Sword and Stealth

"To litter is human, to pilfer, divine." Such a maxim might well be carved on every American monument and tourist attraction. For if airmailing a beer can into Yellowstone National Park seems to give pleasure, stealing a hunk of Arizona's petrified forest seems to afford pure bliss.

Nowhere is the American penchant for pilfering more in evidence than in Boston Common. Ever since 1897, the north side of the common has been dominated by a massive monument with a bronze bas-relief of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white leader of the first black U.S. regiment, who was killed leading a Civil War assault on South Carolina's Fort Wagner. The only problem with the statue was Shaw's bronze sword. It kept disappearing. First the original, then another and another, until the colonel had been rearmed no less than a dozen times. Finally, in the '40s, the city switched to a wooden replica--in acknowledgment of the accelerating costs of labor, if not the rates of degeneracy. Of course, the wooden swords began to vanish--5, 10, 15, 20, 25. In desperation the city switched to molded fiber-glass swords. Now those too are disappearing. But the city remains determined not to leave Shaw emptyhanded. "To give up," explains George Boutilier, superintendent for maintenance for Boston's parks, "would be saying go ahead and take the rest of it." Which, of course, people would do, if the entire monument did not weigh several tons.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.