Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues explores our national reckoning with monuments

Erin L. Thompson. // Photo by Stas Ginzburg

Writer Erin L. Thompson’s new book, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments, traces the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies.

Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author of Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors, delves deeply into the various stories of monument artists and the people who defend them—not as actual history, but “pledges of allegiance.”

We were excited to hop on the phone with Prof. Thompson to discuss Smashing Statues, out now from W.W. Norton & Company.

The Pitch: Is Smashing Statues an outgrowth and exploration of some of the articles you’ve written over the last few years?

Erin L. Thompson: Well, it’s a continuation of my general interest in the intersection between art and the law and art and crime. I didn’t really intend to write this book until I had a tweet go viral in 2020 so many people started arguing about monuments in the replies. There were thousands of comments and replies. Then I thought, “Oh wait, I know the answer to these questions. I can write about these.”

Smashing Statues is an excellent set of tools for refuting the usual debate points.

I’m hoping to show that there are no easy answers. A lot of the things that people think are a “slam dunk” aren’t really.

The chapter “Too Damn Beautiful” about the Spirit of the Confederacy statue, is one of those things where there are so many layers to these arguments. Is it difficult parsing facts versus emotions here when you have your own opinions?

Something that I love about debates, like these public debates, is that people are so interested in them. Because monuments are usually boring, right? They’re things that only pigeons care about. But now people are willing to pay attention when they think they can get more information to win an argument or to refute somebody else. I’m not constituting myself as a czar of monuments, but I think a lot of information in this book will surprise people on all sides of these debates.

Folks are so interested in this topic because while it’s become national and international news around statues, it’s also branched out into the idea of the naming of buildings or locations. It is universal re-evaluation. 

Yeah, and what’s inside of museums too, is of course something that I’m really interested in in terms of repatriation.

Part of what makes Smashing Statues work so effectively is it’s not just the story of the art, but also of the artists. There are artists the reader may not know by name, such as Gutzon Borglum, but people know what he’s done with Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain. Was it important, writing this book, to balance the art with the artist?

You can’t understand how the law works just by reading it. The law, as it is written, bears often very little resemblance to the law as it’s enacted. Laws around protecting statues or removing statues are the laws that we’re debating today, but we have to figure out how they work, and vice versa too. It’s hard to fully understand people’s actions unless you see the playing field set by surrounding law on economic issues and politics and et cetera,

A lot of debates about monuments today boil down into debates about the character of the person presented, and I am much more interested in how the monument itself was used. What was the purpose of putting the statue of whomever it was, and the life of the artist, and the life of the person or people paying for it, in the lives of the people maintaining it, and talking about it from when it was put up to today. Looking at that, you get to figure out what sort of a tool this monument is meant to be. Do we want it to continue to potentially have that use in the future?

Within these debates, people erroneously assert that many of these statues were in place for hundreds of years. Additionally, it’s not like they’re unique individual works of art. In some cases they were mass-produced. As an art historian, was it difficult for you to not delve too much into the “What is art?” argument?

No, because this book is about the effects of monuments and how people relate to that and what they do to people–or, really, how one set of people use these monuments to shape the lives of others. I was surprised by art historians who said, “Hey, yes, this monument causes pain to many people who see it either now or in the past, but it’s art, so we should keep it up.”

If the Mona Lisa gave an electric shock to every tenth person who approached it, we would take it off display.

Like you said, many of these monuments were mass-produced. Some are not that old. Stone Mountain was only completed in 1973. My grandparents have shag carpeting that’s older than that. Which is certainly not a priceless work of historical significance.

Erin L. Thompson’s Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments is out now from W.W. Norton & Company.