The Capitol Dome

11 Fig. 8. Gálvez's interest in ethnography, hydrography, and exploration marked him as a child of the Enlightenment. On 2 March 1784, prominent citizens of Madrid signed a letter testifying to his interest in aeronautics as well. No less a celebrity than Sir Joseph Banks communicated the letter, accompanied by this engraving, to London's Royal Society, whose Transac- tions circulated Gálvez's vision throughout the Atlantic world. Fig. 9. Bernardo de Gálvez's commemoration in Ameri- can public art and popular culture predates his portrait being hung in the U.S. Capitol in 2014. On 3 June 1976, Spain's King Don Juan Carlos I dedicated Juan de Ávalos's statue of Gálvez among the "Statues of the Liberators" on Washington, D.C.'s Virginia Avenue NW—"as a remind- er," according to the inscription on its base, "that Spain offered the blood of her soldiers for the cause of American Independence." In the intervening years, Gálvez has ap- peared as the subject of both a U.S. postage stamp (1980) and an episode of the PBS children's series, Liberty Kids (2002). willing participation in bull fights, dances, and festivi- ties, made Gálvez very popular. But his tenure as viceroy was darkened by the so-called "famine year," a series of weather phenomena that destroyed most of the crops in Mexico. Gálvez had to use all the resources of the Span- ish administration to try to feed the starving inhabitants of the most populous viceroyalty in the Americas. He fought hoarders and black marketers who abused "those unhappy people that, although poor, are the ones who fatten the rich giving them with one hand what they re- ceived with the other, and the ones who make the wealth of kingdoms working with their arms, fighting the wars, and paying taxes." For Bernardo de Gálvez, the people were "the strength and vigor of the State." 27 THE CAPITOL DOME

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