Monday, August 21, 2017

King George III Statue = 42,088 Lead Bullets

OK, I was hot under the collar when I wrote yesterday that the Confederate statues should be melted down. Yeah, I'd vote for that, and the creative re-casting of the bronze (or whatever), but in fact, I still strongly believe it's best if local groups decide what to do with their statues.

I'm curious. What have other nations and times done with their deposed statues?
Lots of things. 


The Allies ordered all Nazi symbols in German territory to be destroyed after the war:
"Every existing monument, poster, statue, edifice, street, or highway name marker, emblem, tablet or insignia .... must be completely destroyed and liquidated by 1 January 1947."
--from "How Did We Treat Monuments to White Supremacists When They Weren’t Our White Supremacists?" Slate, 8-13-17

GZ helpfully pointed me to Hungary's Memento Park:
"an open-air museum in Budapest, dedicated to monumental statues and sculpted plaques from Hungary's Communist period (1949–1989). 


The park was designed by Hungarian architect Ákos Eleőd, who said:
"This park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described, built, this park is about democracy.
After all, only democracy is able to give the opportunity to let us think freely about dictatorship."
Grūtas Park is the same idea in Lithuania, nicknamed Stalin World. "Many of its features are re-creations of Soviet Gulag prison camps: wooden paths, guard towers, and barbed-wire fences."
Ha--it won the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

Another option: melt down and reuse the metal.

Revolutionary Americans melted this lead statue of King George III into 42,088 musket balls. 

No, no more bullets! but I like the idea of reuse. What catches my imagination here is that someone bothered to count and record them. So human.
"Pulling Down the Statue of George III" (1859)
Artist John C. McRae based this engraving on a painting by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel.

INFO ADAPTED FROM Teach US History site:

On July 9, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time in New York in front of George Washington and his troops. In reaction, soldiers and citizens went to Bowling Green, a park in Manhattan, and pulled down the lead statue of King George III on horseback there. (It was originally commissioned to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766.)

This art is a romanticized version of the event. According to the eye witness accounts, the mob included soldiers, sailors, blacks, and a few lower class citizens, not the women, children, and Native Americans pictured here. Also, descriptions of the actual statue say that King George was sculpted wearing a Roman toga. 

This incident showed that Americans were ready to be independent and free from tyrannical rule, and by pulling down a statue of the King, it symbolized the from a monarchy to a democracy."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just like the people from Iraq pulling down the statue of Sadam . Then you contrast that act with ISIS/DASH destroying ancient ruins in Iraq that everyone says was wrong as it destroyed archiology.

Fresca said...

It wasn't wrong because it destroyed archeology.
It was wrong because it was done in hate, in the cause of power & control, not liberation and freedom.

Age of art has nothing to do with it--it's the meaning that counts.