A Veritable 'Who's That?' of U.S. History
Statuary at New Capitol Center An Eclectic Bunch

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 1, 2008

When the first crowds surge through the doors of the lavish new Capitol Visitor Center this fall, they will be steeped in the saga of American Democracy and greeted with a statue of that pillar of the nation . . . Ephraim McDowell, the pioneering hernia surgeon.

Elsewhere in the glittering tribute to good government, pilgrims will find a bronze of the noted agriculturalist Julius Sterling Morton . . . the founder of Arbor Day!

And what temple to the political life of the United States would be complete without a statue of . . . Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television?

That's not all. When the visitor center opens Dec. 2 on the east side of the Capitol, tourists will also encounter statues of such figures as Ernest Gruening, Alaska's first U.S. senator; Joseph Ward, founder of now-defunct Yankton College; John M. Clayton, co-negotiator of the oft-forgotten Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850. There will be a Hawaiian king, a Montana pacifist and a Colorado astronaut.

In vain will visitors look for statues of the titans in U.S. history in the $621 million underground complex, now getting its finishing touches. Instead, they will see the 23 most recent acquisitions of the National Statuary Hall Collection, a relatively contemporary array of individuals, albeit a bit obscure.

"These are not people you would normally expect if you were looking at it from the perspective of national history," said Maryland historian Teresa B. Lachin, who has researched the collection. "A lot of these people, we've never heard of them."

Congress, in conjunction with the Architect of the Capitol, chose the most recent, and, for the most part, contemporary, additions to the 100-statue collection, officials said.

The statues had been spread throughout the Capitol building, some in out-of-the-way corners and corridors off-limits to most tourists. Now they are being placed in and around the center's majestic central gathering space, Emancipation Hall, which commemorates the slave labor that helped build the Capitol.

That raised the uncomfortable dilemma about what to do with the likenesses of bewhiskered Wade Hampton III of South Carolina -- whose aristocratic family once owned thousands of slaves -- and fellow Confederate General E. Kirby Smith of Florida.

Officials decided that they would not place the statues of Hampton, a top cavalry commander, or Smith, whose statue depicts him in a Confederate officer's uniform, in Emancipation Hall. Instead, they will be put elsewhere in the visitors center.

The decision was applauded by Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), who pushed for the hall's name.

"Emancipation Hall . . . stands really as a memorial to our nation's struggle from slavery to freedom, from oppression to equality," he said. "I think it is . . . inappropriate for a statue of a Confederate leader or slave owner to be placed inside Emancipation Hall."

The statues make up a unique, if unheralded, group: five Native Americans; one Catholic priest, Eusebio F. Kino; a Catholic nun, Mother Joseph; a Supreme Court justice, Edward Douglass White Jr.; an early female college professor, Maria L. Sanford, known as the "best loved woman in Minnesota." A 24th statue, that of Helen Keller, the champion of the disabled, will be added later.

Michael Culver, director of congressional and external relations for the Architect of the Capitol, said officials believe the chosen statues are ones "that would be most relevant to people who would be visiting."

The visitor center -- a three-level complex with fountains, spiral staircases, skylights and theaters -- is expected to draw as many as 3 million people its first year. That's double the 1.5 million who visited the Capitol last year, a spokeswoman for the visitor center said. Diane K. Skvarla, Senate curator, said one goal of the move was to make the sculptures more accessible to the public.

The statues in the collection make up one of the oldest groups of public sculpture in the country, according to historian Lachin. She said they reflect the sensibilities of many eras in U.S. history.

The collection has been criticized in the past for lacking in its representation of women and minorities.

There is only one sculpture of a black person in the Capitol complex, the bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the main rotunda, which is not part of the collection, according to the architect's office.

But the eclectic group being moved into the new limelight is diverse.

It includes dramatic bronzes of Nevada's Sarah Winnemucca, a 19th-century Paiute educator, translator and spokeswoman for Native Americans, and Chief Washakie, a renowned Shoshone warrior who was another powerful advocate for Native Americans.

Other striking statues are those of the famed Hawaiian king Kamehameha I, wearing a gilded cape and helmet, and New Mexico's seven-foot-tall pink marble image of Po'pay, a Pueblo Indian leader who directed an uprising against the Spanish in 1680. Both have been moved. To address Hawaiian concerns, the six-ton statue of Kamehameha I has been placed beneath a skylight, so no one will be walking above his head.

More conventional are the statues of Utah's Farnsworth, the homespun 20th-century inventor and television pioneer, depicted with his sleeves rolled up, and Idaho's Sen. William Edgar Borah, a strident isolationist, shown with a clenched fist and wearing a double-breasted coat.

"Part of what you've got there is American history," said Skvarla, the Senate curator. "Some of it's not pretty. But it's part of American history."

The statuary collection was authorized by Congress in 1864 as a way to promote reconciliation at the close of the Civil War. Each state was invited to send statues of two important people for display in the Capitol.

Virginia sent sculptures of George Washington and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Maryland has given statues of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Colonial figure John Hanson. None are to be moved to the visitor center. The District commissioned two statues, of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and architect Pierre L'Enfant, but, in a sore spot for the District, legislation is required for them to join the collection.

The statues were first arrayed in what is now the Capitol's pink-and-gold-domed Statuary Hall, the old chamber of the House of Representatives. Rhode Island contributed the first, that of Revolutionary War Gen. Nathanael Greene, in 1870.

The hall eventually was crammed three-deep with figures -- 65 by 1933 -- and was called a "chamber of horrors." The collection was redistributed around the Capitol that year and again in 1976. Many of the more famous stayed in Statuary Hall, but others wound up crowded into the so-called Hall of Columns or elsewhere in the building.