American Literary History Advance Access originally published online on November 9, 2009
American Literary History 2009 21(4):810-817; doi:10.1093/alh/ajp037
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The Headless Prime Minister and Other Tales: A Response to Anthony Hutchison
By connecting the transatlantic movements of George Grey Barnard's statue of Abraham Lincoln to the political history of Anglo-American liberalism, Anthony Hutchison reminds us that apparently insular intellectual debates in fact take shape within a broadly transnational context. In his closing paragraph, Hutchison suggests that there was something about Barnard's representation of Lincoln that made it especially suitable for cultural mobilization across borders: "Here was a piece of public sculpture monumental only in the magnitude of its reverence for the common man, a work of public art that gave expression to a universal quality identified in Lincoln." Hutchison sets the stage for this celebration of Lincoln's universality by addressing Parliament's belated adoption of the monumental statue by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, criticizing its metropolitan depiction of Lincoln as a "grandiose modern statesman, a transcendental unifier of peoples the likes of which had been championed earlier in the year at the close of the Paris Peace Conference." In responding to Hutchison's paper, I want to affirm the productive tension between—and within—these different versions of transnational cultural value. In the first quotation, Barnard's statue is affirmed as a symbol of universal ethical fraternity, but such fraternity is also social and particular: the interpretive community that the Barnard statue imagines is the "common man," the industrial working classes of the English (and American?) North. In the second quotation, the same double discourse is put to different ideological use; for the Parliamentary elite's commitment to "transcendent" principles of statesmanship is in fact determined by the contingencies of international relations after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. In the last half of my response, I sketch a structurally similar story about how the 1861–65 Lancashire cotton famine helps reveal the underappreciated commitment of vernacular subjects to the humanity of peoples they have never seen, whom they do not know, and whose lives and struggles are quite unlike their own. In so doing, I want to highlight my strong approval of Hutchison's emphasis on this tale of vernacular cosmopolitanism.1 I begin, however, with a rather less profound set of tales about the political meanings attributed to civic statuary in millennial Anglo-America.
I grew up in Macclesfield, on the southern edge of the Manchester textile zone. I have walked by the Barnard statue many times but did not previously know the story of its arrival in the Northwest or its transfer from Platt Fields to the city center. Some desultory research established, however, that Barnard's sculpture continues to be the object of local controversy. At the time of the statue's 1986 resurrection in the newly redeveloped Lincoln Square, a small scandal broke out around the wording on the plinth. Hutchison refers, quite correctly, to the way the new plinth made room for Lincoln's testimonial to "the support that the working people of Manchester gave in the fight for the abolition of slavery." What he does not emphasize, however, is that Lincoln's original testimonial referred to the "working ‘men’" of the city (Wyke 91; emphasis added). In a period in which "loony left" Labour city councils were routinely attacked for so-called political correctness, this silent shift to gender-neutral language became a predictable political football.2 Today, the Barnard statue continues to fulfill its historical function as a sculptural index of contemporary political concerns. Thus, a 2007 article in the Manchester Evening News describes how the director of the Manchester Museum was forced to find national government funding in order to make the statue fit to be featured in local celebrations of the bicentenary of the slave trade's abolition. In the years since 1986, it turns out, Lincoln's inspirational message of transnational fraternity was slowly rendered illegible by "the ravages of pollution and the weather" (Craig). The article uses this news to rather dutifully report on the history of Lincoln's tribute to the Manchester workers. But the center of the story reflects on the more contemporary meanings of the museum director's "shameful" request, with the statue functioning as an index of regional economic inequality, perennially terrible weather, and environmental degradation. In both these stories, the transnational dimensions of Lincoln's tribute provide the occasion for rather more local complaints.
