depicted. he is a fellow with but the library of congress and the u.s. capital historical society. this is about an hour. william: welcome to the u.s. capital historical society lunchtime lecture series. my name is william digiacomantonio i'm the chief of , stories here at the society. it is great to see everyone here. our speaker today is a guy named matthew restall. i want to read his title, because it is ponderous. not like matthew. i do know what to leave anything out. he is the edwin earl sparks professor of latin american history and director of latin american studies at penn state. oxford, ucla,d at and has published numerous books on the spanish conquest. some of you might recognize his name and some of the themes he will be touching on from our last dome, where he has an article on how montezuma keeps inrendered in different ways "the art of the capital." from his various titles and the subjects of his books you might and for correctly that he is an art historian, but this is a chance for us to highlight how i interdisciplinary isroaching capitol allowing us to hear various , stories and because various historians like matthew, it takes a village to tell the story of the capital. he is publishing a book, "when montezuma met cortez, the meeting that changed history." it will be out next month. he is currently the fellow at the library of congress and a capital fellow of ours. we are honored to have him as a capital fellow. and he is a fine fellow in his own right as well. help me welcome matthew restall. [applause] matthew: thank you, chuck. picking up on what chuck just said, as i am looking around the room, i'm guessing everybody here knows academics, professional scholars, we are supposed to stay in our cages, by which i mean cages defined by our discipline and our field. my is history, mexico and central america, colonial period. i am not supposed to be getting out of my cage and wandering around the zoo into other cages. being here in d.c. means i have a rare opportunity and privilege to be able to do that and in august, i enjoyed the time i spent in the archives in the capital, which is where this paper comes from. it is a work in progress and i may be saying things that you already know. i am hoping that most of what i am saying are things that you know but you have already forgotten, so it is new material. i also want to thank the curator in the capital. i do not see her in here, but like chuck, her support and encouragement made all of this possible, as well as the others who work in the curator's office. i have enough images to get us through about one every 45 seconds, so i am going to move quickly through them and you have been warned i am not an art historian, so if you are particularly interested in something, take a note of it and i will go back at the end and maybe ask one of the art historians in the room to talk about it and the proper terminology. albert ports was the first one -- was a scuffle teen rigor who first met the statute at the top of the capital building in the closing years of the 19th century. climbing up to give the bronze lady of bath, he would repeat the process countless times. the intimacy of the experience put ideas in his head. year after year come here and to places -- he earned to place his own lips on the lips on the statue's oversized bronze lips. yet he resisted. they were both married and not to each other. for the statue's popular name, the one that he used himself to refer to her, was on close them's wife. in 1923, he delivered the kiss of which he had dreamed. but guilt consumed him. when four years later while scrubbing uncle sam's wife's face, he fell from the scaffolding breaking an arm and , a leg. he was convinced it was indignation over his liberty. only after confessing the entire story to a newspaper reporter in 1931, you can see the newspaper report right here, did he sense that absolution was finally at hand. a year following ports' illicit kiss, another bronze figure on the exterior of the capital building suffered a nonconsensual indignity. evidence of the incident is preserved in the records of the capitol police. in 1928, a lieutenant reports to , s nash, that the previous night quote, -- i have a lot of quotes in my paper -- "some unknown person has broken the sword off one of the figures for a souvenir from the roger bronze's door." the lieutenant meant the bronze doors designed by randolph rogers in 1853, the eastern entrance into the rotunda, popularly known as the columbus doors. the victim was possibly cortez, the famous conqueror of the aztecs, who also appears in the capital, but it was more likely the brother of the man represented multiple times inside and outside the building, christopher columbus. the lieutenant showed his captain that he was someone sitting information soliciting -- soliciting information and now had a man preventing anyone from approaching the doors when the building is closed. today of course there is more , than one man on guard to ensure no visitor can get close enough to the columbus doors to even see them, let alone steal their swords. what are we to make of these anecdotes? how do they offer us a way to approach a much studied building and its works of art? let me begin to answer by way of william carlos williams. after visiting the capital, the poet wrote a pome about its art. first published in 1924, it was titled, "it is a living coral." in his metaphor, the city is a sea, the capital building an island, and its art and architecture a coral that grows. while the metaphor might be applied to any museum with an expanding collection. the capital is not a museum nor , viewed as such by visitors, and there and lies another side to the metaphor, one that struck me, but with which williams was not concerned at all. he could not have known during that century that