Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On July 4, 2020
KPBS, San Diego’s affiliate of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), showed an
odd assemblage of programs to commemorate America’s Independence Day. One was
the 40th anniversary installment of the annual A Capitol Fourth concert, usually a mass gathering of performers and
audience on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. but this
year, under the lash of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, performed largely in empty spaces
and mostly pre-recorded, with the big moments (like the traditional performance
of the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture) supplied as clips from previous A Capitol
Fourth concerts.
One was a local
program KPBS filmed itself on August 30, 2019 featuring the San Diego Symphony
under its “pops” conductor, Christopher Dragon, performing an all-Tchaikovsky
concert including the rare Souvenir of a Dear Place for violin and orchestra. The other pieces were
familiar: the 1812 Overture (all
of it this time, though still climaxed with fireworks and cannons), Marche
Slave, eight numbers from the ballet
Swin Lake and the last movement from the
Fourth Symphony.
The third
program, which they showed both before and after the concert specials, was an
hour-long film from 1985 called The Statue of Liberty, produced and directed by Ken Burns. Yes,
that Ken Burns, in only his fourth film
project (its predecessors were Brooklyn Bridge, The Shakers: Hands to
Work, Hearts to God, and Huey
Long — about the progressive and/or
quasi-fascist governor who ruled Louisiana from 1928 to his assassination in
1935), made five years before his mini-series The Civil War made Burns’ reputation for mega-documentaries and
his trademark approach of using still photos to reproduce events that happened
before movie cameras existed and having actors read from letters, newspaper
stories or other period sources as his soundtrack.
The Statue of
Liberty became oddly timely towards the end
of 2019 because of an intriguing sequence Burns put in the film towards its
end. Though he had earlier noted that the original intent of the Statue of
Liberty was not to symbolize
America’s embrace of immigrants, he acknowledged that the Statue had acquired
that meaning over the years. He did that by showing some then-recent immigrants
to the U.S. and posing them in front of the statue, including a Ukrainian
family his chyron identified only as “The Vindmans.” They consisted of a father
and twin sons, Alexander and Yevgeny, who had emigrated to the U.S. from
Ukraine in 1979 following the death of the boys’ mother.
During the next
34 years, the Vindmans lived the American dream. Alexander and Yevgeny both
joined the U.S. Army via the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and rose to
the rank of lieutenant colonel. Both were assigned to the staff of the National
Security Council (NSC), where precisely because they were from Ukraine and
therefore spoke the Ukrainian language they were specifically called on as
experts on Ukraine. Their job was essentially to help the U.S. navigate the
thickets of Ukrainian politics and the country’s difficult and contentious
divorce from Russia in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union in
1991.
Tbe Vindmans’
job as America’s “Ukraine whisperers” got a lot harder in 2014, when Russian
president Vladimir Putin ordered an army to invade Ukraine and seize the
Crimea, including its all-important fresh-water port on the Black Sea. And it
got even more difficult in 2017, when Donald Trump got elected U.S. President
and showed an embarrassing and confounding level of fealty to Putin and his
world-political desires, including piecing back together as much of the Tsarist
and Soviet “Greater Russia” as he could. Though Trump was willing to sign a
Congressional bill to give military aid to Ukraine against Russia — which his
predecessor Barack Obama hadn’t — he insisted that newly elected Ukrainian
president Volodymyr Zelensky “do us a favor, though” in exchange for receiving
the aid.
It was actually
two favors. One was to return the computer server on which Hillary Clinton had
supposedly stored her deleted e-mails and shipped off to Ukraine. She hadn’t —
the server she used remains where it always was, in Washington, D.C. — but
Right-wing media propagandists and conspiracy-minded bloggers had apparently
convinced Trump it was in Ukraine. The other was that Zelensky reinstate an
investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board of
directors former vice-president Joe Biden’s son Hunter had once sat, which had
been started by a former Ukrainian state prosecutor Ukraine’s previous
president had fired for not being aggressive enough in investigating corruption.
