Project

Freedom’s Hat

Caleb Hendrickson

Caleb Hendrickson: Chances are you’ve seen the U.S. Capitol building with its monumental dome hundreds of times even if you’ve never been to Washington D.C. It’s an icon, maybe the icon of American democracy. And the shape of the dome might be familiar from elsewhere. It’s modeled on cathedral domes, specifically St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome and St. Paul’s in London. Many mosques are also built with domes like these. Of course at the top of a cathedral dome you find a cross, and at the top of a mosque, a crescent. At the top of the Capitol dome there’s a statue of a female figure. Caleb Hendrickson: She’s dressed in flowing robes and on top of her head…that’s what this story is about. Caleb Hendrickson: Can you tell from here what’s on top of her head? Can you take a guess? Interviewee 1: I’ve seen this statue in the visitor’s center but I can’t remember. Interviewee 2: Looks like a vulture. Interviewee 3: A rooster, or maybe an eagle? Interviewee 4: Um, feathers? Yeah it just looks like feathers from down here. Inside we thought it was a chicken (laughter). Interviewee 5: I would say one of those Roman helmet things with the ridge on it. I think she’s supposed to be freedom so I am thinking it goes back to Roman Greek, that kind of stuff. Interviewee 6: There may be a symbolic meaning for this, but I don’t know it. Caleb Hendrickson: The statue depicts freedom personified as a classical goddess. She’s standing on a globe inscribed with the words e pluribus unum. And yes, on top of her head rests a peculiar feathered helmet. This is the story of Freedom’s hat. Vivien Green Fryd: I did not know the complexity of that statue when I started working on it. I had no idea that race and slavery were central to the statue’s iconography. Caleb Hendrickson: This is Vivian Green Fryd, professor of art history at Vanderbilt University. She has written extensively on the art and iconography of the capitol building, particularly the Statue of Freedom, which was designed by the American sculptor Thomas Crawford in the years leading up to the civil war. Vivien Green Fryd: He originally had her standing atop the globe of the world in order to show that the US’s Manifest Destiny was successful. She also was holding a sword as well as the American shield. And on her head, she was wearing what’s called the pileus or the Phrygian cap, which in English we call the Liberty cap. Caleb Hendrickson: The pileus is a soft cone-shaped hat with origins in ancient Rome, where it was worn by liberated slaves. Vivien Green Fryd: And when slaves were freed, the owner had shaved their heads, covered their heads with the cap, and then tapped them on the shoulders with what’s called the vindicta, and that becomes the staff with the cap on top is a symbol of liberty. Caleb Hendrickson: Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, was Secretary of War at the time the statue was commissioned. He had also been put in charge of the capitol’s extension. Vivien Green Fryd: He objected to the Liberty cap, arguing, “Its history renders it inappropriate to a people who were born free and would not be enslaved.” Well that’s a really problematic statement because Davis was a plantation owner, a slave owner from Mississippi who argued on behalf of the slave system and the extension of slavery into newly acquired lands. So in making that statement he’s suggesting that the slaves on his plantation and on plantations throughout the United States are not human beings. They’re not people. He uses the term “people who were born free and would not be enslaved.” Vivien Green Fryd: Crawford knew he had to change the cap. Caleb Hendrickson: The capital’s engineer suggested replacing it with another Roman symbol, the helmet usually worn by Minerva, the goddess of the city and the goddess of war. Vivien Green Fryd: So, the statue was a conflation of three very separate personifications. She’s a statue of America. She is also Minerva, the goddess of the war. And she’s Liberty. But what’s significant is the absence of the Liberty cap is the lightning rod of that work because it really all has to do with slavery. Caleb Hendrickson: The Secretary of War rejected any work of art bearing any reference to slavery or to African Americans. While the building bears no visible trace of slavery, a great deal of its iconography depicts Native Americans, either as noble savages or obstacles to be conquered in fulfillment of the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Vivien Green Fryd: The works of art on the building and inside the building establish an iconographic program that represents the subjugation of the native peoples. Caleb Hendrickson: In this light it’s also significant that Crawford topped off Liberty’s new helmet with an imagined headdress, “inspired by the costume of our Indian tribes.” Vivien Green Fryd: All these really conflicted issues about our nation are embodied in that statue. Caleb Hendrickson: How are we to look at fraught images from our nation’s past? Thinking of them as sacred images of our civil religion might give us a place to start. These images command our gaze. We make pilgrimages to look at them, to come into contact with what they represent. But sacred sites are not sacred from the dawn of time. We imbue a place or an image with sacred meaning by the way we regard it, by the way we look, and the way we squint to make out its meaning. In the Capitol visitors center a small didactic panel tells some of the story we have just told. It begins to train the eye we bring to the icons of our conflicted past. How this eye learns to see and how it learns not to see will shape what the future of democracy looks like. Caleb Hendrickson: Crawford’s Statue of Freedom was cast in 1860 in a foundry overseen by an enslaved laborer, named Philip Reed. Jefferson Davis left for Richmond not long after. He never returned to Washington he never saw the finished Capitol Building or the statue at its top. Neither did Thomas Crawford. At the height of his career, the sculptor’s sight began to deteriorate. He wrote to his wife of the tumor slowly darkening his vision: “The fact is t’is all in my eyes as yet. And I have not found any way so far of getting it out.”

