Stephen Foster and Uncle Ned
Arguments over the Foster monument in Oakland should not be cast in black and white, suggests Carnegie Museums historian ROBERT J. GANGEWERE
The current debate over relocating the symbolic sculpture of Stephen Foster requires a sense of history, and as a historian for Carnegie Museums I want to offer some perspective. The city of course owns the monument, it is located on public property, and the city will decide its future.
The Giuseppi Moretti statue of Foster was made in 1900 for placement in Highland Park, and thousands of people attended its dedication. A reported 3,000 schoolchildren sang Foster songs at the event, and conductor Victor Herbert conducted music by combined bands from Pittsburgh.
After decades in the park, the statue was vandalized in 1936 and in 1944 was moved near the Carnegie museum and library for safekeeping. Now it sits across the street from the Stephen Foster Memorial at Schenley Plaza, and together they call attention to Pittsburgh’s greatest songwriter.
On the Foster monument, black “Uncle Ned” is seen playing a banjo to the side of and lower than Foster, but he nonetheless is honored as representing the symbolic source of the composer’s inspiration. The music sheet upon which Foster writes is titled “Uncle Ned.”
This is part of an ancient classical tradition in sculpture, including the medieval Christian tradition by which Christ is depicted as the central figure and his apostles surround him as lesser saints. The lyre in the Foster monument is formed from bull’s horns and by a tortoise shell lying on palm fronds — all symbols of immortality in music from ancient times.
It’s worth noting that Foster wrote the words and music of the minstrel song “Uncle Ned” in 1848 to honor the black musician a dozen years before the Civil War. The chorus reads:
Then lay down the shovel and the hoe, Hang up the fiddle and the bow: No more work for poor Old Ned. He's gone where the good men go.
Foster himself died impoverished in New York in 1864 after being found helpless in his Bowery Hotel and being taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he lived for three days. He had three pennies and 38 cents worth of Civil War scrip in his wallet, and the title of a new song on a scrap of paper: “Dear Hearts and Gentle People.” America’s first professional songwriter never made any money at a time when there was no copyright protection for his 200 published songs. He was as far from being the heroic Confederate general on a horse as one could imagine.
Mypoint is that rewriting history should not be the result of a modern knee-jerk reaction to old values and styles, as the destruction of ancient temples in the Middle East shows. Try to understand the past and make adjustments accordingly.
Did you know that, of the 110
names carved on the walls of Carnegie Museums, there is not one name of a woman? Or that the seated sculptures of men practicing their skills at street level — Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo and Galileo — are looked down upon from above by groups of female goddesses, who are symbolically closer to heaven and the finer human instincts that mere men must labor over to understand? Is this an injustice?
The Carnegie Institute and Library were built in 1895 and, soon after they were expanded in 1907, the flagpole near the Foster sculpture was erected. By then, modern anthropology was developing and America was preparing to enter World War I. The values of the Carnegie institutions — literature, music, art and science — are now seen in bronze medallions showing allegorical Africans, Arabs and Native Americans. French sculptor Sylvain Salieres created these after earlier helping to make decorative designs for Grand Central Station in New York.
Andrew Carnegie was also frustrated by the judgments of history. His committee of literary experts refusedto let him carve farmer-poet Robert Burns’ name in the list of writers above the library door, which salutes epic writers like Homer, Virgil and Milton. Carnegie reacted by gathering a loyal group of Pittsburgh Scots to fund their own statue of Burns next to Phipps Conservatory.
Again, the point is to understand and interpret the past, not erase it. If the city eventually relocates the monument, we should still see it somewhere and understand its layers of cultural history for Pittsburgh.