by Jerome du Bois
Introducing the fourth post in a retrospectively-named occasional series: Sometimes A Public Art Notion, on the sidebar. Readers may not be aware of the new, expanded Glorious Golden Grand Avenue Vision, just below. Enjoy. And yes, I know this one should have gone up a couple of days ago. Technical problems. Let's just call July Independence Month.
[The key to this piece emerged in conversation with my wife, when I mentioned that the Liberty Pole, unlike the Liberty Tree, was rootless. "So is Phoenix," she said. "Nobody was living here not so long ago. They even had to change the course of a river to help create the city." That got us thinking . . .]
I first read about Liberty Poles in 1998, in Richard Rosenfeld's matchless magnum documentum American Aurora, whose main action takes place in Philadelphia, the US Capital, between 1798 and 1801. Because of lacunae in my self-education at the time, I didn't know this was the second incarnation of Liberty Poles, raised up in reaction to the Sedition Act, which the newspaper Philadelphia Aurora inadvertently helped to create by its insistent individual intransigence and dedication to the truth. (It is also a continuing inspiration for this blog.) Its motto, set below the image of a rising sun, was Surgo Ut Prosim --"I rise that I may be useful." Amen to that.
New Yorkers raised the first Liberty Poles thirty years earlier (1766-76), which I discovered near the beginning of another history I am now sampling in large chunks, more thematically than sequentially: David Hackett Fischer's lucid and encyclopedic Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History Of America's Founding Ideas. (We're political opposites, by the way.) In what follows I will discuss --quoting liberally from Dr. Fischer-- Boston's Liberty Tree, its effigy and detailed boot, and how the Tree relates to New York's Liberty Poles --with a very brief digression about the decline of imagination in political art.
Finally I'll describe a public art project for Phoenix for Independence Day and the whole following year: an updated, multi-media replica of the 90-foot Sixth New York Liberty Pole of 1770, to be realized at the northeast corner of Indian School Road and Central Avenue, at the southwest edge of Steele Park, Phoenix, Arizona, on July 4, 20??.
The Boston Liberty Tree was a large elm that belonged to Deacon Jacob Elliott, part of his grove along Orange Street. I'll have Dr. Fischer describe what happened around that tree on August 14, 1765:
In the half light of dawn, a passerby glanced at the largest of these trees and was amazed to see a body hanging from a branch. People began to gather around the tree. As the light improved, they discovered that the body was an effigy, marked with the initials A.O., which everyone took to be Andrew Oliver, a Boston merchant who had agreed to collect the new Stamp Tax that Parliament had levied on the colonies . . .
Beside the effigy was a big riding boot, which many recognized as a visual pun on the earl of Bute, a Scottish aristocrat who was thought to be the moving spirit behind the Stamp Tax. The boot was "stuffed with representation," according to one eyewitness. Climbing out of the boot-top was a grinning image of the Devil himself, with an evil gleam in his malevolent eye and the Stamp Act clutched in his sinister claw.
Stitched to the bottom of the boot was a bright green sole. Green had long been the color of liberty and freedom in English folklore, since the day of Robin Hood and his Green Men in the fourteenth century. Rural rebels in Kent and East Anglia wore sprigs of greenery in their caps during the sixteenth century. The first English Whigs (as friends of liberty and freedom were called) organized themselves as the Green Ribbon Club in the seventeenth century.
As the morning wore on, the crowd at Deacon Elliott's tree grew larger. Its size alarmed the governor, who sent for the lieutenant governor, who summoned the sheriff of Suffolk County, who ordered his deputies to cut down the effigy. They came running back to report they "could not do it without imminent danger to their lives."
There follows a very eventful day, to say the least, which ended when the men of Boston
marched on to Andrew Oliver's home, broke its windows, and burned the effigy in a bonfire made from the Stamp Office.
How economical! After that day, Deacon Elliott's elm became a gathering place and symbol of liberty and freedom for Bostonians, and was reproduced in many forms.
[Before we move on to New York, a brief digression on political symbolism in art: it has vanished, along with subtlety. As the last election season made clear, and as anti-Bush exhibitions still sprout here and there, it's obvious that direct sadistic pornography has taken the place of discourse. Ellipsis, displacement, irony, cleverness, confection . . . all gone bye bye.
