system, including their impact on due process and the separation of powers. the talk is the start of a night long slate of programs hosted by the museum of the bible in washington, d.c. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern, and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. there are hundreds of statues, paintings and sculptures throughout the u.s. capitol, and up next on american history tv, penn state university history professor matthew restall talks about the art and architecture at the u.s. capitol including the statue of freedom on top of the capitol dome. other topics include how christopher columbus, native americans and females are depicted. mr. restall has served as a fellow of the u.s. capitol historical society. welcome to the lunchtime lecture series. i'm the chief historian here at

the society. it's really great to see everyone here. our speaker today is a guy named matthew restall. i want to read his title. it's kind of ponderous, not like matthew, i don't want to leave anything out. the edwin earl sparks professor of latin american history and director of latin american studies at penn state. he was educated at oxford, ucla, and he's published numerous books and articles on the african diaspora and spanish america and the spanish conquest period. some of you might recognize his name and some of the themes he's going to be touching on from our last dome where he has an article on how montezuma just keeps surrendering in different ways in the art of the capitol, and its historical implications. from his various titles and the subjects of his books, you might infer correctly that he's not an art historian per se.

but this after all is a chance for us to highlight how interdisciplinary approaching the capitol is and allowing us to hear various stories, it takes a village to tell the story of the capitol. he is publishing a book when montezuma met cortez, the true story of the meeting that changed history. it's going to be out next month. might be a nice christmas gift for people. he's currently the kiz lack fellow at the library of congress and a capital fellow of ours. we're really honored to have him as one of our capital fellows currently and he's a fine fellow in his own right as well. so help me welcome matthew restall. [ applause ] >> thank you, chuck, and picking up on what chuck just said, as

i'm looking around the room, i'm guessing everybody here knows academics, professional scholars, we're supposed to stay in our cages by which i mean our cages defined by our discipline and our field, so mine is history, mexico and central america, colonial period. i'm not supposed to get out of my cage and wander around the zoo and go into other people's cages. and being here in d.c. and being a capitol fellow and a kizlak fellow means i have a rare opportunity and privilege to be able to do that. in august i really enjoyed the time that i spent in the archives in the capitol, which is where this paper comes from. so it's a work in progress, and i may be saying things that you already know. i'm hoping that most of what i'm saying are things that you already know but you've forgotten so it seems like it's new material. i also want to thank dr. michelle cohen the curator

in the capitol. i don't see her in here, but like chuck, her support and encouragement made all of this possible as well as the others who work in the curator's office. i have enough images to get us through about one every 45 seconds, so i'm going to move fairly quickly through them and, you've already been warned that i'm not really an art historian, so if you're particularly interested in something, make a note of it and i can go back at the end and maybe ask one of the art historians in the room to talk about it in the proper terminology. albert ports p-o-r-t-s, albert ports was a scaffolding rigger who first met the 16 1/2 foot statue at the top of the capitol building in the closing years of the 19th century. climbing up to give the bronze lady a bath, he would repeat the process countless times across the decades of his adult life.

the intimacy of the experience put ideas in ports' head. year after year, he yearned to place his own mustacheio'd lip on the statue's oversized bronze lips. yet he resisted. after all they were both married and not to each other, for the statue's popular name, the one ports himself used to refer to her was uncle sam's wife. then in 1923 ports surrendered to lustful impulse and delivered the kiss of which he had dreamed for so long, but guilt consumed him. when four years later while scrubbing uncle sam's wife's face, he fell from the scaffolding to the balcony below breaking an arm and a leg. ports was convinced the cause was her indignation over his adulterous liberties. only after confessing the entire story to a d.c. newspaper

reporter in 1931, you can see that newspaper report right here, did port sense that absolution was finally at hand. a year following ports' illicit kiss, another bronze figure on the exterior of the capitol building suffered a non-consensual indignity. evidence of the incident is preserved in the records of the capitol police. on november the 12th, 1928, lieutenant clarence stimler reported to captain s.j. nash night that the previous, quote -- i have lot thes of quotes in my paper, if you see me waving my fingers like this, it's to say quote, unquote, some unknown person has broken a sword off of one of the fingers for a souvenir. by rogers bronze's door, the lieutenant meant the bronze doors designed by randall rogers in 1853 for the eastern entrance

into the rotunda, popularly known as the columbus doors. the victim was possibly amanda cortez, the famous conquerer of the asteks, but it was mor likely the brother of the man represented multiple times inside and outside the building, christopher columbus. lieutenant stimler showed his captain he was soliciting information with regards to this trick and that he now had a man preventing anyone from approaching the doors when the building is closed. today of course there is more than one man on guard to ensure that no visitor can get close enough to the columbus doors to even see cortez and cologne, let alone steal their swords. what are we to make of these an ek dotes how do they offer us a new way to approach? let me answer that question or