Though
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had wisely tried to avoid impeaching
Trump — she knew there wouldn’t be enough Republican votes in the Senate to
convict him and remove him from office no matter what he’d done — the public outcry surrounding Trump’s
apparent attempt to bribe the leader of a foreign country to dig up dirt on his
likely 2020 re-election opponent led the House Judiciary Committee to begin an
impeachment investigation.
One of the
people who testified was Alexander Vindman, who on October 27, 2019 — a day
before he spoke to the committee — released a written statement in which he
said, “In Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a
false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus
views of the interagency, [which was]
harmful to U.S. national security [and also] undermined U.S. Government efforts to expand
cooperation with Ukraine.” The “outside influencers” included former U.S.
Attorney and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and two Russian-born associates of
his named Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
As part of his
job as the NSC’s Director of European Affairs, Alexander Vindman listened in on
the July 25, 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelensky in which Trump demanded
“a favor” from Zelensky in exchange for his aid. “I was concerned by the call,”
Vindman wrote in his statement. “I did not think it was proper to demand that a
foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the
implications for the U.S. Government’s support of Ukraine. I realized that if
Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely
be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine
losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all
undermine U.S. national security.”
Trump, with his
notorious demands for “loyalty” and his instinct to take revenge against
anyone, especially within the government, who criticizes him, fired Alexander
Vindman from his NSC post. For good measure, Trump also fired Vindman’s twin
brother Yevgeny even though Yevgeny had had nothing to do with the impeachment
hearings. But Trump wasn’t through with his revenge on Alexander Vindman: this
year acting defense secretary Mark Esper refused to confirm that Vindman was
getting the automatic promotion to full colonel to which his years of service
entitled him.
In early July
U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Wisconsin), herself a combat veteran who lost
both her legs in Iraq, threatened to hold up all 1,000 scheduled promotions of
senior military officers until she received an adequate explanation for why
Alexander Vindman was being denied his. On July 8, four days after KPBS had
shown Ken Burns’ film featuring Alexander and Yevgeny Vindman as 10-year-old
recent immigrants to the U.S., Alexander resigned from the U.S. military.
Though he didn’t release a statement explaining why, his attorney, David
Pressman, did.
“Over the last
months, LTC Vindman has been guided by a very simple and very American
principle: ‘Here, right matters,’” Pressman’s statement said. “He has spoken
publicly once, and only pursuant to a subpoena from the United States Congress.
Compelled to testify, this decorated soldier was thrust into a conversation
that goes to the heart of our country’s values, and its future. Through a
campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation, the President of the
United States attempted to force LTC Vindman to choose: Between adhering to the
law or pleasing a President. Between honoring his oath or protecting his
career. Between protecting his promotion or the promotion of his fellow
soldiers. These are choices that no one in the United States should confront,
especially one who has dedicated his life to serving it.”
How the Statue Got Here
Burns, who
co-wrote and co-photographed the film The Statue of Liberty as well as directing it, began with impressionistic
photography of the Statue of Liberty as David McCullough (who narrated most of
Burns’ projects until he dropped out of the series and Peter Coyote replaced
him) intoned the words of Thomas Jefferson from the Declaration of
Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights; and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Then Burns goes
into the historical background of how the Statue of Liberty came to exist in
the first place. The statue was the brainchild of French sculptor Frédéric
Auguste Bertholdi, who conceived of the project in 1865 — the year the North
won the U.S. Civil War — after a discussion with a friend, Édouard de
Laboulaye. The two men recalled that the U.S. had won its independence in the
first place with the aid of France, who had backed the rebel colonists largely
as a “proxy war” with France’s great existential enemy of the time, Great
Britain.
