A statue representing the Missouri River as the “mother of the West” stands guard outside the Missouri Capitol. The Capitol Commission tapped Robert Aitken to build two sculptures, one on each side of the building. Aitken chose a female figure to represent the Missouri River; the Mississippi River was shown as a male figure, ”the father of waters” (Caleigh Christy/Missourian).
Lightning flashed over the Missouri Capitol on Oct. 6, 1924, just 13 years after the building burned to the ground following a powerful lightning strike.
This time lightning flashes were joined by the red hues of celebratory fireworks. This was the grand pageant to celebrate the opening of the new Capitol.
Though the Capitol had been used by the legislature since 1919, it was felt at the time that the building needed a formal opening. It was decided to hold the event on the 13th anniversary of the Capitol Commission’s founding.
Twenty thousand people gathered on the steps of the building to watch a series of shows depicting major moments in Missouri’s history, including depictions of settlers founding the state, World War I and the Civil War. The Civil War section was cut short as heavy rain ended the pageant abruptly.
This summer Missourian staff members toured the Capitol with Bob Priddy, who is working on his fifth book about the building and its history. Missourian staff also spoke with historians about the significance of the building’s art at the centennial of its official opening.
Murals showcasing the epics of Missouri line the rotunda of the Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City. While the paintings inside the Capitol are relatively historically accurate, the date of creation plays a large role in the full truth of the depiction (Caleigh Christy/Missourian).
With the exception of one room — the House Lounge — and a few smaller pieces, all of the art in the building was done from 1917 to 1928, Priddy said.
To pay for the building, the state issued a tax bond during the roaring ’20s as the state’s — and nation’s — economy boomed. With robust resources, $1 million of the $4 million allocated for the building was spent on decoration — equivalent to about $16 million today after adjusting for inflation.
“This new Capitol, whose cornerstone is laid today, will represent the greatness of Missouri,” former Gov. Elliott Major said at the laying of the building’s cornerstone in 1915.
The art of Missouri’s Capitol offers a snapshot of the state’s past, and the themes filling the walls of the building can be seen in the composition of the state today. Artists dealt with environmental destruction and conservation, historical accuracy and sanitization, and competing state identities. The combination of artistic quality, stylistic consistency and innovation presents a canvas for understanding Missouri both then and now.
World War I
Hanging above the visitors’ gallery on the east wall of the House chamber is “The Glory of Missouri at War.” The 49-foot-long painting depicts troops from the U.S. Army’s 35th Division, comprising Missouri and Kansas natives. During the war, 156,000 Missourians served and 10,000 were wounded or killed.
“The Glory of Missouri at War” was painted by French artist Charles Hoffbauer, who had served in World War I alongside American troops. Before the war, Hoffbauer had established himself as a prominent painter and had caught the attention of the Decoration Commission for his depictions of Confederate military leaders for the Confederate Memorial Institute in Richmond.
Noticeably absent from the painting is Gen. John Pershing, a Missourian who served as commander of the American Expeditionary Force. Hoffbauer said at the time that he instead wanted to depict the soldiers of Missouri.
The Missouri soldiers in the painting march through the rubble of a French town. The painting is bathed in gray hues, and early sketches of the painting depicted a much bleaker scene. The commission was concerned about the “rather depressed, worn, and melancholy” look of the soldiers as well as a dead horse in the original sketches and asked Hoffbauer to remove them.
Opposite Hoffbauer’s painting is “The Glory of Missouri at Peace,” a stained glass window by H.T. Schladermudt. This work utilizes the artistic and symbolic technique of personification. Central in the stained glass is Missouri, depicted as a woman on a throne surrounded by figures personifying peacetime activities including art, science, justice and learning.
Throughout the Capitol there is an outsized depiction of WWI, as the building was constructed just after the war.
Civil War
Despite World War I’s prominence, “the Civil War has the biggest legacy of any conflict in Missouri history, not only politically but socially and economically,” said Sean Rost, assistant director of research at the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Lingering impacts of the war were present on that rainy October 1924 night in Jefferson City. One of the pageants recalled the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, a Confederate victory outside Springfield. Lady Missouri emerged from the sky as the two sides fought and “clasped the hands of the blue and grey soldiers,” according to a St. Louis Star newspaper account.
The cordial display of the Confederacy and Union shaking hands wasn’t accurate to the true legacy of the Civil War in Missouri, according to Rost. From 1875 to 1903, both of Missouri’s U.S. senators were former Confederates. After failing to make Missouri a Confederate state, former Gov. Claiborne Jackson fled to Arkansas to prop up a separate Missouri government in exile. While Missouri did not leave the Union, residents fought on both sides. About 110,000 Missourians fought for the Union compared to some 40,000 for the Confederacy.
The deep divisions created by the war are evident in the Capitol. Both the Confederate victory at Wilson’s Creek and the Union victory at the Battle of Westport are shown in the “Missouri at War” area of the building.
Missouri’s complex relationship with the war plays out in the Senate chamber. On one side is a large painting of Francis Preston Blair Jr. fighting against the loyalty oath. In 1865, Missouri adopted a constitution that required citizens to attest their loyalty to the United States to hold public office or vote. It also required Missourians to say whether they had ever defied the U.S. government. It was impossible for Confederates to do that, effectively barring them from public office.
Blair was a unionist but opposed the loyalty oath. Detractors tried to assassinate Blair at some of his speeches. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled against the loyalty oath on the grounds that the state cannot punish someone for a past act that wasn’t illegal when it was committed.
While Black people moved to the state for more opportunity, “reconstruction in Missouri was just as conflicted as the Civil War,” said Marlin Barber, a Missouri State University professor emphasizing 19th-century Black history. “Politically, the state was still rather polarized. And if you went into places like southern Missouri, it’s more closely culturally aligned with the Deep South. It was even more contentious,” he added.