begin to answer it by way of william carlos williams. after visiting the capitol, the celebrated poet physician wrote a poem about its art. first published in 1924, the poem was titled it is a living coral. in williams metaphor, the city is a sea. the capitol building an island in the sea, and its art and architecture a coral that steadily grows by aggression. the metaphor might equally be applied to any museum with an expanding collection, but the capitol is not a museum nor is it viewed as such by visitors. and therein lies another side to the coral metaphor, the one that struck me most but one with which williams was not concerned at all. for he could not have known that during the 20th century, they would develop an entire field of study devoted to coral mortality. to understanding why and how the world's coral reeves have suffered catastrophic destruction as a result of human land use, fishing and tourism.

so just as the human impulse upon visiting a coral reef is to break off a piece of coral to take home, so have visitors to the capitol been tempted to take a piece of it for a souvenir. those souvenirs have in rare cases such as that of physical objects or they've been memories of physical interactions with the building's art objects, such as the kiss that ports shared with freedom. and that physical component of the capitol human experience is the first topic i shall outline in the next half hour. but more often, the takeaway has been in the realm of ideas not objects. in the 21st century thousands of visitors leave the capitol every week with the digital representations of themselves posing with a piece of the building or its art. selfies that fall intriguingly.

this is not the place to true in any depth upon reception theory, plus i don't really understand it, and that is the study of how readers and viewers respond to literature art, cinema and so on. but at the heart of reception studies, there is an idea that is very relevant here, that readers respond to a text based on their horizon of expectations, or the cultural framework they bring with them to the text. so with respect to the capitol, visitors come to the building with a sense a proprietorship, a belief that they own a share of it, of all that is in it and it tells them something about themselves or more specifically it reaffirms something they already believed about themselves and their nationality. so visitor response to, for example, the identity of the statue atop the dome or the meaning of the paintings in the rotunda is determined by the ideas about such imagery that visitors bring with them. and the same applies to the historical events that are encapsulated and referenced in the capitol's art.

so the ideological reception of the capitol's art is the second topic i'll briefly outline, and my third and final section circles us back to freedom, whose true identity i shall suggest to you at the end of my talk. and in order to arrive back at freedom on time, i've selected one cluster, albeit a complex one of visual and historical themes. those themes are the usage of people and places from elsewhere in the americas, especially columbus, the representation of indigenous peoples in the capitol, and the building's gendered representation of the americas and its history. those are obviously all vast topics, but they are threaded together in the capitol in a way that i hope to show you office visitors a simple takeaway, something almost as simple as a stolen kiss or a stolen sword. no, that's not me, but it's one of the conservators.

somebody in the room might actually know who this is. you can see how tempting it is, right? okay. so part one for a souvenir and that's a reference to a quote that i just read out a little while ago. the american sculptor horatio greenow, i think i'm pronouncing greenow correctly complained in a letter to his brother in 1842 that statues of washington and columbus in the capitol had received considerable injury in the few years that they had been standing. he was referring to his own much reviled sculpture of washington, which was located in the center of the rotunda from 1841 to '43 before being moved out to the capitol grounds where it's seen here in this 1899 photograph, and you'll recognize it because it's in the museum of national history today. soon after luigi persico's the

discovery of america in place in 1884 was placed on one of the cheek blocks of the building's eastern front. and you can see it here in the distance on this 1846. the space behind it was an ideal spot for ball games. shortly before his death in 1852 he grumbled that, quotes i have seen several times boys at play on the portico of the capitol, which if right makes it wrong there to place costly sculptures. greenow was right to worry about the discovery of america, wrote an observer in 1912, it is somewhat to the nation's discredit that time and exposure, neglect and vandalism after long years have mutilated in a degree the beauty of persico's work. end quote. among the various sculptures on the east front of the building there were eyelids chipped, hands broken up, grapes crushed and winless, a marble nose was

missing its tip, and the blade of a short sword was broken, that theme again. due to exposure to the elements and to visitors, the garment that sways the limbs of the indian girl has a moth eaten look. from 1871 through to the 21st century when the building was closed so too were the columbus doors. with the columbus scenes looking into the eastern part of the city, accessible to any visitor climbing the steps on holidays or at night, the stolen sword from cologne in 1924 was hardly the first casualty of such accessability. a self-identified congressional wife wrote in january of 1989, quote, lust spring a policeman arrive just in time to save one of the high relief figures on the bronze doors of the rotunda from a head hunting savage from indiana, end quote. cortez and columbus were both frequently subject to the tugs

