Bell itself. Thus we have Kimball’s (n.d.: 3) claim that in 1837 ‘... a stylized but recognizable drawing of the bell, with ‘Proclaim Liberty’ and ‘All the Inhabitants’ emphasized, appeared as a frontispiece in Liberty, the magazine of the New York Anti-Slavery Society.’ The New York Anti- Slavery Society’s bell, similar in every respect to the smaller Friends of Freedom’s bell, may seem ‘stylized but recognizable’ as the Bell to us today (precisely because the Bell’s image has become an iconic legisign), but it would not have seemed so to its original audiences.

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◆ ROBEY CALLAHAN is an advanced doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to perform dissertation ﬁeld- work on ‘Labor Migration and Notions of Self among the Rural Maya of Yucatan, Mexico’. Address: Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 329, University Museum, 33rd and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398 USA. [e-mail: [email protected]]