In what could be their last joint appearance before the midterm elections, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined with other lawmakers on Thursday to unveil a new statue of Harry S. Truman.
While Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the leaders of the Missouri delegation largely stuck to Truman’s history in Congress and the White House, McCarthy took a subtle turn toward the political present.
Truman’s slogan “The buck stops here!” is good advice for everyone, said McCarthy, who hopes to be speaker next year.
“I think it is sound advice, not just to a president, but I think to a nation. Everyone should listen to it, especially policymakers. Don’t blame others for your failings. Learn from them, and fix it. Whatever the dangers today, it is important that we learn from history as we welcome this statue to the Rotunda,” McCarthy said. “Let’s work to build a nation that is safe, a future that is built on freedom and a government that is accountable.”
As a statue of a former president, the new Truman bronze benefited from tradition and got a prime place in the Capitol Rotunda, alongside the likes of Andrew Jackson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. But that meant an occupant of the Rotunda had to be booted to a slightly less desirable position in the building. A marble statue of Alexander Hamilton was moved to the Hall of Columns to make room.
Hamilton has had something of a renaissance because of his namesake musical, which is playing at the Kennedy Center through Oct. 9. The founding father helped draft the Constitution and went on to serve as Treasury secretary.
Filling the shoes of a founding father — marble or otherwise — might seem like a big task, but the assembled lawmakers heaped ample praise on Truman, who became president at the end of World War II and was the first and only world leader to use nuclear weapons in warfare.
“Today we gather to celebrate Harry Truman and the greatest gift he gave to our nation. His unyielding commitment to democracy,” Pelosi said of the 33rd president, who also served as a senator from Missouri. “It was this fervent belief that drove him to don our nation’s uniform, to fight in France during the First World War, to defend the people’s interest for a decade here in these hallowed halls and to champion freedom and justice here at home and across the world.”
McConnell, perhaps predictably, quoted from fellow Kentuckian Alben Barkley, who served as Truman’s vice president after a long career as the Senate Democratic leader, and Missouri GOP Sen. Roy Blunt noted, as he is wont to do, that he occupies Truman’s former Senate office.
“No president, in such a short period of time, made more consequential decisions than Harry Truman: ending the war in Europe, how to deal with the Soviets, how to look at transitioning back to a peacetime economy, what to do about ending the war in Japan, the United Nations. And that’s just the first six months,” Blunt said. “If you’ve ever been in a job where you’ve made decisions, just imagine the decisions he had to make and how quickly he had to make them, and how well he made them.”
The new larger-than-life bronze joins the National Statuary Hall Collection, a group of 100 statues that stand in various locations around the Capitol, with two donated by each of the 50 states. Missouri legislators picked Truman to represent the Show Me State, replacing an 1899 statue of former Sen. Thomas Hart Benton. (Benton was a relative of the famous painter of the same name.)
Perhaps the most coveted spot in the Capitol for an artwork to end up is the Rotunda, the center of the building and home to nine other statuesque presidents. Overhead is “The Apotheosis of Washington,” a fresco that shows an ethereal George Washington ascending to the heavens.
Sculptor Tom Corbin was commissioned to create the Truman statue in 2019.
Among the dignitaries on hand for the unveiling Thursday were both current and former members of the Missouri congressional delegation. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., whose district includes Independence, concluded his remarks in the Rotunda by saying, “If you can hear me and if there are antagonists, even in Zion, give them hell.”
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