of souvenir seekers. for example, the chains around the navigators wrists in the columbus in chains scene were missing for almost all of the 20th century. the art inside the building was almost as vulnerable. in the 1890s, the sculpture of father marquette still featured a group of indians to whom he was preaching, one had his bow stolen another lost a finger. a group of soldiers grew rowdy, drinks seems to have been involved. when they started stabbing with their artwork with their bayonets they were thrown out of the building, which was then closed to visitors for the rest of the day with the columbus doors locked, which seems to be one of the few occasions in the history that the great key was actually turned. earlier that decade, the rotunda was host to an event called the garfield fair with a pine board barrier put up to protect the paintings. extraordinary to imagine this was done, but it was winter, so

furnaces were set up to warm the space, and by means of an impromptu flew, heat was discharged onto the baptism of pocahontas and the discovery of mississippi causing discoloration, cracking, holes, and other damage. bearers of a seed. so the capitol's archives are full of detailed reports reflecting the myriad of ways in which human beings have endangered the building and its art, and i suspect if the last five minutes, if i pursued that topic in the archives of the capitol police themselves, there would be enough material for something book length. i'm not sure if it would be that interesting. it would be interesting to me anyway. in 1995 a congressional subcommittee on appropriations received a proposal designed to protect the building from visitors. because people, quote, wear down the steps and brush against the

walls, end quote, and here i'm paraphrasing, generally, prod, poke, and pull at the artwork, an entrance fee should be charged suggested the heritage foundation. democrats in the house denounced the idea as indirect taxation typical of republican dishonesty arguing that the public saw its as the proprietor of the capitol. quote, don't charge american families use fees to visit what belongs to them declared representative sherrod brown, ohio. democrat senators chimed in. senator byron dorgan, north dakota, quote, does anybody really believe it is too old fashioned to think that those who own a building ought not to have to pay an admission fee to tour it and enter it? well, lawmaker sentiments were issued by visitors canvassed by a reporter for the hill. i'll give you just a small sampling here. mr. and mrs. brock of williamsville new york called touring the capitol our

privilege. quote, we're not visitors. we're taxpayers. this is my house said deb degregorio of new jersey. since we already paid for the capitol, we deserve to be here. i pay enough admission every year already, commented robin dill, a pilot from california. in the words of ralph tobias of bethesda, we paid for the damn place. and best of all, the reverend donald basset of franklin, tennessee, found the fee proposal detestable and in violation of, quote, the very concept, the very idea of america, end quote. well, the notion of ownership of walking into my house is a thread that runs back through two centuries of visitor responses. and attached to that idea have often been related sentiments of duty and patriotism. margaret leech wrote all the way back in 1860 that visitors

lingered on the east portico to admire the colossal statues. it is not clear what they made of them, but they all paused to stare. in 1864 a union army officer wrote to his sister that the capitol is a fine affair and the paintings are magnificent. he was particularly taken by images of pocahontas and columbus as historical figures he recognized, their representations splendid. a century later, tom wicker, long-time washington bureau chief for the "new york times" commented on the visitors he'd seen year after year bringing their children to the capitol. there they would take their photographs in front of the statues, seldom knowing who the sculptor figure was and here's the beginning of the quote, but the meanest of them know he was part of something, and they're part of it too. i've seen fat women in ridiculous tight shorts walking carefully around statuary hall in the capitol peering closely at bronze figures of men so obscure even historians would have to look them up.

and high school kids wearing confederate caps and popping gum. they're all part of the same thing, secret sharers, bear ers of a seed. end quote. what exactly is that seed? is it one of patriotism? well, there's certainly no shortage of claims to that effect. we love our capitol wrote mary ames in 1874, not because it's perfect but because being faulty it's still great and worthy of our reverence. maybell pendergrass, the women's editor for the "sacramento union" told ka yans in 1967 that a visit to the capitol quote, will stir a new patriotism in you. the history of the united states comes so much closer and becomes more than just words in a book. you can feel the red, white, and blue in your veins, end quote. so is the seed one of education with the capitol's art serving as a show and tell history lesson.

