Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory
408
Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory
408eBook
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Overview
For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments.
In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism.
In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery.
Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806163888 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 61 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ENSHRINING WHITE CIVILIZATION IN EARLY PIONEER MONUMENTS, 1890–1920
In 1905, white women leaders of the suffrage movement gathered in Portland, Oregon, to dedicate Alice Cooper's statue of Sacajawea (more accurately spelled Sacagawea; see plate H), in honor of the Shoshone guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition and to commemorate "the pioneer mother of Old Oregon." But Anglo- American men and women throughout the West soon came to challenge the idea that an image of the famed Shoshone guide could rightfully commemorate the sacrifices of white settlers. This female sculptor's depiction of a Native woman soon yielded public attention to male sculptors' celebrations of generic Pioneer Mothers as symbols of rural nostalgia, white domination, and traditional gender roles. Between 1905 and 1930, the racial dynamics of proper pioneer monuments became set in stone (and bronze) through conversations and sometimes heated confrontations among donors, artists, and public audiences. By the late 1920s, western pioneer monuments would abandon images of indigenous peoples and famous individuals, instead coalescing around a monolithic image of a sunbonneted Pioneer Mother, which would be replicated in communities throughout the American West.
Monumental sculptures like Cooper's Sacajawea were selected for creation and display through partnerships between government agencies and private donors, and many such monuments appear to have enjoyed widespread popular support. But, as scholars of monuments to the Confederate lost cause have clearly shown, early twentieth-century public monuments were erected to endorse the political and social agendas of their often wealthy backers. Historical accuracy was less important than promoting the donors' imagined versions of the past. Focusing on negotiations surrounding the design and erection of pioneer monuments highlights how commemorative statuary was collectively curated by sculptors, heritage organizations, and large and small donors to display history lessons on the American landscape. Examining how these monuments portrayed western settlement reveals how Americans chose to remember Anglo-American westward migration — and to forget the damaging effects of settler colonialism on nonwhite peoples. In this chapter and the chapters that follow, I explore how the erection and public reception of these monuments worked together to shape American memory of the frontier.
As early settlers grew elderly in the decades following the supposed closing of the frontier in 1890, organizations and private individuals throughout the western United States built monuments to honor their pioneer forefathers and mothers. As early as 1883, W. Lair Hill urged "some capable hand" in the Oregon Pioneer Association "to gather up the scattered materials and erect a monument to the pioneer mothers of Oregon." This impulse to memorialize early pioneers was similar in many ways to current calls to remember the sacrifices of World War II veterans — the so-called greatest generation — before that generation passes by, creating what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). At the turn of the twentieth century, the first generation of white settlers in Oregon celebrated their success in transforming the landscape, economy, and society from the rough living conditions and cultural mixing that were characteristic of frontier life. By the 1890s, orderly farmsteads produced goods for the market economy. Portland gradually shed its Stumptown moniker to become a modern, progressive city. Like those who valorize the greatest generation, early settlers and their descendants sought to commemorate those who had laid the foundation for that settled society, and to create lasting monuments to what they viewed as those early settlers' tremendous achievement.
Wealthy donors and voluntary associations across the western United States similarly sought to memorialize their own founding fathers by erecting monuments to early white settlers sculpted by famous artists. Pioneer monument building paralleled and drew inspiration from fin de siècle monument building elsewhere in the United States and Europe. Colossal Beaux-Arts monuments were commonplace in late nineteenth- century France, as what Sergiusz Michalski calls "statuomania" inspired the erection of many statues of questionable artistic taste honoring minor celebrities. In the United States, the massive Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant memorials came to anchor the National Mall in Washington, D.C., shortly after World War I. Meanwhile, southern whites grappled with the profound economic and social changes wrought by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of the New South by clinging to the race-based power structure of the Old South. Segregation laws and monuments to Confederate leaders and soldiers reinforced this racial divide by commemorating the lost cause.
Contemporaneous western monuments to early white settlers consistently labeled those settlers as "pioneers," indicating that they had carved a path for others to follow. Monument erectors believed those pioneers to be the vanguard of white civilization in the West. As Gail Bederman argued, Americans at the turn of the twentieth century used the term civilization in various ways to legitimize different claims to power. But in the context of frontier memory, this term was consistently used to evoke the imagined cultural superiority of the Western world (meaning Europe and European settler societies such as the United States). Adapting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies, late nineteenth-century Euro-Americans identified civilization as a specific stage in human racial evolution that followed the more primitive stages of barbarism and savagery. Pronounced gender differentiation — in which manly men worked to protect and provide for delicate, spiritual women — was among the traits that they believed distinguished civilized white culture. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pioneer monuments consistently celebrated the arrival of this so-called white civilization (in the form of manly pioneers and saintly Pioneer Mothers) to the allegedly untouched western wilderness and supposedly savage (uncivilized) indigenous peoples. But artists and donors often disagreed about the proper way to represent the civilized white men and women who settled in the Far West, and at times those disagreements boiled over into public controversy, providing a valuable window into turn-of- the-century thinking about race, gender, and regional identity.
