TY - JOUR
AU - Stott,, Annette
AB - Abstract This article analyzes the cemetery monument that Alexander Ross caused to be erected at a moment of spiritual crisis when he realized that Jesus was not going to return in 1898. It reveals the complexity of a Protestant, Anglo-Israelist, premillenarian adventist’s intersecting religious, ethnic, racial, gender, and social identities at one moment in time as they became embodied in an object intended to outlast the physical body. Ross turned to a common rite of death and mourning—the erection of a gravestone—to cope with his spiritual loss. I argue that his excessive fear of death, literal hermeneutic, grief at the physical loss of family members, and position of social power contributed to the decision to meet a crisis of faith with an object of material Christianity, every aspect of which made his spiritual hopes and dreams solidly visible. Ross’s reaction to failed prophecy places materiality at the core of his adventism. UNTIL MONDAY MORNING DAWNED on April 11, 1898, Scottish-Presbyterian immigrant to the American West Alexander Ross (1838–1915) lived in the full expectation that Jesus Christ would return to earth on April 10 of that year, Easter Sunday. He looked forward with great expectation to the opening of believers’ graves and the emergence—in shining, glorified bodies—of his beloved mother and wife. He was so certain of the date that he devoted two years of his life and part of his considerable fortune to writing, publishing, and distributing a book, The Time Appointed or End of Gentile Times (Ross 1897), to convince others to turn to Christ before April 10.1 Like the Millerites before him, Ross must have felt the crushing blow of disappointment when Jesus failed to materialize on schedule (Dick 1994; Knight 1993; Sandeen 1970). Whereas disappointed Millerites who did not leave the faith often joined existing sects, such as the Shakers, or created new denominations, including the Advent Christian Church and Seventh Day Adventists (Numbers and Butler 1987), Ross exemplified a different, very personal reaction. He turned to a traditional form of mourning art as an expression of his complex grief, commissioning a large granite monument for Fairmount Cemetery in Denver (Fig. 1).2 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Unknown maker, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite and marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Unknown maker, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite and marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Ross’s elaborate cemetery monument served simultaneously as a memorial to the death of his dream of meeting Jesus in 1898 and a public affirmation of his continued faith in a literal second coming. It offered consolation for not yet seeing his loved ones return to life by providing marble portraits as a temporary substitute for their unrealized glorified bodies. Ross’s monument also embodied his religious identity in other ways, including an unconscious reification of his racialized faith, for Alexander Ross was a member of the Denver branch of the Sons of the Ten Tribes (Denver Post 1898).3 This group of Anglo-Israelists embraced the notion that Anglo-Saxons are the direct blood descendants of the ten lost tribes of the northern kingdom of ancient Israel. There have been many permutations of Anglo-Israelism from the eighteenth century to the present, crossing denominational lines and ranging from antisemitism to philosemitism (Baron 1915; Barkum 1997; Benite 2009). The Sons of the Ten Tribes identified contemporary Jews as the descendants of the southern kingdom, Judah, and as a completely separate people from the northern Israelites/Anglo-Saxons (Howlett 1894; Steele 1898; Streator 1900). They understood the major Anglo-Saxon nations of their day—Great Britain and the United States—to be the world’s spiritual leaders in an era leading up to the Messiah’s second coming and the eventual reunification of God’s chosen peoples, the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews (Baltimore Sun 1898; Howlett 1894). Adventism was particularly compatible with Anglo-Israelism, because adventists expected the lost tribes to reemerge in the last days so that God could fulfill biblical promises to them. In coopting Israelite identity, racially proud Anglo-Saxons4 like Ross elevated the chosen people status that Americans had been claiming since the Puritans to a whole new level. Colleen McDannell notes, “throughout American history, Christians have explored the meaning of the Divine, the nature of death, the power of healing and the experience of the body by interacting with a created world of images and shapes” (McDannell 1995, 1). David Morgan argues, “rather than marginalizing belief, we need a more capacious account of it, one that looks to the embodied, material features of lived religion” (Morgan 2010, 7). This article adds to the growing literature exploring the material features of an embodied, lived religion through which Christians in the United States have explored the meaning of the Divine, the nature of death, and the power of healing. The story of the Ross monument provides a case-study opportunity to examine these themes through an aspect of material Christianity that scholars have not yet addressed in much depth: the individual or family grave marker whose design makes personal belief visible to self and community. Ross’s erection of a granite memorial when Jesus failed to appear was the physical manifestation of a spiritual