again, there's no shortage of claims to that effect. for example, the official 1955 guide to the capitol stated that john trum bell, painter of the war of independence quartet in the rotunda developed his talent in art for the express purpose of leaving to the american people historically correct paintings of the struggle for liberty. visitors were reassured in the guide that the building's art was generally speaking, fact factual and historically correct. third possibility, is the seed a lesson in aesthetics through negative example. greenow told his brother in the 1840s that the ornamental department of the capitol seems controlled by the demon of bad taste. an 1855 review of the baptism of pocahontas concluded that, quote, chapman makes you regret that he ever painted it, end

quote. we don't really live in a world where people make mild criticisms like that, do we. while columbus was tamed, ir arranged and destitute as for the discovery, quote, an abomination. a 1912 guide lemented the work of thomas crawford, he the creative of freedom. of light and shade and sculpture, he was apparently ignorant. a 1915 guide to the city described sculptural work and in 1867 ought to be a federal crime. well, how quick he was to deliver distain noticed the arrangements and ineptitude of those who were creating the capitol. does any fancy that it does not

feel these incongruties. it is not so. but later observers were not so convinced. alfred friendly, great name, a reporter for "the washington post" joined a bus tour of capitol hill in 1966 noting that visitors in the capitol seldom looked up unless directed to do so. quote, no uplookers. without command, overhead beauty missed. at the end of the 20th century, roll call wondered if the capitol 4 million annual visitors a toll from its art. quote, the capitol's paradox is this. an easy building to get in to, as i said, end of the 20th century. easy building to get in to, but a hard building to understand. reliable information about what the visitor sees, why it is important is fragmented and difficult for most people to obtain. visitors can find free papers about the corridors which are lovely, but hardly central to the meaning or importance of the capitol.

end quote. and what exactly was the building's meeting at the time of the millennium? the senate historian at the time dick baker, may still be senate historian, i haven't googled him. if you ask a visitor the name of the building, that's while they're touring the capitol, in most cases they'll say the white house. around the same time an english visitor to the capitol summarized to the "post." when it comes to monuments and things like this, ours are a lot older but yours are bigger. in 1966, friendly had concluded real purpose of washington's famous monuments suddenly apparent. backdrops for family pictures. anticipating the culture of smartphone selfies by half a century, do tourists really want to see anything or just want to have been seen at the site? there i think is where wicker's

seed bearers are most meaningfully found. yes, for two centuries visitors may have felt patriotic fervor and historical accuracy and may have experienced what mark twain called after visiting the capitol the delirium of art. but visitors have exited and entered the building with a particular sense of ownership. kind of national home, therefore, the building is not expected to be museum perfect or history book accurate. as ames put it back in 1974, the capitol's very defects the more indarant to us because above all, these are human. no matter how lonely an american citizen was, quote, yet these paintings and marble corridors and mighty dome are yours. the highest man in the nation owns nothing here, which does not equally belong to you. the goddess of liberty, yes, she called it that, we'll come back to that, goddess of liberty

gazing down from her shield bestows no right to which she extends to the loneliest of her sons. third and final section. the very idea of america. all this suggests is that the horizon of expectations that visitors typically bring to the capitol is, at best, highly abstract. and at worst so vague and contradictory as to be almost meaningless and yet the building is packed with very specific representations of historical moments and figures. what or who among those emerges as potentially more meaningful or at least resonant for visitors. there are some very obvious candidates such as george washington. but my interest right now is in one man who never set foot in what would become the united states. and yet is disproportionately represented. appropriate for this week.

columbus. there have been close to 1,000 works of art in the capitol during its history. including items lost or stolen, destroyed in fires or transferred to other buildings. and depending on how one counts an object, so, for example, other columbus doors one object or nine or dozens? roughly 700 for the past century. of these, about 40 depict not u.s. individuals. that is figures from the european and early latin american past such as the columbus brothers, cortez and las casas. that's less than 6%. but almost half of all those comprise or include columbus. beginning in 1827, sculpted and painted columbeanna grew steadily. by 1912 when it was built in

front of union station and just to show you that i'm not being snobbish about people using monuments for family pictures. this is my oldest and youngest daughter. with the navigator that you can see him twice staring towards the capitol, by then there were close to 20 representations of columbus in the capitol building or outside it. today's tally is still 15. meaning roughly 1 in 50 pieces of art in the capitol feature columbus. furthermore, until 1958, visitors walked past the massive sculpture of columbus that is the discovery and until the opening of the capitol visitor center in 2008 through the columbus doors were then nine depictions of the navigator into the rotunda where columbus appears three more times. so, why columbus? in part, because he is not

cortez. the 19th century american understanding of the spanish conquest was heavily influenced by protestant writers from williams to prescott and whose book for children on coretz and others were best sellers in many languages. you may not have heard of him, but he sold more books than more famous historians. and amusingly to us today these are books that aren't supposed to be for young adults and for children and structured as a father reading stories to his children. and they are full of the most extraordinary violence that we would never permit into children's books today. descriptions of aztec sacrifices and so on. columbus was first published in english in 1799. library of congress has a couple copies. he called them dreadful monster