Bertholdi and
Laboulaye decided the project should be a joint celebration by the French and
American people of the American independence the French had done so much to
bring about. While the project was delayed a decade by the collapse of the
autocratic French government of Louis Napoléon — nephew of the original
Napoleon, who had overthrown the second French Republic in 1852 and called
himself “Napoleon III” — and its catastrophic loss of its own war with Germany
in 1870, eventually the French government agreed to pay for the statue if the
U.S. would donate the land for it — Bedloe’s Island, in the Verrazano Narrows
at the entrance to New York City — and supply the pedestal on which to put the
statue.
Burns’
documentary details how the statue was put together from a full-sized mold
based on a quarter-sized scale model. The finished product was divided into 300
copper sheets for transportation across the Atlantic, Bertholdi had originally
hoped to have the statue up in time for the American centennial celebration in
Philadelphia in 1876, but all that was ready when that event rolled around was
the right arm bearing its iconic torch. It proved harder to get the U.S. to
fund the pedestal than it had to get France to finance the statue itself, and
Burns’ film includes some snarky comments from American newspapers about the
white elephant the French were trying to palm off on us.
When money to
create the pedestal dried up in 1885, Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian-born publisher
of the New York World, took over the
fundraising campaign. He made it a personal project and used his newspaper to
encourage donations, no matter how small — essentially a Kickstarter campaign
130 years early. The pedestal was completed a year later and the statue was
assembled from the parts shipped over from France. It was dedicated October 28,
1886 in a grand ceremony that featured then-President Grover Cleveland.
Ironically, when Burns made his film in the early 1980’s the statue was
surrounded by scaffolding that made it look like it was imprisoned — the result
of a major renovation by the Reagan Administration that was still in progress
when Burns was filming.
Opening — and Closing —
the Golden Door
Originally the
statue was supposed to be a celebration of liberty and the collaboration of
America and France in bringing it to the New World. (The fact that
representative forms of government had existed in America before its so-called
“discovery” by European whites — notably the six-nation Iroquois Confederation
— wasn’t mentioned.) That changed when poet Emma Lazarus was commissioned to
write a sonnet that would appear as a plaque on the Statue’s pedestal.
Contrasting the Statue of Liberty to similarly giant statues that had been
built by the Roman Empire and other autocratic regimes of yore, Lazarus wrote a
poem called “The New Colossus” which read:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek
fame,
With conquering limbs astride from
land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset
gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose
flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and
her name
Mother of Exiles. From her
beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild
eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin
cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied
pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your
tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore.
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”
Virtually none
of her poem gets quoted today except for the last 4 ½ lines, but they remain
controversial as well as inspiring. When those words were inscribed on the
Statue of Liberty’s pedestal the U.S. had already begun to restrict
immigration, passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 whose purpose was just
what its title said: to stop all
immigration from China to the U.S. for 20 years. (In 1902, when the 20 years
were up, the ban was renewed and made indefinite.) According to history.com (https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/chinese-exclusion-act-1882),
“Although the Chinese composed only .002 percent of the nation’s population,
Congress passed the exclusion act to placate worker demands and assuage
prevalent concerns about maintaining white ‘racial purity.’”
Immigration has
remained a flash point ever since. In 1924 Congress passed broad limits on
immigrants, essentially setting “quotas” limiting how many immigrants each
country could send to us and, not surprisingly, admitting more white Europeans
than people of color. In 1965, under a broad-based immigration reform sponsored
by the late Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), the quotas were lifted
and the laws against Chinese were finally repealed. But more recently aides to
President Trump, including anti-immigration “hawk” Stephen Miller, have called
for a return to the principles of the 1924 law and for so-called “merit-based”
immigration, which would assess would-be immigrants based on how much they
could potentially contribute to the American economy.
