Statues of Liberty

About Statues Of Liberty

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America in 1950, Jack Whitaker, the Scout Commissioner of the Kansas City Area Council proposed that a number of miniature (8-½ foot tall, 290 pounds) Statues of Liberty be made and sold to various groups around the country for $350. The statues were made of sheet copper by the Friedley-Voshard foundry in Chicago. I learned of these about 1980 after seeing one in Bellflower, California.

Contacting the Boy Scout headquarters in Texas, I learned that a fire in the 1960s had destroyed all records of the statues. In those pre-Internet days, I spent the next five years finding the locations of as many as I could: writing to Chambers of Commerce, calling local libraries, contacting newspapers, and so on. In 1987, having assembled a partial list, I set off across the country to document as many as I could find.

Since most were in the mid-west and south, I decided that a panoramic format would best suit the environment in which the statues were located (even though I did a few vertical panoramas – is that an oxymoron?). The condition of the statues, at that point almost forty years old, varied considerably from polished and gleaming, to a coat of white paint, to forty years of weathering, to perforated with bullet holes, to being stored in the basement of the local police department.

-Arthur Taussig 2018