monsters but a great and good man. courageous and resolute. opposed to idleness and under line that. so, it was a noble, manley explorer untarnished by tales of massacres. columbus was not only an acceptable alternative to but allowed him to be an american and that is not an original statement by me, as you probably already know. but if you don't, you should. an entire literature of books about how columbus is invented in the 19th century, particularly in the united states and becomes turned into a kind of an american as in u.s. rogers was expressing the common opinion when he told montgomery migs in 1855, miggs is an important figure in the creation of the capitol in the 19th century. a footnote i can't go in to. he was expressing the common opinion when he told miggs that

columbus was second only to washington as the man, quote, most intimately connect would the history of this country. who better deserves a lasting monument to his memory. and, indeed, his reinvention as an american is so profound that even the conkeesdores in the capitol rendered as columbus like. desoto peacefully discovering the mississippi in an echo of columbus' discovery of america. and cortez accepting the surrender of montazuma. here's a shameless plug from my book that is coming up. which no where in the book in this like 600 pages long do i make that connection between there was only by spending time in the capitol and looking at the art did i realize that, oh, wait, there is another way to understand who the spanish conqueesdores are.

they are being columbusized, if you like. as a side bar, i think a totally fascinating one. note that this substitution of columbus for cortes also took place in the mid 20th century in the mexican embassy right here in d.c. this is the building that was the embassy through most of the 20th century and mexican culture and institute. akron here you can see where the mural is on the staircase and you have the image of aztec and on the left you can kind of see a figure of columbus that allows you to see him where he is more clearly. that should be cortez approaching, you can see other

conquistador. any mexican knows instantly that the red bearded conquistador is a famous conquistador. it should be cortes, that was originally planned. and the respect for the development of art in the capitol he was substituted. however, all that is only part of the explanation to the colombianan phenomenal in the capitol. the rest of it lies in indigenous people who appear in roughly 50 artworks in the building. so, some 7%. but these are from within what became the united states so historical figures such as pocahontas and include some from latin america as well as generic indians. but that small 7% is misleading because it is skewed down by the hundreds of statues, portraits of politicians much of whom

visitors walk right past or no longer allowed to see. furthermore, depictions of indigenous people are concentrated on the eastern front of the building and in the rotunda the focal point of tours to the building. as a 1912 guide noted, the fortunes of the american indians furnish a theme which constantly recurs throughout the decorations of the capitol, end quote. east front and rotunda structures demonstrated what becoming of the new race was to mean for the old. as for capitol visitors, columbus and indians have always been as inescapable as george washington, arguably more so. now, those representations of indians fall into two main categories. either they display indigenous men engaging in acts of violence against europeans or euro americans, here a good example is the reliefs in the rotunda or they show indigenous men and women calmly welcoming the invaders and settlers in ways

that either openly accepting of their permanent presence or passively acquiescence. captured this as early as the 1830s. as well as its intended impact on visitors. now her comment on early indian portraits could apply to the succeeding century of representations of all indigenous peoples. they have, quote, but two sorts of expression. the one is that very noble and war-like daring and the other of a gentle and naive simplicity that has no mixture in it, but inexpresstally engaging and more touching, perhaps. from 1844 to 1958, the same duality was presented to all visitors as they climb the east front. in the stark and controversial form of pursaco's discovery on the left and the rescue. blatantly racist to 21st century

eyes, the pieces were denounced from the very start. yet survived every from indignation by a visiting tribal chiefs in 1855 to house resolutions in 1939 and 1941 calling for their removal or destruction. finally going into permanent storage in 1958. now, this duality and the two way of presenting was not a 19th century invention, of course. deep roots going back to columbus himself. when they were placed in two categories. into invented races. the noble savages who accepted and embraced christian civilization and the blood thirsty bar yarians who were labeled after the accusation that they were all cannibals. both of them are present here. across the americas for the next three centuries, those two categories were reinforced by spanish and portuguese law

regarding the enslavement of indians. those who toiled away peacefully as colonel subjects could not be enslaved. those who resisted such subjecitation in any way could be branded or sold or slotted. in north america that latter category was applied far more than the former as the english were less interested in spaniards in creating colonies on converts. so, as is well known, yet i think insufficiently discussed, in 19th century north america, indigenous people were systematically displaced and virtually eliminated. the history reflected in sequencing of art in the capitol. thus, depictions of violent indian warriors tend to come earlier with peacefully indians predominating later in the century. now, for modern visitors that sequencing is largely irrelevant as the two categories are experienced all at once. if you're standing in the rotunda and looking around and