they would develop an entire field of study devoted to coral mortality, understanding why and how the coral reefs suffered catastrophic destruction has a result of human, land use, fishing, and tourism. just as the human impulse upon visiting a coral reef is to break off a piece to take home, so visitors to the capital attempted to take a piece of it for a souvenir. those souvenirs have in rare cases, such as the sword, have been physical objects. they have been memories of physical interactions with the buildings' art objects, such the kiss shared with freedom. that physical component of the capital human experience is the outline in the next half hour. firstmore often, the takeaway has been in the realm of ideas not objects. ,in the 21st century thousands , of visitors leave the capital every week with the digital representations of themselves posing with a piece of the building or its art selfies that , fall into a liminal space between objects and ideas, like a hologram of a piece of the capital's coral. this is not the place to draw on depth perception theory, the study of how readers and viewers respond to literature, art, cinema, and so on, but there is at the heart of the studies in idea that is very relevant here, that readers respond to attacks based on their horizon of expectations and the cultural framework they bring to the text. with respect to the capital, visitors come to the building with a sense of proprietorship, the belief they own a share of it, all that is in it, and it tells them something about themselves, or more specifically it reaffirms something they already believe about themselves or nationality. visitor response to the identity of his statue at the top of a dome or the meaning of the paintings in the rotunda is determined by the ideas that visitors bring with them. the same applies to the historical events referenced in the capital's art. the ideological reception of the capital's art is the second topic i will outline. my third and final section circles us back to freedom. whose true identity i shall suggest to you at the end of my talk. in order to arrive back at freedom on time, have selected one cluster, albeit a complex one, on visual and historical themes, the usage of people and places from elsewhere in the americas, especially columbus the representation of indigenous , peoples in the capital, and the buildings gendered representation of america and its history. those are obviously all best topics -- all vast topics, but threaded together in the capital in a way i hope to show you, something almost as simple as a stolen kiss or a stolen sword. no, that is not me, but it is one of the conservators. somebody in the room i actually know who this is. you can see how tempting it is, right? [laughter] one -- for a souvenir, a reference to a quote i read a little while ago. the american sculptor complained in a letter to his brother in 1842 that statues of washington and columbus in the capital had received considerable injury in the few years they had been standing. he was referring to his own much reviled sculpture of washington , which was located in the center of the rotunda from 1841-1843 before being moved to the capitol grounds. where it is seen here in this photograph, you will recognize it because it is in the museum of natural history today. the discovery of , america in place in 1844 was placed on the building's eastern front. you can see it here in the distance. the space behind it was an ideal spot. greenhouse's indignation. shortly before his death in 1852, he grumbled, "i have seen several time boys the plan the -- at play on the portico of the capital, which makes it the wrong place for costly sculptures." he was right to worry about the discovery of america. wrote an observer in 1912, "it is somewhat to the nation's credit that time and exposure and vandalism after long years have mutilated the beauty of the work." among the various sculptures on the east front of the building, they were eyelids chipped, hands grapes crushed, a marble knows was missing its tip , and the blade of a short sword was broken. that theme again. due to the exposure of the elements and the visitors, the garments that sways the lens of -- of the indian girl has a -- look. from 1871 through to the 21st century, when the building was closed, so too were the columbus doors. with the columbus scenes looking into the eastern part of the city accessible to any visitor climbing the steps on holidays or at night. the stolen sword in 1924 was hardly the casualty of such first accessibility. ellen slated, a self identified congressional wife, wrote in january of 1899 in her diary, "a policeman arrived just in time to save one of the hiring -- one of the high figures on the bronze doors of the rotunda from a headhunting savage from indiana." cortez and columbus were both frequently subject to the tugs of souvenir seekers. for example, the chains around the wrists where missing for almost all of the 20th century. the art inside the building was almost as vulnerable. in the 1890's, one sculpture in statuary hall featured a group of indians to whom he was preaching, one had his bow stolen, another lost his finger. in 1889, a group of soldiers visiting the capital grew rowdy, drink seems to have been involved, when they started stabbing at the artwork with their bayonets. they were thrown out of the building, which was then closed to visitors for the rest of the day with the columbus doors locked, one of the few occasions that the great key was overturned. -- key was actually turned. earlier that decade, the rotunda was the host to the garfield fair with a pine board barrier put up to protect the paintings. it was extraordinary to imagine this was done. but it was winter, so the furnaces where set up to warm the space and by means of an impromptu flu, heat was