Name that Founding Father. Who happens to be depicted by a bronze in Lincoln Park in Chicago, a place he surely never visited.

Yes, it’s Alexander Hamilton, inventor of the national fisc. And, for that matter, our public debt, which you can see as a millstone around ca. 300 million necks, or a brilliant way to promote the stability of the federal government (indeed: the entire world now has an interest in maintaining the United States).

The statue has a story. Kate Buckingham — the heiress who paid to build Buckingham Fountain — apparently thought Hamilton didn’t get his due among Founding Fathers. She lived long enough to see Hamilton put on the $10 bill, so you’d think that would be enough, but no. She didn’t live long enough to oversee the large memorial she originally wanted for the site (see this posting for more on the story, including the original, never-done monument design by Eliel Saarinen).

So what we have in the 21st century is a gilded bronze of Hamilton on a red plinth, overlooking some flower beds. As you can see, there isn’t much gilding left. I like it that way.

Not far away is a statute with a somewhat different vibe.

Yet Hamilton and this fellow were pretty much contemporaries: it’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (except Geothe never wound up on the wrong end of a dueling pistol, so he lived longer than Hamilton). Maybe Johann’s dressed for an outing of Sturm und Drang. At the base the statue says: To Goethe/The Master Mind of the German People/The Germans of Chicago 1913.

I can’t see the date 1913 and not think of what was to come, when the Mind of the German People was distracted in such unfortunate ways. But that’s hindsight. The statue’s been there 100 years, free of the “trammels of costume and conventionality,” as the committee of local Germans who commissioned the work wanted. Recently, I read, a new brown patina was added, so it looks nearly new.