crisis. He lived his religion through this creative act, and probably through continuing interactions with the monument, although we do not know what those interactions looked like. I argue that we find the roots of this material turn in Ross’s obsessive fear of the grave with its inevitable disintegration of the body; in his literalist hermeneutic, particularly with respect to Jesus’s resurrection and return in a perfect physical body; and in his privileged position as a wealthy white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) male in nineteenth-century America. His whiteness, the most extreme expression of which was membership in the Sons, characterized his brand of Christianity and made it possible for Ross to erect this particular monument when his adventist chronology failed. Using visual analysis in the context of documented biographical, cultural, and historical evidence, this article will show how Ross’s personal response to a religious crisis produced an artifact that consciously and publicly testified to his continued faith in the second coming as an imminent physical event and that, both consciously and subconsciously, embodied his private religious identity as an Anglo-Israelist adventist and a Protestant family patriarch. This monument opens the way for the careful observer to better understand the materiality of an adventist’s spirituality. Ross was just one of many late-nineteenth-century Americans who was wealthy enough to purchase a gravestone and who shared a Victorian fascination with death and the conviction that their Christian faith would ensure the continued life of their souls. This conviction, coupled with diverse specific theologies, manifested itself in the era’s grave markers. Interpreting material Christianity is a risky business; iconology constantly shifts and each viewer brings personal insights, so decoding an art object as if it had a fixed meaning would be an exercise in futility. My interpretation, which bears the stamp of my own interests, time, culture, and identity, is an attempt to better understand the relationship between the object and the event that inspired it, and between the object and the man who commissioned it, not to attach a definitive meaning. THE MONUMENT The monument that Alexander Ross commissioned in 1898 and erected in Fairmount Cemetery in 1899 is a tall shaft of red granite, square in section, with high-relief white marble portrait heads near the top of each of its four sides (Fig. 2). Inscriptions beneath the portraits in a section bound at each corner by Corinthian columns identify the people portrayed and their relationships with Ross. A plinth above the portraits is surmounted by a classical urn draped in a funeral pall. Various incised ornamental motifs—ivy, thistles, monogram—contribute to the monument’s iconography, and the whole thing is set on three graduated red granite bases. The number of portraits adorning it is unusual for Denver, but the Ross monument is not without precedent. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite and marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite and marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Gravestone design in the United States was always an art of copying, borrowing, adapting, and personalizing, often based on European models. Even as gravestones became more eclectic and varied in the nineteenth century, their common visual elements made them legible to their communities (Giguere 2017). The usual means of obtaining a desired monument, other than buying a finished headstone at a firm where personal inscriptions were added in predetermined spots, was by choosing a general type based on examples in local cemeteries or reference to a monument catalog or sales book, and designating how the various parts should be altered and assembled.5 The patron chose the materials, inscriptions, size, and any decorative or iconographic elements. The process was guided by custom, cost, personal preference, and advice, but it was not limited by the type of restrictions that cemeteries often apply today. The result was a cemetery filled with visually similar shapes, forms, and iconography, where every object represented a unique individual through the specific combination of elements and attached meanings. Ross would have been familiar from childhood with the upright slab headstones and crosses of his hometown churchyard cemetery in Kilmuir Easter, Ross-shire, Scotland (Fig. 3), where several modest square shafts topped by urns are the closest thing to the more imposing monument he would eventually erect in Denver. He also lived in New York City and Chicago, where he might have seen the general form he adopted of stacked shapes culminating in an urn. Wherever he found the inspiration, Ross’s choices made the monument what it is and gave it personal meaning. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Parish Churchyard, Kilmuir Easter, Ross-shire, Scotland. Photo c. 1996, courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland ©Crown Copyright: HES. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Parish Churchyard, Kilmuir Easter, Ross-shire, Scotland. Photo c. 1996, courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland ©Crown Copyright: HES. The Base The three stepped bases constitute a common form in Christian grave monuments that observers today sometimes identify with the Trinity but that also served the practical function of elevating the die (the section with inscriptions) on a kind of pedestal. The Ross family name appears on one side of the top base, and biblical inscriptions take up the other three sides. These inscriptions constitute important support for Ross’s belief in a literal second coming of Jesus and provide evidence of the focus of that belief on life after death. Ross quoted from the 1881 English Revised Version:6 The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. (I Thess. 