Cornhusker Majesty: Nebraska’s State Capitol

Its football prowess might be long gone, but its capitol in Lincoln is among America’s greatest buildings.

I’ ve always wanted to visit Lincoln, Nebraska’s capital, to visit the Sheldon Museum, the university’s distinguished art gallery, and the Nebraska State Capitol, which I knew to be the phenomenon of the prairies and the grandest such building in the country. My high expectations were met and so exceeded that I consider myself an honorary Cornhusker. The Capitol is also one of America’s greatest civic buildings and the apotheosis of Art Deco style. Here’s to Cornhusker vision and sense of adventure.

Designed in 1920 and built between 1922 and 1932, it’s not a typical capitol with a big white dome, columned but still looking squat and derivative. Its tower soars 400 feet from pancake plains and can be seen for 20 miles on a clear day. The bronze sculpture of a sower on top of the tower is a beacon of civic pride and civic purpose. Louisiana’s capitol, built a little later, is also Art Deco, 50 boastful feet higher. Even with the stray bullet holes from Huey Long’s murder, it’s still a rip-off.

From the outside, the Nebraska State Capitol is bracing. To those who hear “Art Deco” and think Fred and Ginger, the Normandie, and lacquered wood, rethink. The Capitol is geometric and symmetrical. It’s thematically various but unified. Bison reliefs are aplenty, inside and out, but the exteriors convey primordial heft, though they’re in low relief. I entered through the south side, where “Political Society Exists for the Sake of Noble Living” is carved on the façade, along the parapet. Superiority of mind, doing what’s right and good, freedom from petty, mean behavior. The look is powerful and direct.

There’s a dramatic, deep frieze depicting the coming of the pioneers, a multigenerational group with a young man holding a basket of seeds, an old man with a dowser, and young parents with a baby. Buffalo Bill Cody leads the way. The background is gold. An eagle points toward a rising sun. “The Salvation of the State Is Watchfulness in the Citizen” is the inscription below. “Keep an eye on the bastards,” a skeptic like me would say.

I walked around the building, seeing reliefs of Old Testament scenes, including Moses descending from Sinai with the Ten Commandments and learning that, in his absence, a golden calf took center stage. Then Greek and Roman legal history — Solon, Plato, and Orestes — and the signing of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. Then there are friezes on the history of Nebraska. Heavy-duty, yes, and books needed to be cracked open, but “Watchfulness in the Citizen” isn’t for dummies. Does the program reduce us viewers to insignificance? Yes and no. We’re looking up at big figures in stone grappling with big matters, but it all leads to us and to the systems and philosophies we inherit. All of that looking up might have craned my neck, but it put me in a state of transcendence.

Having worked for the Connecticut legislature in the 1980s — my humble title was administrative assistant, but I ran the patronage system — I knew about the Nebraska Capitol but, later, got to know in depth the work of its mosaicist, the brilliant Hildreth Meière (1892–1961). She did many commissions, though the Nebraska Capitol was her biggest. My eyes were first fixed to her mosaic floors in the vestibule, foyer, and rotunda. The building’s architect, Bertram Goodhue (1869–1924) hired her, knowing her work as a New York theater set and costume designer and her training at the Art Students League. She’d also studied murals in Florence and mosaics in Ravenna.

Floors can be fascinating and narrative, too. These start at the very beginning with Cosmic Sun, 21 square feet of yellow, gray, buff, pale orange, and brown. The central stone seems to reflect the universe. Surrounding the sun, God’s first gift to humanity, are a spiral nebula, a solar group, and patterns of points and spheres radiating energy. What does the sun deliver? We learn the answer via black and buff marble mosaics unfolding from it, starting with Genius of Creative Energy, which depicts a man holding reins pulled by an unseen force and riding on a cloud amid bolts of lightning. Medallions depict spirits of the soil, vegetation, and animal life, are there’s a genius each for water, fire, air, and earth. The medallions for the four elements have a concentric circle for which Meière designed critters from the days of the dinosaur to our day. She worked with a Nebraska paleontologist, Erwin Hinckley Barbour, who picked the creatures, all found in Nebraska in fossils or in the flesh. Millions of years pass, and we seem to be walking in the footsteps of time and matter.