I have another example, from America's middle period, so to speak, which I found, serendipitously, in another book I'm reading: Flag: An American Biography, by Marc Leepson. On page 232 he describes a 1969 antiwar poster by my favorite artist, Jasper Johns, who did this dumb thing:
The colors of the fifty-star flag in Johns' poster, titled "Moratorium," make a subtle antiwar statement. The stars and six stripes are black; seven stripes are done in a green camouflage pattern. The canton's field is painted orange. The word "Moratorium" is stenciled underneath.
"Johns' print successfully became a symbol of protest," the artist Deborah Wood wrote, "because he changed his approach. The image is immediately recognizable as a symbol for America, but there is obviously something wrong because the colors are distorted. A single word "Moratorium" requires no complex analysis."
No kidding, because there is none available. She's blowing smoke. Johns couldn't tell you why the canton was orange (Agent Orange? I think not), but everyone looking at that effigy and boot in 1766 knew what everthing referred to without the heavy-handedness of direct address. Nowadays people are so easily impressed with vagueness, or fame, like exhausted Romans barely able to lift their languid arms to point to something significant. The Loyal Nine of Boston and New York's Sons of Neptune kick these wankers' asses aesthetically, even now; and they weren't even "artists."]
Since "No self-respecting New Yorker was content to imitate a Yankee," New Yorkers' take on the Liberty Tree --the Liberty Pole-- was sui generis. It was the brainchild of four men, the Sons of Neptune: John Lamb, Joseph Allicocke, Isaac Sears, and Alexander MacDougall. Dr. Fischer describes them:
All were self-made men, humble in their origins and mixed in their ethnicity. John Lamb was a prosperous wine importer, the son of an English convict who had been transported to Virginia for burglary. Alexander MacDougall was a fiery Scottish immigrant who came to New York as a poor seaman, opened a secondhand slop shop on the waterfront, married a woman of means, and became a prosperous merchant. Joseph Allicocke was described as the son of "mulatto woman," an African American who worked as an employee of the British provision contractors in New York and became a merchant in his turn. Isaac Sears was a Connecticut Yankee, the son of an oysterman who followed his father's trade, became captain of a small sloop, married a tavernkeeper's daughter, and settled on the New York waterfront.
People sometimes have burdensome pasts. They overcome them. They rise above them, and they even rise above themselves. Why? Because they stand on the solid ground of liberty and freedom and mutual respect!
The Liberty Pole these self-made people (you forget their wives at your peril!) created was
a tall mast that rose high above the rooftops of their town and rigged it with stays and halyards. At its peak, New Yorkers hoisted "a large board fixed on a flag staff, with an inscription that read "George 3rd, Pitt-- and Liberty." Other elements would be added later: a flag with the cross of St. George as an emblem of loyalty, a gilded weathervane with the word LIBERTY in large letters, and a liberty cap on top of the pole.
This device was thought to be a new invention. Its novelty appeared in the fact that people did not know what to call it.
So they bandied about names, some of which I'll skip. At the end:
Seafaring men thought of it as a mast, which was the model for its construction, but landsmen began to call it the Liberty Pole. That simple name suited the blunt speechways of Manhattan. It quickly caught on.
Alert readers will recall my reference to the Sixth New York Liberty Pole. That's because the British kept cutting them down or blowing them up, so the designers and builders of these poles had to keep reinforcing them. When the fifth pole was cut down by the British, the ensuing violence ("sharpened sleigh-rungs") was so bloody it earned a name: The Battle of Golden Hill. The city fathers were aghast at the violence of their fellow-citizens, and refused another pole location on public city land.
But Isaac Sears bought an adjacent lot and exercised his private rights against public authority, in the spirit of New York. In defiance of the town fathers, the radical Whigs raised a new Liberty Pole, much larger than the others, and taller than any structure in town.
This is the piece I would like to see reproduced, with some additions and electronic embellishments.
Its lower part was a ship's mainmast sixty-eight feet long, so big that six horses were required to haul it through the streets. It was surmounted by a topmast of twenty-two feet and crowned by a gilded vane with the gleaming word LIBERTY. From halyards it flew a large flag, probably the British Red Duster, which the seamen used at sea, with the word LIBERTY added in large letters.
