The Corn Latitudes

A school-sponsored visit to the statehouse is a ritual that has been enjoyed by millions of Illinois schoolchildren over the years, usually because it means a day out of school and the chance to lark about on a bus for hours. The education in state government thus acquired has had no marked effects on civic commitment; voter turnout in Illinois, for example,  is as low as it is most other states its type. Still, the capitol’s preposterous grandeur never fails to make an impression of one kind or another, and is worth a visit just for that.

 

Unfortunately, the State of Illinois has never made visitors particularly welcome to the capitol complex in Springfield. It is a working capital, and tourist amenities are lacking and visitor parking is hard to find, in spite of the acres of under-used state-owned parking lots that blight the landscape thereabouts. The Armory and the Stratton building suffer in dignified decay, with no hope of rescue or replacement any time soon, and the three great halls in the old Centennial Building still cry out to be restored and put to some better uses.

 

Nonetheless, a visit to that part of Springfield is more rewarding today than it was for years. The Illinois State Museum has survived its reckless shutdown in good shape, at least physically. The capitol building has been spectacularly revealed by restoration, as has the Supreme Court building, and the executive mansion and grounds have undergone a major renovation.

 

Please note that some of these remarks originated in columns for Illinois Times, or later migrated into columns when the material became orphaned by its lack of a publisher.

​

See also Politics & government: The capitol complex.

 

The new, then old, then new old state capitol 

​

What is now known as the Old State Capitol was Illinois’s statehouse from 1839 to 1876. Its cornerstone was laid in July 1837, five months after legislators voted to move the state capital to Springfield. Employees began moving into the partially finished building two years later, but political squabbles and money troubles, delayed the building's completion until 1854. While the carpenters hammered away, legislators convened in local churches—an experience that had no discernible effect on the virtue of the lawmakers.

 

The building was designed by Springfield architect John Rague in the Greek Revival style then popular. The result offered grace, balance, and symmetry rather than monumentality. Original plans called for it to made of brick, but after construction began it was decided to use buff-colored limestone from a local quarry—a happy improvement. The building enjoyed a general repute for a time as the most imposing state capitol west of the Alleghenies.

 

The Old State Capitol made an astonishing addition to the skyline of a town that only a few years earlier had boasted that it had frame houses as well as log ones. It was as startling a departure in scale from the rest of the town as the present statehouse was to be 40 years later. In addition to both houses of the General Assembly and the Illinois Supreme Court, the capitol had rooms for the state's five elected chief executive officers and their staffs.

 

Lincoln spent much time in the building. He tried more than 200 cases before the Illinois Supreme Court. He made use of the state court’s law library. (Friends recalled that he especially enjoyed the story-swapping and game-playing that took place in the clubby atmosphere of the court library and clerk's office.) He delivered his famous "House Divided" speech ("I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free") in Representatives Hall in 1858 at the start of his campaign for the U.S. Senate. Presidential candidate Lincoln received well-wishers and favor-seekers—rather more of the latter than the former—in the second-floor Governor's reception room. (That room has since been recreated from a contemporary woodcut showing the President-elect greeting his visitors.) Lincoln paid his final visit to the Old State Capitol in 1865 when his body lay in Representatives Hall, where 75,000 mourners paid their last respects.

 

Lincoln of course was not the only dignitary associated with the building. To a whole generation of Illinois political leaders, the capitol was as familiar a place as their parlors. Stephen A. Douglas was at home there, as his Democrats controlled state offices for most of the period the building was used. The old statehouse also has a macabre association; it was from the capitol grounds, in 1846, that the Donner party (inevitably described as “ill-fated”) embarked for California, most of them to encounter death by starvation in the snows of the Sierra Nevada.

 

As Illinois boomed, state government boomed with it, and the once-huge new statehouse soon was bursting at the seams. The state voted to build a new capitol, a really big one this time, six blocks away. The now-old capitol was sold to Sangamon County for use as a courthouse. Within twenty years the county government also outgrew the building, and by the 1890s some county officials were arguing the need to tear it down and replace it. In the end, however, the county was persuaded to find its needed space by raising the old building on jacks and installing a new first floor beneath it. The lifting of the building was an engineering marvel, if an architectural travesty that destroyed the proportions of Rague’s design.

