Fallen Idols

Twelve Statues That Made History

Alex von Tunzelmann

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780063081673
• eBook ISBN: 9780063081697
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

A timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments that explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past.
An  Economist Best Book of the Year
In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Winston Churchill's monument in London was daubed with the word "racist." As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense.
But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made.
Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of "virtuous" individuals, usually "Great Men"—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But  Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?

1

A Revolutionary Beginning

King George III

Location: Province of New York

Put up: 1770

Pulled down: 1776

On July 4, 2020, during the great wave of iconoclasm, President Donald Trump vowed: “We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms.”¹ Yet there is little that is more fundamentally American than an angry mob tearing down a statue.

The statue in question was of George III, king of Great Britain and Ireland. At the time it went up in 1770, a swathe of the East Coast of North America was under British control as the Thirteen Colonies. The settler population of these colonies had grown enormously in the preceding century and a half, pushing Native Americans out. Increasingly, the colonies became frustrated with British rule, especially with questions of taxation and control. They had no representation in the British parliament but could be subjected to laws and taxes in which they had no say.

The 1765 Stamp Act—a tax on printed materials—was a prime example of these unpopular taxes. When it was repealed in 1768, the General Assembly of the Colony of New York commissioned a statue of George III to celebrate. The statue was made by the British artist Joseph Wilton, sculptor to the king. Wilton was already at work on an equestrian statue of George III, commissioned by the king’s aunt, Princess Amelia, for Berkeley Square in London. He was asked to produce one for New York too: it was probably identical, cast in the same mold.²

Wilton worked in the classical style, and his statue was modeled on the ancient figure of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. George III was shown in Roman dress, crowned in laurel leaves, in the hope that the public would make the link with the ancient philosopher-emperor. Marcus Aurelius was revered for his learning, moral character, and strong sense of public duty: qualities that perhaps fewer people saw in George III.³ Marcus Aurelius’s statue was in bronze, while Wilton cast George III in lead, then clad the statue in gilt. Any symbolism in the material was probably not intended, but there it is anyway: all that glitters is not gold. In this case, behind the gleam was a dead weight.

Though King George’s statue appeared to be a fine tribute, it was commissioned as an afterthought. The General Assembly of the Colony of New York’s first choice had been to put up a statue of William Pitt the Elder, the British politician widely credited with driving the repeal of the Stamp Act. Pitt’s statue was also commissioned from Joseph Wilton, in marble. It was destined for pride of place at the intersection of Wall Street and William Street, then right in the center of New York City. Yet Pitt became prime minister shortly after the Stamp Act was repealed, and there was concern in the General Assembly that to put up a statue of the king’s minister when there was no statue of the king himself would be insulting—so they decided that they had better have one of those as well.⁴ King George’s statue, cast rather than carved, was cheaper than Pitt’s. It would be set up in the less prominent location of Bowling Green.

The statue was dedicated on August 16, 1770, to the sound of a thirty-two-gun cannonade. It was raised to a height of eighteen feet on a pedestal to protect it from vandals. This did not work. In 1771, a protective fence had to be built around it, and, in 1773, an anti-desecration law was passed to punish those who defaced the king’s statue.⁵

These interventions tend to suggest that American patriots had been attacking George III’s statue from more or less the moment it went up. Yet it would take something really big to spark pulling the statue down entirely: a declaration of independence.

General George Washington arrived in New York City on April 13, 1776 and set up his headquarters right by Bowling Green on lower Broadway, next to the Battery—with George III’s statue outside his front door. Washington had visited the city only twice before. His wife, Martha, arrived four days later. They moved into a mansion in Lispenard’s Meadows: then a delightful countryside location with views across the Hudson River, now the busy intersection of Varick Street and Charlton Street. War with the British was fast approaching, and Washington spent much of the spring and summer fortifying New York.