discharged causing , discoloration, cracking, holes, and other damage. bearers of the seed. the capital's archives are full detailed reports reflecting the ways in which human beings have endangered the building and its part, and i suspect that for the last five minutes i have pursued the topic in the archive of the capitol police themselves that there would be enough material for something book length, i am not sure would be syllogistic. it would be interesting -- would be so interesting. it would be interesting to me, anyway. in 1995, a congressional sub committee on appropriations received a proposal to protect the building from visitors. because people quote, "wear down the steps and brush against the walls" and generally product, artwork, anthe entrance fee should be charged, suggested the heritage foundation. democrats in the house denounced the idea as indirect taxation typical of republican dishonesty, arguing the public saw itself as the proprietor of the capital. "don't charge american families use fees to visit with belongs to them," declared a representative from ohio. democratic senators chimed in. the senator from north dakota, quote "does anybody really , believe it is too old-fashioned to think those who own the building will not have to pay an admission fee to to enter it?" lawmaker sentiments were canvassed by a reporter from the hill. i'll give you a small sampling here. mr. and mrs. brock of williamsville, new york called touring the capital, our privilege "we are not visitors. , we are taxpayers." said onemy house," visitor from new jersey. "i pay enough already," commented robin dale. in the words of another visitor, paid for the place." and best of all, the reverend donald bassett of tennessee found the fee proposal detestable and in violation of "the very concept, the very idea of america." the notion of ownership of walking into my house is a thread that runs through two centuries of a visitor responses. attached to that idea i have often found related sentiments of duty and patriotism. margaret leech wrote in 1860 , that visitors lingered on the east portico to admire the colossal statues. who is not clear what they made of them, but they all paused to stare. in 1864, a union army officer wrote to his sister that the capital is a fine affair and the paintings are magnificent. he was particularly taken by the images of pocahontas and columbus as historical figures he recognized. their representations splendid. a century later, tom wicker, the longtime washington bureau chief for the new york times commented on the visitors he had seen year after year, bringing their children to the capital. there they would take their photographs in front of the statues, seldom knowing who the sculpted figure was but "the , meanest of them know that he was part of something and they are part of it too." i have seen fat women walking carefully around statutory hall in the capital,. i bronze figures of men so obscure that historians would have to look them up. and high school kids wearing confederate caps and popping gum, they are all part of the same thing secret sharers, , bearers of a seed." seed?xactly is that is it one of patriotism? well, there is no shortage of claims to that effect. we love our capital, wrote mary in 1874. not that it is perfect, but because being faulty and is still perfect. maybelle pendergrass the women's , editor for the sacramento union told californians in 1967 that a visit to the capital "will stir a new patriotism in you. the history of the united states comes so much closer and becomes more than words in a book. you can feel the red, white, and blue in your veins." so, is the seed one of education? with the capitals are to as a show and tell history lesson? there is no shortage of claims to that effect. for example, the official 19 55 guide to the capital stated that john trumbull painter of the war , of independence cortez the rotunda developed his talented , art for the express purpose of leaving to the american people historically correct paintings of the struggle for liberty. visitors were reassured in the guide that the building's art was factual and historically correct. or the third possibility is the third possibility is, a lesson in aesthetics through negative example. told his brother in the 1840's that the "ornamental departments of the capital seem controlled by the demon of bad taste." an 1855 review of the baptism of pocahontas concluded that "chapman makes you regret that he ever painted it." we don't live in a world anymore where people make mild criticisms like that. while columbus was "tame, ill arranged, and destitute of atmosphere." as for persico's discovery, "an abomination." in 1912 guide to washington's art treasures lamented how often one encountered the work of thomas crawford. the greater freedom. who quote, "of light and shade and sculpture he was apparently ignorant." a 1915 guide to the city work ofd the sculptural the city as not cultural. and it was thought to be a federal crime. quick as he was to deliver disdain, -- argued that the masses noticed the ineptitude of those that were creating the capital. does anybody fancy that the uninstructed multitude does not feel these incongruities, it is not so. but later observers were not so convinced. alfred friendly, a reporter for the washington post, joined a tour of capitol hill in 1966, noting that the visitors in the capital seldom looked up unless they were directed to do so. lookers.iquors -- up without command, beauty missed." at the end of the 20th century, he wondered if visitors were learning much from its art. "the capital's paradox is this, it is an easy building to get into, but it is a hard building to understand. reliable information about what the visitor sees, why it is important, is fragmented and difficult for most people to obtain. visitors