In 1815 Jesse Torrey, a Physician from Philadelphia, observed groups of enslaved people at work constructing the U.S. Capitol building. Torrey decried “the contradiction of erecting and idolizing this splendid…temple of freedom and at the same time oppressing with the yoke of captivity…our African brethren.”[1] The Capitol building occupies a place in our national imagination that the historian of religion Mircea Eliade might call a “sacred center,” a meeting place of heaven and earth.[2] The film shown in the visitor’s center today refers to the building as “a temple of democracy.” The ideals of American government take place here, in the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives. The contradiction that Torrey observed between the ideal of democratic liberty and the fact of American slavery remains present in this space.

It is especially present in the art of the Capitol building. However, slavery is most present in its absence from the iconography of the Capitol building. Nowhere are enslaved people depicted. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd employs W.E.B. DuBois’s metaphor of “the veil of race” to explain the conspicuous absence of slavery from the building’s iconography, which was created in large part in years leading up to the Civil War.[3] DuBois claimed that white Americans fail to see black Americans, who are “shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Fryd proposes that the same veil hangs over the art and iconography of the nation’s capital. In this short audio piece, Professor Green Fryd unveils this act of veiling with regard to one especially prominent artwork: Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom, which stands at the pinnacle of the Capitol’s iconic dome.

Recently, the nation has turned its gaze on other public images fraught with the history of American slavery and its underlying ideology of racial supremacy. We would do well to remember that disputes over such images are not new. How are we to view these contested images today? We might consider them among the most powerful symbols of our civil religion. Like a religious symbol, these images carry the weight of the past with them. They are accretions of history. However, their meaning depends as much upon how we behold them in the present – how we imagine our past in them now, and how, in turn, their imagery circumscribes the we of “our past.” An image implicates the viewer in its meaning. It leaves the viewer no choice. As the philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer writes, “the recognition of the symbolic is a task we must take on ourselves.”[4] Crawford’s Statue of Freedom may be easy to overlook. It flies high above the sightline of the casual observer. However, it demands to be seen again, to be recognized for what it shows, and what it does not.

[1] Quoted in Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capitol (Princeton University Press, 1967), 33.

[2] See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987) 36ff.

[3] Vivien Green Fryd, “Lifting the Veil of Race at the U.S. Capitol: Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom,” Common-place 10, no. 4 (July 2010).

[4] Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47.

Additional Reading

Green Fryd, Vivien. Art & Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860. Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1992.

———. “Lifting the Veil of Race at the U.S. Capitol: Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom.” Common-place 10, no. 4 (2010).

Meyer, Jeffery F. Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

1859 drawing of the Tholos of the Capitol Dome by Thomas U. Walter, architect of the U.S. Capitol building. Courtesy of the Office of the Architect of the Capitol.

Close up view of the Statue of Freedom, removed from the dome in 1993 for restoration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Close up view of the plaster model of the Statue of Freedom on display in the Capitol visitor’s center. Photograph by author.

Project Contributors

Caleb Hendrickson

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Carleton College

Caleb Hendrickson received his PhD in religious studies at the University of Virginia in 2020. His work focuses on issues in religion, art, and visual studies. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Vivien Green Fryd

Professor, American and Contemporary Art

Vivien Green Fryd teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, methods in art history, American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. She is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1865 (Ohio University Press, 2001; reprint Yale University Press, 1992), Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970 (Pennsylvania University Press, 2019). She is currently writing a book manuscript entitled, "Writing Trauma: Henry Ries' Photographs of Berlin, 1937-2004." She has published articles in The Art Bulletin, The American Art Journal, The Winterthur Portfolio, American Art, the National Women's Studies Association Journal, Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, Continuum, Traumatology, and other journals, and has essays in a number of edited books, including Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, ed. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (HarperCollins, 1992), Critical Issues in American Art, ed. Mary Ann Calo (Westivew Press, 1998), and Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky-Tonk Bars, ed;. Cecelia Tichi (Duke University Press, 1998). From 2008 to 2009, Prof. Fryd served as director of "Trauma Studies," a fellows' program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

Additional Credits

Special thanks to faculty mentor, Jennifer Geddes, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

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