4:16) This assurance that those who have already died will not be left behind when the living are reunited with Jesus was particularly important to Ross and the next quotation continues this theme: If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with him. We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord, shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. (I Thess 4:14) Each text is bookended with an ornament of incised ivy, a plant that stays green year-round and became a common symbol of eternal life in cemetery art. The image reinforces the text in its emphasis on life after death. I will ransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death, O death I will be thy plagues, O grave, I will be thy destruction. (Hosea 13:14) An emphasis on overcoming death is hardly novel for a Christian grave marker, but Ross had previously employed all three verses in his book announcing that Jesus’s second advent would occur in 1898, so these verses must be placed in that context (Ross 1898, 20–22, 84). The Time Appointed or End of Gentile Times was an urgent, eleventh-hour call to conversion. Ross issued the third edition only one month before the predicted second coming that was supposed to end the gentile age, a divinely appointed period of time in human history that Ross and other dispensational adventists identified with Luke 21:24, “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Shuck 2012). This verse is followed by Jesus’s list of other “end time” signs leading up to verse 27: “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” Thus, the end of gentile times, which Ross described as “the period of grace during which the Lord is calling out a church from amongst the non-Jewish nations” (Ross 1898, 8–9), became shorthand for the return of Jesus to earth. Ross emphasized that Jesus’s return would not proclaim the end of the world (Ross 1898, preface to third edition) but would initiate a series of events, including Jesus’s literal reign over the world as king, ultimately leading to a wonderful new heaven and earth for true believers where neither death nor sin would ever again be experienced. Ross relied for the timing of these events on biblical and astronomical evidence worked out by Professor Dimbleby of the British Chronological and Astronomical Association in London. In fact, Ross’s title honors Dimbleby’s publication two years earlier, The Appointed Time: Being Scriptural, Historical, and Astronomical Proofs of the End of Gentile Times in 1898 ¼. Although an honorary member of the same chronological association, Ross emphasized Jesus’s physical return to earth and the imminent resurrection of believers in new bodies rather than the timing of events. One has to study The Time Appointed (Ross 1898) closely to realize that for Ross the gentile times began in the year 31 on the day of Pentecost (Ross 1898, 113) and would end in 1898 with Jesus’s return to mid-air. A thirty-year “Time of the Jews and Great Tribulation” would follow on earth while Jesus and his faithful waited in mid heaven until 1928 (Ross 1898, 74), at which time Jesus and his resurrected saints and angels would continue down to earth where nonbelievers and the newly converted Jews would see him for the first time. In this scheme, the year 1928 marked the beginning of Jesus’s millennial reign as king of peace on earth, while Satan was temporarily bound in hell. The millennium would end, presumably around 2028, with increasing apostasy and Satan’s return for a final rebellion and the “Great White Throne Judgment Day & Death of Death” (Ross 1898, 76–89). Ross wrapped up his forecast at that point: “The blessed Savior has reigned, as man, over a renewed earth for a thousand years; the righteous are blessed, the wicked are condemned, and every foe subdued. Then He surrenders His kingdom” (emphasis in the original, Ross 1898, 90).7 The section of this eschatological scheme referred to on the monument is the period known as the rapture, when Jesus was expected to secretly return to mid air to resurrect dead believers and rapture his living followers up to join him so that they would not experience the great tribulation on earth. Yonder M. Gilihan describes rapture as “a cornerstone doctrine in premillenialist Christian eschatology” that was introduced to the United States by the British clergyman John Nelson Darby in the mid-nineteenth century and became extremely popular after the Civil War (Gilihan 2000, 347–50). Darby and his followers based the theology of rapture on I Thessalonians 4:14–18, two verses of which Ross placed on the base of his monument. Ross explained: “From I Thess 4:14–18, we learn that the dead in Christ shall rise from their graves, and we which are alive on the earth at His Coming, shall be caught up in the clouds to meet him in the air, to be forever with Himself according to His promise in John 14:1–3” (Ross 1898, 22–23). Thus, Ross’s inclusion of the critical verses from Thessalonians not only referred to his continuing faith that “the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven” but also emphasized that Jesus’s advent would reunite his