can find free papers about the corridors which are lovely, but hardly central to the meaning and importance of the capital." what exactly was the building's meaning at the time of the millennium? the senate historian, dick baker, he may still be the historian, he lamented "if you , ask a visitor the name of the building will while they are touring the capital, in most cases they will say the white house." around the same time an english , visitor to the capital summarized his impressions to the post. "when it comes to monuments and things like this ours are a lot , older, but yours are bigger." in 1966, friendly concluded "real purpose of washington's famous monuments suddenly apparent, backdrops for family pictures." anticipating the culture of smartphone selfies by half a century he asked "do tourists , really want to see anything or just want to have been seen at the site?" that is where the uighurs and seed bearers are most meaningfully found. yes, for two centuries visitors may have felt patriotic fervor and pondered issues of historical accuracy and they may have experienced what mark twain called after visiting the capital the delirium trimmings of art. but above all, visitors have entered and exited the building with a particular sense of ownership, a kind of national home, therefore it is not expected to be museum perfect or history book accurate. as ames put it in 1874, the capital's defects more in dear us, because above all it is human. she said "these corridors, domeng walls, this mighty are years, the highest man in the nation owns nothing here which does not equal to the one -- clearly belong to you. down from her shield bestows no -- the goddess of liberty gazing down from her shield bestows no rights upon the lofty which she does not extend to the lowliest of her sons." third and final section. the very idea of america. all this suggests that the horizon of expectations that visitors bring to the capital is at best highly abstract, and at worst so vague and contradictory as to be almost meaningless, and yet the building is packed with very specific representations of historical moments and figures. what or whom among those emerges as potentially more meaningful, or at least resonant for visitors. there are some very obvious candidates, such as george washington, but my interest right now is in one man who never set foot in what would become the united states, and yet is disproportionately represented. appropriate for this week, columbus. there have been close to 1000 works of art in the capital during its history, including items lost or stolen, destroyed in fires or transferred to other buildings. depending on how one counts an object, for example, are the columbus doors one object or nine? there have been roughly 700 for the past century. of these, about 40 of them depict non-u.s. individuals, that is figures from the early european and latin american past, such as the columbus brothers cortez, conquistadors, , and the dominican friars. that is less than 6%, but almost half of all those comprise or include columbus. beginning in 1827, sculpted and painted columbiana grew steadily so that by 1912 when the christopher columbus memorial was built in front of union station, and just to show you i am not being snobbish about people using monuments for family pictures, that is my oldest and youngest daughter -- with the navigator you can see him twice, staring towards the capital. by then there were close to 20 representations of columbus in the capital building or outside it. today's tally is still 15, one in 50 pieces of art in the capital feature columbus. furthermore, until 1958, visitors walked past the massive sculpture of columbus, and until the opening of the capitol visitor center in 2008, through the columbus doors with nine depictions of the navigator into the rotunda, where columbus appears three more times. why columbus? in part, because he is not cortez. the 19th century american understanding of the spanish conquest was influenced by protestant writers from writers like robertson and prescott to to -- whose books for children on cortez and others were bestsellers in many languages. you may not have heard of him, but he sold more books than most famous historians and amusingly to us today these are books that are really supposed to be for children and structured as a father reading stories to his children and full of the most extraordinary violence we would never permit in children's books today. descriptions of aztec sacrifices and so on. columbus was first published in english in 1799. the library of congress has a couple of copies. he called the conquistadors monsters,k dreadful but the genoese explorer was a good man, courageous and resolute, opposed to idleness and effeminacy, underline that. so a noble manly explorer untarnished by massacres, columbus was not only an acceptable alternative to the spanish conquistadors, his national identity allowed into him to be appropriated as an american, and that is not an original statement by me as you probably already know. there is an entire literature of books how columbus was invented in the 19th century, particularly in the united states, and becomes turned into a kind of american, as in u.s. rogers was expressing the common opinion when he told montgomery in 1855, montgomery miggs was a creator of the capital in the 19th century, he was expressing the common opinion when he told him that columbus was second only to washington, as the man "most intimately connected with the history of this country, so who better deserves a lasting monument to his memory? " and indeed his reinvention as an american is so profound that even the cookies the doors in the capital -- conquistadors are rendered as columbus-like. desoto peacefully discovering the mississippi in an echo of columbus's discovery