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It is better to question, examine and confront the problematic and controversial issues of the past than to pretend they did not happen. With grace, tact and a bit of soul searching, the New Bedford Whaling Museum is doing that with a small exhibition in the Little Braitmayer Gallery.
“Complicated Legacies: Museum History, White Supremacy, and Sculpture” is primarily focused on a 1916 bronze bust of Jonathan Bourne Jr. (1811-1889), surrounded by a bit of ancillary text, as well as a carefully curated selection of paintings, cartoons, photographs and historical objects.
Bourne was born in Sandwich and moved to New Bedford at the age of 17 to work as a grocer. In 1834, he was wed to Emily Summers Howland, which the museum suggests was “a strategic match for the young man.” She was the daughter of prominent and wealthy parents. The marriage provided access to the elite power players of New Bedford, with the inherent social status and financial access.
The fact that Emily suffered with mental illness for much of their marriage suggests that, perhaps, love and romance were not the driving factors leading to their betrothal.
Bourne invested in whaling ships, purchasing the Lagoda in 1841, and invested in textile mills, transportation and banking, and was rather grandly referred to as “New Bedford’s Iron Duke.” In 1885, he oversaw the construction of an ornate mansion at the corner of Orchard and Clinton Streets at a cost of $50,000 ($1,825,695 in 2025 dollars). It was demolished in 1911.
Bourne and Emily had seven children, including a daughter named after her mother. The younger Emily inherited approximately $1 million after her father died in 1889. She lived primarily in New York City and through her philanthropic efforts, established a school for the blind, a library and an educational institution that sought to “reform youth through rural work.”
In 1903, the New Bedford Whaling Museum was founded as the Old Dartmouth Historical Society. In 1914, Emily Bourne donated $75,000 to put up a new building for the museum, one that would eventually house the famed half-scale model of her father’s prosperous Lagoda.
And she donated the bust of her father.
For over a century, it sat on a plinth overlooking the Lagoda. But in 2020, the museum decided to take it out of public view.
Why? In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, and the subsequent dialogues revolving around racial injustice and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the museum had internal conversations that ultimately prompted the removal.
But again, why? Commissioned by Emily Bourne, the statue, titled “Bust of Jonathan Bourne Jr.,” was created by John Gutzon Borglum in 1916 and donated to the museum the same year.
Borglum, best known as the sculptor of “The Shrine of Democracy” or the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Pennington County, South Dakota, and for his work on “The Confederate Memorial Carving” at Stone Mountain, Georgia, was a rather controversial figure. In fact, he was a straight out racist and white supremacist.
Born in 1867 in the Idaho Territory to Danish immigrant Mormon polygamists, he eventually moved to New York City and carved statues of apostles and saints for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and created a group sculpture for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first sculpture by a living American artist that the Met had ever purchased.
He was on the committee that organized the seminal New York Armory Show of 1913, considered by many to be the birthplace of modernism in American art. He soon stepped away from the committee as he felt that the focus on the avant-garde made more traditional artists look dated and provincial.
A nativist, Borglum was an ideologically slanted shoe-in to carve a memorial to the “heroes” of the Confederate States of America. In 1915, when D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was raking in millions portraying the Ku Klux Klan as heroes that protected white women from “savages” and maintained white supremacy, Borglum was tapped to work on a high relief frieze at Stone Mountain.
His plans included depictions of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, followed by artillery troops. He had agreed to include an altar to the KKK. Ultimately, the project fell apart due to disagreement with the leadership of the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument Association. What he had begun was blasted away and another artist took over the project.
According to historian John Taliaferro, author of the 2002 book “Great White Fathers: The Story of The Obsessive Quest To Create Mount Rushmore,” “Borglum was imperious, he was cocky. He was prone to angry outbursts.”
The sculptor referred to immigrants as “slippered assassins” and warned that America was becoming an alien “scrap heap.” Sounds familiar.
In a letter to a friend in the 1920s, Borglum asked “Is it true you joined the Ku Klux Klan? I hope so. They’re a fine lot of fellows as far as I can learn and if they elect the next President, by gosh I’m going to join ‘em.”
Borglum was contacted by South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson, who wanted him to sculpt a tribute to the American West in the Black Hills which would include Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse and Buffalo Bill Cody.