Still Fighting the Civil
War
As with his
later, longer and more famous films, Ken Burns studded The Statue of Liberty with prominent talking heads discussing the issues
raised by the statue and the whole concept of “liberty” as it applies — or
doesn’t — to the United States. Then-New York Governor Mario Cuomo appears in a
fantasy interview with his mother, supposedly conducted as she arrived in New
York as an emigrant from Italy, and the punch line was that she would say,
“Some day my son is going to be Governor of New York.” (As things turned out, Signora Cuomo would have not only a son but a grandson as governor of New York: the current governor is
Mario’s son Andrew.)
Perhaps the
movie’s most powerful comments come from writers James Baldwin and Carolyn
Forché. Baldwin says quite frankly that, as an African-American, he finds the
lines of Thomas Jefferson, slaveowner, about all men being created equal to be
insulting. In 2020 Baldwin’s icon-breaking attack on Jefferson seems ahead of
its time, newly relevant in an era in which the culture wars are being
re-fought and one of the flash points is over how, or even whether, to honor
the founders of a republic that for all its loudly proclaimed ideals of freedom
and liberty was based on a genocidal campaign against its Native population and
the importation of Africans to be permanent slaves.
Statues have
become key parts of the battleground over which the culture wars are being
fought. Even before the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on
Memorial Day 2020, there were calls to remove the monuments honoring leaders of
the Confederate rebellion. These statues of Confederate President Jefferson
Davis, generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and other
so-called “heroes” of the Southern struggle to retain ownership of Black people
as slaves were mostly put up between the 1890’s and the 1920’s.
Their real purpose was to intimidate Black Southerners with the
totality of the Southern triumph. The U.S. Civil War was a classic example of
one side winning the war but the other “winning the peace.” With dedication,
fanaticism, a commitment to white supremacy, and liberal doses of outright
terrorism, the slaveowners waited out the 1865-1877 “Reconstruction” period,
reversed the business and political achievements of Southern Blacks and shoved
them back into a level of political, economic and social subservience only a
little better than being slaves. Those long walks filled with statues of
Confederate “heroes” in cities like Richmond and Charlottesville were built by
Southern whites to tell Southern Blacks, “We won. You lost. Accept it … or else.”
A June 2020
program on NBC News and MS-NBC, Stone Ghosts in the South, by Black journalists and filmmakers Trymaine Lee
and John Eligon, shows the fraught history of Confederate monuments in the
South; it’s available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msIDM8MyGqg.
Amazingly, Confederate monuments are still going up in the South; 1972 saw the
official opening of the Stone Mountain project — enormous bas-relief statues of
Davis, Lee and Jackson.
The Stone
Mountain carvings had been planned in the late teens and had been commissioned
by the Venable family, who owned the property, and the United Daughters of the
Confederacy (UDC), who as the Lee-Eligon film shows were behind a lot of the Confederate monument projects. UDC charter
member Mrs. C. Helen Plame headed the project and commissioned the first artist
associated with it, sculptor Gutzon Borglum. She also tried to get Borglum to
include a positive depiction of the Ku Klux Klan in the design. “I feel it is
due to the Klan, which saved us from Negro dominations [sic] and carpetbag rule, that
it be immortalized on Stone Mountain,” Plame wrote Borglum. “Why not represent
a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”
Borglum left the
project over a financial dispute with the UDC and went on to create the
monumental outdoor sculptures of former Presidents George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore, South
Dakota. Meanwhile, the UDC and other pro-Confederate organizations continued to
raise money and hire artists, until the monument was finally completed and
unveiled in 1972. In 2015, then-NAACP president Richard Rose said that Stone
Mountain was “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world
... I don’t think people understand the objective and the intent. They don’t
understand that it’s based on white supremacy because the [American Civil War]
was based on white supremacy, and the ‘heroes’ are based on white supremacy.
After the killings at Emanuel Church in Charleston, it finally crystallized for
me that these monuments encourage violence and validate oppression.”
