National Statuary Hall

The Spring 2010 class of Glenn Fellows will be matriculating one week from today. They number 11 in all, of whom five will be interning in Congressional offices. It is likely that most of the Fellows will be taking a tour of the Capitol building and its many sights, including National Statuary Hall, where each of the fifty states is represented by two statues of prominent statesmen.

Or not. In fact, Ohio is one of a number of states that has settled for less. One of the Ohio honorees is James A. Garfield, a personal hero of mine. But the other is William “Fog Horn” Allen, a 19th-century politician (pictured above) who came by his posthumous obscurity the old-fashioned way: he earned it by defending slavery.

As former New York Times reporter Adam Clymer explains in a recent issue of Roll Call, the state legislature is considering “recalling” Allen so that he might be replaced by a more worthy Ohioan. Readers may already have heard that OSU’s Jesse Owens, the “Buckeye Bullet,” is one of the ten finalists. Clymer makes a powerful case for another of the candidates, a twentieth-century Republican Congressman named Bill McCulloch.