 

In that enlarged form the Old State Capitol served Sangamon County for another sixty years. By the 1950s, even the enlarged capitol-cum-courthouse was too small. While the years had rendered it outmoded as office space, the building in that time had acquired new importance as an historic shrine. In 1961 Sangamon County sold it back to the state so the latter could restore it. The courthouse square was excavated for make room for an underground parking garage and a subterranean home for the Illinois State Historical Library. The original stone façade was dismantled, the pieces carefully numbered and stored, and later reinstalled atop a new frame. The original interior had been destroyed during the 1899–1901 renovation, but while the interior of the reconstructed building was new, the space was old, as the rooms fit the original floor plan.

 

The result is a building that looks like the one that Lincoln saw that enfolds the same space he occupied, but not, weirdly, the building he used. Because the structure is not itself  historic, the rooms can actually be used, with the result that the new/old building matches the function of its original too. Just as schoolhouses in frontier villages doubled as churches and meeting halls, so did parts of the Old State Capitol host concerts, dances, levees, and civic affairs, as well as political rallies and conventions. Today its doppelganger is again a venue for community events, being available (for a fee) for weddings, receptions, and other events for which the Elks Club or the American Legion hall is not quite special enough.

 

 The new, now old state capitol

 

Once Illinois’s 1839 capitol was abandoned, Springfield no longer had an automatic claim to be the state’s political capital. A new statehouse could have been built anywhere, and Peoria, Chicago, and Decatur were among the cities that tried to snatch the prize from Springfield. Springfield leaders were alert to the danger, however, and offered as an inducement an attractive site for a new capitol in the form of a large block of land west of downtown that was originally purchased in the hope that Lincoln would be buried there. Sangamon County also offered to purchase Rague's old state capitol for use as its courthouse—the last time that body of government showed much interest in recycling—which lowered the cost of the project to state taxpayers. Thus persuaded, the state chose Springfield as the state capital a second time.

 

Illinois’s current capitol is not the historic shrine that its predecessor is. Lincoln never set foot in it, and none of Illinois’s great political debates were held here. No leader has been assassinated here, although plenty of careers have died there. The statehouse is surprising somnolent, save for the final weeks of a legislative session, when there usually too much going on for a visitor to make sense of.

 

To be sure, the building has seen its shares of real news. In 1933, two hundred Progressive Miners union members stormed the Statehouse; expelled from the gallery of the House, they marched on the governor’s office where they indulged in minor vandalism before the governor ordered the state police to evict them, which they did, enthusiastically. During the Equal Rights Amendment “debate” in the 1970s, demonstrators threw pig blood onto the floor of the building’s rotunda. But these days politics is more decorous, and the statehouse—a usage preferred if only because it avoids the perennial confusion about whether “capitol” has one “a” or two—serves mainly as an astonishingly expensive stage set. Interest groups and candidates use it as a backdrop for photo ops, and media use it as a scene-setter for state news reports.

 

Cost and construction

 

In some ways, the most interesting history attached to the building is the story of its own construction. The customary turning of the symbolic shovelful of earth to mark the official start of construction was not considered enough of a groundbreaking for a building of such a scale, so the job was done instead with a plow, as dignitaries turned a furrow outlining the foundation. Newspapers reported that no speeches were made on the occasion—perhaps the dignitaries were out of breath from their exertions with the plow—and a local newspaper reported that “the whole operation was performed in a sensible and business-like manner.”

 

Those are not words usually used to describe a state operation, and “sSensible and businesslike” certainly do not describe what happened afterwards. The new statehouse seemed to take forever to be built. It was not finished when the General Assembly moved into the building in 1876, eight years after it was begun. Construction continued on and off for twenty years in fact, as money as made available for it.

 

The cost overruns became a scandal. In 1877 and again in 1882, voters refused an approval of appro­priations to complete the building, and in the 1870s critics even mounted an effort to abandon it and move the capital to a different city. The sheer size of the building was a factor in its cost, as was suspected theft and design about-faces. The building’s “front door” facing Second Street originally featured a massive staircase of 37 marble steps that carried visitors to a main entrance on the second floor; after 17 years the stairs were ripped out, and the original “basement” converted to the new ground-level entry hall, with the former entry hall on the second floor converted into offices for the governor.

  

Whatever its other qualities, the building certainly was imposing. Poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald grew up a few steps from the statehouse. Of it he wrote:

 

It tow­ered and bulked and cut off the winter sunset, the sheer cliff of it going aloft in arches and verticals in one great pile . . . . “No castles, no cathedrals, and no kings,” wrote Emerson of America in 1833, “Land of the forest . . .“ Well, here was our castle and our cathedral . . . 