And if you think
1972 is an awfully late date to unveil a new monument to the Confederacy in the
Old South, how about 2000? That’s the date when a statue honoring Confederate
General Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the key founders of the Ku Klux Klan,
went up in Selma, Alabama. In 1965 Selma gripped the nation when civil-rights
volunteers led by the recently deceased U.S. Congressmember John Lewis
(D-Georgia), assisted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of his
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, marched on Selma to demand equal
voting rights for African-Americans. They were violently turned back by
deputies led by racist sheriff Jim Clark, and Lewis was clubbed by a deputy and
got a fractured skull.
This all
happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, itself named after a former Confederate
soldier and Klan leader. The official recorded tour guide to the Selma cemetery
says, “In this old section of the cemetery, many notable citizens of Selma were
laid to rest, such as General William Pardee, Senator Edmund Wilson Pettus, and
Congressman Benjamin Stirling Thomas.” The appearance of a Forrest statue in
Selma led to the predictable ruckus as Black Selmans denounced it as racist.
The city took it down in 2012 — though they left the pedestal for it standing —
but restored it in 2015.
The Legacies of Statues
Confederate war
memorials and monuments aren’t the only arenas in which Americans are currently
contesting the symbolism of statues as the way we tell our history and decide
whom we should honor. President Donald Trump, who seems never to miss an
opportunity to pick at the scab of American racism, has come out strongly for
keeping up both the Confederate statues and the names of the 10 U.S. military
bases — including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood — which bizarrely
honor generals who fought their most famous war against the United States military.
After the
violent clashes over the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia
in 2017 — during which a pro-Confederate demonstrator ran down and killed an
anti-racist activist and Trump said “there were very good people — on both
sides” — Trump questioned whether the anti-racist activists who demanded
tearing down the statues of Confederate leaders would stop there. Would they,
he asked rhetorically, demand the destruction of statues honoring George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they owned slaves?
For once, Trump
was right. On June 14, protesters in Portland, Oregon tore down a statue of
Jefferson. Four days later, a statue of Washington was also torn down. On July
19, activists in San Francisco destroyed a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, who
ironically had led the U.S. military against the Confederacy in the Civil War. What’s more, during his eight years
(1869-1877) of his Presidency, Grant also supervised Reconstruction and used
the civil-rights laws passed by the Reconstruction Congresses to suppress the
Ku Klux Klan.
According to
Jonathan Turley, professor of public interest law at George Washington
University and the one historical expert who testified for President Trump in
impeachment proceedings (https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/504033-the-destruction-of-statues-comes-with-more-attacks-on-free-speech),
other unlikely targets for takedown or vandalism by supposedly anti-racist
students and other activists include Abraham Lincoln; Admiral David Farragut,
who fought for the Union in the Civil War; abolitionist leader Matthias
Baldwin; and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the all-Black volunteer
regiment who fought in the Civil War. (The film Glory, starring Denzel Washington as their leader and
Matthew Broderick as Col. Robert Shaw, the white officer who commanded them, is
about the 54th Infantry.)
But Turley isn’t
the only writer who’s calling on protesters to be a little more judicious in
whose statues they tear down or vandalize. Writers Tom Mackaman and Niles
Niemuth of the World Socialist Web Site (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/22/pers-j22.html)
write that the destruction of memorials to the Confederacy is justified, “[b]ut
the removal of monuments to the leaders of America’s revolutionary and civil
wars has no justification. These men led great social struggles against the
very forces of reaction that justified racial oppression as an incarnation of
the fundamental inequality of human beings.”
And, I would
add, if they themselves participated in an evil economic system based on racial
oppression, that doesn’t move them from a “good” to a “bad” column of human
character. It makes them human beings, flawed and not always able to live up to
the best of their ideals. One of the odd things about how we write our history
today — and, indeed, how we judge people we encounter in our ordinary lives —
is a tendency, which I think is driven by the entertainment industry and how it
divides the people it depicts into “heroes” and “villains,” to seize on the
worst thing a person ever did and hold that
as the standard by which their character should be judged for all time.
