Turmoil likely to delay Bates statue unveiling
Speakerless House can’t set date for Capitol event
The lack of a U.S. House speaker to set a date for the unveiling of a statue of Little Rock Nine mentor Daisy Bates likely means the statue will not be unveiled in Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol later this year, the state Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission learned Tuesday.
Shane Broadway, Arkansas State University System’s vice president of university relations, said that “obviously for the Daisy Bates statue we are still just waiting on a date from the speaker’s office and obviously at this current moment in time there is no speaker, so until that is resolved, I don’t anticipate anything happening this year.”
There was “a window of opportunity” for the unveiling of the Daisy Bates statute in Statuary Hall this year during the last two weeks of August and the first two weeks of November, he said.
But Congress’ approval on Sept. 30 of a 45-day extension of a continuing resolution “leads them until November 17” to work to keep the federal government open beyond then, “so I would imagine and rightfully so the focus needs to be on the matters at hand,’” Broadway said.
“So I don’t anticipate, although I could be surprised, anything occurring this calendar year, so we are probably looking at [unveiling] both of them next year,” he said.
Arkansas’ other statue scheduled to be placed in Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol is of the musician Johnny Cash.
Kevin Kresse of Little Rock, the artist for Cash’s statue, told the Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission on Tuesday that he drove the statue of Cash on a 16-foot trailer to Eureka Springs, where “they are working on the pedestal.
“I have the steel structure welded here and I took that up, so now they are working on putting that pedestal together and then once everything is finished up there,” then he will complete his work on the statue, he said.
“Shane, I will probably get with you to see do we need to hang onto it here or do we need to ship it up there? I am not sure about that,” Kresse said.
Kresse said he is excited about how the Johnny Cash statue looks.
“I am a happy camper,
and obviously now it’s kind of a waiting game up there,” Kresse said.
Michael Harry, chairman of the Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission, said “the delay in Washington might be a bit of a blessing in disguise for us to do these [two statue] unveilings a little closer together than what might have actually happened, had it not.”
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the U.S. House Republican majority is stuck, one week after the ouster of U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, with lawmakers unable to coalesce around a new leader in a stalemate that threatens to keep Congress partly shuttered indefinitely.
On Tuesday evening, two leading contenders for the gavel, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, were scheduled to address colleagues in at a closed candidate forum, but they appeared to be splitting the vote, according to The Associated Press. McCarthy, meanwhile, was openly ready to reclaim the gavel he just lost but was seen by many as a long-shot option unlikely to win back the handful of hardliners who ousted him.
In June of 2021, Kresse and fellow sculptor Benjamin Victor of Boise, Idaho, were awarded commissions to create the likenesses of Cash and Bates, respectively. The statues were approved under Arkansas’ Act 1068 of 2019 to replace Arkansas’ two statues there. Arkansas’ current statues are of the late attorney Uriah M. Rose and the late U.S. Sen. and Gov. James P. Clarke.
In 1864, Congress passed a law inviting each state to submit up to two bronze and marble statues to be placed in what is known as Statuary Hall. As the number of states grew, the statues spread to other areas in the U.S. Capitol.
In 1917, the Arkansas Legislature approved a marble statue of Rose, who helped found the Rose Law firm and the American Bar Association.
In 1921, the Legislature approved a marble statue of Clarke, who was governor from 1895-1897 and U.S. senator from 1903-1916.