A 6-foot-tall bronze statue of an immigrant mother with two children stands in Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square. It’s been there since 1960.
Bubbler Talk listener Cletus Hasslinger wanted to know more.
"How was the statue titled 'Dedicated to the Valiant Immigrant Mother' conceived and executed and placed in Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square?” he asked.
Hasslinger says the question came to him while he was at the park for an anti-ICE protest.
"When I looked closely at the poorly-lit title chiseled into the granite base of the statue, I thought given the purpose of this rally, the speakers should be standing over here with the statue behind them and looking out over their shoulders," he says.
Hasslinger thinks the statute is especially poignant now, as the federal government cracks down on immigration.
According to UW-Milwaukee art history professor Kay Wells, the immigrant mother statue was erected during a time of shifting immigration policy in the U.S. It was during the last years that the Immigration Act of 1924 was in effect. That law was replaced in 1965.
"The 1924 Act is very famous for having prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe," Wells says. "Whereas the number of immigrants from Northern Europe, especially the UK and Germany, were allowed to remain high — relatively high — compared to other countries."
The 1965 law did away with those discriminatory quotas.
Wells says the “Immigrant Mother” statue was funded by a German American citizen. To learn more about him, I talked to Michael Berera at the Milwaukee County Historical Society.
"William George Bruce was a publisher and civic activist here in Milwaukee, who had a prolific career in business, starting out in cigar-making and then working a clerical job for Milwaukee Daily News," Berera says. "And then on to the Milwaukee Sentinel as a bookkeeper and cashier. Very, very accomplished. But 'Immigrant Mother' is really a tribute to his mother."
Her name was Appollonia Becker Bruce.
"She came to Milwaukee from her native Germany at the age of 17, married at 18, had a total of eight children, William George Bruce being the eldest," Berera says. "And then his mother died at the age of 38. William always regarded her as a real important guiding influence in his life, and I think the difficulty of her life, the difficulty of his life, and the, you know, closeness between the two of them are really key to why he wanted to memorialize her in such a way."
When William George Bruce died in 1949, he bequeathed $30,000 to the city of Milwaukee for a statue to symbolize motherhood.
The "Immigrant Mother" is not a literal depiction of Bruce's Mother, but a way to honor her memory.
And according to an old newspaper article, he left explicit instructions for how it should look: “Her head covered with a white kerchief. The ends tied under her throat. With a babe at her breast. And a small child clinging to her skirt.”
Bruce’s heirs chose renowned Croatian artist Ivan Mestrovic to sculpt “Immigrant Mother.”
Diane Buck is an expert on outdoor sculptures in the Milwaukee area. She says Mestrovic may have also been paying homage to his mother when he made the statue.
"He (Mestrovic) often used his memory of his mother as he sculpted," says Buck. "You can see the obvious marks of Mestrovic’s hand on the bronze sculpture. That means that when he sculpted that he did not make it completely realistic and smooth, so that you saw where he took his hands and he was sculpting it in clay."
A 1960 Milwaukee Journal article on the unveiling of the statue says in his will, Bruce wrote, “the memory of the immigrant mother of the new world should be enshrined in the hearts of future generations as that of a ministering angel who braved the roughness and hardships of a pioneer life in order that the blessings of civilization might come to her progeny.”
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