Guest Editorial: The Shevchenko Monument (06/27/04)

ARAS SHEVCHENKO IN WASHINGTON: 1964-2004

Svoboda, Special Washington Edition, June 27, 1964

Guest Editorial: The Shevchenko Monument

by Clarence A. Manning

This is the day of the formal dedication of the Shevchenko monument in Washington and this means that this day will see the completion of an ambition that has been nourished by the Ukrainians in America for decades, although it has been an urgent task only for the last few years. It is no less pleasant for the Ukrainians for that reason and it is a well-deserved tribute to a patriot who longed for a George Washington to appear in his own land and institute a new and just law.

This is not the first statue of Shevchenko to be set up in the United States. The late Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko earlier designed two and they are both worthy memorials, but with a different purpose. The first bust of the poet was unveiled in 1957 at Soyuzivka, the estate of the Ukrainian National Association in Kerhonkson, N.Y. This was in the full sense of homage of the Ukrainians in their own great poet. It was under the banner of Shevchenko that the Ukrainian National Association was founded 70 years ago and it was in his name that the oldest Ukrainian scientific society was established in Lviv. The statue was in honor then of the Association patron.

The second, erected some years earlier and also designed by the same Archipenko, stands in the Ukrainian Gardens in Cleveland, Ohio. The authorities of that city conceived the idea of setting in one of the public parks a series of national gardens to honor each of the ethnic groups that had played a part in the development of the city and the neighborhood. So quite logically there were arranged Ukrainian Gardens as well as those dedicated to the great leaders of the other national groups. Here we find monuments to Grand Prince Volodymyr, to Shevchenko and to other Ukrainian heroes. This was designed so that people of Cleveland could be made aware of the national heroes of their neighbors in Europe and the world. It had a broader purpose but still one with perhaps a local significance.

Monument In Canada

Then there is the statue of Shevchenko in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It speaks for the Ukrainians of Canada and especially of the Prairie Provinces where most of the Ukrainians who came to Canada before World War II settled. But conditions in Canada always differed from those in the United States, for at its very foundation Canada was confronted and formed out of the two consciously national groups, the English speaking settlers of Ontario and the Maritime Provinces and the French of Quebec. When other groups come to the West, it was only natural that they were encouraged far more than in the United States to maintain and foster their national heritage. They were encouraged to found their own villages and it was and probably is possible to find villages where only Ukrainian is spoken. It was natural that under such conditions a monument to the great Ukrainian poet would come into being.

Yet the statue in Washington is something else, for it not only honors Shevchenko the poet but the ardent fighter for liberty and to use the modern term, civil rights. It honors the man who preached not only the glory of Ukraine but called upon his people to overcome barriers of class distinction and to live henceforth as brothers in the assurance that only so could an era of peace and good feeling be brought about. To do that he called for a general moral revival of his people and for a Washington to bring them "a new and righteous just law." He never lost hope that that would happen despite all the hardships of his life.

U.S. Recognition Of Shevchenko

Now his monument is being unveiled in Washington, the capital named after his ideal. It is not only the result of hard and continuous work by the Ukrainian population of America and by the members of the various committees and groups that have pressed the work to completion, but it represents also an approval by a resolution passed by both Houses of Congress and signed by the President of the United States. All who know anything of the history of that endeavor realize that the resolution was not adopted lightly or hastily but it was by men who were fully acquainted with the ideals and the work of Shevchenko in breathing into the Ukrainians of his day, a nation of down-trodden peasant serfs and denationalized nobles, a sense of their own dignity and of their obligations to themselves and to the world.

Russian Opposition To Shevchenko Monument

The efforts that the Soviet regime has made to oppose the erection of this monument or to try to use it for its own purposes like the efforts to depict Shevchenko as an ardent fighter either on his way to becoming a Communist poet or to have become one, would be amusing, if they were not so true to form. When in the early years of this century, the American Poles set up a monument in Washington to Brigadier General Tadeusz Kosciuszko who had fought in the American Revolution, the Imperial Russian Ambassador protested that it was an unfriendly act because by his later actions Kosciuszko showed that he was endeavoring to separate Poland from Imperial Russia. The argument found a short hearing from President Theodore Roosevelt who made it clear once and for all that foreign regimes had no right to interfere and rewrite history for their own purposes.

Compare this with the fate of the memory of George Washington. He had been the leader of a successful revolt against Great Britain. He had set up a young country on territory that he had torn from the British Crown but he had been a man of honor and ideals. When he died, due honor was given his memory by both the British Navy and the French Army of Napoleon. More than that a monument was erected to him soon after his death in Westminister Abbey without any attempt to prove that if Washington had lived, he would have tried to undo his lifework.

Ideals Of Shevchenko

The ideals of Shevchenko are ideals that can be respected by men of good will everywhere. They speak and show the way to a better world and nowhere does his statue belong more fittingly than in the capital on the Potamac. The Ukrainians should be proud of this and to no one man do they owe more for what hopes they have for the future than the mighty poet prophet and national inspirer who roused them from their lethargy and set in motion a train of events and an influence which has not yet reached its zenith.

The name, the work and the vision of Taras Shevchenko will long endure. He is one of the brightest stars in the history of the nineteenth century and his fame and glory will spread continually despite all his detractors and falsifiers. It is as a mark of this that the monument is being dedicated and will be a monument for all free men everywhere who understand human brotherhood in those terms in which it has been developed for millenia and will continue to develop for millenia to come.

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