Battle of Yorktown

When the National Park Service began looking around for a sculptor to do a new figure for the top of the 97-ft. shaft of the Yorktown, Va. monument commemorating Washington's victory over Cornwallis, its eye fell on Norwegian-born Oskar Hansen, 61. Hansen was a monument-maker of some repute: he did the figures at Boulder Dam, a World War I memorial in Hinsdale, Ill., and a Columbus memorial in Rio de Janeiro. What was needed at Yorktown was a new statue of Liberty to replace the one decapitated by lightning in 1942.

At first all went well. Sculptor Hansen designed a classic Goddess of Liberty. It was duly approved by the Park Service, and Hansen went to work. But Hansen soon began to worry about the shaft on which his new statue was to be placed. Not only was it a Victorian monstrosity, he charged, it was also an unsafe base for his new Liberty. At the top of the shaft, he said, is a gunmetal core which had repeatedly attracted lightning.

By last week, the Park Service and Sculptor Hansen seemed at hopeless deadlock. Hansen charged that when he agreed in 1949 to design a new figure, install it and repair the shaft, he did not know the condition of the column. His new, 13-ft. granite statue, he says, will "last for 10,000 years," and he objects to putting it on a base "that has not lasted the life time of a frame bungalow." The Park Service replied that Government engineers have inspected the shaft, and with a little fixing, it will be perfectly safe. Besides, Congress only appropriated $59,000 for the whole job: a new shaft alone would cost $397,000.

Hansen was not concerned with such trivia. Said he: "To ask me to perpetrate, on the battlefield at Yorktown, a composition in sculpture bastardized according to the collective idea of a government bureaucracy, is asking of me not only the services of my body but the devastating perdition of my soul."

This week the outcome of the new battle of Yorktown was still in doubt. The Park Service hoped that Hansen would come around; if he did not, he could be sued for contract violation. Hansen, for his part, hoped public pressure would change Washington's mind. If not, he would rather call off the deal and give the Government back the $20,000 it has paid him so far. In that case, Hansen says, he might give his Liberty to President Syngman Rhee of Korea, whom he regards as "a champion like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson of the ideals of democracy and freedom."

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