The San Pedro Symbol of Democracy That Never Was in the South Bay By Adam Arenson
The San Pedro Symbol of Democracy That Never Was in the South Bay
By Adam Arenson
Monument to Democracy. Statue of Liberty in the Pacific. Design for Project at San Pedro, Port of Los Angeles. Millard Sheets.
Draft image for sale by Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, https://www.art-books.com/pages/books/03-0055/millard-sheets/monument-to-democracy-statue-of-liberty-in-the-pacific-design-for-project-at-san-pedro-port-of-los
Unbuilt projects can often be fascinating in their counterfactual, floor-moving-under-you way, a vision of a city unvisited yet so familiar.
One of the biggest unbuilt projects from the Millard Sheets Studio was the Monument to Democracy, a 1954 effort spearheaded by LA County Supervisor John Anson Ford to build the Pacific Ocean’s “Statue of Liberty” companion in San Pedro
“The erection, on the West Coast, of an heroic statue to Democracy…is a project combining considerations of statesmanship, education and art, of profound international significance,” Ford wrote. Echoing age-old themes with a new Cold War twist, Ford declared,
“The course of Democracy is moving westward. The great nations about the Pacific basin are looking across to America trying to discern whether our Democracy is really something for all, or is in effect a concept reserved for the Anglo-Saxon. Communism tries with cunning and skill to alienate all of darker skin from the ideals that motivate our Western society….When this project becomes a reality, as it certainly must, countless millions will find their way to it, there to be inspired by its majestic symbolism, and there to learn something of the unending story of how Democracy has inspired and blessed mankind.”
Intended to be 480 feet tall, on a drum base 46 feet high, topped with a bronze globe 125 feet in diameter, the Monument to Democracy was to have three figures, each 250 feet tall, on top of historical and art museums revealing the progress of each of the world’s races toward democracy. (I guess we are talking Asian, African, and European here — not a period of much considered of indigenous American peoples.) Millard Sheets was listed as the project’s designer, with the statue to be designed by his colleague, sculptor Albert Stewart.
This funding prospectus was circulating just as Sheets was completing his first project for Howard Ahmanson, the remodel of the National American Fire Insurance building, then at 3731 Wilshire (now the site of the Ahmanson Center).
If Sheets and Stewart were to have become wrapped up with this statue/museum project, how different southern California would look! One iconic statue, for good or ill, would have replaced the effort, history, and messaging that Home Savings received, to different ends.
So should we cheer for all the buildings we have, or wonder after this statue and museum that we don’t?
For my award-winning books — Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California (Texas, 2018), The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard, 2011/paperback Missouri, 2015) — and my co-edited volumes Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (California, 2015) and Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Penn, 2013), as well as current projects, see: http://adamarenson.com and http://manhattan.edu/faculty/adamarenson