Even as settlers celebrated their success in carrying white civilization to savage lands and peoples, they remained insecure about their place within that society. At the turn of the twentieth century, white Americans in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Far West were all anxious about dramatic changes to their society. The second industrial revolution was transforming the United States from a young nation of yeoman farmers to a global industrial power. Industrialization lured native born and immigrant alike to rapidly growing cities. And industrialization, urbanization, and the end of the frontier era all threatened to emasculate middle-class white men who no longer provided for their families through land ownership and subsistence farming. Aging western settlers joined eastern urbanites in embracing tales of masculine adventures in the Wild West as an antidote to their growing anxiety.
Nonetheless, while southern monuments hearkened back to an earlier era of civility and clear racial divisions, western settlers had little interest in returning to the hardships of frontier life. Instead, they sought to commemorate early white settlers to demonstrate how far they had come from an era of trade and conflict with indigenous peoples and the struggle for mere survival. By erecting massive bronze monuments sculpted by famous artists, growing communities declared themselves to be cosmopolitan centers on par with Paris or New York. At the same time, white westerners sought to justify settler colonialism. White southerners worked hard to keep African Americans in place as a meek, impoverished labor force. But white westerners believed the proper place for Native peoples was in the past. Thus, the myth of the "disappearing Indian" — a widespread American belief that Indians were a primitive people who would necessarily disappear in the face of white civilization — bore particular power in regions seeking to separate themselves both from indigenous peoples and from their own less-refined frontier pasts.
Across the country, Philip Deloria and others have argued, white Americans reinforced their cultural dominance by commemorating the passing of what they termed "noble savages." At the same time, they assumed aspects of indigenous culture to stave off neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion, a condition thought to result from overcivilization) and become better middle-class urban men and women. Urbane easterners joined fraternal organizations such as the Improved Order of the Red Men and sent their sons to Boy Scouts and their daughters to Camp Fire Girls, where they donned Indian-inspired garb and performed primitive tasks in the wilderness. Western men told tall tales about the early days on the frontier, when they wore buckskin clothing and hunted wild game like the indigenous men whose lands they had settled. But playing Indian was more dangerous for western women, who sought to distance themselves from the flexible gender roles typical of frontier life. Like their counterparts in the South championing the Confederate lost cause, western women embraced maternalism and narratives of womanly sacrifice to shore up their gender and racial identity.
Like Cooper's Sacajawea statue, pioneer monuments drew on these racial narratives of civilization and savagery. Most of the earliest monuments depicted specific famous men as well as a broader class of white settlers. Several featured both white settlers and the noble savages they had displaced. But amid rising xenophobia and anxieties about changing gender norms, wealthy donors embraced increasingly similar images of generic white settlers they called pioneers. By the late 1920s, varied images of Native guides and chiefs, wealthy businessmen, starving cannibals, and buckskin-clad frontier settlers gave way to remarkably similar statues of a sunbonneted Pioneer Mother, who selflessly carried the supposed blessings of white civilization to unsettled frontiers, armed only with a Bible or a rifle. In this chapter, I examine the various forms that pioneer monuments took prior to 1920 and explore why those diverse images were abandoned in favor of an iconic Pioneer Mother in the 1920s. In so doing, I reveal the processes by which prominent individuals and various groups negotiated their ideas about the past and about contemporary racial and gender relations, as well as how those ideas came to be enshrined in western places.
THE MARCH OF WHITE CIVILIZATION
The first western pioneer monuments were erected in the years immediately following the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. While historians now recognize that deadly event as an anticlimax to decades of U.S. military efforts to force Native peoples onto reservations, in the 1890s, western settlers worried about possible future Indian attacks and feared a loss of economic opportunity as the frontier's promise of free land ended. Yet they also sought to demonstrate their sophistication as a newly settled postfrontier society and their cultural superiority to the indigenous peoples they had displaced. Portraying an inevitable progression from Indian savagery to white civilization justified white settlers' displacement of Native peoples and absolved white guilt. Just as southern elites mourned the passing of the Old South through memorialization, from the late 1880s to World War I, western settlers expressed their diverse anxieties and yearnings through public monuments that celebrated the arrival of white American civilization in the Old West.