 

Visitors are told that at 785 feet the edifice is 74 feet taller than the U.S. capitol (although the fact that the Illinois building is smaller in every other way is mentioned less often). Its central space is acoustically magnificent at least; once on a visit to his friend, then-governor Henry Horner, Carl Sandburg bellowed in the rotunda of the statehouse to hear how his voice would echo under the huge dome.

 

The competition for the capitol’s design was won by the Chicago-based architectural firm of J. C. Cochrane and George Garnsey. (A $3,000 prize had been offered for the best architectural plans; the winner revealed later that he had spent $2,700 of the $3,000 bribing the legislative commis­sioners making the award.) Speaking of his firm’s design, Cochrane wrote that he had discarded “all unnecessary and useless ornament” such as the peristyle, or ring of columns of the sort that surrounds the dome of the U.S. capitol and London’s St. Paul cathedral.

 

Pared-down Cochrane’s design may have been by then-current standards but to more recent tastes the statehouse seems heavy, vulgar, and ostentatious. The north and east wings, for instances, are faced with those massive porches—loggia, columns, roofs consisting of classical architrave and pediment. (The building’s “back doors,” on the south and west wings, remain unadorned, and visitors can see there how the pre-porch wings looked.)

​

Impressive perhaps, but few have dared to call the building beautiful. The word “eclectic” often is used to describe its architectural style, which is a bit like calling Illinois politicians pragmatic. The building is the visual equivalent of the cliché-ridden Labor Day picnic speech. The Old State Capitol, four blocks away, looks like a prim spinster to its successor’s hooker; the older building has a dignity that the newer building utterly lacks.

 

In a famous poem, Vachel Lindsay (who could see the building’s dome from his house on Fifth and Edwards) likened it to “A speck, a hive, a football,/A captive balloon!” In middle-age, Robert Fitzgerald recalled that the architect had modeled the porches that adorn the east and north facades on the temple of Jupiter Stator in Rome. (Considering the antics that have gone on in the statehouse, Rome’s Coliseum might have been a more apt model.) The result was a building that struck Fitzgerald—and millions of others—as “impure and ungainly.”

 

Whatever its failure as art, the building makes the damnedest bird roost ever built. The statehouse’s myriad ledges, nooks, and crannies have attracted flocking birds on and off for decades. In 1885, a Secretary of State is said to have hunted pigeons from the roof of the State House with a shotgun—a perk of office that his successors have surrendered in favor of noise-making cannons and laser beams.

 

Government agencies seem bound by a version of Parkinson’s Law, in that bureaucracies expand to fill the space available for them. The capitol is huge but not rich in usable space, and was soon filled to overflowing. (In the not-distant past, filing cabi­nets used to adorn the remoter corridors.) In time, many agencies originally housed in the statehouse decamped for buildings of their own that were more appropriate to their needs. Today, apart from providing offices of the requisite majesty for such constitutionally ordained elected officials as the comptroller, the building is devoted to the legislature. The two houses of the General Assembly are here, as are hearing rooms and offices for related staff, bureaus, and commissions.

 

Transforming such a pile into modern office space has taxed the ingenuity of the state's architects and the patience of its taxpayers. Uncounted millions have been spent over the years to equip the statehouse with air conditioning and computer lines and electricity and telephones. Several new buildings could have been built for what has been spent merely keeping this one functional. It would be cheaper to maintain it as the museum that in many ways it is, but no one talks seriously about that alternative.

 

Using the statehouse as an office building detracts from the ambiance of the building as well as the efficiency of the state operations. The building is the symbolic people’s palace, built to house what Fitzgerald called “the elect of Illinois and beyond that to represent the dignity of the Republic, heir to all ages and builders.” The spectacle of the statehouse lends what little majesty attaches to several minor state offices and dignity to the major ones, and their holders are loath to give up either.

 

Thus the present statehouse is not likely to be abandoned. Unlike its predecessors, which were fairly modest buildings, the 1876 statehouse is just too big, and has cost too much money for the state to abandon it. Nor could the state possibly build a replacement that could come close to matching it in scale, opulence, or craftsmanship. Not that many would want to try. The shadow of the James R. Thompson Center—a building that, like the 1876 capitol, was criticized for costing too much, and for being garish and impractical—falls as far south as Springfield, where it darkens hopes that the state might commission a new capitol from a cutting-edge architect.