taking it all in, for example. i expect that visitors instinctively grasp that the violent indian is a figure from the distant past. historical, illusive, harmless and possibly even fictional. while the passive indian is the more acceptable and closer to the present and more suitable as a character in say a disney movie. and, indeed, the passive indian is most obviously represented by pocahontas who appears three times in the rotunda. in all cases, she plays a clear role as the antidote of the violent indian including her own relatives. quote, foremost in the train of wondering children of the forest, this is in the words of chapman who created this painting. snatched from the fangs of idolatry to become lambs. or in the phrases of a modern art historian pocahontas has turned this painting into a demure maiden diminished both in the painting and in life just as

her fellow indians soon would be, end quote. among the awkwardly posed male relatives, only her sister is caught in the light and properly rendered yet her highly passive pose on the ground scantily clad almost topless ties her to larger depictions of indigenous women in the capitol, especially in the rotunda. where other indigenous women are passive, prone, and this brings us a to a crucial piece of this puzzle. the columbus era people into two categories was not intended as a division of men and women, but it soon became gendered. over the centuries that followed in text an image and the process of discovery, conquest and colonization became gendered as male with indians and indigenous

male gendered as female. this could take the form of how history was narrated. this is an 18th century engraving. that is cortes receiving the indigenous women who goes down in history as being his mistress and interpreter but who was actually a 12-year-old girl. and then as romanticism sweeps art and history telling a century later, here we have the similar kinds of representation. so, how history was narrated. or how the continent was presented allegorically. here we are back to this 16th century image holding the banner and then the naked woman in the hammock is supposed to be america. i'm going to come back to one of these, but here are two 17th century representations of, again, this is america.

moving forward to the 19th century and into the capitol itself. columbus and the indian maiden. which i think is absolutely extraordinary and not often discussed piece of art. the only way it doesn't quite fit my argument is how for some reason decided to portray the indian maiden, not as really as an indian at all. the clothing is all completely wrong and sort of a slightly in terms of the clothing as opposed to the feathers which he should have done. but nonetheless, there is on his face and actually kind of gives us what he is thinking in that way in the capitol. so this is an obscure but highly revealing example of the gendered and even sexualized nature of the phenomenon. the capitol is packed full of female allegories, of course. as befitting its neoclassical

style and freedom, the statue freedom is not only the only female in the sculpture by thomas crawford. this view here on the right as you look up at her, there's three more right in front of her and shown there in more detail. but only one fits into a tradition that is so deeply and specifically rooted in how europeans and euro americans have depicted and imagined america. that is as female indigenous, wealthy and right for the taking. as captured in these images, the one on the left is a book first published in amsterdam in the 1960s and highly influential and much copied into the 19th century. an image not familiar to you, but would have been familiar to any literate or semi literate european or euro american running all the way through into the early 19th century by which

time it appears in multiple different variants. so, the origin of the feathered head dress atop freedom is well known. repeated in guides for visitors. at least that is the immediate origin. that immediate origin was david jefferson's order to remove the statue's liberty cap deemed inappropriate for him for a nation where slavery was still legal. as secretary of war, davis oversaw work at the capitol but would soon become president of the confederacy. the liberty cap was replaced by, quote, a bold arrangement of feathers suggested by the costume of indian tribes. in crawford's words, repeated in some form or another right up to the official descriptions by the current curator's office. but the deeper origin of the head dress was the role played for indian, again, going all the way back to the 1490s.

throughout the capitol, indigenous people are stereotypically marked in the west for five centuries. for that reason, i would suggest freedom has struggled her entire life to be recognized by her official name. newspaper reports on her as, quote, america's most misunderstood woman or one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted girls in the capitol have been regular. far more often created armed freedom or what the curator of the capitol calls her, the statue of freedom, her popular names have evoked her identity as female and indigenous. in my survey of newspapers from the late 19th and 20th centuries, i came frequently upon miss liberty, miss freedom, the lonely lady and significantly miss america. other names marked both her sex

and her divinity, most commonly the goddess of freedom, the goddess of liberty but also a variant such as the seven ton goddess and on occasion across the decades, she's been called the statue of liberty. they do kind of look related. crawford imagined that the statue's olive branch was emblems that the mass of our people would easily understand. that the people would understand her as freedom triumphant and prove to be the feathers, not yet even part of the design which crawford wrote those words rather than the emblems of war and peace meaningful to the masses. as the "washington post" explained in 1899. a very campy headdress and heavy roads with trim. or three decades earlier the statute, quote, wears a head gear usually described as a feather headdress but more resembles a dead eagle.