The earliest pioneer monuments borrowed stylistically from European and southeastern U.S. monuments to tell distinctly western stories celebrating white settlers. Like several Confederate monuments erected in the late nineteenth century, San Francisco's 1894 James Lick Pioneer Monument (plate A) was modeled after grandiose European Beaux-Arts commemorative statues of the era, featuring realist sculptures of famous men — sometimes combined with allegorical figures — mounted on large stone bases. But where French monuments commemorated both major and minor political figures, and late nineteenth-century Confederate monuments generally celebrated a military hero or common soldier atop a tall pillar, several prominent early western pioneer monuments combined portraits of prominent men with allegorical sculptural elements around large central columns. Although they explicitly honored specific famous individuals, western monuments such as San Francisco's James Lick monument and Salt Lake City's Brigham Young monument (discussed in chapter 4) were labeled by donors and contemporary viewers as pioneer monuments, indicating that those famous individuals were intended to represent a broader class of white settlers. Like the art and architecture among which Cyrus Dallin's portrait of Brigham Young (which later topped Salt Lake City's monument) was displayed at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, these pioneer monuments emphasized the superiority of Euro-American culture. And like historian Frederick Jackson Turner's famous lecture at that 1893 world's fair declaring the "Significance of the Frontier in American History," white Americans defined western history as an evolution from Indian savagery to white civilization. Erecting colossal pioneer monuments proclaimed their young western cities to be cosmopolitan centers on par with Paris and Rome, and western American civilization to be equal to that of western Europe. Those monuments also declared white dominance over disappearing Indian savages.
San Francisco–based artist Frank Happersberger sculpted that city's James Lick Pioneer Monument to enshrine a history of Anglo dominance on the California landscape. Yankee-born James Lick had worked as a carpenter and piano builder in South America, earning a small fortune, which he then multiplied by investing in San Francisco real estate during the California gold rush. This eccentric millionaire refused to leave his fortune to his illegitimate son, choosing instead to support his philanthropic interests and to inscribe physical tributes to his own success on the San Francisco landscape. Lick bequeathed a stunning $100,000 ($2.8 million in 2015 dollars) to the city of San Francisco to fund bronze "statuary emblematic of the significant epochs in California history" since the Spanish mission era. The resulting monument was erected in front of San Francisco's city hall. Although that 1897 city hall was soon destroyed by the fire that followed the city's enormous 1906 earthquake, Lick's forty-seven-foot-tall, 800-ton monument stubbornly survived, towering over the destroyed city and becoming not only a postfrontier lieux de mémoire but also a symbol of the city's determination to rebuild.
San Francisco's Lick monument features a massive stone column and bronze sculptural elements that commemorate prominent men who had helped to establish Anglo-American California. Together, those bronze sculptures and reliefs construct a whitewashed narrative of California history typical of that era. Anglos chose to emphasize the godly influence of kindly Spanish padres (which conveniently skirted their undesirable Catholicism) and the romance of elite Spanish landowners. This story of the region's Spanish fantasy past was told and retold throughout California at the turn of the twentieth century, through novels such as Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, historical pageants, and Los Angeles's wildly popular Mission Play. These stories enabled Anglos to ignore the plight of indigenous Californians, who were decimated by Euro-American contact and settlement, and to forget that most Spanish-speaking peoples in California during the Spanish and particularly Mexican periods were of mixed racial heritage, rather than the genteel and lily white Spaniards depicted in stories like Ramona. In an era of Chinese exclusion, the Spanish fantasy past also erased the ethnic diversity of gold-rush California. Frank Happersberger's version of California history began with its discovery by Europeans, followed by the Spanish-led conquest and conversion of its indigenous peoples. He focused on Yankee-led economic expansion during the Mexican period, which was soon replaced with even greater wealth and an Anglo population explosion during the gold rush. That rough-and-tumble frontier period in turn gave way to more refined Anglo civilization in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the business accomplishments of the monument's donor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pioneer Mother Monuments"
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Copyright © 2019 Cynthia Culver Prescott.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Monuments and Public Memory,
1. Enshrining White Civilization in Early Pioneer Monuments, 1890–1920,
2. Bibles, Rifles, and Sunbonnets: Venerating Pioneer Motherhood, 1920–1940,
3. Memory and Modernity in Postwar Family Monuments, 1940–1975,
4. Mormon Exceptionalism, Assimilation, and Americanness, 1890–1980,
5. Conservative Commemoration and Progressive Protest in the Culture Wars, 1975–1995,
6. Memory Makes Money, 1980–2005,
7. Inclusivity and the Limits of Pioneer Memory, 1990–2020,
Conclusion: Public Perceptions of the American Pioneer Past,
Appendix: Monuments Keyed to Maps in This Study,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,