of america, and cortez peacefully accepting the surrender of montezuma, and here is a shameless plug for my book coming out. which nowhere in the book, and it is like 600 pages long, do i make that connection because it was only by spending time in the capital and looking at the art that i realized there is another way to understand who the spanish conquistadors are, how you have to understand how columbus is americanized and they are all being columbusized. as a sidebar, i think it totally fascinating, note that this substitution of columbus for cortez took place in the mid-20th century in the mexican embassy in washington dc. this is the building that was the embassy and is now the mexican cultural institute. here are the americanized genoese is inserted into a ural.ard and aztec mer you can see where it is on the staircase. on the left, you can see a figure of columbus that allows you to see him where he is more clearly. that should be cortez approaching, you can see the other conquistadors, more behind him, and you can see more clearly, including figures like the conquistador with a red beard. in a mexican knows instantly -- any mexican those instantly that is pedro alvarado, and infamous conquistador, so it makes no sense columbus should be there. it should be cortez, that is what was originally planned. that is what i'm talking about with respect to the development of art in the capital, he was substituted. however, all that is only part of the explanation to the columbiana phenomenon in the capital. the rest of it lies in the parallel depiction of indigenous peoples who appear in roughly 50 artworks in the building, some 7%. these are mostly from within what became the united states, so historical figures such as sequoia and pocahontas, but include some from latin america like montezuma and generic indians. that small percentage is misleading because it is skewed down by the hundreds of statues of politicians, most of whom visitors walked past or are no longer allowed to see. furthermore, the depictions of indigenous people are concentrated on the eastern front of the building or the rotunda, a focal point of tour. s. noted the fortunes , of american indians constantly recurs throughout the decorations of the capital. the east front sculptures demonstrated "what the coming of the new race was to mean for the old." thus for capital visitors, columbus and indians have always been as inescapable as george washington, arguably more so. those representations of indians fall into two main categories, either engaging in acts of violence. violence against europeans or euro americans. a good example is the relief in the rotunda. or show indigenous men and women welcoming the invaders in ways that are openly accepting of their permanent presence, or passively acquiescent. this duality was captured as early as the 1830's, as well as its intended impact on visitors. her comments on early indian portraits could apply to succeeding representations of all indigenous peoples. they have "but two sorts of expressions. the one is that of very noble and warlike a daring. the other of a gentle and naive simplicity. it has no mixture of folly but which is inexpressibly engaging and more touching perhaps." from 1844 to 1958, the same duality was presented to all visitors as they climbed the eastern front. in the stark and controversial form of prisco's discovery, you have seen this before, and the rescue. blatantly racist to 21st century eyes, the pieces were denounced from the very start, yet survived everything from visiting tribal chiefs to house resolutions calling for their removal or distraction. -- destruction. finally going into storage in 1958. this two allergy -- duality had two ways of presenting indigenous people having deep roots going back to the era of columbus himself. when the indigenous people of the caribbean were placed into categories, into invented races, the noble savages, innocent and childlike that accepted and even embraced christianity, and the bloodthirsty barbarians who resisted and given the accusation they were cannibals. both the present here. across the americas for the next three centuries those two , categories were reinforced by spanish and portuguese law regarding the enslavement of indians. those who toiled away peacefully could not be enslaved. those who resisted would be branded and sold or slaughtered. in north america, the latter category was applied more than the former. as the english were less interested than the spanish in creating colonies that relied on the labor. as is well known, yet has been insufficiently discussed, and in 19th century america, indigenous people were systematically displaced and then eliminated, a history depicted in the sequence of art. thus, depictions of indian warriors were replaced with those who were peaceful and passive later in the century. for modern visitors, the sequencing is largely irrelevant as the two categories are experienced all at once, if you are standing in the rotunda and taking it all in for example. i think visitors instantly grasp that the violent indian is the figure from the distant past, harmless, possibly even fictional. while the passive indian is closer to the present, more acceptable. the passive is closer to the present. most obviously represented by pocahontas. in all cases, she plays the clear role as the antidote to the violent indian, including her own relatives. foremost in the forest, snatched from the idolatry to become lambs." in the phrases of a modern heart -- art historian pocahontas has , changed into a highly anglicized demure maiden diminished in the painting just as in life, as her ancestors soon would be." you can see the painting to the right, only her sister is caught in the light and properly rendered, yet her highly passive pose on the ground, scantily clad, almost