Monuments and our view of history

If David Anthone had his way, public statues would go the way of the dinosaur. 

“The idea of the traditional monument is dead and I don’t want to see to many more monuments being created,” said Anthone during a Zoom talk hosted Sunday, Feb. 21, by The League of Women Voters of Litchfield County and the Litchfield Historical Society.

Anthone is an artist, based in Roxbury, Conn., and is half of the DARN Studio, whose work often has a political or social message.

He is also a historic preservation officer for the state of Connecticut.

As old as America

Particularly during the past year, in part because of anger over the shooting deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others, historic Confederate monuments have served as lightning rods for discussion, debate and protests regarding systemic racism and historical narrative.

Pulling down statues, particularly those related to the Confederacy, is not a new concept. It is a tradition that dates to the American Revolution, said Anthone. 

He spoke about the fate of a 2-ton equestrian statue of King George III that was toppled from its plinth on Bowling Green by a group in New York City in 1776, shortly after a reading of the new Declaration of Independence.

The statue, the first monument in the U.S. to be toppled, was brought to a foundry in Litchfield, he said. Some of it was melted and recast into ammunition, some was cut up and made into souvenirs and reliquaries.  

Before the statue was melted into 40,000 bullets, however, about half of its weight went missing.

“Interestingly enough people had been pillaging parts off it. People love to hold on to pieces of history.” 

The fate of the King George statue illustrates that history will live on, even when a statue no longer occupies public space.

During his hour-long presentation, Anthone explored various options for dealing with controversial statues, their original intent and their impact on current communities, and he questioned whether looking at a statue is an effective way to learn about the past. 

He pointed to the circa 1912 Custom House, which since 2012 has served as the National Museum of the American Indian & U.S. Bankruptcy Court at One Bowling Green in New York City. The Cass Gilbert-designed building, in the Beaux-Arts style, features four monuments designed by Daniel Chester French known as The Four Continents: Asia, America, Europe and Africa.

“My main concern is the children,” Anthone said, “the busloads of kids going to the museum” seeking out the statue that resembles their African-American heritage, only to be faced with a jolting, larger-than-life negative depiction. 

“That’s what I am most concerned about. Systemic racism begins with kids as young as 5 years old,” he said.

Don’t turn your eyes away

“Many WPA murals, too, project art history in a derogatory way,” Anthone noted. 

For instance, on display at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., is a mural by Western artist Frank Mechau, titled “Dangers of the Mail,” and another, “Covered Wagons Attacked by Indians,” by the artist William Palmer. 

One depicts a brutal rape. The other shows Indians scalping and murdering white settlers. 

In 2011, a curtain was installed to limit viewing, and the interpretive panels were re-written “to correct a very profound imbalance that hits you in the face first,” said Anthone.

An emphasis on ‘whiteness’

Anthone, in his work as DARN Studio, recently undertook a project involving a Stonewall Jackson statue in Richmond, Va. 

“Our proposal was to diagram it, like a butcher cutting apart a side of beef. 

“We knew we would not be selected for the Richmond monument, but we wanted to push the conversation.” 

He recently spent time searching for historical markers in Litchfield County, and noticed a common thread on towns’ timelines of historic events. What he found was a consistent emphasis on whiteness.

“I grew up in Nebraska. There were no minorities. I thought Black people were only on Sesame Street and that Jews were Biblical.” 

Racism, he said, “is embedded in every one of us. Silence without action is complicity. You must also learn to be active.”

Monuments, said the artist/historian, by the very nature of their expense, “exert power.” 

They have become lightning rods for heated conflicts between competing visions of history. But there is a difference between destroying a statue and defacing it, he said. 

“Destroying a monument for purposes that are violent,” or for the sole goal of projecting power and fear, “is not appropriate.”

While statues reveal much about the past, said Anthone, it is also important to view what they tell us with a critical eye and open mind. 

He borrowed a quote from the American novelist James Baldwin: “American History is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”