Congress approved the final text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Two days later, John Hancock sent a copy to Washington, asking the general to read it aloud to his army in New York. Washington received the broadside on July 8. He gathered his troops at the common (now City Hall Park) the following evening at 6 p.m. There, the Declaration was read out in front of each brigade. It detailed at length George III’s injuries to the American colonists, and concluded: “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This was received with delight by the men, who responded with “three huzzas.”⁶

With the king identified as the enemy of the revolution, the logical thing to do would be to find him and pull him off his throne. Regrettably, he was around 3,500 miles away in England. The regicide would have to be symbolic. An excited crowd headed down Broadway to George III’s statue. The crowd included perhaps forty or so soldiers (and sailors) led by Captain Oliver Brown, as well as the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary organization that had been responsible for the anti-tax protest known as the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Accounts differ as to how many civilian New Yorkers joined in or spectated. The protesters climbed the fence, attached ropes to the statue, and pulled it off its plinth.⁷

Later paintings and engravings of the incident added glamorous details. The statue was often incorrectly depicted as showing George III in court dress, with robe and crown, rather than in Roman attire. Some depictions even forgot the horse and imagined his statue as a standing figure. The scene was set in front of a pretty lilac-hued dusk, dramatic sunset, or a backdrop of bonfire smoke. Elegant ladies were shown watching in shock; small children and dogs ran around in excitement; in some versions, African American figures and even a Native American family can be seen. All this was artistic license. We know little about who was in Bowling Green, who led and who followed, or the order of events. We do know that, at the end of it, the king’s statue lay on the ground, in pieces. We also know that it was not the only British symbol attacked that night. British coats of arms were ripped from the walls of the council chamber, courts, and churches. Paintings of George III were smashed and burned.

General Washington himself was not pleased about the statue being toppled. “Tho the General doubts not the persons, who pulled down and mutilated the Statue, in the Broadway, last night, were actuated by Zeal in the public cause,” he wrote in his orders the following day, “yet it has so much the appearance of riot and want of order, in the Army, that he disapproves the manner, and directs that in future these things shall be avoided by the Soldiery, and left to be executed by proper authority.”⁸

Of course, revolutions are not always carried out with perfect decorum, no matter how much their commanders might wish it—and a revolution was now happening in New York.

After the fall, George III’s statue was beheaded. The rest of its lead was broken into chunks. Captain Brown’s men loaded it on to wagons and took it to the harbor. It was shipped on a schooner to Connecticut, where it would be melted down and turned into 42,088 musket balls, to be used against the British in the War of Independence. The king’s “Statue here has been pulled down to make Musket Ball of, so that his Troops will probably have melted Majesty fired at them,” wrote postmaster Ebenezer Hazard on July 12.⁹

Special humiliations were reserved for George III’s severed head. John Montresor was a loyal British captain in New York at the time. He wrote that he heard that the rebels “had cut the nose off, clipt the laurels that were wreathed round his head, and drove a musket Bullet part of the way through his Head, and otherwise disfigured it.” The head was carried off to Moore’s Tavern, adjoining Fort Washington, where the rebels hoped to impale it on a spike, like that of a traitor. Before that could happen, Montresor sent a man to steal it from the tavern and bury it. Later, he dug it up. “I rewarded the men, and sent the head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed country.”¹⁰

The head arrived at Lord Townshend’s house in Portman Square, London, in November 1777. The Townshends were entertaining Thomas Hutchinson, the former governor of Massachusetts. “Lady Townshend asked me if I had a mind to see an instance of American loyalty? and going to the sopha, uncovered a large gilt head, which at once appeared to be that of the King, which it seems the rebels at N. York, after the Declaration of Independence, cut off from the statue which had been erected there,” Hutchinson wrote. “The nose is wounded and defaced, but the gilding remains fair; and as it was well executed, it retains a striking likeness.”¹¹