Goodhue didn’t go to an architecture school. He apprenticed with James Renwick Jr., the architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and then partnered with Ralph Cram for years. In 1915, he went independent. Goodhue’s Gothic Revival highpoint is St. John the Divine by Columbia University, but he designed Byzantine Revival churches and pioneered the Spanish Mission Revival, leading Santa Barbara’s rebuild from the grave, since much of the city’s look after the 1925 earthquake borrowed from Goodhue’s work on the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.

Overall, Goodhue loved integrating sculpture, mosaics, murals, and their designers into his projects. He wanted — and got — a coordinated experience of approach, entry, and revelation, all planned to inspire civic duty. He and his patrons in Lincoln, Neb. — the special commission overseeing the project — wanted a civic cathedral. Capitol planners in other states probably wanted one, too, but they usually failed — their goal was killed by compromise, a will to imitate, budgets, or, let’s face it, hearts not in it. New York’s Capitol looks like a caliph’s palace. Even the Georgian Revival ones might’ve started as temples to democracy, but they evolved into the whorehouses they truly are.

No, Nebraska’s is a civic cathedral. The rotunda dome — mosaics by Meière — visualizes what was thought to be eight virtues native to Nebraska, and they’re civic as well as sacred. Standing in a circle are Charity, Hope, Magnanimity, Faith, Justice, Wisdom, Courage, and Temperance, a mix of Wagner’s Brünnhilde, the processioning virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, and winged angels. In the center is a blazing sun in a dozen yellows.

Goodhue was at his best in assembling a team, visionaries like him but on the same page. This was a boon for the Capitol since he died in the middle of the project. In addition to Meière and Barbour, he also worked with Lee Lawrie (1877–1963), the architectural sculptor who gave us the exterior reliefs and much else. Rafael Guastavino was long dead, but his glazed terra-cotta tile arches and vaults, based on Gothic Catalan techniques, were New England and New York fare that, for the Nebraska Capitol, went west. And there’s Hartley Burr Alexander (1873–1939), who taught philosophy at the University of Nebraska. Alexander, a Nebraskan — Meière and Goodhue weren’t — developed the thematic program, inside and out.

Alexander wasn’t an ideologue. He drew on Western civics but also Plains Indian lore and design. His theme is human settlement and existence. He saw the sun as the anchoring motif, but the agriculture motifs that he and Meière produced don’t have tribal, ethnic, or temporal looks. Mosaic vignettes surrounding the dome’s Virtues depict products such as wheat, flowers, fruit, and sheep, each with a hodgepodge of figures — Greek, Native, biblical, Egyptian, a nude or two — harvesting, hauling, and herding.

I saw the two legislative chambers. Isn’t Nebraska our single unicameral legislative state? Yes, but it didn’t ditch its House of Representatives until 1937. The single house today — the Nebraska Senate — meets in the chamber originally designed for the House, but the old Senate chamber wasn’t dismantled. It’s used for events and preserved as Goodhue and his team made it.

Again, the looks were coordinated. Lawrie designed the massive doors to the old Senate chamber with dazzling Native themes and patterns like the Tree of Life with branches of corn and a thunderbird for rain but also resilience. One of the double doors depicts a Native woman standing on a turtle, a sign of fertility, the other shows a chief with a headdress. The chamber’s ceiling is a quartered dome with a central Meière mosaic sun disk and four panels depicting a peace council, a buffalo hunt, corn husking, and a war party. The mosaic style is different and more like Indian beadwork.

What’s now the sole working chamber across the hall is entirely different. The double doors, designed by Meière, are painted leather on wood, and part-Assyrian, part-Etruscan. Inside, 20-foot friezes, six of them, in gold leaf on walnut, treat Nebraska history from Coronado’s expedition to the Homesteaders. They’re fantastic, inspired by the Parthenon frieze, but hard to see from the floor. Meière and Alexander did their homework, though, since the details are exacting down to the equipment used by the early U.S. government surveyors and what Bourgmont saw in 1714 when he explored the Platte River for the French.