 

 

White elephant

 

When construction of the statehouse began in 1868, a cornerstone was engraved and filled with a copper box crammed with the usual souvenirs. But the massive stone was found to be cracked, so workmen removed it, transferred its copper box of mementos to a new cornerstone, and disposed of the old one. That was no easy job, as the cornerstone wasn’t much smaller than a small car. Rather than stand the expense of hauling it away, the workmen followed the practice of construction crews everywhere and buried what Paul Angle called this “cal­careous white elephant” where it lay, on the statehouse lawn.

 

The interment was forgotten, and it was later assumed that the original cornerstone had been stolen or destroyed. In 1885, workmen digging a foundation for the new, stair-less east entrance found the original stone. It being still every bit as large as it was in 1868, it was not removed but re-interred on the spot. In time its presence was forgotten again, record-keeping never having been a forte of statehouse administrators. In 1944, repairmen found the original cornerstone a second time; this time it was removed and put on display (where is still stands) on the northeast lawn, presumably so that officials would not forget where it was a third time.  

 

Among the mementos thought to be still entombed in the replacement cornerstone in the northeast corner of the building were a set of original construction plans for the building. In 1966 officials searching for the original plans of the capitol—statehouse officials seem to have been forever losing things—thought to look in the time capsule. The cornerstone was opened and the box removed; the plans, alas, were not there; the cornerstone bears a scar of the operation that can be seen today. [See also God Lets Bob Ingersoll Off.]

 

The people’s art museum

 

In the opulence and variety of its decoration at least, the statehouse really is Illinois’s civic cathedral. Describing the many kinds of stone used in it or the details of its miles of carved friezes and cornices is as exhausting to the guidebook author as looking at it often proves for the tourist, and we will here dispense with it.

 

The building’s statuary does deserve mention. Plaster statues of Lincoln, Douglas, and Gov. John Wood originally lined the second-floor hallways; today these and five other state government notables stand in alcoves set into the second-floor rotunda. The 1895 statue that dominates the rotunda’s first floor, "Illinois Welcoming the World," is a bronze version of a work that was first displayed in the Illinois Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. As sculpted by Julia M. Bracken, the face and figure of what is popularly known as Miss Illinois are those of turn-of-the-20th -century stage star (and paramour of Diamond Jim Brady) Lillian Russell, star of such hit shows as “Whirl-I-Gig,” “Hoity-Toity,” and “Woop-Dee-Doo.”

 

Paintings so abound in the statehouse that, measured by the square footage of painted surface, the Illinois capitol ranks as one of Illinois’s biggest art museums. Everywhere there are murals, portraits, and commemorative paintings. The walls of the ground-floor halls of the north and south wings are the accepted Big Moments in Illinois’s Past rendered in paint: Marquette and Joliet at an Indian Village on the Des Plaines River in 1673, Fort Dearborn at the Mouth of the Chicago River, New Salem, and Lincoln At New Salem 1831; in the north hall, Fort Chartres on the Mississippi River Near Prairie du Rocher, Future Governor Edward Coles Freeing His Slaves While Enroute to Illinois 1819, and U.S. Grant Taking Command at Cairo in 1861; and Starved Rock on the Illinois River Near Ottawa.

 

There are many, many others.

 

When the original entry staircase was removed in 1886, the original “basement”—actually, the ground floor—became the new first floor. That space needed duding up for its new prominence, so three murals were added to the ceiling of the east foyer. One depicts "Charity" distributing the bounty of a cornucopia, a painting that no doubt has inspired many a legislator and special interest lobbyists as they make their ways toward the workplace.

 

The eagles and shields that decorate the spaces between the statue-bearing corbels in the upper rotunda were added as part of Illinois's centennial celebration in 1918 by Springfield artist George H. Schanbacher. In 1888, Schanbacher had decorated the ceiling of the State Library (now Senate Minority offices) with murals of owls, a symbol of wisdom and thus a fitting choice for a library ceiling. A symbol of wisdom might have been considered a mockery by lawmakers, however, and when the library was converted into a legislative lounge in 1923, Schanbacher was asked to return and paint over his earlier work.