So the British had their head back; the Americans had their musket balls. Even so, much of the statue was unaccounted for. It reportedly weighed two tons, or 4,000 pounds. One pound of lead could make twenty musket balls. That meant around half the lead had gone astray. Some may have been taken as souvenirs by the patriots who pulled it down, or looted by opportunists. Other parts were stolen by loyalists, either from Bowling Green or in Connecticut. Gradually, over the years, bits began to turn up—an arm, part of the saddle, a length of cloak. The tail of the king’s horse is now in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. In 1991, a resident of Wilton, Connecticut, who lived in a house that had once been inhabited by a loyalist, dug up their garden and found the king’s left hand, wrist, and forearm. This piece was auctioned in 2019 for $207,000.¹² Even adding in the surviving pieces that are known to the musket-ball total, though, there is still a lot of statue unaccounted for. Should you live in a house with a revolutionary history, it may be worth taking a look in your yard.

In a setback for the American revolutionaries, British forces captured New York City in September 1776. They could not put the king’s statue back up, of course: as any child knows, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. Instead, they wreaked vengeance on another. Their target was Joseph Wilton’s white marble statue of William Pitt, friend to the colonists, which stood on Wall Street. Soon after they occupied the city, British forces beheaded it and ripped off its arms. The mutilated remains of Pitt’s statue were removed in 1788, after the Americans had won the Revolutionary War, and are now in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.¹³

George III’s empty plinth remained in Bowling Green until 1818, when it was broken up and the materials dumped for scrap. The removal of the statue had not caused much distress among New York patriots, but the removal of the plinth—itself now a monument to American revolutionary spirit—did. “What was there odious in this simple memorial of a people’s valour and devotion?” wrote one distressed correspondent to the Evening Post. “Why was it left untouched by hands that destroyed the statue of a king, under circumstances that swell the breath of an American with the proudest emotions? . . . I cannot but lament this vestige, however obscure, thus removed forever from our view.”¹⁴ To this individual, removing the statue had made history—but removing the empty plinth erased it.

And what of Wilton’s statue of George III in London? It would not survive long either. This time, it was not politics that brought it down. George III had been popular at some points, despite losing the American colonies and suffering long bouts of physical and mental incapacity. He died in 1820. His statue in Berkeley Square still stood, but had fared poorly in the London climate. It turned out that lead was not a good material for statues. The horse’s legs began to buckle, and the body of the statue slowly sank into its own plinth. In 1827, his deflated majesty was removed, and would ultimately be replaced with a pump house. A new and more durable equestrian statue of George III in bronze went up on Cockspur Street nine years later, and is still there today.

In the run-up to the American Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century, images of American revolutionary heroes were in vogue. The toppling of George III’s statue became a popular subject. The art historian Arthur S. Marks wrote that these paintings were unusual for not including a singular hero: George Washington, as we have seen, was not involved in the statue toppling. “To the contrary, if anything, it may be said that the action in these works is focussed on a traditional anti-hero, the mob.”¹⁵

These images of the mob as a manifestation of American heroism bore striking similarities to those of Black Lives Matter protesters pulling down statues in 2020. When that happened, two famous paintings of the pulling down of George III’s statue were turned into memes and circulated on social media. William Walcutt’s 1857 version was overlaid with text that reads: “July 9, 1776: After hearing a reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, New Yorkers ‘Destroy History’ by toppling a statue of King George III. And that’s why no one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: The Making of History
• 1. A Revolutionary Beginning: King George III
• 2. From Prince to Pariah: William, Duke of Cumberland
• 3. The Cult Leader: Joseph Stalin
• 4. Imposing Erections: Rafael Trujillo
• 5. The Great White Elephant: King George V
• 6. “The Horror! The Horror!”: King Leopold II
• 7. Lying in State: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
• 8. “The Desert of the Real”: Saddam Hussein
• 9. Colossus: Cecil Rhodes
• 10. Dedicated to a Lost Cause: Robert E. Lee
• 11. Making a Splash: Edward Colston
• 12. American Idol: George Washington
• Conclusion: Making Our Own History
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Alex von Tunzelmann
• Copyright
• About the Publisher