Indian in St. Paul

Ubiquitous in U. S. parks and public buildings is the conventional War memorial doughboy with trench helmet and bayonet, charging eternally in bronze or marble. Last week an arrestingly different conception for a U. S. War memorial was unveiled at St. Paul, Minn. Startled citizens and American Legionaries got their first look at a huge, brooding Indian, towering in 55 tons of cream-white Mexican onyx 36 feet above a slowly rotating pedestal in the black marble concourse of St. Paul's new City Hall. One great hand held the Pipe of Peace. The other was raised in a vaguely benedictory gesture over some little chiefs from whose council fire the mighty figure seemed to rise.

This boldly romantic Indian God of Peace had been made for St. Paul by Sweden's great, famed Sculptor Carl Emil Andersson Milles, whose international reputation overawed literal-minded objectors to his scheme. The idea had come to Sculptor Milles before the St. Paul commission, when he was watching a New Year's Eve celebration in which 3,000 Oklahoma Indians quietly listened while an old Chief spoke of peace with a "deep, masculine feeling of brotherhood and understanding."

After receiving the $65,000 commission, Milles worked four years at his studio in Cranbrook Academy of Art at Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit, to make a full-scale model which was shipped in sections to St. Paul, where the finished statue's 98 onyx blocks were carved and carefully lifted into place by a crew of workmen. The statue's turntable was motivated by a one-half h. p. motor which slowly swings the Indian 90DEG to the right in one hour, then 90DEG to the left next hour. From the second floor level of the concourse surrounding the figure, four big floodlights glow on Mr. Milles' work.

Sturdy, broad-shouldered Carl Milles is 60, was once a pupil of Rodin, is one of the world's most respected artists. Noted for his unerring sense of design, especially impressive in his many famed fountains, Sculptor Milles was dismayed when the Rockefeller Center management rejected his plans for an Adam & Eve fountain in Manhattan's Radio City, filed a $15,000 suit for his time & trouble.

No pompous parvenu, Carl Milles was amused last week when a woman, after carefully inspecting his Indian God of Peace, somewhat resentfully asked: "Is that thing made of soapstone?"

"No madam," said Carl Milles, "just plain soap."

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