The Capitol Dome

THE CAPITOL DOME 2 I n 1958, the statue groups that stood on the cheek-blocks of the Capitol's East Front were curiously removed. For over a hundred years, Luigi Persico's e Discovery of America and Horatio Greenough's e Rescue bookended the stair- case, greeting congressmen and visitors as they entered and left the building and serving as fixtures at every presidential inauguration. Leta Myers Smart, a member of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, led the removal campaign from her posi- tion as "Assistant to the Sachem" of the California Indian Rights Association based out of Los Angeles. She wrote doz- ens of letters to legislators, art critics, and architects through- out the 1950s; she was tenacious, perceptive, and really witty. In one letter, for example, to the long-serving Architect of the Capitol, David Lynn, she threatened, "to take a stick of dynamite (no, two sticks!), and blow up the 'Rescue Group' (laugh)," but then, feigning fear that she might have just incriminated herself, suggested that perhaps she'd just "have to get the communists to do the job!" She continued, "Seriously now, Mr. Lynn, I have been as busy as one could be when they [are as] indisposed with arthritis as I have been for several weeks,—writing and talking whenever I get the chance about those hideous statues that are a disgrace to the Indian race, shameful things that never should have been put up in the first place!" 1 At other points she referred to the A CURIOUS REMOVAL: Leta Myers Smart, The Rescue, and The Discovery of America C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa Fig. 1. Pediment of the Central Portico of the United States Capitol. ARCHI T EC T OF T HE C API TOL

• Cover