Between 1877 and 1950, 60 people were lynched in Missouri, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. No art in the Capitol depicts this history.
Native Americans
A mural inside the Missouri Capitol depicts an interaction between indigenous people and frontiersmen (Caleigh Christy/Missourian).
By 1830 most of Missouri’s Native American tribes had either been wiped out or removed from the state. Yet, paintings of Native Missourians populate the Capitol walls. Greg Olson, an expert on Native American history in the state, thinks many Missourians felt imperialist guilt by the early 20th century when the paintings were done.
“People began to realize (in the late 19th century) that not only have we settled the frontier, but we’ve also conquered the Natives,” Olson said. “We felt a little bad about killing the buffalo, we felt bad about settling the entire continent, we began to feel like we spoiled the wilderness.”
Many of the paintings depicting Native Americans are inaccurate and largely based on dated tropes, Olson said. The artists of the time presented a vision of Missouri untamed and natural before the arrival of settlers. But Olson notes that Native Americans had been reworking Missouri’s landscape for thousands of years.
The painting “Trail to Happy Hunting Grounds” represents the view that Native people were inevitably going to disappear. A Native woman looks across the Missouri River as two people standing nearby appear to try to get her to stay. Settlers believed that when Natives died, they would cross the Missouri River and enter the “happy hunting ground.” In reality, it was a justification for the death and removal of Native Americans, Olson said.
“It’s just all about romanticizing the disappearance of Indians from Missouri because it was seen as being inevitable,” Olson said.
The ground the Capitol occupies is an example of how far Missouri went in the removal of Native Americans. An 1889 historical archive of Cole County describes the removal of a native burial ground for the construction of an earlier Capitol.
Transportation/forming the state
Missouri is a state of great rivers. The Missouri River begins in Montana and flows through Kansas City, past the steps of the Capitol in mid-Missouri and enters the Mississippi River north of St. Louis. The Mississippi River starts in northern Minnesota, defines the state’s eastern border and ends in the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans.
“Up until the Civil War, every significant community in Missouri was on the rivers,” Priddy said. “That’s how people got here. That’s how people traveled. That’s how commerce moved. They were the liquid highways. Interior Missouri was still very much uninhabited.”
To show the significance of these two rivers, the Capitol Commission tapped Robert Aitken to build two sculptures on the left and right side of the building. Aitken chose a female figure to represent the Missouri River as the “mother of the West.” The Mississippi River was shown as a male figure: ”the father of waters.”
Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s first U.S. senators, pushed Missouri’s development forward with rail. A painting in the Senate shows Benton giving an impassioned speech at the 1849 National Railroad Convention in St. Louis, where he argued for a nationwide railroad system that became reality 20 years later.
“Railroads (stretched) across northern Missouri and then as they progressed in the southwest, created towns, created commerce, created ways for farmers to get their goods to markets in St. Louis or Kansas City,” Priddy said.
The painting “The Artery of Trade,” shows the impact rail and steamboat technology had on Missouri when the two worked in concert. The left side of the painting shows the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it’s the first steel bridge and longest-standing span over the Mississippi River. The foreground shows steamboats arriving in St. Louis. The combination of steamboats, rail, growing industry and a movement of people north from the south led St. Louis to be the nation’s fourth-largest city in the 1900 census.
Brangwyn/Taos Society
With roughly $1 million in the Capitol’s budget for art and decoration, the commission hired some of the top painters from around the world.
“A million dollars would buy you England’s and America’s foremost 20th-century artists,” Priddy said. “The artists were considered to be leaders in their field, leading portrait artists, leading Western artists, and so we were able to hire the cream of the crop,” he added.
Roughly 4,310 miles away from Jefferson City, English painter Frank Brangwyn caught the eye of the commission.
Brangwyn was commissioned to paint a series of 13 murals throughout the Capitol’s rotunda. Those murals represented the largest single commission of his life. Each of the four canvases in the third-floor rotunda measures 45 feet along the top, 15 feet along the bottom and roughly 22 feet high.
“Onions and oranges are as big as footballs,” a reporter with The Kansas City Times wrote at the time of the mural’s placement. “The ordinary box of fruit becomes six feet long. The Daniel Boone rifle of the pioneer is 14 feet long.”
The third-floor paintings mark four historic moments in the state’s history:
“The Historic Landing” depicts the landing of Pierre Laclède on the west side of the Mississippi River, where he would later found St. Louis.
“The Pioneers” shows settlers traveling to Missouri from the east in the late 1700s.
“The Home Makers” shows forests being cleared so permanent settlements could be built in Missouri.
“The Builders” shows the construction of the Eads Bridge in St. Louis.
These depictions were “handled with freedom from factual details. More than this, they are permeated with a kind of robust symbolism that gives them a universal appeal,” according to Emily Grant Hutchings, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter writing at the time of the mural’s placement.
Brangwyn never set foot in the Capitol — or Missouri, for that matter. His art was shipped from England and affixed to the walls by others.
The Taos Society of Artists was a group of six artists based in Taos, New Mexico. The society was known for its depictions of the American Southwest, Native Americans and romantic style.
Artists including E. Irving Couse, Ernest L. Blumenschein, O.E. Berninghaus and Bert G. Phillips all contributed the majority of lunette paintings on the second floor. Berninghaus, born in St Louis, also contributed to two of the “Missouri at War” paintings.
Another famed artist featured in the “Missouri at War” section was N.C. Wyeth, probably America’s foremost illustrator at the time. He painted both depictions of Civil War battles in Missouri.
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.