It makes sense--the story here. Meet John Brown, the John Brown, as he lives and breathes and has his being upon a huge wall of the Kansas Statehouse. The symbolism is painfully obvious, but this grand mural is a masterful work, a work Kansas is, today, greatly proud of.
Not that it always has been.
It's titled Tragic Prelude because what happened in Kansas, "Bleeding Kansas," was, in fact, a "tragic prelude" to the Civil War. Some astute historians like to think that the Civil War didn't start with the firing on Ft. Sumter, but began right there at the border of Kansas and Missouri, where pro-slavery folks from the South and abolitionists from the North, well, went to war.
Among them, the ever larger-than-life John Brown, who, with four of his sons, simply broke into the frontier homes of pro-slavery families one night in May of 1856, removed some of the men who lived there, then murdered them, cut them to bloody shreds with swords. Some say Brown and the abolitionists killed them, didn't murder them, because Kansas was at war and killed is a word we use for real warfare--murder isn't.
The fact is, Brown still strikes terror in the hearts of historians because no one really knows what to make of him. As greatly as I admire his fiery hatred for slavery, his fanaticism feels almost insane. Look at his eyes. Look at the open Bible. Look at the rifle in his right hand. Here he stands in the Kansas Statehouse as if thrilled with the lifeless victims beneath his boots. The prairie fires and that awful tornado seem spun from his singular mad desire to free America of the sin of slavery.
John Steuart Curry painted this epic, an artist with the same kind of penchant for heroic dimensions as his friends from the same school, Thomas Hart Benton and Iowa's own Grant Wood, all of whom loved colossal figures bestriding nothing less than life itself in a manner that had "manifest destiny" writ large over the story.
Curry's benefactors, however, were not so inclined. They hated what he was doing. Controversy raged over this huge mural, and others Curry was working on in the Statehouse, in part because some folks simply didn't find them--this one particularly--all that becoming. I mean, who wants an entire state to be known by its madmen, right? "Bleeding Kansas" needs to be stanched.
Besides, our Statehouse should be a place of beauty, like this.
John Brown was nightmare better swept from memory. Things were said. Rulings were made.
So Curry quit and never signed his work. See it for yourself in Topeka. Like every Statehouse in the Union, Kansas's draws awe by its magnificence. But it's not known for its galleries or its dome. Curry's Tragic Prelude sits in glory the way Rembrandt's Nightwatch makes everything else in Rijkmuseum play second fiddle.
Tell you what. Go to Wikipedia and look up "Pottawatomie Massacre." What you'll find is disputed territory, another battleground because historians of all kinds still draw swords when they tell the story of what happened that May night Brown killed the "Border Ruffians." Wait. Let me change that: ". . .when Brown murdered 'the Border Ruffians.'"
Killed or murdered? Was John Brown a great national hero or a freakin' madman?
Or was he both?
John Brown the abolitionist was hung after his ill-fated rebellion at Harpers Ferry, so his body lies a moldering in the grave. But if you visit the Kansas Statehouse and stand in front of him, right there, the dead at his feet, you can't help but think his soul goes marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah.
An amazing American story.
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