topless, ties into the larger depiction of indigenous women in the capital, especially in the rotunda where other indigenous women are passive, prone, half naked and loosely sexualized. this brings us to a crucial piece of the puzzle. the columbus era of indigenous people into two categories was not intended as a division of men and women, but it soon became gendered. over the centuries that followed the prospect of colonization and progress became gendered as male, with the indians and indigenous america gendered as female. this could take the form of how history was narrated this is an , 18th-century engraving of cortez receiving the indigenous woman who goes down in history as his mistress, who was actually a 12-year-old girl and then as romanticism sweeps and history telling a century later, we have similar representation. so, how history was narrated or how the continent was presented allegorically. here we are back to this 16th-century image and then the naked woman in a hammock is supposed to be america. i am going to come back to one of these, but these are 17th-century representations of again, this is america. forward to the 19th century and into the capital itself. columbus and the indian maiden. which i think it is absolutely extraordinary and not often discussed piece of art. the only way it does not wake -- not quite fit my argument is how for some reason the artist decided to portray the indian maiden not as really an indian at all. he has got the clothing all ampletely wrong, slightly utilization for the clothing as opposed to the feathers, which he should have done but nonetheless there is a lear on his face in which he gives us what he is thinking in that way. it is a highly revealing portrait of the sexualized nature of the phenomenon. these are revealing portraits of the gendered allegories. as befitting its neoclassical style, the statue of freedom is not even the only female allegory in the capital sculptured by thomas crawford. this view on the right, as you look up at her, there are three more right in front of her and they are shown in more detail. but only one fits into a tradition, so deeply and specifically rooted and how europeans and euro-americans have depicted and imagined america. that is as female, indigenous, wealthy, and ripe for the taking. as captured in these images, particularly this frontispiece that was in a book first published in london and amsterdam in the 1670's, highly influential and much copied. there may not be an image familiar to you, but it would have been familiar to any literate or semi-literate european or euro-american running all the way through into the early 19th century, by that time appearing in multiple different variants. so, the origin of the feathers headdress atop freedom is often well known, often repeated in guides for the visitors. that is at least the immediate origin. that immediate origin was jefferson davis's order to crawford to remove the statue of liberty cap, deemed inappropriate for a nation where slavery was still legal. as secretary of war, davis oversell work at the capital, but would soon become president of the confederacy. the liberty cap was replaced by "a bold arrangement of feathers, suggested by the costume of indian tribes." in crawford's words, repeated in some form of another up to the current carita's office. the deeper origin of the headdress is the role played by feathers as an icon for indians, again going all the way back to the 1490's. throughout the capital, indigenous peoples are stereotypically marked by feathers, a symbol that has now functioned efficiently in the west for five centuries. for that reason, i was a just freedom has struggled her entire life to be recognized by her official name. newspaper reports on her as quote, "america's most misunderstood women or one of the most misunderstood or misinterpreted girls in the capital." far more she has been called "armed freedom," or the "statue of freedom" she would more properly be called indigenous. in my survey of newspapers, i came frequently upon miss liberty, miss freedom, the lonely lady and significantly, miss america. other names marked both her sex and divinity, most commonly the goddess of freedom, the goddess of liberty, but also variants occasion, the on statue of liberty. crawford imagined the statue and all the branch where emblems that people will easily understand, that the people would easily identify her as freedom triumphant. but it would prove to be the feathers, not yet even part of the design one crawford wrote those words, rather than emblems of war and peace that would be meaningful to the masses. as the washington post explained in 1989, freedom with a cross ibook, a very campy address and heavy robes. or three decades earlier, the statue "wears a headgear usually described as a feather headdress but at close range it more resembles a dead eagle. wrote another reporter, the silly headdress looks more like a chicken ban in eagle."' despite, or perhaps part and parcel, the statues indigenous identity has been a consistent threat the indian goddess has . the indian goddess has been one of her names going back to the late 19th century and in 1939 a washington post article stated that tourists most commonly to -- took the statue to be pocahontas. as well as a replica of the statue of liberty, miss america, and various other things. the post stated in 1945 that because of those miscellaneous feathers in her headgear most , people speak of "that indian on the dome" and in fact and this is ironic, 1945, ironic in view of the alignment of nations in the recently concluded world war, the post said "she is no indian, she is italian." the explanation as a footnote we can come back to but i suspect you all know. in 1961, a magazine polled tourists and locals asking them the identity of the female