5 of the Most Screwed-Up Presidential Statues
Abe Lincoln got Young Sheldon’d, and Thomas Jefferson nearly died taking a 19th-century selfie.
30 Rock-Solid Inches of Nude Washington
In 1815, the state of North Carolina decided they were sick of seeing George Washington dressed in boring contemporary clothing, as “our boots and regimentals have a very puny effect.” So they commissioned a statue of our founding-est father writing his farewell address while cosplaying as an ancient Roman nobleman. They didn’t have Grok to make A.I. art of a powerful racist looking way cooler than he ever was, you see, so they had to pay a skilled Italian artist to make their fanfic.
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The finished product is pretty jarring in and of itself, but it’s the rough draft that will sprain your forehead raising a skeptical eyebrow. And the rough drafts are all we have left, since the North Carolina state house burned to the ground 10 years after the statue was installed. Most notably, we have a 30-inch, 3D nude of George Washington. Sculptor Antonio Canova decided that, in order to complete the assignment, he must first imagine in great detail what Washington’s knob and baubles looked like. After the original was destroyed, the government was like, “Oh my God, wouldn’t it be like, so funny if we put the naked one in a museum?” And so, George’s fun-size twig and berries are now on display in New York’s Frick Museum.
The Statue That Almost Murdered Thomas Jefferson
In 1825, artist John H.I. Browere was granted the honor of immortalizing the ex-president. Jefferson agreed to let Browere take a “life mask,” making a mold of his face like that one scene in Mrs. Doubtfire. The result is a chillingly lifelike sculpture of a frail, furious Jefferson with a furrowed brow and protruding chin like he was being actively strangled.
And that’s because he was! Browere’s plaster mix hardened far quicker than he’d planned, causing the presidential orifices to seal shut and leaving him unable to call for help. Jefferson was able to blindly grasp at a nearby chair and bang it around to get Browere’s attention. Even then, the plaster was sticking to his face, and Browere had to break it off by whacking the ex-president in the head with a mallet like a damn Looney Tune. Granted, it would have only shaved about a year off of his life, as he’d finally croak in 1826. But “asphyxiating while taking a 19th-century selfie” would be right up there with “too many cherries” on the list of dumbest ways for a president to die.
A Pitiful Tribute to Reagan
Aesthetically, this is a perfectly normal statue. What makes it one of America’s stupidest tributes is all the hero worship and empty bluster behind it. The city of Covington, Louisiana never voted for Ronald Reagan, and was in fact financially and culturally gutted by his policies. Nevertheless, the city started voting Republican in 2003, and the local elites saw an opportunity to rewrite history. They dubbed some random road the Ronald Reagan Highway, which caught the attention of oil tycoon and Reagan crony Patrick F. Taylor. “When Reagan passes away, I’m gonna build the largest memorial to him that I can,” Taylor promised.
Reagan died in 2004, and Taylor joined his friend in hell five months later, unable to fulfill his promise. But the sycophants he left behind to run the Taylor Foundation finally made good on it four years later, installing what is officially the largest Ronald Reagan statue in the world! At a whopping… 10 feet tall. So now there’s a kind of big Ronald Reagan saluting what appears to be a bus stop in the middle of a city that he almost killed and that hated his guts in life.
A Putrifying Presidential Zombie Army
Houston artist David Adickens took a peek at Mount Rushmore during a road trip and was struck with almost divine inspiration: what if gigantic presidential heads, except a lot smaller? For six glorious years from 2004 to 2010, patriots could stroll amongst the gods of democracy in beautiful Presidents Park in Williamsburg, Virginia. Adickens installed a 20-foot bust of every president from George Washington to George W. Bush and that’s it.
For reasons we’ll never know, folks below the Mason-Dixon line stopped wanting to celebrate the presidency in 2010, and the park fell into disrepair. The busts were moved to a dusty field in Croaker, Virginia, where time, weather and underpaid movers have turned them into grotesque horrors. George Washington has gangrene, Lyndon Johnson looks like he got an axe lobotomy and several others appear as though they’ve been crying blood for decades. Characteristically, Jimmy Carter seems to be holding up remarkably well, all things considered.
Abraham Twinkoln
Around the time of the New Deal, American jingoism took a weird little detour where artists kind of Young Sheldon’d Abe Lincoln, reimagining him as a patriotic teen Jesus with Frankenstein’s cheek bones. Among the wave of public art depicting Abe as a li’l tyke was an eight-foot-tall ectomorphic twink with chiseled abs, hard nipples and alluringly bare toes. Hot Lincoln, as he’s been dubbed on Twitter, has one thumb hooked into his tight slacks, barely obscuring a well-articulated bulge. All this, displayed soberly in a California courthouse since 1941.
This was just the second sculpture made by 22-year-old art student James Lee Hansen, and it won him a Federal Works Agency contest. He had just been complaining about being “an impoverished student,” and upon winning the $7,200 prize, he very frugally bought a brand-new car, wrecked it and spent 18 days in jail. When his sculpture was unveiled to a partially horny, partially scandalized public, Hansen explained his artistic choices: “From a sculpturing standpoint, it’s better to show the body without any clothes. That’s why I left ‘em off.”
