The statue still had not been properly affixed to its base even at the time of the ceremony-“A strong man could have pushed it off,” Alderman wrote a friend at the time.įour days afterward, Alderman wrote Borglum’s secretary: “I am very happy over the dignity and splendid beauty of this figure. He did deliver in June 1919, but not without a great deal of consternation throughout and up to the last minute.Īs the unveiling ceremony-during final exercises-approached, Alderman grew “more and more uneasy” about the progress of the statue’s unfinished base, writing tense and beseeching letters to Borglum’s secretary. In a letter at that time, UVA President Edwin Alderman expressed hope for a sculpture that would carry “a spiritual and patriotic appeal to future generations of youth.” Renowned sculptor Gutzon Borglum-who would go on to sculpt Mount Rushmore-was commissioned. entered the war weeks later.Īlmost immediately, his friends back home began collecting money for a proper memorial. 2055-went down in northern France on March 19, 1917. In a fight with three German Albatros biplanes, McConnell-who’d had a red “hot foot” painted on his Nieuport No. joined the war, McConnell enlisted in the French Air Service and became one of seven American pilots to form a squadron later known as l’Escadrille Lafayette. 2055 airplane, adorned with a red “hot foot.”īefore the U.S. James Rogers McConnell leans on his Nieuport No. He was awarded a Croix de Guerre for conspicuous bravery while rescuing a wounded French soldier. cummings, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos and witnessed many of the war’s horrors up close. As an ambulance driver, he joined ranks that included the writers e. Society, and the Seven Society-withdrew from the University without a degree, and in 1915 he followed the war to France. In 1910 McConnell-a member of T.I.L.K.A., the Hot Feet, the New York Club, the O.W.L. Dobie later put it, “a hatred of the humdrum, an abhorrence of the commonplace, a passion for the picturesque.” He arrived on Grounds from North Carolina in 1907, nursing, as his law professor Armistead M. The Aviator statue commemorates James Rogers McConnell, who was among the first UVA students to fight in World War I, the first of them to die, and the last American to be killed before the United States entered the conflict. It’s an odd piece of art that was erected in an open field that is now the heavily trafficked pathway between Alderman and Clemons libraries-where rushing students and passersby barely notice it at all. The bronze Icarus rises 12 feet above a marble pedestal, wearing a pilot’s helmet, combat boots and a knife strapped to his waist. A Flight Forgotten A brief history of a familiar statue
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