statue. none called her freedom. instead, guesses included "dolly madison, betsy ross, columbus, queen isabella of spain, about a cortez miles standish, john paul , jones, paul revere, a roman senator, susan b, anthony, joan of arc, sitting bull, with hiawatha at number two, and the ."st popular guess, pocahontas and the most popular guess, albert porte thought of her as mrs. uncle sam. most identified her as pocahontas. i suggest since she was placed on the capitol dome she has been , understood in various, sometimes particular ways, as being america in female indian form. the tiny fresco images hidden on the ceilings in different rooms in the capital, there was a obvious connection. this one on the left is on the front cover of the spring 2014 w issue by the way. visitors do not need to get special permission to see america, as he called both figures, black and white on the left and then on the right you can see her, you have seen her enough now, you can see her up there with her colored feather headdress. so you do not need a special mission to get into these. her ornamental position at the top of the capital, combined with the imagery of the artwork inside the building reinforces visitor expectations that the building, the whole capital building, is a complex visual expression of history and power racialized and gendered. no wonder persico's discovery was hated and hidden. it made it way too uncomfortably obvious that freedom is really america. thank you. [applause] >> yes? >> very interesting lecture. thank you. could you talk a bit about depictions of other nonwhites in the capital building and how that has changed over the years, and in particular whether there was a big change before and after the civil war. matthew: you mean slavery and the depiction of african-americans? >> and asian-americans, yes. matthew: no. i can't. i started to look into that and, no, i started a project in august in the archives and i realized that there was an entire whole separate topic there and it has been studied in and there were references to articles. i'm not sure if there's a whole book on it but i began this project by thinking about writing just about the statue itself of freedom and was surprised to discover there was not a serious or even semi-serious entire book just about the statue, but there is massive material in the archives that would work for that and in the early version there is a chapter on that exact topic , because i discovered -- this is material if you pay close attention to in your tour of the capital building reread the plaques around, any visitor would know this -- that the statue of freedom which he was cast in bronze, right up on the borders of the district of columbia and baltimore, that the work was done by slaves. and the timing of when the statue was created, not the original plaster model in rome but the bronze one created here, was such when the war was happening and slavery was abolished. so there is a particular inuvo slave -- individual slave whose information is known about and in the archivist i found -- archives i found sort of primary source material relating to his not his selling but his , emancipation and his owner receiving a sum of money from the government in return for that emancipation and he was the guy in charge of the bronzing of the statue. so that is really ironic, right? because of jefferson davis saying, you need to take the liberty cap off because it is a symbol of slavery, and by the time they took the top off of the dome slavery was abolished. , there are all kinds of nice ironies there. if i can give you a fuller answer, i would say that would be the beginning moment. that was the anecdote to begin that story. and it is one to do with kind of layers of irony, and those stretch all the way to the present day to, there was an article i looked at very quickly -- no, i can't get sent down into that rabbit hole to do with african-american responses to the capital building. responses were not recent, i think it was the 1980's, early 1990's, in which somebody had interviewed people coming of the building and they are saying "yeah, i guess this , is not really about our history." we are of not really in their much. ok. but then, you go all the way back to the headdress on the top and the feathers on the cap and that kind of opens up a whole other story that is interesting. also at some point i imagined, wrongly, that the museum of -- i amamerican history getting the name wrong -- the african-american history of culture museum, i had this idea you could somehow walk up the steps to the capital and somehow you could see the museum, a visual sense of how the way that buildings are structured on the mall and the art in them reflect s changes in american history and how the united states is kind of dealing with all of this -- kind of looking back and say, yes the way that african-american people and indigenous people are represented our 19th century ones, but we have not changed that. we appointed in silos in separate buildings which is either great or terrible depending on your perspective. when i stood there i realized it does not work quite like that. can we just move those buildings? they should be hovering on the edge of the capital. does anyone have a question about something i actually know something about? that would be great. [laughter] i know, that is a tough one. >> i think i understood the point you are trying to make by the substitution of columbus for cortez in the mexican culture. al center. i'm not sure what the mexican cultural center was tried to accomplish by doing that. maybe the larger question is, what do latin americans and south americans think when they see the whitewash, you know, cortez disappears? or the columbusization of conquistadors. which i imagine is a way of making them look kind of like purveyors of