Who deserves a statue? Monuments reflect community values — for better or worse
We love heroes.
It’s a human impulse to immortalize something solid in a changing world. We search for an embodiment of abstract ideals and put them on a pedestal.
Lady Liberty stands in New York Harbor, while Abraham Lincoln sits in Washington, D.C.
Monuments can be a personification of an era’s admired virtues, tangible indicators of economic and political power. And sometimes the message being sent by the monument isn’t on the plaque.
Currently, the back stories of monuments are being reexamined.
Some have been torn down. Others have been voluntarily removed, such as the Father Junipero Serra statue at Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.
A proposal to install a statue of President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt in a San Luis Obispo public park is on hold after meeting with controversy.
Throughout the South, statues of Confederate generals have become a flashpoint. Many have racist undertones.
For example, there are few statues of Confederate General James Longstreet, arguably the second or third most important Confederate military leader.
If heritage, culture and history were the primary motivations for monuments, why was he left uncast in bronze?
Longstreet does not fit the mythology of the Lost Cause.
A few years after the Confederates lost, Longstreet endorsed former Union general Ulysses S. Grant for president rather than the self-professed “white man’s candidate,” Horatio Seymour.
Later at personal risk to himself, Longstreet defended a newly elected Republican governor against a racist vigilante mob in New Orleans.
One of the few Longstreet statues is located in the north, at the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. That statue doesn’t even have a pedestal.
By contrast, there are plenty of statues in the South of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader, Confederate Army general and founding grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
A fiberglass statue of Forrest installed in 1998 on private land in Tennessee next to a freeway has been called hideous. The statue’s patron defended James Earl Ray, the convicted murderer of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The move to glorify men who took up arms against the United States of America was controversial from the start and began soon after the Confederacy lost the Civil War.
The reactionary process often accelerated when civil rights movements were active.
It was a blunt message from racists to those who advocated voting rights for former slaves. Often the monuments were placed in public squares within sight of the halls of government.
Five years after various Confederate generals had surrendered across the South, the former wartime governor of Virginia proposed a memorial to Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Former Gov. John Letcher was considered a mainstream moderate of his time. Letcher called for donations to make a bronze of the rebel general who died during the war, calling him a “Christian hero and soldier.”
On May 28, 1870, San Luis Obispo Tribune editor Walter Murray ridiculed the move to glorify a general who had been responsible thousands of Union deaths.
“And yet this Christian hero at the outset of the war proposed to the Confederate Congress not to give quarter to prisoners!” Murray wrote. There’s Christianity! ‘There’s richness.’ ”
Murray would be pleased that a statue of Jackson was recently removed from the Virginia state capitol of Richmond.
Murray was pro-Union and progressive on rights for freedmen, but he was largely silent on the issue of women’s right to vote and he was a vocal critic of Chinese immigration to the United States.
On the same Tribune page on which he denounced Jackson, Murray wrote, “During this month an aggregate number of 1832 Chinese immigrants have arrived in San Francisco. What are we drifting to?”
Murray authored more shameful comments on the subject as a state assemblyman in the 1850s.
The first newspaper editors in San Luis Obispo were often anti-Chinese though they were occasionally happy to accept advertising from pioneer businessman and labor contractor Ah Louis.
Chinese labor crews helped build two railroads in San Luis Obispo County, the Southern Pacific and the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railway
The contribution was recognized with a bronze monument about 18 years ago.
Maude Wilson wrote this story, published on July 20, 2002.
Chinese who laid the rails depicted
A forthcoming sculpture pays tribute to them
A sculpture of two Chinese-American railroad workers will be installed in the center of the Osos Street turnaround in San Luis Obispo’s Railroad Square next month.
The sculpture, designed by Elizabeth MacQueen, depicts two Chinese-American men working on a section of railroad track.
MacQueen is the designer of the bronze sculpture of Puck, the character from Shakespeare’s “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” in San Luis Obispo’s Downtown Centre.
In the works since at least 1994, the project received unanimous approval from the Architectural Review Commission on Monday. The target date for completion is Aug. 20.
According to Jeff Hook, associate planner for the city, the new sculpture is a monument to the Chinese-Americans who helped build the railroad in San Luis Obispo and the entire West.
“It’s a tribute to bringing the railroad to this area,” Hook said. “Along with economic opportunity.”
The ARC originally granted approval for this public art project in March 1995, and at that time the City Council approved funding of $50,000. However, after a three-year period, ARC approval lapsed, which required that the application be resubmitted for approval. That was done recently.
Marco Rizzo, general manager of Cafe Roma, has helped to raise $75,000 in private funds to assure completion of the project. Today, the sculpture is nearly complete and ready to be installed.
Sandy Lydon, author of “Chinese Gold,” wrote that although many Chinese remain unnamed or unrecognized, their presence has left its mark on the region. Their story is entwined with that of California’s development.
“If you held each page to the light, you can make out a faint pattern. The longer you look, the stronger the pattern becomes,” Lydon wrote. “The Chinese are in the very paper. They are the watermark.”
Paula Carr, vice chairwoman of the Cultural Heritage Committee, said that the monument will prompt people to think about the role of the Chinese in the history of this area.
Lisa Rawlinson, proprietor of WineGuy, has supported the project since 1995.
“I think it’s great that the area will be a center for foot traffic,” Rawlinson said. “It will bring excitement about the history of this area.”
In 1994, MacQueen and applicant Rizzo held a public reception to get feedback from the community on which image to display in the turnaround. Aside from the Chinese-American railroad worker image, MacQueen had a design of a train conductor holding a little girl’s hand.
Residents chose the railroad worker image, but they didn’t agree that its original name, “Gandy Dancers,” was an appropriate description of the workers. So the Chinese community was asked to find a better name.
The term gandy dancer developed as a description of the movements of railroad workers as they wielded tools to lay the rails and ties.
The community later chose the name “Iron Road Pioneers,” which is the name that stuck.
Correction: A Photos from the Vault column about the filming of “The Junkman” contained incorrect captions. Captions on photos should have said the filming was on Union Road. The error has been corrected.
