Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 31

century, the American Republic, preserved by his father in the Civil War, was
experiencing rapid geographic and economic expansion during the industrial revolution.
An enormous labor force was needed to work in nation’s new mines and factories. Liberal
immigration policies were enacted and millions responded, fleeing the poverty and
discrimination that they had long endured in Europe. The Statue of Liberty, located on a
small island in New York City’s harbor, extends a lamp in its outstretched right arm,
welcoming the new arrivals and offering them a share of the promise of ‘liberty’ the
Republic offers to its citizens. New York City was the epicenter for the new wave of
arrivals and many of them settled in the Statue’s shadows. The soon to be parents of Elias
Skriloff settled in the Bronx.
Male Virtue, in ‘Civic Virtue Triumphant over Unrighteousness’ vanquishes female
vice. If Anglo-Saxons needed non-Anglo-Saxons to populate the Republic, it was essential
that they virtuously resisted their races’ natural inclinations towards lasciviousness.
McClellan tapped McMonnies to sculpt a monument to this goal at the turn of the 20th
century. MacMoinnes labored on the work for over a decade.
Civic Virtue demanded of foreigners, a transformation. In exchange for direct
participation in the American Republic, they were obliged to conform to the model of
virtuous behavior defined by their Anglo-Saxon hosts. The male figure ‘triumphantly’
resists the slivering mass of lustful ensnarements personified by the snakelike women at
its feet. Civic Virtue, commissioned in 1909, embodies just one of the challenges posed to
the newly born Elias Skriloff of 1908 as he set his path in 20th century New York City and
his new nation.
In 1941, Civic Virtue was moved to Kew Gardens after a couple of descendants of
immigrants, New York’s first Italian mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia and its great Jewish
builder, Robert Moses, objected to its remaining in such a prominent position in
Manhattan. Civic Virtue also alienated women who objected to the monument’s use of
women as the personification of lasciviousness’ creeping tentacles. Women had secured
universal suffrage in the United States in 1920. Newly empowered, they had little use for
a statue installed two years later in the shadow of City Hall, celebrating male triumph
over his sexual impulses, personified as nubile temptresses writhing at his feet.
Queens, where the statue would languish for seventy years, would emerge in the
Millennium as the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. Perhaps the elders
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