Locality is not, however, the antithesis of the global. The last decade has seen the creation of three statues of Margaret Thatcher, arguably the most famous British politician of the post-1945 era and a particular figure of infamy and renown in the US. One of these statues, unveiled last May on the campus of Hillsdale College in Michigan, is a seated figure cast in bronze; an image of the Prime Minister in middle age, at the height of her popularity and political power (Figure 1). Over six feet in height, the statue is adorned with a quotation from a 1990 speech in which Thatcher welcomed the "dazzled socialists" of Eastern Europe to the "familiar and well-loved ground" of democracy—a political terra firma that, in a characteristic elision of national character and conservative values, Thatcher identifies as resting on essentially British "truths" of "personal liberty, private property, and the rule of law" ("First Statue"). In this way, the Hillsdale statue speaks eloquently to the popular American image of Thatcher as a kind of vernacular Reaganite, a peculiarly English emanation of the millennial turn in transatlantic conservative thought, in which the deregulation of economic markets was accompanied by a nationalist reconsolidation of the state's martial and coercive functions.3
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Thatcher's sense that the British and American peoples possessed a shared history and destiny—an inheritance literalized in her political partnership with Ronald Reagan—also forms part of the story of two other recent statues of the British Prime Minister. One of these is a massive bronze figure now on display in the House of Commons.4 This statue by Anthony Dufort was commissioned by the Speaker's Advisory Committee on Works of Art in 2003 and installed in the Members' Lobby in February 2007. At the time of its unveiling, reporters often mentioned the role played in its short history by the late Tony Banks, MP, a populist Labour left-winger who argued that history demanded the inclusion of a monument to Britain's first woman Prime Minister in the Commons, despite previously having claimed that he would like to see the woman in question "stuffed, mounted, put in a glass case and left in a museum."5 As Chairman of the Speaker's Advisory Committee, Banks agitated successfully to overturn a parliamentary rule forbidding the erection of monuments to MPs until at least five years after their death. His February 2002 victory over parliamentary tradition came long before the unveiling of Dufort's sculpture; still, it was just too late to save the first Thatcher statue commissioned by his committee, which in 1998 tasked Neil Simmons with the creation of a giant marble figure of the Prime Minister in her pomp. For four years after its commissioning, MPs and reporters worried that Simmons's sculpture—all eight feet and two tons of it—was doomed to a life in storage. Intended for display on the site of its subject's greatest triumphs and defeats, the statue was instead ignominiously kept on ice. Indeed, it looked for a while like this massive marble Margaret was to follow the path of an unemployed cotton worker: emigrate or retreat into idleness. A proposal was floated by the officials of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, who desired that Baroness Thatcher's gigantic twin join the old London Bridge as part of their odd installation of obsolescent English stonework (Lyall). More seriously, the tale of the Arizonan Thatcher provides a new footnote to the American tradition of seeing new-world virtues in the political leaders of the Old. And yet the burghers of Lake Havasu City were bound to be disappointed in their mission. Faced with the expatriation of their statue, the Speaker's Committee found a temporary home for the Simmons figure in the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.
| [T]he tale of the Arizonan Thatcher provides a new footnote to the American tradition of seeing new-world virtues in the political leaders of the Old.
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Saved from emigration to the Americas, the Simmons statue was nevertheless still doomed by its transatlantic connections. If Hutchison's paper shows how sculptural monuments to political figures can operate as moving targets for different national traditions—indeed, if it reveals how apparently domestic histories are constructed in and through transatlantic exchange—then my final tale shows how national subjects can find things to resent in that very same process. As the public waited for the repeal of the parliamentary ban on representations of living politicians, the Simmons statue was put on view to the public at the Guildhall. It was, however, soon decapitated. On a July day in 2002, a theatre producer called Paul Kelleher became briefly infamous for entering the Guildhall armed with a cricket bat, which he then used to strike Lady Thatcher's image about the head. I am sad to report that, like too many Englishmen, Kelleher soon discovered that his ability with a cricket bat wasn't equal to his ambitions. And so he grabbed a metal pole that formed part of a security barrier and duly performed what no Englishman had managed since the reign of Charles I.6 Asked at his trial about his motivation in vandalizing the statue (he was jailed for three months on a charge of criminal damage), Kelleher confessed that he "had nothing against Mrs. Thatcher as a person." Rather, in the context of the Iraq War and the UK's ongoing military alliance with the US, he acted out of anger at the way she had "jumped into bed" with America ("Thatcher statue"). If Simmons's statue briefly looked like an emigrant in waiting, then it ended up by having Americanness thrust upon it in an act of political violence.
These stories have little to do with Lincoln, a man of surpassing historical importance and immense cultural complexity. What they do show, if only in lamentably broad strokes, is the way that British political discourse takes shape within an overdetermined force field of transnational cultural exchange. And just as this is the case in the rather comical instance of a decapitated statue, so, too, does it apply to the tragic history of the cotton famine of 1861–65, during which thousands of Lancashire textile operatives suffered great poverty and hardship due to the closure or slowdown of the mills in which they worked. John Watts's The Facts of the Cotton Famine (1866) makes plain how the coincidence of the Union blockade of the Confederate cotton states and the overwhelming dominance of textile production in Lancashire meant that applications for Poor Law relief went up by as much as 400% in the period between 1861 and 1862 (121). In a region in which many skilled laborers owned their own cottages and saved in building societies, this was a sign of deep and pervasive social insecurity. This does not mean that the people of Lancashire were all emphatic internationalists or antislavery martyrs. But as Hutchison remarks in explaining Lincoln's gratitude to the Lancashire workers, whatever the evidence of pro-Confederacy sentiment among suffering factory hands, the central point to remember about the cotton famine "is not how many cotton workers supported North or South but the remarkable number who supported the Union cause despite the direct threat to their livelihoods." This judgment is reinforced by Watts, who reports on how public meetings held to promote British action to recognize the Confederacy and break the blockade were immediately opposed by rival voices making the moral case against chattel slavery—the principled affirmation, deeply resonant in a regional culture that mixed labor politics with religious non-conformism, of the ethical duty to support the North, no matter the cost in wages lost (123).
