Connecting the Windy City

                 The deed is everything; the glory is naught.

Months ago I wrote of my surprise at seeing an exact replica of Chicago’s Standing Lincoln across the street from The Houses of Parliament. No altruistic act is simple, straightforward or without conflict, but the partnership that was formed between England and the United States to place Lincoln’s statue on London’s Parliament Square would have made Basil Fawlty and his crew look like five-star innkeepers.

By way of review . . . way, way outside the empire, back in provincial Chicago, old Eli Bates kicked off in 1881 and left enough money behind to erect a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish immigrant and the foremost sculptor of his day, conceived and executed the work, which was dedicated in 1887 and which still stands at the head of Dearborn Street in Lincoln Park.

To get to London, though, we have to go by way of Cincinnati, a city that had a fair shot at becoming the mid-continental superstar, if only the City with the Big Shoulders hadn’t muscled all the other players out of the way by getting the canal built first, hogging the title of Stacker of Wheat and Player with Railroads.

Just as old Eli Bates had done in Chicago, a wealthy Cincinnati department store and hotel owner, Frederick H. Alms, left a $100,000 legacy to place a statue of Lincoln in a place of prominence to honor the centennial of Lincoln’s birth n 1809. Mrs. Alms established a committee of five influential Cincinnati citizens to choose a sculptor.

Everyone agreed on George Grey Barnard – except for Mrs. Alms, who wanted her husband’s gift to underwrite the work of Gutzon Borglum. But what does a woman, especially a woman stricken with grief, know about such things? Borglum only went on to wrest Mount Rushmore from the Dakota badlands.

As The New York Times reported on December 17, 1910 . . . “Rather than have any further wrangling over who should give to the City of Cincinnati a monument to Abraham Lincoln, Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft, the former a brother of President Taft, volunteered on Thursday to give the $100,000 necessary for that purpose.”

Barnard, the beneficiary of Taft’s generosity, was born in Kankakee, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris and, like Saint-Gaudens 20 years earlier, had found success in a conspicuous space, having finished the sculptural work for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Once chosen to execute the important work, Barnard’s plan was to sculpt Lincoln in a way that portrayed the president as a workingman who had risen to greatness. In a sense the work was to be about the country as much as it was the president – a country in which even a farm boy from the hinterlands of Illinois could become the head of state. So the statue, necessarily, was as much prairie farm boy as it was savior of the union.

It wasn’t until March of 1917 that the benefactor’s brother, the former President of the United States, William Howard Taft, unveiled the statue in Cincinnati. In the elation that ensued Charles Taft made an announcement that he would pay for a replica of Barnard’s Lincoln, that statue to be sent to London where it would stand outside the Houses of Parliament.

The former President’s brother had reason to believe that his gift would be accepted. Some years earlier the American Peace Centenary Committee had been established to figure out ways in which the hundred years of peace between the United States and Britain, formalized in the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, could be celebrated.

Anticipating that the love you take is equal to the love you make, the American and British Peace Centenary Committees agreed to mark the century long love-in by exchanging statues. Saint-Gaudens’ Standing Lincoln, the work of Augustus Saint Gaudens, was chosen for America’s gift, and the British government agreed to provide a site in Parliament Square between Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament. For its placement. [pmsa.kcl.ac.uk]

But World War I interrupted the plans, and Standing Lincoln didn’t make it across the pond. And this is where the last and most amazing part of They Got Lincoln, Again and Again begins.

So me and the missus are standing across from Parliament Square, trying to figure out how 40 Greenpeace folks ended up on the roof ruining the pictures of Big Ben with banners protesting the abuse of the environment, when she nudges me and points to a statue over on Parliament Street.

“Looks like Abraham Lincoln,” she says.

“Yep, sure does,” I say.

And I take a picture, one of the dozens of pictures I took of the statues and memorials that occupy every bit of free space in London.

We’re proud of our sculpture in Chicago. Heck, we’ve got Calders, a Miro, a Picasso, a few Henry Moores, even an entire auto junkyard that Frank Stella piled up inside the Metcalfe Federal Building on Jackson. But here in the Windy City our sculptures are like super-heated molecules moving quickly away from one another.

Sculpture-wise London is the equivalent of a substance cooled to near absolute-zero. Works aren’t just plopped into parks and plazas . . . in many places they step over the curb and stand in the middle of the street.

Anyway, it turns out that she who is wiser than I was right and that the Parliament Street statue really WAS Abraham Lincoln.

That London Lincoln – the throne-like chair, the standing President, his head bowed, a farm-boy’s oversized hand grasping the iron lapel of his frock coat – is familiar to every Chicagoan. It’s a replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture that stands at the north end of Dearborn in Lincoln Park, the work we call The Standing Lincoln.

Saint-Gaudens had at the age of 17 seen Lincoln’s train as it moved toward the President’s inauguration. After schooling, including studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and a time in Rome, he received his first major commission in 1876 for a sculpture of Admiral David Farragut that still stands in New York City’s Madison Square Park.

Five years later Chicago lumber baron Eli Bates died and in his will left the city enough money to cover two projects, a fountain and a statue of Abraham Lincoln, each to be located in Lincoln Park. Saint-Gaudens was chosen for both projects. The fountain, Storks at Play, is located to the south of the Lincoln Park Conservatory.

It took several years for the sculptor to form his vision of the fallen president into its final form. Using his boyhood impression of Lincoln as he viewed him on that inaugural train, standing “tall in the carriage, his dark uncovered head bent in contemplative acknowledgement of the waiting people,” (www.sgnhs.org) along with the life mask of Lincoln and the casts of his hands made by Leonard Volk before the President was elected, Saint-Gaudens began work.

He used a six-foot, four-inch Vermont farmer, Langdon Morse, as his model, beginning at Cornish, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1885. (www.waymarking.com)

The pedestal on which the Lincoln Park sculpture is mounted was the design of Stanford White, who began his career as the principal assistant to the foremost architect of the day, Henry Hobson Richardson, and who was a partner in the most prestigious architectural firm in New York City, McKim, Mead and White.

Sharing the fate of Lincoln, in June of 1906 White was shot three times in the head at point blank range by multi-millionaire Henry Kendall Thaw on the Madison Square Roof Garden. From that roof it is certain that he could have seen the Admiral Farragut statue, another Saint-Gaudens work for which White designed the pedestal.

The Standing Lincoln was unveiled on October 22, 1887. Chicago Mayor E. A. Roche headed the dignitaries on the dais, and Abraham Lincoln II, the 15-year-old grandson of the late president, released the flag covering the statue. (www.lib.niu.edu) And in that place at the head of Dearborn Parkway Saint-Gaudens work has stood ever since.

As hundreds of thousands of young men were dying on the western front during World War I, negotiations were being carried out for a statue of Lincoln to be erected near Parliament Square in London. The struggle between lawmakers and artists that ensued makes for a fascinating story. Read about it in the next installment of They Got Lincoln – Again and Again.