Hawaii’s aloha to the 16th president

Diamond Head, outrigger canoes, Waikiki Beach — all are icons synonymous with the 50th state. Yet just a half-hour west of downtown Honolulu and not too far from another American icon, Pearl Harbor, in Ewa (Eva) Beach, one can find a bronzed, rippled, wide-shouldered, brawny and broad-chested figure, another American icon, cut from the Illinois prairie rather than the Banzai Pipeline of the North Shore — Abraham Lincoln.

Thanks to a dedicated educator, Lincoln has a special home in the Aloha State, a place that brings him garlands of leis every Feb. 12. “Lincoln the Frontiersman,” the work of prodigious American public sculptor Avard T. Fairbanks, has graced the entrance plaza to Ewa Elementary School since 1944 and is the school’s beloved mascot.

Posed as a larger-than-life (9-foot) rail-splitter, Lincoln has powerful, taut forearms, and his hands grip an ax, which rests across his flexed right thigh. His right foot, wearing a boot, rests on a fallen log, bearing part of his weight. With his feet spread apart and tension evident in his torso, he has his left leg and foot planted firmly as he prepares to fell not a nearby palm tree, but timber from Sangamon County, Ill.

Lincoln wears a V-necked undergarment, split down the middle and exposing part of his massive pectoral muscles beneath his open shirt. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows. Unlike other statues in the genre of “Lincoln the Youth,” Mr. Fairbanks’ treatment of the subject’s face shows marked maturity.

Art historian F. Lauriston Bullard said, “The neck, rightly, is long; the face is strong; the whole effect is that of a strong personality.”

Another critic argued that “the listless, gawky, sleepy-eyed Lincoln is gone, and we have instead a Lincoln powerful, alert, aggressive, with eyes through which only Lincoln could visualize far ahead of time itself the great benefits to be enjoyed through a free and united nation. Standing before Fairbanks’ handiwork, one can sense the sweat of Lincoln’s labor. It is not hard to imagine, given the pose and attention to anatomical detail, that Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, on an 1864 visit to the Army of the Potomac in Virginia, would entertain the troops by holding just such an axe, one armed and parallel from his body.”

Western horizons

To understand the genesis of this Lincoln, far removed from the American mainland, one needs to recall the tale of the school’s beloved teacher and principal Katherine McIntosh Burke, who bequeathed funds in her will to erect the statue.

Burke, like Lincoln, was a product of the prairie. Her family’s roots, like Lincoln’s, reached to Kentucky. Burke was born in the contested territory of Kansas 11 days before Lincoln first took the oath of office, and she was raised in Leavenworth. Being from the more progressive western part of the nation, she attended Kansas State Teacher’s College at Emporia and then moved on to the University of California, from which she graduated.

Always drawn to a frontier vision, Burke taught in tandem with the westward movement. Her teaching posts ranged from her home state of Kansas to Arizona, Nevada, California and Alaska. It was in Arizona and Nevada where she secured positions as school principal. When Hawaii was taken by the United States in 1898 during America’s love affair with imperialism, Burke jumped at the opportunity to expand her horizons farther westward and moved first to the island of Kauai and then to Oahu, where this schoolmarm-turned-principal ended her career in 1929 at Ewa Plantation School, then kind of a country day school.

All her life, Burke was dedicated to working with children who reflected the ethnic mix of America. Her admiration for Lincoln’s legacy of equal opportunity for all Americans inspired her work as an educator. She died in 1938 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and along with her request to have a Lincoln statue erected, she asked to have her ashes returned to the Hawaiian Territory for burial.

A long career

The task of making Burke’s dream a reality fell to sculptor Avard Tennyson Fairbanks. More than 100 public monuments across the United States are the result of Mr. Fairbanks’ handiwork. Abraham Lincoln is the subject of 11 of them.

Born in Provo, Utah, in 1897, the sculptor lived a long life, dying just two months before his 90th birthday in 1987, and worked almost constantly until his death. His 75-year catalog is deep and wide, conveying a variety of themes. His subjects range from the Pony Express to George Washington to heroes from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Mr. Fairbanks was a member.

Sculpture captured Mr. Fairbanks’ fancy when he was 12, and his academic career and training included working in his early teen years under the direction of noted sculptor James Earle Fraser at the Art Students League in New York. In 1913, he enrolled in the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and exhibited some works at the Grand Salon.

Story Continues →