Context

In addition to the mounted Washington by French and Potter on 51st and Martin Luther King Boulevard (1904), this work shows Washington in the company of two financiers of the American Revolution, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon. Formally cloaked in 19th-Century Beaux-Arts tradition, it was driven by distinctly 20th-century forces. The sculpture was the brainchild of attorney, Democratic Party operative, and at the time Chicago Corporation Counsel, Barnett Hodes, who like Haym Salomon was a Polish-born Jew. Hodes was aware that an earlier proposal to honor Salomon in New York City had foundered — rejected by city's design commission, then troubled by class divisions in the New York Jewish community. According to Christopher J. Young in the American Jewish Archive Journal, Hodes' solution was to emphasize not Salomon himself, but to use Salomon to underline the broader ethnic contributions to the Revolutionary War and to contemporary civic life. The inscription at the base is taken from Washington's 1790 speech to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI: "The government of United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." A bronze plaque placed by the donor reads: "Symbol of American tolerance and unity and of the cooperation of people of all races and creeds in the building of the United States.”