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