American History Symbolism - Essay Example

American history is saturated with instances of effective, pervasive symbolism: the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol building (Bowling), the Eye of Providence, and so on. However, the earliest instances of such symbolism were not driven at evoking pride in the loose collection of ideologies that today are identified by and subsumed under the vague term “Americanism”. The earliest symbolism dealt with the inducing with pride in the ideals of republicanism. A symbol is an object which stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance. Republicanism, a political philosophy which will be defined further, is, in history, a long tradition of writings which express common concerns about “the importance of civic virtue and political participation, the dangers of corruption, the benefits of a mixed constitution and the rule of law, etc” (Lovett). Combining the two concepts, a symbol of republicanism is an object which stands for or suggests the ideals of historic republicanism—values of liberty, individual rights, rule of law, and so on—by reason of relationship, association, convention, and so on. In early America, symbolism was needed to retain loyalty to the ideals which caused the colonists to fight the tyrannical rule of the King; such a symbol would need to remind these individuals of the momentous nature of their endeavor. To do this, the symbol should draw a direct connection between this endeavor and the glorious histories of the greatest civilizations of mankind, bypassing the ages of Darkness and ushering in the Enlightenment. First of all, however, it may be instructive to explore the history of republicanism in order to define it: to contrast both classical and modern versions of the philosophy. In Ancient Rome, the Roman Republic existed from 508 B.C. to 27 B.C., when the government was structured by a complex constitution, forming a mixture of three types of government. It was only during the Enlightenment that we see the strong emphasis upon civic virtue and the common good (Lovett). Roman citizenship afforded to the individual a variety of rights under the law; individual rights, which will be a focus of later discussion, are instrumental to any conception of republicanism. During the Enlightenment, individual rights for the common man received a second look, following in the tradition of Locke (Kurland and Lerner). Incidentally, Locke’s influence seeped into justifying the American Revolution (Lovett). The Founding Fathers, thus, developed their own unique conception of republicanism. To Thomas Jefferson, a “republic” is definable as “a government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority; and that every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in its composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens” (Jefferson). John Adams, when speaking on American values, persisted in the following: “[the government] is to be bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend” (Kurland and Lerner). The conflicting visions about the construction of the nation’s federal capital revealed an underlying inconsistency, however, in the American view a republic: on one hand, a “pre-Revolutionary American republicanism” by taking out excesses and luxuries, and on the other, a “rising-glory republicanism”: the grand seat of an Empire to rival Ancient Rome. It is questionable regarding which vision prevailed, but we can safely assume that both survived (Bowling). When we dissect the various aspects of a republic, according to the intellectual founders of republicanism, we find them all essential to the creation of such a government. We identified some of these aspects previously as “rule of law”, “liberty”, “individual rights”, “popular sovereignty”, “civic virtue”, and “opposition to corruption”. The rule of law, in its simplest formulation, is the principle that no individual is “above the law”, or, as Thomas Paine (a well-known republican) said: “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other” (Paine). “Liberty”, in this political context, means political freedom, or “the absence of physical coercion”—the principle that individuals have the capability to act according to their own free will. “Individual rights”, accordingly is a principle which defines man’s freedom in the context of a group or polity. Rights guarantee liberties insofar as they sanction or permit certain actions for individuals to partake in. “Popular sovereignty”, an aspect particularly important to the Founding Fathers is, as John Adams put it: “the people have a voice in making [fixed laws]” (Kurland and Lerner). In other words, the formation of laws is a process which all citizens have an individual right to participate in. “Civic virtue”, in a manner of speaking, are those activities which are politically necessary for the survival of the community. In other words, civic virtues are behaviors which conform to a certain social mode and form the basis of that society and its laws. An “opposition of corruption” is instrumental in the assurance of individual rights and liberties; this aspect of republicanism is heavily emphasized in classical writings but is nevertheless essential. The question becomes, then, how can one concretize these ideals into a single symbol of republican values? With the proper context in place (the determination of what republican values are), how can one effectively portray them in a concrete, instantiated form? Among the many possible methods of doing so, perhaps the most effective would consist of a statue which integrates these various values together. Such a statue would have to combine elements of classical republican values as well as modern, Enlightenment ones. The statue would require strategic placement in order to reach the largest target audience, and be sufficiently large to convey its message effectively. To successfully integrate classical and modern values, the statue would have to represent these as well. Thus, what we have is a statue, made from bronze or some other easily crafted material, of a man dressed in a Roman toga—the symbol of citizenship in the Roman Republic—and holding in his left hand an American flag and in his right hand a musket resting upon the ground. The flag, representing liberty, flutters in the wind, while the musket signifies rights (and the historic fight for individual rights during the Revolution). To extend this symbolism further, atop the man’s head could sit a pileus, a brimless cap which symbolizes liberation, freedom from bondage, and liberty itself. Worn during the 17th and 18th centuries, its origins trace back to Ancient Rome when the pileus was placed upon the head of a freed slave to represent his newfound autonomy (Yates). To establish the connection further, the face of the man could be shaped to match that of Cato the Younger, a legendary Roman republican, renowned for his opposition to corruption, moral integrity, and stubbornness. For