Many of the
people whose statues are being attacked today have highly complex and ambiguous
historical records. Through most of the 20th century, Andrew Jackson
was considered a liberal hero because he worked to strike down property
qualifications for voting. Before Jackson, you had to own land or some other
tangible good to be allowed to vote — which led Benjamin Franklin to joke that
if a man owned a donkey, and therefore could vote; and then the donkey died, so
the man couldn’t vote, who held the franchise: the man or the donkey? After
Jackson, just about every white male in the U.S. could vote.
Jackson was also
hailed by liberal historians — including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., author of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning 1946 biography The Age of Jackson — for taking on the Bank of the United States,
symbol of the capitalist oligarchy of the time; and for standing up to
pro-slavery secessionists like his first vice-president, John C. Calhoun, when
they tried to tear the union apart over tariffs. But today most discourse
around Jackson centers around the bad parts of his legacy, including his
slaveownership and the genocidal policy of removing Native Americans, forcing
the Cherokees out of the South on the infamous “Trail of Tears.”
Other highly
contentious figures in American history whose statues are being torn down
include Christopher Columbus, the so-called “discoverer of America,” and Father
Junipero Serra, who during California’s days as part of the Spanish colony
called “New Spain” (modern-day Mexico) built the mission system that helped
unify the state — and did it with enslaved Native labor. The attacks on
Columbus and Serra have often pitted historically disenfranchised groups
against each other: Italian-Americans (who, like Irish-Americans, suffered over
a century of racist discrimination and weren’t fully accepted as “white” until
the 20th century) protest every time a statue of Columbus comes down
and say it’s an attack on their
contributions to the American saga.
Likewise, Serra
biographer Stephen W. Hackel acknowledges in a Los Angeles Times op-ed (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-19/junipero-serra-statue)
that many of the criticisms of Serra are justified, but his removal from the
historical record of America will paradoxically reinforce the standard racist
narrative of America as a “white” nation with everyone else just along for the
ride.
“Calls for
Serra’s cancellation can reinforce outdated notions that the settlement of
North America was a natural, pre-ordained, westward-moving Protestant tide,
even though much of the continent from Florida to California was colonized by
Spanish-speaking Catholics who came north from the Caribbean or what is now
Mexico,” Hackel argued. “The cultures and religion of these pobladores and their descendants shape our land in lasting ways.
Monuments to Serra have served as useful — if flawed and insensitive — markers
for Hispanic contributions to a diverse national fabric.”
As for those
faces on Mount Rushmore, not only have Washington and Jefferson been
reflexively denounced as slaveowners (as if they did nothing else of any
importance at all), Theodore Roosevelt has got criticism from both sides in the culture war. Progressive activists got
a statue of him removed in New York because it posed him with a Black boy on
one side and a Native boy on the other, essentially presenting him as a “Great
White Father” to hapless racial inferiors. Right-wingers, who point to
Roosevelt’s attacks on corporate trusts, his protection of the environment, and
his call (after he left the Republican Party and sought a third term
independently in 1912) for universal health insurance, have said he wasn’t a
“real” Republican and called for him to be sand-blasted off Mount Rushmore and
replaced by Ronald Reagan.
Even the Statue
of Liberty hasn’t been immune from the culture wars. A number of anti-immigrant
activists have called for the removal of Emma Lazarus’s poem from its pedestal
on the ground that the appeal to immigrants is out of date and the U.S. can no
longer afford to welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free.” It’s just another example of how the United States is not
immune to the battles we’ve seen in other countries over who gets to define the
national heritage and for what purposes.
Public statues
and monuments are symbols of what we value, but when they also represent real
people they can get caught up in historical arguments over who those people
were, what they accomplished and whether their net effect on the world was for
good or ill. Maybe the real genius of Frédéric Auguste Bertholdi was to make
his statue a mythical “Miss Liberty” rather than a real person — male or female
— whose legacy we could fight over in what seem to be our interminable culture
wars.
