Heroes, Statues, and the Price of Public Flattery

That a nation should honour George Washington, especially as the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth approaches, is neither surprising nor blameworthy. I am told that a great museum of American history is urged to remove a “strange modernist sculpture” from its grounds, to set in its place an eleven-foot Washington from a recent race spectacle, and to construct within a “Center for American Heroes” telling edifying tales of founders and patriots. The request is pressed in imperious tones and on a very short deadline, as if public memory were a regiment to be wheeled about at the word of command. When political authority discovers an urgent taste in the fine arts, prudence bids us examine whose taste, and at whose expense, is truly in question.

In my Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I observed that every public measure has its real cost in the labour and stock of society, though that cost is often disguised from those who pay it. The visible benefit here is flattering and immediate: a heroic figure in marble or bronze, a hall of exemplars, solemn speeches about founding ideals. The unseen charges are more diffused: curators constrained in their arrangements, other stories crowded from limited space, public funds and attention drawn from less showy but more useful improvements. It is in the nature of such projects that the glory is concentrated, while the opportunity cost is dispersed among a multitude too busy to calculate what they have forgone.

The impartial spectator, of whom I spoke in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, does not ask whether we ourselves would enjoy walking beneath a colossal Washington; he asks whether the design is praise-worthy, or only calculated to attract praise. A well-informed and disinterested observer, considering that the statue comes to the museum straight from a political pageant, and is urged in language accusing its present keepers of insufficient reverence, might suspect that the chief object is not the virtue of the dead but the splendour of the living. To employ public institutions as mirrors in which rulers may contemplate a magnified image of their own patriotism is a kind of vanity which the spectator admires less, the more plainly he sees it.

Yet it would be unjust to condemn every proposal for a national pantheon as mere ostentation. In Wealth of Nations I assigned to government a duty, not only of defence and justice, but of erecting those public works and institutions which, though useful to great bodies of people, could not repay a private undertaker. Museums of history, if honestly governed, belong to this class: they extend the market for knowledge, they diffuse a common instruction among rich and poor, they help the labouring mechanic to feel that he is a citizen in a long story, not a solitary drudge in a present hour. To tell the stories, as this proposal phrases it, of those who “faced great challenges, overcame them, built great things, defended their country,” is no contemptible aim; the danger lies less in the end avowed than in the hand that would direct every brushstroke of the picture.

For here the spirit of the man of system appears. He cannot bear that the nation’s memory should grow by the quiet industry of scholars, artists, and schoolmasters, each contributing his small part under the higgling and bargaining of criticism and public reception. He must have a Center, a single orchestrated narrative, the heroes selected under his eye, the chronology arranged to suit his present quarrels. He treats the great chess-board of human society as if every piece were moved only by the hand of the magistrate, forgetting that each spectator and each student has a principle of motion of his own, a judgment which resents too visible a management. The more a government insists upon a particular pattern of admiration, the more it tempts free men to admire something else, if only to prove that their minds are not yet enrolled in livery.

There is, besides, the small matter of other people’s money. The same hands that sign decrees for statues sign warrants upon the treasury. If the expense is direct, taxpayers must support the taste of their governors; if private benefactors are urged to pay, the price is repaid in influence over the museum’s course. In either case, those who care most passionately about a single heroic story will exert a weight out of all proportion to their number, while those who value the quiet diversity of the collection will scarcely know that it is being narrowed until the work is done. In commercial affairs I counsel the most suspicious attention to every petition from merchants; in matters of memory one should extend the same suspicion to petitions from power seeking to immortalise itself in stone.

There is, finally, that amiable self-deception which I once described in the poor man’s son, who toils all his life for a splendour that brings less happiness than he imagined. Political men are not exempt from this delusion. They suppose that by attaching their names to arches, centers, and centennials, they purchase a kind of earthly immortality, and that the applause of the present age will sound as sweet in future centuries as it does today. But posterity is a colder auditor than they fancy; it loves Washington for dismissing his own power, and it will judge most harshly those who seemed to love him chiefly as a convenient pedestal for themselves. A free people may accept the statue; they should bargain hard over the strings tied to its base.