COMMENTARY: State Capitols Hold Visions of American Greatness

c. 2006 Religion News Service HELENA, Mont. _ On the Election Day that ended the smallest-minded campaign in recent memory, I took a self-guided tour of Montana’s handsome State Capitol, set on a slight rise in a valley surrounded by mountains. By no means the largest state capitol _ Texas claims that honor _ this […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

HELENA, Mont. _ On the Election Day that ended the smallest-minded campaign in recent memory, I took a self-guided tour of Montana’s handsome State Capitol, set on a slight rise in a valley surrounded by mountains.

By no means the largest state capitol _ Texas claims that honor _ this Greek neoclassic building modeled on the U.S. Capitol does more than house legislature and governor. It incarnates a vision of what Montana means.


Here, in statues, plaques, paintings and historical documents, I saw Montana’s pride at joining the Union in 1889, new arrivals’ awareness of sharing land with Native Americans, heroes who express values like courage (Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress and an iconoclastic opponent of two world wars) and justice (civil rights stalwart Sen. Mike Mansfield), and the ambiguities of being a rough-and-tumble land founded on gold and silver.

My one-hour tour didn’t remove the sour taste of election 2006, but it did remind me of higher-minded days. It was like visiting the Indiana State Capitol and seeing statues dedicated to Law, Oratory, Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Liberty, History and Art, and remembering that our polity means more than scapegoating gays and immigrants, distortion and lies, religious bullying and attack ads.

This tour reminded me that, as it says in Missouri’s State Capitol, “Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto,” or “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.”

Our contemporary leaders tend to behave like monarchs, talking grandly of “dynasty.” But, as a statue in Virginia’s State Capitol makes clear, our forefather, George Washington, is a onetime farmer who rose to the moment, turned down the title of “king,” and is remembered by his home state as wearing civilian clothes and standing next to a plow.

I asked a guard here about C.M. Russell’s masterpiece, “Lewis and Clark Meeting the Indians at Ross’ Hole,” which hangs in the House chamber. Braves on ponies dominate the huge painting. I never did see Lewis or Clark. He laughed and said, “Russell preferred the Indians. Lewis and Clark are over at the side.”

Now I understood maverick Montana politicians like Sen. Thomas Walsh, who led investigation of the Teapot Dome Scandal, and Sen. Burton Wheeler, who in 1924 ran for vice president on the Progressive Party ticket.

As we recover from campaign ugliness, this would be a good time for all of us to visit our state capitols. Many were built in the heady years after 1865, as America expressed a determination to be noble, cultured, worthy of history’s mantle, a force for wisdom and justice. We had seen our worst in the Civil War, and now it was time to envision our best.


In Lansing, stand in the rotunda and look up at eight muses, painted in 1886, before the automobile transformed Michigan, and now, perhaps, an invitation to imagine life after the automobile.

In Sacramento, be reminded that California extended voting to women in 1911, nine years before the U.S. Constitution was so amended. In Austin, see a statue of a Texas pioneer woman, baby in arms, looking confidently into a windswept future.

As we try to move on from the low-minded, demagogic politics of recent years, we should read the nobler visions captured in our state capitols. As they grappled with the aftershocks of Civil War, the unrelenting greed of robber barons, and cascading foreign wars, they asserted the enduring values of an optimistic nation.

Even now, as some learned last Tuesday to their surprise, the will of the people is guided by more than fear and pseudo-religious ideology.

KRE/JL END EHRICH

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.


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