civilization and really good guys, rather than conquistadors, conquerors. that thateah, i think kind of cracks open an entire topic to do with mexican nationalism and the way that mexican history and culture has developed in the last 200 years as a kind of -- all countries grapple with national identity and how you deal with your past right? ,that kind of paradox of wanting to only pull a positive things so you can engender them and everybody has a sense of loyalty and patriotism, but in the course of doing that you are rewriting history, so teaching your children lies right? ,so that has been a particularly interesting and well-studied story along those lines in mexico in the last 200 euros. -- years. and i think mexicans have been very open and transparent in how they have tackled that. they left a superb trail of art and literature that has allowed historians to pursue it. and i am kind of wildly guessing but i imagine if we were to sort bring thousands of nationals from mexico into the old america, can see that now, have them look at that and tell them about that, they would have a lot of things to be able to tell us. they would respond to that about their opinions about columbus and cortez and so on. so, i think it is very obvious to mexicans why that was done, that cortez is a controversial figure and mexicans and said, we -- will say that we do not even have statues of cortez in mexico, and mexico city. you cannot find them. occasionally there are things that are sort of vaguely named after him, but there is no big monument. nothing even remotely close to what you would see in c for columbus and george washington nothing like , that. so it would not be surprising to them. what is interesting to me is the parallel in the capital building or on capitol hill generally or , maybe in the whole city and states, the weight columbus is used at think is not as transparent. not even remotely as transparent. every columbus day, different days are set about columbus day indigenous peoples day, so on, , that show there is not that same level of transparency and instead it becomes kind of a little battleground like we've seen recently over these -- battleground like we have seen recently over these monuments and things like that. has tove a question that do with people talked about how people have looked at the capital over the centuries. ,ou know, words like vandalism souvenirs, protecting the building for visitors who prod and poke and pull the artwork, the shift over time in the way in which those that were in charge of preserving the capital thought about the visitors? matthew: no, i know where you are going and i looked for that. archive, it is not catalogued. there is a basic archive. i am interested in the columbus drawers, but none of that is catalogued. so it is not searchable in any way. so, i wanted i was curious about , that. like official curator positions. no, not official, because the official curator positions do not really change. they are just obviously sort of very diplomatic. our job is to preserve the artwork from damage and allow people to come in and enjoy it. the has not really changed. but the unofficial ones is what i am interested in. and i got kind of little snippets, usually it was snippets of somebody talking about somebody else. dick baker, i guy forgot to google. he might be in the room. whether he is still around. him making that quote about a lot of people think that no curator is going to officially say something like, people think they're in the white house, you know, they don't understand the art so it is fine not to let them see it. let me answer the question in another sort of slightly indirect way that relates to percival's discovery. i understood from talking to michelle: and from some of the documents i found that they wanted to remove that and the other for a long time but they were not quite sure how to do it. right? once the curator or anybody, the architect of the capitol, starts removing art around the building and taking it out, you kind of open up a can of worms, right? you don't do that. so under what were they removed? 1958 is when they begin the renovation. the east portico was rebuilt. everything had to be removed, you know, for the dismantling to be done and the new columns put up. so they were temporarily removed into storage and the smithsonian and then accidentally on purpose, somebody forgot to put them up there. that gives you insight into various aspects. they were sort of having official reasons that was built but unofficially what that meant was that having hordes of people wandering freely through the building where it has always been. you walk up the front steps, through the rotunda and you just walk around and look at the art but that came to an end because of reasons of security. not because the curator said, it is getting damaged because kids with backpacks and that can stuff. no. so i think attitudes, the official attitude in the unofficial one and it provides opportunities. >> would you be available if people contacted you and the little time you have left ear and washington, d.c., people contacted you? prof. restall: yes, particularly like -- dude, there's a whole book on that. i would like that very much. >> thank you again. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] >> interested in american history tv? this our website, www.c-span.org /history. you can see our schedule, preview upcoming programs, watch college lectures and archival films and more. www.c-span.org/history. >> the vietnam veterans memorial was dedicated on washington, d.c.'s national mall in 1982. next, author james reston and jan scruggs discuss the memorial's creation. james reston is the author of, "art, memory, and the fight for the vietnam memorial." the wilson center

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