 

Converting the statehouse into office space has made it the scene of all kinds of cover-ups. Remodelings covered up carving and paintings that were forgotten for decades. Typical were the ornate wall decorations in Room 115, which was for a time used as a Civil War museum. In Room 300, large murals depicting Lincoln, Grant, and a Civil War soldier were painted on the upper walls when it was dedicated as a memorial hall for Civil War battle flags and mementos; the murals were covered up in the 1930s when the room‘s ceiling was lowered and not discovered until 1971 when the space was converted into a Senate hearing room.

 

Even artwork that was left in plain sight was not seen for decades. Clumsy redecorating had changed the original colors and blurred the sculptural details of the plaster ornaments. The stained glass in the building's  inner dome was obscured by soot and dirt; when it was cleaned and repainted in 1986, its glass was spectacularly revealed for the first time in decades—or, perhaps more accurately, was revealed to be spectacular.

 

Some compromises have had to be made in restoring the building. Much original gold leaf was replaced with garish gold-colored paint; restorationists have replaced the paint with imitation gold leaf made of copper and zinc. The center of the ceiling in each legislative chamber was once made of stained glass, illuminated by skylights whose reconstruction is unfeasible; the skylights have been replaced by painted panels. Some of the decorative ceiling paintings were not repainted directly onto the ceilings, as the originals would have been painted; to save money their replacements were painted on canvases in a studio and glued into place on the ceilings.

 

A civics classroom

 

The purpose of the building’s statues and paintings is not merely decorative. Like a cathedral, the statehouse aims to teach visitors the essential lessons about the heroes and  history of Illinois's civic religion. But the statehouse makes as lousy a classroom as it does an office building. For example, any numbers of works depict the triumph of the North over the South in the Civil War, a success to which Illinois contributed more than its share, and which was fresh in the minds of the building’s builders. Of other, less flattering events in the state’s past no mention is made. One can wander the corridors forever and not see a depiction of the Haymarket Square bombing, the Herrin massacre, or the East St. Louis race riot.

 

Even events that are depicted are not always depicted accurately. The staircase to the fourth floor is dominated by 40 x 20-foot painting showing George Rogers Clark negotiating with Native Americans at Fort Kaskaskia in 1778. The canvas was painted by Chicago Gustav Fuchs in 1886, by which time Illinois Indians had been absent for a half-century; without appropriate models, Fuchs gave his Indians costumes of indigenous people who had never lived in Illinois. 

 

Students who venture into the capitol expecting it to be a Cliff’s Notes crib guide to Illinois history thus will be disappointed. Not every one of  the most accomplished state leaders is commemorated in the capitol, and several of the people who are commemorated there are relative nonentities. The most conspicuously placed statues in the building, for example (not counting "Miss Illinois" in the rotunda) are the eight figures set into niches ringing the second-floor rotunda. Some depict acknowledged notables—Lincoln and Douglas (inevitably, and redundantly), along with the first African American Illinoisan to be elected to the Senate, and the first woman member of the House. But also honored are the first Mayor Daley (a small figure in Illinois history, however large he looms in Chicago) and John G. Wood, the Quincian lieutenant governor who served out uneventfully the brief unexpired term of his predecessor and didn’t even bother to move to Springfield.

 

Above these statues, mounted on corbels that project from the wall of the statehouse dome beneath the plaster frieze, we find ten-foot statues depicting early Illinois’s genuinely important men. Here at last is Ulysses S. Grant; Ninian Edwards, territorial governor and third governor of the state; first governor Shadrach Bond; Edward Coles, second governor and the man who probably kept Illinois a slavery-free state; Sidney Breese, Illinois supreme court justice and United States senator; Lyman Trumbull, United States senator, Lincoln intimate, and coauthor of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution; and John A. Logan, Civil War general and U.S. Senator.

 

But even here the selection seems wayward, at least in light of subsequent historical opinion. Surely no committee of Illinois historians would today vote to give one of these coveted places of honor to soldier and congressman William R. Morrison. Also, their installation around the dome gives the “Big Eight” the most exalted position in the building but, perversely, leaves them the least visible of all the building’s statue-ized dignitaries.

 

Inevitably, the building’s artworks from the 19th century reflect those times, puzzling some of today’s visitors and offending others. The plaster bas relief on the north balcony on the fourth floor that illustrates the forced migration of Native Americans to the West is one of a series that also depicts the breaking of the prairie or the clearing of forests, as if the state’s indigenous people were so many weeds that had to be pulled from the garden that was to be "civilized" Illinois. The statue of Pierre Menard outside on the capitol grounds poses similar problems. As a specimen of modeling and casting it is gorgeous, but he is posed offering his hand to an Indian seated at his feet, in a pose impossible not to interpret as condescending. [Note: That statue has since been removed for that reason.]

