A Chilling Symbol of Violence in Washington Square Park
Walking through Washington Square Park on my way to supervision the other day, I was stopped in my tracks by a symbol. Carved in relief on the base of a flagstaff commemorating the world war is a bundle of sticks around an axe. This symbol is known as the fasces and dates from ancient Rome where local representatives of the imperial magistrate known as lictors would carry around a literal bundle of sticks and axe. The fasces both symbolized and was the means by which these lictors would exact corporal or capital punishment; either a beating or a beheading. The fasces allowed these persons even the right to enter private residences to seek out retribution. In time the fasces would soon represent a kind of imperial terror campaign and the bearers of the fasces became notorious as torturers and executioners. Mussolini would famously reappropriate this symbol for his national fascist party in Italy in the 1920s. It’s inclusion here in America, on a civic monument from the same time period, strikes me as chilling. Whoever designed this flagstaff base was (probably) only attempting to link American imperial war power to the Rome of classical antiquity, but now, while our civil rights are being systematically dismantled, the symbol takes on all of its more frightening history and signifies, however latent, that there had always been a hard fascist element in the United States—a contingency of torturers and executioners given power by the state. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified, at the time of this monument’s installation, by the Jim Crow laws and the people who enforced them.
