The Musée des Arts et Métiers is one of my favorite museums in Paris. And, I like lots of museums in Paris. Its collections include models of classic French cars and a recreation of French chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s laboratory. There are also models showing different phases of construction of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s “Liberty Enlightening the World” (the Statue of Liberty).
Elsewhere in Paris, at Pont de Grenelle on the Seine, is a quarter-scale working model for the statue unveiled on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. No surprise there: After all, Bartholdi was French. That particular statue was an 1889 gift from the American community in Paris to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution. Then there is the Statue/s of Liberty in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The scale version that Bartholdi created for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 and later gave to the Musée du Luxembourg long stood in the gardens there, together with many other figurative monuments. In 2014 it was moved into the Musée d’Orsay. A new bronze replica, also the gift from the Americans, now stands in the earlier statue’s place in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Statues of Liberty can be found elsewhere in France, including one in Colmar, Bartholdi’s birthplace.
But, a random scale model in the small town of Lexington, Missouri? I simply thought someone the Lafayette County Courthouse wanted a statue on the lawn to balance the historical marker about the 1861 Civil War Battle of Lexington. Nope, it turns out I was wrong, as we shall see.
That was when I ran into the second scale model of the Statue of Liberty. It stands on the courthouse lawn in Leavenworth, Kansas, some fifty miles away across the state line from Lexington as the crow flies. That was one random scale model too many. So, I did what any good researcher does today: I began by googling it. It turns out these Statues of Liberty weren’t random at all.
Shawnee Mission North High School Campus, Mission, Kansas, USA (2019)
There were other Statues of Liberty in the Kansas City area, including one on the northwest corner of the Shawnee Mission North High School campus in suburban Mission, Kansas. Why is this you might ask? And, what do their inscriptions say?
Well, they are part of a program of scale models of the statue unveiled across the United States in the early 1950s, the brainchild of a Kansas City Boy Scout council commissioner. These statues were meant to help promote the Boy Scouts of America’s fortieth-anniversary theme, “Strengthen the Arm of Liberty,” whatever that may mean. I’m pretty sure it’s not a reference to Emma Lazarus’ “…A mighty woman with a torch…” For one thing, the sentiments in the inscription were male, giving thanks to “forefathers,” rather than to the gender neutral “forebearers,” but, hey, it’s the Boy Scouts.
How have these particular Statues of Liberty fared over time? Apparently, some have been moved indoors or taken down and altogether. I also wonder if today’s Boy Scouts think contemporary US immigration policies, like not granting temporary protected status to people from the Bahamas displaced by Hurricane Dorian, are helping strengthen that arm of liberty.
Of Monuments and Memory 