The building is in beautiful condition, obviously revered by the public and its caretakers. A few years ago, HVAC was added since the building’s an art museum.

The story unfolds through art in multiple media and styles, from Alexander, Goodhue, Meière, and Lawrie, but by 1932, the Depression’s grip was tight, so spaces meant for art went unfilled until times were better. I’m amazed at how well the Capitol’s masters did, not because they’re Nebraskans but because political people anywhere and everywhere tend to have bad taste. Good art is poetic, enigmatic, elastic, and suggestive, pulling us to think about beauty and things of the soul. All things a good piece of legislation decidedly isn’t. Talking to people in Lincoln and Omaha, I found Nebraskans to be civic-minded and no slouches when it comes to craftsmanship.

Gradually, spaces left empty were intelligently filled in ways that fortified the basic 1920s program. I loved the suite of mosaics, 13 by 19 feet each, on the wall of the Capitol foyer above Meière’s floors and below a Guastavino ceiling and more Meière mosaics. All are from 1966, Abstract Expressionism is in, Deco’s dead, and the themes are the past, present, and future of life on Nebraska’s prairies. I’d never heard of Jeanne Reynal (1903–1983), a New York School mosaicist. Mosaic is a good medium for abstract art because it starts with bits of glass in pure color. Her Blizzard of 1888 is something I’ve never seen — a grisaille, or nearly grisaille, mosaic — and the subject is a rural schoolteacher who leads her 13 students, tied together by a golden rope, from their rickety one-room schoolhouse to her home. An overarching form on the left margin is thought to be a spirit guiding them to safety. Pagan but dramatic.

In the 1990s, the state finally attended to the Memorial Hall on the 14th — the top — floor of the Capitol tower. The walls are Vermont Verde Antique marble, exotic and dark green. The dome is made from blue and gold Guastavino tile with a mosaic red-and-gold sunburst in the center, 70 feet above the floor. The overarching theme is honoring heroism, idealism, and generosity. Words from Lincoln’s second inaugural address circle the space. Above them was room for murals. Stephen Roberts (b. 1952), from Omaha, won the commission for the job, completing eight of them, each 12 feet wide, by 1996.

They’re superb, meticulously crafted realism, so they’re different from much of the program at the Capitol but in complete thematic harmony. Some depict events in history. The Ideal of Freedom is about the trial of Chief Standing Bear, the 1879 federal case that established Native Americans as “persons” under the Constitution, meaning they couldn’t be forced to move to reservations. Others are imagined history, such as  The Ideal of Self-Determination, a group of pioneers seeming to settle a dispute, inching toward a civic order. Soldiers, police and firefighters, and doctors and nurses, everyday heroes, get starring roles. Nebraska’s not just life à la Willa Cather, whose books I love. It has cities and poverty and emergencies and can’t help experiencing the delights and woes of the rest of the country.

In 1922, Governor Samuel McKelvie broke ground with a sod-cutting plow — historically apt — and in doing so foretold Lawrie’s Sower, from around 1932. Barefoot, arms bare, trousers rolled to the knees, in a tight shirt and a sun hat, he tips the tower, casting seed northwest, the direction of most of the rest of Nebraska. He’s the Cornhusker prelude to Lawrie’s Atlas in New York, at Rockefeller Center, facing St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The sower is a Greek nude, or close to it, gone homesteading.

I looked at him and thought of a broadcasting tower. He’s broadcasting Nebraska, its heritage, its values, and its future. He and, we hope, the government under him, are sowing the seeds for a noble life. He’s also easy to read from a distance, reedy, all muscle, competing with no one since farming isn’t competitive. “All of us are sowers,” Lawrie said, “and we should not expect life to yield much in return for little, or little for nothing, or anything at all for the mere wishing.” Thoughts to hold dear as we head toward Election Day.