 

Unfortunately, political correctness has trumped historical significance in the selection of some of the more recent artwork in the capitol. In 1918, Chicagoan Robert Wadsworth Grafton painted the three large murals on the fourth floor as a part of Illinois's Centennial celebration. Recently restored, the works are Commerce (dock workers unloading a freighter), Agriculture (a farmer plowing behind oxen, women sowing seed) and Industry (men working at a smelter). They tell us nothing about real life in Illinois, and nothing that a child doesn’t already know about farming, trade, and factories. The inclusion is meant to flatter the visitors to the building who ply those trades, to express officially the respect that the state’s political masters have for the work that generated the tax monies that, it must be recalled, paid for it all.

 

Hypersensitivity to historical slights is not much better than insensitivity, if both lead to distortions. The south hall of the second floor is lined with paintings of former Illinois governors. Among them is Senator Fred. J. Smith, a loyal machine Democrat who spent more time in the Senate (24 years) than anyone—a career that was more a monument to his safe seat than to Mr. Smith’s capacities. Smith is the only non-governor on “Governor’s Row” in spite of fact that he is conspicuously absent from histories of his era. He is there because he was an African American, and is likely to remain there until Illinois elects a black governor who can take the place of honor that Smith is keeping warm.

 

For decades, history as reflected in statehouse artworks seemed to have stopped with the Civil War, as none of the paintings and only a handful of statues and portraits depicted later eras. To update the paintings in the capitol, the state in 1988 sponsored a competition to select four artists to produce new murals as part of the building’s 100th anniversary celebration. The results were in many ways self-conscious throwbacks to the WPA-style of painting that typified most of the post office murals that can still be seen around the state, such as Ken Holder’s Transforming the Prairie. Even the titles recall the uplifting social realism of the 1930s; D. F. Bushman called his composition A Clinic on Constructive Contribution.

 

The fourth of the new works, The Key, by Billy Morrow Jackson, illustrates the genre. Like the rest, it is large—approximately nine by nine feet. The central theme of the painting is social reform, specifically the early twentieth-century progressive move­ment in America. The work focuses on the social reformer Jane Addams. The poses are heroic, the action uplifting, as figures struggle with an outsize key in attempting to unlock Knowledge. One critic lamented that the painting is not accompanied by a guide explaining it, although one must question the appropriateness in such a setting of paintings that are intended to teach but whose lessons are too obscure to be understood without a guide.

 

Many older statehouse paintings also make literary and mythical allusions that are utterly beyond visitors who are not scholars. On the second-floor walls between the entrances to the executive offices of the Governor and Secretary of State are four allegorical paintings representing Art, Literature, Peace, and War; these are banal but at least are decipherable. Not so the shields painted on the walls between the corbel statues in the upper rotunda. They have ten stars on either side of a blue ribbon with a large white star in the center, which represent the ten northern and ten southern states that composed the U.S. at the time Illinois was admitted to the Union, with the large white star representing Illinois, the 21st state; it is not clear that knowing this adds to one’s enjoyment of the work, but it can be assumed that very few people would grasp the message at all unless it is pointed out.

 

Statue-esque memorials

 

The grounds of the statehouse are decorated by a motley collection of bronzes, most of them human figures. (Recent maintenance has prolonged their lives but at the expense of the characteristic patina, without which they look, for the moment, like painted plaster.) Here, as is the case inside the statehouse, visitors who assume that the statues represent the men (sadly, few women) who most shaped the state would be misled. One permanent resident on the lawn is Pierre Menard. His achievements—Illinois's second lieutenant governor and its only prominent French American—are far from stellar, yet Menard had the honor of being the first notable to be installed on the grounds, in 1886. The fact that the son of Menard's former business partner, donated the money for the work perhaps explains the priority given by the state to a man who was an significant but not seminal figure in the state’s past.

 

The nearby statues of Civil War governor Richard Yates (“the wounded soldiers’ friend”) and John M. Palmer, governor and senator from that era, were jointly dedicated in 1923. Both were useful chief executives, with Palmer being the more substantial leader and formidable political presence. Their obscurity may be undeserved, but obscure they are; it unlikely that most members of the General Assembly know much more about them than that each was a governor.

