The Statue of the Republic is a 24-foot-high (7.3 m) gilded bronze sculpture in Jackson Park, Chicago, Illinois. The statue was built in 1918 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago and the Illinois statehood centennial. The statue was funded by the Benjamin Ferguson Fund., which commissioned Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the original 65-foot-tall (20 m) statue that stood on the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, to sculpt this smaller replica. Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, designed the pedestal for the 1918 Republic.
The original statue stood in front of the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition. However, in 1896, the original 65-foot statue succumbed to a fire, destroying it. The current statue stands on the site of the Exposition's famous Electricity Building.
The statue is widely known in Chicago by the colloquial name of the "Golden Lady." It was designated a Chicago Landmark on June 4, 2003.
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“The consolations of space are nameless things.
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And then to refill its emptiness again....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)