The massive base of this new mast was heavily armored with iron bars, studded with nails, and bound with metal hoops. Thousands of New Yorkers escorted it to the Fields with weapons in their hands. To the people of the town it became a sacred object, baptized by the blood of its defenders. This Liberty Pole stood for six years, until the Revolution.
Dr. Fischer points out important differences between the Liberty Trees and the Liberty Poles:
Like most political emblems, New York's Liberty Pole combined its central symbolism with other meanings. It was constructed in the manner of a ship's mast by maritime artisans who represented a social class and had a strong sense of class consciousness. The Liberty Pole came to be associated with that idea, always stronger in New York than other American towns from the seventeenth century to our own time.
Its origin also gave it another significance. Unlike the Liberty Tree, it was a human artifact. Its mast, spars, shrouds, stays, halyards, and blocks made it a human construction that was more mechanical and less organic than New England's favorite symbol.
Further, a Liberty Pole had no roots. It could be constructed anywhere on the spur of the moment and in many different sizes. Some Liberty Poles were bigger than the tallest building in old New York. Others were small enough to be carried by a man or even a child. The Liberty Pole became a versatile symbol of authonomy for an individual group, sect, class, party, guild, town, colony, or an entire country.
Even --or maybe especially-- a rootless city like Phoenix.
When I originally got the idea of reproducing Liberty Poles, I wanted to recreate about two dozen of them in their authentic historical locations around New York State and the New England states, hook them all up interactively with televisions, feeds, and satellite links --so that each location could channel every location-- and then live-feed and record the fireworks all at once. . .
But we can scale the idea down without losing impact. Set up the Liberty Pole in Steele Park: a real mast, a real topmast, with at least three custom-made flags flying, with all their gear and tackle and trim; the base complete with defensive nails and criss-cross grids of welded and riveted steel hoops. (Everything would be modular, including the buried counterweight, so that the Pole may be reassembled anywhere.) Floodlights all around. The great golden four-foot sign at the tip, LIBERTY on one side, FREEDOM on the other, a true weathervane pointing withersoever the wind may blow, but always toward glorious individual freedom and mutual respect in all directions. All of it topped by a twice-lifesize wooden Liberty Cap, painted bright red. And, around the base, a dozen large (damage-proof) televisions, each broadcasting live the fireworks (just the fireworks; no talking heads) from feeds at a dozen prominent locations around the Valley of the Sun on July 4, 20??.
Afterwards the fireworks feeds will be edited and rebroadcast into a half-hour show every night for the rest of the month, with sound, on a special screen built above the Arizona Lottery Billboard on the northwest corner of Indian School Road and Central Avenue. Across the street, the Liberty Pole will be emblazoned with light from newly-sunken base to golden forecastle. The twelve televisions surrounding the base of the Liberty Pole will be available for perusal 24/7, with choices on touch screens. Most will be pictorial collages of American ideas, with occasional onscreen written summaries. There will be nothing negative; no Abu Ghraib pantyheads, no police dogs attacking black men, no Wounded Knee whining.
Some ideas include:
-- A replay of the local July 4th fireworks;
-- A selection of fireworks displays nationally;
-- A pictorial survey of the number and variety of American flags, with narration;
-- A pictorial collage of film clips of the World Trade Center towers, up to but not including their destruction;
-- A pictorial collage called Smaller Faster Cheaper Better, showing the paradox of shrinking physical computer size with the expansion of computer power;
-- A pictorial collage of the American (strummed, not bowed) stringed instrument, from the African slave's drum which became the banjo, including the mandolin, acoustic and electric guitars, down to the nearly-air electronic guitars of today;
-- A pictorial collage of the use of bald eagles as symbols in American history;
-- A collage of American entrepreneurial and trade signs (as distinct from corporate advertising), from Colonial Times on down to our times;
-- Live feeds when appropriate, such as broadcasts of public meetings.
Many other ideas apply, and, as the Pole travels, it allows for local feeds. (Other city's leases will help recoup the costs for Phoenix.)
Picture it: a ship's mast rising in the desert, like the audacious triumph of an irresistible idea. From whatever direction you arrive at this busy crossroads, you'll easily be able to see from far off the Golden Words that crown that proud Liberty Pole.
Ah, Phoenix, can you not see how beautiful it could be?
Posted by Jerome at July 6, 2005 05:16 PM | TrackBack