 

The place of honor closest to the main public entrance to the building goes to Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant, as sculpted by Gilbert P. Riswold in 1918. This work was paid for as part of the same project that produced O’Connor’s centennial version of Lincoln and was dedicated on the same day. It conveys Douglas is all his vigor, and the base is decorated with his dying admonition to his children, whom he urged to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United States—good advice for state officials as well. But, like Lincoln, Douglas did not make his career as a state politician. True, he served in the state legislature—most men of ability did in those days—and a brief (and undistinguished) term on the Supreme Court. But he made his mark in Washington as a congressman, and, from 1847 until his death in 1861, as a U.S. Senator, and a Presidential candidate. His signal contribution to Illinois was splitting the Democratic vote in the 1860 Presidential election, thus permitting Lincoln to win the White House.

 

When time came to celebrate the state’s centennial, in 1918, the General Assembly could think of nothing more appropriate than a new statue of Abraham Lincoln; as executed by Andrew O’Connor, it depicts Lincoln making his famous "Farewell to Springfield." But the contribution of Lincoln to Illinois history as a lawmaker, for example, was matched by hundreds of others, and exceeded by dozens; he was a great historical figure from Illinois, not a great figure in Illinois history. The same can be said for Everett Dirksen—one of many Illinoisans who rose to prominence and influence in Congress, but the only one with a statue.

 

That all the governors on the statehouse grounds, and two of the four non-governors, are figures from Civil War era, further distorts Illinois history for the non-expert. One looks in vain for depictions of such standout Illinois governors of more recent eras, such as Frank Lowden or Henry Horner. Perhaps they are missing because the 1920s, which is when the last of the “great leader” statues was commissioned, may have been the last era in which Illinoisans could muster a consensus about who its great leaders were.

 

The memorialization of Menard, Yates, Palmer, Douglas, and Lincoln tells visitors something more reliable about trends in statuary than about Illinois history, which is that history gets made by (and can be understood in terms of) individuals. A newer trend has peopled the lawns with commemorations of a very different sort. Instead of famous leaders, these newer statues depict Illinois’s un-famous (though often more heroic) unsung citizens—its coal miners (1964), its police officers (1990), its laborers (1992), and its firefighters (1999). Each of the groups is recalled with a statue or statuary group of the sort that in the past usually depicted only soldiers. 

 

Indeed, these works should be understood as war memorials of a sort. John Szaton's coal miner may look the picture of health but in fact he was meant to represent the more than 9,000 Illinois miners who died in the 82 years previous to the statue's dedication in 1964. The monuments to police officers, fire fighters, and “workers,” similarly commemorate Illinoisans hurt or killed while trying to make a living. Future monuments to the sacrifices of the state’s farmers, its shop clerks, bus drivers, janitors, restaurant cooks, and, in time, lawyers and accountants seem inevitable. There should be room for them; a "statue row" has been created along what used to be Spring Street between the statehouse and the Stratton Building.

 

The extension of the monument franchise, so to speak, does not yet extent to women;  on the lawns the only females are the anonymous figures that appear in the police and worker memorials. That franchise does allow, however, for non-Illinoisans. The statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Geraldine McCullough, was installed in the Capitol rotunda in 1988. King was not the first African American to be honored in the capitol but he was the first non-Illinois resident to be honored with a statue. Then-Secretary of State Jim Edgar said King "merits this special recognition for his contributions to Illinoisans of all colors and creeds." That rationale  could of course apply equally to dozens of other notables, with the result that the statehouse would eventually become as crowded with statues as with lobbyists on opening day of the General Assembly session. Tacit admission of that made when officials in 1993 moved the work to a spot (dubbed "Freedom Corner") at Second and Capitol streets facing the Lincoln statue. 

 

To be persuasive as rhetoric, populist art needs to be persuasive as art. The newer statues are crude, even cartoonish, being clumsy in execution, stilted in composition, and sentimental in conception. (The trend began in 1976, with Carl Tolpo's Everett Dirksen.) The loss is not that these new statues are not great art. The loss is that, being bad art, they can't do justice to their subjects. They lack the power to move, to excite, to involve the way the best of the older capitol art can. Over the years Andrew O'Connor's Lincoln on the east lawn has been draped with the banners of a dozen causes during rallies, and never once was its dignity impaired by such shenanigans. There's the ultimate test of public art in the capitol complex—whether it can stand in those surroundings and not be reduced to ridiculousness.