Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, is a city with a lot of bronze monuments, not only political ones but also a fine portrayal of Sacajawea and her baby, a traditional one of Joan of Arc at the go-around near Laurelhurst and so on. This is because most of the early leaders in the city came from New England where Boston is filled with the same kind of statues on their commons. They were considered a sign of civilization, identity, and — truth be told — European-style entitlement. I'm mostly Scots.
My high school was Jefferson High School, then considered one of the best in the nation and then gradually becoming Black as N. Portland became Black after the Vanport Flood destroyed the housing Kaiser had built when he recruited ship-builders from the rural South. When I was there ’53 to ’57, we were about one-fifth Black. At a reunion later, a Black woman made a scathing accusation about how she was treated and how she was excluded from the “sororities” who aped colleges. No one knew what to say. A few individual men had gone the route of science or military and become outstanding. One was a dancer who succeeded in Hollywood. The school is now a “magnet” school that draws the student body from all over because of specialized programs like pre-med or arts.
Our high school rival was Grant, with some upscale neighborhoods. They would come over and paint the statue of Thomas Jefferson in their school colors, but no one in their wildest dreams thought of tearing it off its plinth. I assume their school was named for Ulysses Grant, the 18th President of the United States and the leader of the Union Army that won the Civil War. I’m not aware of any statue to paint or pull down, though we must have retaliated somehow. I pulled them up on Google and they seem to use the rainbow as their symbol.
The surprising thing about pulling down Jefferson is that it was not done by Black Lives Matter to make a point about slavery, but was an almost random act by white people looking for some kind of excitement and importance. One man who participated was not from Portland, but rather had been hanging out on the beach, living on unemployment. He just happened to drive by and decide to help.
When I was a kid and the South Dakota relatives came to visit, we took them on a tour of the statues. So when Bob Scriver came for our wedding, my mother took him on the tour. We went by the elk in the middle of the street downtown and he was critical of the statue itself, which which he thought was anatomically inaccurate. The sculptor must have been working from pictures — he’d probably never seen a real elk. I’ve forgotten who he was.
The emplacement itself is a generous fountain designed for thirsty horses and dogs, a part of the Black Beauty impulse when there really were horses and dogs in the downtown streets. More recently the mounted PPD officers would pause there. I’m not sure there was still water at the time that recently young people wrapped the elk in the American flag, dragged it down and set it on fire.
These seem to be misguided, incoherent, and random acts, but maybe not. They turned out to be an excuse for Trump to take one of his revenges, using one of the few military assets directly controlled by the Executive Branch that was meant to be a security force to protect federal buildings. He evidently has sent men in camo driving rented vehicles, all without emblems or ID, to seize people in the streets, put bags over their heads, and drag them off to federal buildings to be terrorized with questions. Then release them, traumatized, to tell the story. Another strategy off late-night TV movies.
Oregon, like Montana, is really two states, divided by mountains. The east side is dry, economically based on ranches of wheat or beef. The west side is either the artistic coast of fishermen (divided by another mountain range) or the lush Willamette Valley. The cultures in each ecosystem are quite different from each other but also respond to trouble in quite different ways. The east side does not shrink from guns. The Valley is gentler, more urban, and more inclined to sue. The coast may be a playground in some ways but the whites there in the early days were the most vicious in the ways they treated the indigenous people, so time can change the culture.
I spent the Sixties focused on bronze casting and preserving images of the interface between the original people and the first whites who came. Bob Scriver was divided between both sides. One neighbor said he was more “Indian” than the real people, because he was so in love with the 19th century. This time of year to start the day at first light we took a horseback ride across the prairie. One would expect that I would be devastated by the treatment of familiar statues. I'm glad my parents never saw such a thing.
I have a novel about a fabulous and invaluable Chinese bowl in a museum and a woman curator’s effort to protect it. The title of the novel is “The Bowl Is Already Broken.” The idea is that as soon as something is made, it is bound to be eventually destroyed, like a living being whom we know will die as soon as it’s born. Some people are so enraged and opposed to this idea that they claim they will come back to life somewhere else, but in the meantime they will prevent change. What the Third World and the indigenous peoples of the planet have to tell us is that we can’t even persist forever as a culture or as a species.
It’s a compliment to the monuments that they are seen as icons that can be destroyed, because they illustrate this fact. But those who are young and think they will live forever are only bowls that will be broken. And, of course, some were too cracked to be useful anyway.
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