those familiar with the history of Rome (which, after Gibbon’s publication of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788, would have been many), Cato the Younger’s face would represent the nascent republic’s opposition to corruption to ensure the production of individual rights and liberties, its moral integrity to demonstrate its commitment to the principles of republicanism on which it was founded, and stubbornness to express the strength of its leadership. In drawing the direct connection between the rise of America and the decline of the Roman Republic with this statue’s various symbolic elements, citizens would be invited to draw comparisons between them, and to realize that for the first time since the Romans real political power has been vested in the common man—the individual—not exclusively in the royalty or the aristocracy. It is these ideals—these republican ideals—that the statue concretizes. The natural rights tradition of the Enlightenment and consequently the American Revolution developed in Ancient Greece, where the Stoic philosophers developed a system natural justice into natural law and derived from that natural rights, which served as the basis for the Roman conception of individual rights (Science Encyclopedia). In the Enlightenment, philosophies of natural law and natural right were revived, mostly through the works of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who continued the republican tradition (Zuckert). These conceptions of rights were brought together during the formation of the Bill of Rights, a series of Amendments to the United States Constitution which guaranteed various essential rights for each citizen. And knowing the previously defined connection between rights and liberty, these rights are designed to protect the liberties and freedoms of these citizens. In Ancient Rome, the situation was no different: the Romans even made liberty itself, the concept, into the goddess Libertas, deserving of temples, worship, and celebration. Liberty to the Romans was itself symbolized by the pileus, the hat previously mentioned as worthy of sitting atop the statue’s head to signify freedom and liberty for the individual (Yates). This collection of republican values is precisely what the statue is aimed at representing, and evoking the appropriate response from its viewer. The primary purpose, or final goal, of the statue is specifically this: bringing republicanism into physical form. Nevertheless, there are secondary aims which the piece can fulfill. One of these aims is to remind the ordinary citizen of the blossoming republic of the past many centuries: an age of oppression, mysticism, superstition, theocracy, and darkness. Enlightenment thinkers made it no secret how they felt about the Middle Ages and its backward quality; they thought that not until this, the age of reason and rational thought, that human history could resume its great progress—progress which had grinded to a halt with the fall of the Roman Empire. This statue is aimed at ushering in the culmination of the Enlightenment, providing the political framework to guide mankind into this new age, and restart the gears moving human beings forward. And unlike the Washington Monument, a structure which propagates ideals of central political might, such a statue of the common man would capture the public imagination for the rest of its existence (Savage). The statue’s aim is to evoke a certain response in its target audience: citizens young and old, some having fought for independence, some having fought to maintain that independence (in the War of 1812), and all at least aware of the peculiar novelty of their nation’s endeavor. This statue’s aim is to remind these individuals of the supreme significance of this amazing undertaking: the restoration of Roman ideals of liberty and rights to full fruition in the form of a sovereign nation, and the concretization of real republican ideals in the form of a constitutional, democratic republic. Essentially, then, the statue is a grandiose, almost propagandist, attempt to maintain the emotions which gripped the Founding Fathers and the rest of the Patriots in bringing them to war. Just as the famous “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photograph, taken in 1945, is an iconic representation of American victory in Japan, this sculpture would serve as an iconic representation not only of American victory in its successful revolution, but also its continued commitment to freedom, liberty, and the republican values which it had waged war in order to acquire for American citizens. We have defined both the classical conceptions and the early American conceptions of what republicanism and what values it entails, according to both ancient accounts and those given by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. In doing so, we have realized what would be serve to bring these values together and effectively represent them in a solid, concrete form. Using a sculpture of a Roman citizen, wearing a toga and a pileus, carrying a flag and a musket, characterizes many of the several features which we have identified as belonging to the loose intellectual tradition of republicanism. And by connecting the splendor of the American experiment in actually founding a nation upon these principles with the lost ideal of the Roman Republic, the statue gives its target audience something to remember in pondering the question of why this nascent republic is so significant. The answer lies in the temporal disparity between the death and rebirth of such values as civic virtue, rule of law, individual rights, and so on. Retooling the ideals of the classical world, lost to the darkness of the Middle Ages, the American vision could once again breathe life into the political and metaphysical significance of the individual person. Works Cited Bowling, Kenneth R. A Capital before a Capitol: Republican Visions. Washington D.C.: George Washington University Press, n.d. Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816. 25 October 2008 . Kurland, Philip B. and Ralph Lerner. Republican Government: Introduction. 18 July 2000. 25 October 2008 . Lovett, Frank. Republicanism. 19 June 2006. 25 October 2008 . Paine, Thomas. Thomas Paines Common Sense. 12 November 2002. 26 October 2008 . Savage, Kirk. "The Self-Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial." Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1987): 225-242. Schockenhoff, Eberhard and Brian McNeil. Natural Law and Human Dignity: Universal Ethics in an Historical World. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Science Encyclopedia. Human Rights - Stoicism And Roman Jurisprudence, Christianity And Medieval Contributions, Modern Natural Rights, The Reformation And Its Aftermath. 3 November 2008 . Yates, James. Pileus. 18 October 2008. 26 October 2008 . Zuckert, Michael. "Review: Hobbes and the American Political Tradition." The Review of Politics, Vol. 42, No. 2 (1980): 267-269. Read More