Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment by Wendy Bellion

Abstract

Reviewed by: Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment by Wendy Bellion Michelle Sizemore (bio) Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment wendy bellion Penn State University Press, 2019 272 pp. On July 9, 1776, a crowd toppled the equestrian statue of King George III in Lower Manhattan after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. They beheaded the leaden king, smashed him to bits, and shipped off his remains to be melted into bullets for Washington's army. This much is well-known. Wendy Bellion's new book completes the story, offering a fascinating chronicle of the statue from its creation, installation, and display to its destruction and afterlife. The book's expansive investigation [End Page 955] of the battered statue focuses an account of early British American iconoclasm as a national "creation story" (3). Indeed, a great strength of the study is its dilation from fine details such as choice of the statue's material and its orientation in Bowling Green park to the broader sweep of transatlantic protest. In Bellion's words, "Iconoclasm in New York asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III in 1776—and why they keep bringing it back." The answers are rewarding. Iconoclasm in New York argues that this legendary mock execution of the king dramatizes a fundamental tension in early American identity formation, for it was an act that at once figuratively severed political ties and secured cultural ties with Great Britain. By enlarging her survey of the event, Bellion builds on histories that view the symbolic regicide exclusively as a sign of American independence. The transatlantic scope and extensive timeframe of the project elucidate the continuities between radical protest in Revolutionary-era New York and British folk and Reformation practices. Further, this research adds to art history's burgeoning study of destruction, of which iconoclasm forms a crucial subset. The book is divided into two parts, each containing two chapters. Part I, "Iconoclasm: The Eighteenth Century," explores American iconoclasm in the eighteenth century within a longer British history and larger Atlantic network of people and objects. Part II, "Afterlife: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," traces the material remains of the statue and subsequent representations of its demolition. This structure makes manifest "how iconoclasm has continually shaped American identities since the very formation of the United States" (13). To set the stage for a discussion of the king's statue, chapter 1, "Idols in America: Liberty Poles," examines its immediate antecedent: the cycle of creation and destruction of five liberty poles in Manhattan between 1766 and 1776. Converted from pine masts, the liberty poles were powerful symbolic structures paraded from East River shipyards to the Commons (now City Hall Park), along the northern border of the city. The rituals of raising and felling invested the poles with meaning and agency. Both the American patriots who celebrated the poles and the British soldiers who demolished them transformed wooden posts into animate forces, joined in a reiterative process of creation, destruction, and recreation. For this reader, a wonderful highlight of the chapter is the prehistory of the masts, when they were trees in northern New England. Considered "princes of [End Page 956] the American forest" (24), the extraordinarily tall and perfectly straight white pines were valued for their sublime natural beauty and for shipbuilding, especially for masts; in addition, the jurisdiction over cutting white pines had long been under dispute between colonists and royal authority, making the trees one of the most contested resources in the British Empire. As Bellion explains, the liberty pole preserved these economic, political, and natural associations in its charged symbolism. This example is representative of the thorough attention given to every facet of icon-making and-breaking throughout the book. This chapter establishes the book's emphasis on the "thing power" of political icons in eighteenth-century America and beyond. Following the work of Jane Bennett, Bellion conceives of these objects as vital matter and proposes that we approach iconoclasm not simply as the human destruction of things but as a phenomenon in which things act on people and participate in the rituals of destruction. Importantly, these objects signified differently among New York's diverse population...