Myths exploded as state prepares to hoist ‘Genius’ statue at Capitol
A Central Connecticut State University professor has exploded more than a century of erroneous stories surrounding “The Genius of Connecticut,” the allegorical statue that stood atop the state Capitol building for 60 years before it was removed prior to World War II, only to be recast in recent years, where it has become the highlight of tours.
The real story of the statue unfolds at a time when the state is preparing to hoist a modern copy of The Genius back to the top of the gold dome at the cost of half a million dollars.
Popular history around the original 18-foot-tall winged protector of the state — with her flowing robes, crown of oak leaves representing the state tree, a wreath of dried flowers in her right hand and mountain laurel, the state flower, in the left — is that the infamous Hurricane of 1938 loosened the statue’s moorings, prompting state officials to haul it off the 257-foot dome to safety.
Then came World War II, when the bronze was supposedly sacrificed heroically and with great fanfare for the manufacture of munitions. Fortunately, a fullsized plaster model used by sculptor Randolph Rogers dating back to the opening of the state Capitol in 1878 remained
Matthew Warshauer, a CCSU history professor and an expert on the state’s role and experiences in the Civil War, says in an article in the Connecticut History Review that the story is much more nuanced and that those popular recollections are false.
“It’s all a myth,” Warshauer said in a recent interview. He used contemporary newspaper accounts dating back to the 1800s to trace the mystery.
He opposes plans for the 5,500pound, 12-year-old copy of the original statue — which resides on a $30,000 stone pedestal inside, under the Capitol rotunda — to be hoisted back atop the dome at a projected cost of $500,000, which is included in the current state budget.
Warshauer believes there should be a statewide fundraising effort to cover the expense, similar to the effort to pay for a popular statue of State Heroine Prudence Crandall and a young Black female student by the sculptor Gabriel Koren that was the idea of Bristol schoolchildren and has been on display in the Capitol since 2009.
He believes that hundreds of thousands of dollars could be saved by enlisting a heavy-lift helicopter from Sikorsky Commercial Aircraft Division of Lockheed Martin. “Hartford is always looking for a way to highlight their city’s history,” Warshauer said.
“The Genius was not taken down specifically because of the hurricane, and patriotism did not seal her fate during World War II,” Warshauer wrote. “Rather, the Capitol building and the Genius who adorned it had always been debated, even controversial works of art.”
The first time the statue, with her out-stretched arms symbolically protecting state residents, was removed from the top of the dome was in 1903, as disagreement raged over what to do with the piece. The second time was after the 1938 hurricane, when the dome and the statue were suffering from decades of neglect in New England weather made worse by a cracked foundation supporting it.
“Her removal was not done lovingly or with a steady eye toward her return,” Warshauer found of the 1938 removal. “Instead, she was unceremoniously beheaded, dismembered, and lowered to the ground piece by piece.”
Originally called “The Angel of the Resurrection,” which was also the name of a Rogers’ sculpture, marking the grave of firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt in Hartford’s Cedar Hill Cemetery, the statue is one of 19 Civil War monuments both inside and outside the 14-acre Capitol complex, the most in any state capital in the nation. The Capitol building itself was built to commemorate the Civil War, which was still fresh in the minds of the state in 1878.
By 1903, it began to sway slightly in breezes, prompting the formation of a state commission and scaffolding to be erected. Workers found cracks in the foundation supporting the statue. That set off a public debate on whether it should be returned to the top of the Capitol.
While engineers disagreed on the best course of action, an iron support rod was replaced with a bronze rod and the statue was hauled back up to the top of the dome in 1904. But during a routine building inspection in 1935, workers saw evidence of damage to the tower supporting The Genius. In the 1870s, Architect Richard Upjohn had not planned on designing a dome to the building, but state lawmakers insisted.
When Upjohn said he needed to use 10 huge granite piers to support the dome, a legislative committee voted to save $6,000 by ordering brick piers instead. “That was the first mistake,” Warshauer wrote. The piers, reaching all the way into the basement, began cracking in 1878 and had to be supported by the infusion of molten metal.
The September 21 Great Hurricane, which killed 600 people in the Northeast, did not damage the statue, but did spell its doom. Within 10 days, workers cut off her head with a saw, then the rest of the body, lowering each piece by rope. “There was never a long debate over saving her, as later histories of the statue claimed,” Warshauer wrote.
The dismembered pieces of the statue were stored in the Capitol basement until a metal drive was held for the war effort and the statue’s pieces were unceremoniously tossed in the scrap bin with other metal detritus from the Capitol cellar. “So much for the patriotic devotion of donating the Genius to the war effort,” Warshauer wrote.
Fortunately, the full-size plaster model remained in the Capitol, so the new, lighter statue was created using high-tech lasers and computer measurements to cast the new Genius in three pieces by the Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry in Rock Tavern, N.Y.
The effort to make a fresh copy of The Genius dates back to 2003. By 2006, there was $300,000 in the state budget to recast a new statue, along with a false narrative that the scrapping of the original was necessitated by the historic hurricane and a patriotic gesture against Fascism.