Instead, Borglum chose to depict four U.S. presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Two of them were slaveholders. All are considered racist by many Native Americans.
Taliaferro noted of Borglum: “He never came out and said he was a member of the Klan. But he sure was at the table with them a lot.”
There is certainly no doubt about the kind of man Borglum was. But what of his patron, Emily Bourne?
Beyond the bust of her father, she also commissioned a statue of Dr. John Allan Wyeth from Borglum. Wyeth was a native Alabamian and a Confederate veteran whose family had been slaveholders. He was her physician in New York City and she was fond enough of him to purchase him a car. He read her poetry and they called each other “my dear parallel.”
He was saddened by the emancipation, grotesquely romanticizing the relationship between the slavers and the enslaved, saying that human beings that were owned “were treated with great kindness and consideration.”
While Bourne is not responsible for Wyeth’s words, apparently, she was too enamored of him to repudiate them.
But what of that bust itself in the Little Braitmeyer Gallery? To my eye, it is soullessly stoic, dull and devoid of any particular aesthetic charm. It is akin to hundreds of other busts one would see in any museum, corporate lobby, university hall, library, government building or cemetery.
In the same room, there is a painting of Jonathan Bourne Jr. by Benoni Irwin that stares back at the viewer, as if a conversation were about to ensue.
And what of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s decision to remove the bust in 2020? I applaud it. It was the right thing to do at the moment. But even more so, I applaud its return, not because of any particular fondness for it, but rather for institutional introspection and the engagement with the community.
Disney’s 1946 film “Song of the South,” cartoon crows Heckle and Jeckle, and the savage scalphunters of old westerns are problematic.
Fifty years ago, Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase did a Saturday Night Live “word association” skit that doesn’t fly today, not without a bleeping-out or a carefully worded warning.
It all exists. Art, entertainment, and history need not be erased. But certainly, with the passage of time, it may need to be recontextualized, lest we slip back into unforgivable ugliness.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
Fascinating! Informative! Another excellently crafted article and more importantly, a much needed look at how art is a reflection of its time and a reminder that historical fact can’t be changed with contemporary opinions.
I wanted to take a moment to express my admiration for your recent article, “‘Complicated Legacies’ a soul-searching exhibit at Whaling Museum,” published in The New Bedford Light. Your insights on controversial art and social issues were not only thought-provoking but presented with clarity and depth that kept readers engaged.
Should art make history or simply be history ? Is it truly simply illustration for critical text? The whaling museum is one of history not art, certainly, and ours is complicated indeed. But must we embrace bad art made in bad faith and hope that the public can discern the difference, even as you say we should? Curators as apologists? I personally don’t have faith that the viewer of today are capable of complicated thought and understanding, and that as in life that which is symbolic of -dare I say evil?-should not be embraced or excused by the City of light. Bad enough that that light was created by whale oil. Let’s not make either art or history be an apology, but clearly called out for what it is, or we become just that. Have we learned nothing of what comes of tolerating such intolerance? Should the Germans have tolerated statues of Hitler because they are history? Or Stalin? What is a statue if not an icon?
How about Curators as Educators. One cannot ignore the “uncomfortable” parts of U.S. History, even if it is exemplified by “bad art.” To assume that “the viewer(s) of today are (in)capable of complicated thought and understanding” is to deny the value of education. Ignorance of history has led to the proliferation of holocaust deniers and white supremacists. Kudos to a museum that displays art, and puts in the correct context.
Wilkinson’s article articulates a concept many of us feel is desperately needed at the moment.
Once we learn about the personal life and views of a person, we see their work with different eyes. However, I personally feel good work and good art should not be removed unless it is distasteful…or hurtful to the majority who see it.
Seeing Mount Rushmore’s huge well carved mountain, I knew of Borglum’s rascist views. It did tarnish the sculptor to me. But the work is no less impressive.
His disgusting personal views should be known. But I will forever
Associate him with his work.
Particularly to Paulette Cuffee As our President keeps telling us, the Museum has four pillars Art, History, Science, and Culture. Not just history. There is considerable debate about these priorities within the organization especially what seems to some to be an over emphasis on the art part when there is so much at stake on the history and culture front.