The cotton famine had transnational dimensions in excess of these admirable bonds of social solidarity. For Watts, the commitment of the Lancashire workers partly originated in their phlegmatic regional character, which allowed them to simultaneously recognize and shrug off the knowledge that the cause of their suffering lay far off, in a battle they could neither end nor join. But it also stemmed from the influence "of penny newspapers, and other cheap literature"—that is, from the way that, thanks to burgeoning literacy and mass media publications, a vernacular working-class culture could learn about, and feel affinity with, the world beyond the terrace row (Watts 231). Finally, as the cotton famine extended into 1863, Watts explains how local economic suffering prompted new patterns of debate about emigration and whether the skilled working class had a future in an England so dependent upon global trade. Indeed, the crisis revealed a marked diversity of opinions about emigration to the US and the colonies. For the Associated Operative Cotton Spinners of Lancashire, emigration was held out as one of the only means through which "the position of the working classes can be improved." Their 1864 communiqué therefore declared: "any individual who neglects to promote emigration ... neglects a duty which he owes to himself, while inflicting a serious injury upon his fellow workers" (Watts 215). And yet when liberals like Richard Cobden went against their laissez-faire instincts and pressed Parliament to pass a public works bill that would reemploy idle mill hands, they had to fend off attempts from usually protectionist agricultural interests to instead appropriate state funds for emigration—a policy that would have exported Lancashire's labor problems to the colonies, rather than seeing it as a domestic crisis to be dealt with at home. In a speech that Watts evidently approved, Cobden therefore rejected the curative potential of emigration, implying that skilled mill workers would face even worse destitution in the farmlands of Canada or the US (317). Whatever the merits of this argument, it is clear that agricultural service was not the only fate awaiting emigrant mill workers. The cotton famine also provided rich pickings for American industrialists, whose agents toured the decimated cotton towns of Lancashire, offering free passage and steady work to spinners and weavers ready to start again in the mills of New England (Watts 216).
My purpose in writing this response has been to indicate how the story of the Barnard statue is part of a larger history of transatlantic relations, one in which the workers of the English Northwest—like disillusioned theatre producers and museum directors chafing at budgetary cuts—are not dumbly suffering subalterns but, rather, what Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih would call "minor transnationals." That is to say, they are agents of a history that is both larger and smaller than the nation-state, a history that they do not control but to which they are not merely subject. This is not a new lesson, as Hutchison's analysis of Lincoln intellectual history ably shows. It is, nevertheless, a crucial component of any scholarly response to the complex cultural geography in which the sixteenth president of the US still circulates as an object of cultural value. Lest we forget that message, there are headless prime ministers, eager to remind us.
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Matthew Hart is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His book, Nations of Nothing But Poetry, comes out in late 2009. He joins the faculty of Columbia University in 2010.
1 For this term, see Homi K. Bhabha, "Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," in Laura García-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer, eds., Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities (1996), 191–207. Pnina Werbner surveys the many versions of this concept in "Vernacular Cosmopolitanism," Theory, Culture & Society 23/2–3 (2006), 496–98. 
2 For the party-political context of attacks on the "loony left," see Peter Jenkins, "Tories turn on the town halls," Sunday Times (23 Nov. 1986), Lexis-Nexis Academic, University Library at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, accessed 16 Feb. 2009 <http://www.lexisnexis.com/>.
3 I draw broadly on the seminal analysis of Thatcherism by Stuart Hall in such texts as The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, 2nd edn. (1988).
4 See the history and images at the website, "Baroness Thatcher Statue" (10 Nov. 2007), <http://www.parliament.uk> 2 Nov. 2008.
5 For Banks's reference to the demands of history, see Charles Moore, "Sculptor transforms the Iron Lady into the Bronze Baroness," Telegraph.co.uk, 19 Feb. 2007 (Accessed 16 Feb. 2009). For his earlier remarks about Thatcher's stuffing, see Nigel Morris, "Thatcher's statue inches nearer to Commons," Independent, 7 Feb. 2002 (Accessed 16 Feb. 2009).
6 My joke is obviously inexact. Thatcher was both never a sovereign and not in power at the time her image was decapitated. For reporting on Kelleher's attack, see Andy McSmith, "Man knocks head off £50,000 Thatcher statue," Telegraph.co.uk, 4 Jul. 2002 (Accessed 2 Nov. 2008).
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Craig Ian. Lincoln Statue Message to be Made Clearer. Manchester Evening News. Manchester Evening News, 3 Mar. 2007. Web. 3 Nov. 2008. http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/ 1003/1003022_lincoln_statue_message_to_be_made_ clearer.html.
"First Statue of Margaret Thatcher in the U.S. Dedicated at Hillsdale College." Admissions, Hillsdale College. 14 May 2008. Web. 2 Nov. 2008. http://www.hillsdale.edu/admissions/news/news_story.asp?iNewsID=1014&strBack=/Default.asp.
Lionnet Françoise, Shih Shu-Mei, eds. Minor Transnationalism (2005) Durham: Duke UP.
Lyall Sarah. London Journal: Lady Thatcher in Marble, Craved by Arizona. In: New York Times. New York Times, 29 Jan. 2002. Web. 2 Nov. 2008.
Thatcher statue protester ‘felt driven. In: BBC News Online (2008) British Broadcasting Corporation. 22 Jan. 2003. Web. 2 Nov.
Watts John. The Facts of the Cotton Famine. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Manchester: A. Ireland & Co. 1866.
Wyke Terry. Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester (2005) Liverpool: Liverpool UP.
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