wrote another reporter, the silly head dress looks more like a chicken than an eagle. well, despite or perhaps part and parcel of such disdain, the statue's female indigenous identity has been a consistent threat. the indian goddess has been one of her names going back to the late 19th century and in 1939, "washington post" article stated that tourists most commonly took the statue to be pocahontas, as well as a replica of the statue of liberty, miss america and various other things, end quote. "the post" stated in 1845 because of the miscellaneous feathers in her head gear most people speak of that indian on the dome, but, in fact, this is ironic, this is 1945, so ironic in the view and recently concluded world war, "the post" said she's no indian, she's italian.

the explanation for that is a footnote. in 1961, a reporter for "this week magazine" polled locals and tourists walking in the capitol fusinty. none called her freedom. instead guesses in reverse order of popularity, are you ready for this? dollie madison, columbus, queen isabella of spain, balboa, john paul jones, paul revere, susan b. anthony, joan of arc, sitting bull, and the most popular guess, you'd all be able to get it already. pocahontas. albert ports thought of her as mrs. uncle sam. most visitors apparently identify her as pocahontas.

i suggest to you that since she was placed on the capitol's dome, she has been popularly and widely understood in various, sometimes vague, sometimes particular ways as being america in female indian form. in two tiny fresco images hidden on the ceilings of meeting rooms in the capitol, made the connection obvious. this one on the left here is on the front cover of the spring 2014 capitol dome issue, by the way. visitors don't need to get special permission to see america as remidi called both of these figures. the black and one on the right and on the left you can see her, you've seen enough now even if you didn't even know the things i have been talking about this morning. you can see her up there with the colored feather head dress. you don't need to get the special omission to get into h-144 or s-127.

her ornamental position at the very top of the capitol combined with the imagery of the artwork inside the building reinforces visitor expectations that the building, the whole capitol building is a complex, visual expression of history and power, racialized and gendered. no wonder percsico discovery was hated and hidden. it made it way too uncomfortably obvious that freedom is really america. thank you. yes. >> very interesting, lecture. thank you. could you talk a bit about depiction of other nonwhites in the capitol building and how that's changed over the years and in particular whether there was any big change before and

after the civil war? >> you mean slavery and depictions of african-americans -- >> and asians, yes. >> no, i can't. i could have a guy start to look into that and i've started this project in august in the archives and, as i started to look into that i realized an entire whole separate topic there and that it has been studied and there were, i found references to articles and so on. i'm not sure if there is a whole book on it. when i began this project by thinking about writing just about the statue itself of freedom. and just surprised to discover there is not a serious or even semi serious entire book just about the statue. but material in the archives in the capitol building and the curator would work for that and in that early version of this project there was a chapter just

on that exact topic because i discovered and this is material that if you pay close attention in your tour of the capitol building or read the little plaques around any visitor would know this that the statue of freedom when she was cast in bronze right up on the kind of borders of the district of columbia and baltimore that the work was done by slaves. and that the timing of when the statue was created, not the original plaster model in rome, but the bronze one created here was such that it was right when the war was happening and when slavery was abolished. so, there's a particular individual slave whose some information is known about and in the archives i found sort of copies of primary source material relating to his, not his selling, but his emancipation and that his owner receiving a sum of money from the government in return for

that emancipation and he was the guy who was in charge of the bronzing of the statue. so, that is really iconic, right? because of jefferson davis saying are you going to take the liberty cap off and then by the time the statue was put on top of the dome, slavery was abolished. nice ironies. and i realize people spotted this before me and i think that, if i was to be able to, if i had done more research and give you a fuller answer that is the beginning moment. that is the antic dote to begin that story and one to do with kind of layers of irony and those stretch all the way up to the present day to there's an article that i very quickly looked at and thought, no, i can't get sucked down into this rabbit hole here to do with african-american responses to the capitol building. and it was the responses were not recent. i think it was the 1980s, early

1990s which somebody had interviewed people coming out to the building and they're saying, yeah, i guess this isn't really about our history. we're not really in there much. okay, well, but then you go all the way back to the head dress on the top and the feathers and the cap and that kind of opens up a whole other story that i thought was really interesting. also at some point i imagined wrongly that the museum of african-american history, i'm getting the name wrong. culture and history museum were somehow visible. like i had this idea that you could walk up the steps to the capitol and turn around and see that museum and that would be kind of a visual sense of how the way that buildings are structured on the mall and the arts in them reflect the changes in american history and how the united states is kind of dealing with all of this and looking back and say, oh, yeah, the way that indigenous people and

african-americans are presented in the capitol is very much a 19th century one because those were the attitudes and so we haven't changed that. what we've done is kind of put it in silos and separate buildings which is either great or terrible depending on your perspective. but, unfortunately, when i stood up there and looked around and realized it doesn't work quite like that. but could we just move those buildings up? they should be right there hovering on the edge of the capitol. does anyone have a question about something i know something about would be great. i know, that's a tough one. >> i think i understood what you were, the point you were trying to make by the substitution of columbus for cortes in the mexican cultural center. i'm not sure what the mexican cultural center was trying to accomplish by doing that. and maybe the larger question to that is, what do latin americans or south americans think when they see the whitewash, you

know, the cortes disappearance with conquistadors which i mage purveyors of civilization and really good guys rather than, you know, conquistadors, conqurers. >> that cracks a title of nationalism and the way that mexican history and culture has developed in the last 200 years as a kind of, all countries grapple with this notion of national identity and how you deal with your past, right. that kind of paradox of wanting to only pull the positive things up in order that you can engender and everybody a sense of loyalty and patriotism and then in the course of doing that, you're then distorting and rewriting history and you're sort of teaching your children

lies. and there has been a particularly interesting and well studied story along those lines in mexico in the last 200 years. and i think that mexicans have been very kind of open and transparent in how they have tackled that. so, they left a superb trail of art and literature and so on that is allowed historians to pursue it and i'm kind of wildly guessing, but i imagine if we were to sort of beam thousands of people, mexican nationals into the old embassy mexican that is the mexican cultural institute and have them look at that and tell them about that, they would have a lot to tell us and respond to that about their opinions of columbus and cortes and so on. so, i think it's very obvious to mexicans why that was done. that cortes is a controversial figure and mexicans will say we don't have statues of cortes in

mexico in mexico city. you can't find him. things vaguely named after him but no big monuments and even remotely close to what you would see in washington, d.c., for columbus and george washington and so on. nothing like that. so, it wouldn't be surprising to them. what's interesting to me is that the parallel in the capitol building or on capitol hill generally or maybe in the whole city and perhaps in the whole of the united states. the way that columbus is used is not as transparent. not even remotely as transparent. i think every columbus day different things are said about columbus day and indigenous people's day and so on that shows there isn't that kind of same level of transparency. instead, it becomes kind of a part of these little battlegrounds that we've seen recently over monuments and their significance. >> i have a question that is

literary rather than historical. >> another one i have no business -- >> i think you should wander in to. you quoted the ways in which people talked about how people have looked at the capitol art over the centuries. words like vandalism, souvenirs, protecting the building from visitors who prod, poke and pull the artwork. do you sense any kind of shifts over time in the ways in which those who were in charge of, you know, preserving the capitol thought about the visitors? >> no. i know where you're going and i looked and i looked for that. the archive, the curator's archive in the capitol is not cataloged. basic index and i'm interested

in the columbus doors, but nothing in that is cataloged and it's not searchable in any way. i wanted, i was curious about that. like official curator positions. well, no, not official. because the official curator positions don't really change. they're, obviously, sort of very diplomatic. like our job is to, you know, preserve the artwork from damaged but allow people to come in and enjoy it. that hasn't really changed. but the unofficial ones are what i was interested in and i got kind of little snippets usually it's snippets of somebody talking about somebody else. like this poor guy dick baker who i said i forgot to google to find out. he might even be in the room. whether he's still around. him making that quote about visitors, right, which is what i think a lot of people think but no curator is officially going to say something like, people

think they're in the white house, you know. they don't understand where the art is and therefore it's fine to not let them see it. let me answer the question kind of in another sort of slightly indirect way that relates to pursaco's discovery. i understand from the curator and some of the documents i found that they wanted to remove that and the other, the greenhouse rescue for a long time. but they weren't quite sure how to do it. right. once the curator or anybody, the architect at the capitol starts moving art around the building or start taking it out, you kind of open up a can of worms, right, you don't do that. what circumstances were they removed? in '58 they began the renovation

project and the it was moved forward and everything had to be removed in order for the dismantling to take place and the new columns put up and so on. they were just temporarily moved into storage in the smithsonian and then accidentally on purpose someone forgot to put them back up there. so that kind of gives you some insight into the various kind of aspects of this. the whole visitor center. the cbc itself is official reasons why that was built but unofficially what that meant was that having hordes of people wandering freely through the building which is the way it always has been. you walk up through the front steps and through the columbus doors and the rotunda and walk around and look around and that came to an end because of reasons of security. not because the curator said, the corridor is getting damaged because people, kids with backpacks and that kind of stuff, no. so, i think that attitudes, the

official attitude and the unofficial one and that particular sacrifices provide opportunities. >> would you be available for people to contact you in the little time that's left while you're here in d.c. if they have other questions or comments? >> yes. particularly, you know, things like, dude, there's a whole book on that and i don't want to raise that -- >> hey, i'm alive. i'm not dead yet. >> i would like that very much. >> let's wrap this up and thank you, again. you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span3, explore our nation's past. american history tv on