followers, “we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord,” with “them that are fallen asleep.” The additional text from Hosea reinforced the idea that Jesus would “ransom them from the power of the grave [and] redeem them from death.” Ross’s abhorrence of death and his fear of burial undergird his choice of texts and probably his enthusiasm for adventism in general. In The Time Appointed, he described death as “the hateful monster,” “ugly, cruel and merciless,” and “a cursed enemy” that forces people into the “cold loathsome grave” (Ross 1898, 19, 25–6, 28). He understood death as “an unnatural process” and the separation of soul from body as a violation of God’s original plan, further asserting, “it is God’s enemy as much as ours, it conquered Christ on Calvary, and He hates it” (Ross 1898, 19). According to Ross, “we all show a horror to a lifeless body. It is a repulsive and hostile element, and the most detestable irregularity in God’s Universe” (Ross 1898, 18). This revulsion at the very idea of a dead body, the first step in material decay, reveals Ross’s central concern with the physical. “We should not believe that the soul goes to heaven upon the death of the body and that is the end of it,” he wrote, “body and soul will be reunited at the resurrection” (Ross 1898, 32–33). Ross had left his mother’s body in the old country, buried his wife Annie in a New York City grave after two short years of childless marriage, helped bury his niece, Maggie, in Denver, and then devoted himself to anticipating the great day when they would be raised from the dead. “When Christ comes the grave will give up our dead . . . Hearts which have been wrung and torn by merciless death, will be made glad and joyful, ones dear as life itself to us will be united again” (Ross 1898, 20, 25–26). For Ross, faith in an imminent second coming and the new life that he expected to follow provided consolation in the face of human death. Thus, the verses he chose for the monument emphasized advent and resurrection. Monument makers never developed a standard location for Bible verses, alternately placing them above or below the die, on shields and scrolls, or on the die itself. In the face of this variability, Ross’s choice of the base is significant. It made biblical authority the literal and figurative foundation of the monument, just as the Bible provided the basis for his evangelical faith. For Ross, biblical authority resided in what he called “an honest literal interpretation” of selected texts pieced together from throughout the Bible (Ross 1898, preface to third edition). Glenn Shuck points out that nineteenth-century Dispensationalists virtually always employed a literal hermeneutic, often based on the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of Common Sense Realism, which suggested that any passage that could be read literally, should be read literally (Shuck 2012, 519). Ross’s literalism pertained to any scripture that could be understood as referring to physical matter.8 This material literalism may be demonstrated by a characteristic passage from The Time Appointed in which, after citing “the heavenly Jerusalem” described in Revelation 21, he exclaimed: “thank God, heaven is our home. It is a real and definite place, having locality, name, and description, a fitting and glorious dwelling for the resurrected and translated saints” (Ross 1898, 83).9 Of hell he wrote: “It is certainly a locality and an actuality” (Ross 1898, 67). He rejected the nineteenth-century turn toward literary criticism as a means of understanding the Bible and disdained Christian “spiritualizers and dreamers” (Ross 1898, 82) who interpreted scripture abstractly as symbol or allegory, warning: “The Church need not suppose God is so enraptured with its ‘culture,’ ‘progressive thought,’ and ‘higher criticism,’ so as to shut His eyes to their rubbish and sin” (Ross 1898, 69). Ross’s avoidance of abstract interpretation in favor of something more palpable suggests a preference for the material that may be an inherent aspect of his spirituality, helping to explain his decision to commission a granite monument when Jesus remained invisible spirit. The Body The body of the monument, consisting of the shaft with its inscriptions and portraits, also provides insight regarding the nature of Ross’s “great disappointment,” which might be better characterized as a “great grief.”10 He was not just disappointed by the failure of Jesus to materialize but deeply grieved by what that brought in its wake: (1) the realization that he would not be reunited with his loved ones immediately; instead, their physical remains must stay longer in “the cold loathsome grave”; and (2) the possibility that he would die and his body would also disintegrate in a grave. Ross had pinned his hopes on Jesus’s return in a real body as the forerunner to the physical return of Jesus’s followers: “The real personal Christ went, and the real personal Christ will return, in a true body of flesh and bones” (Ross 1898, 22). Ross elaborated: “He was seen, heard and handled, and exercised all the powers of life, such as walking, talking, eating and drinking. There is no reason to believe that He is any different now, or that the Saints will be after their resurrection, for ‘they shall be like Him’” (Ross 1898, 73). Resurrection of the body is an orthodox Christian doctrine, included in the Apostle’s Creed since at least the fourth century, but Ross’s emphasis on it reveals his longing for the physical return of his loved ones and helps explain his action in commissioning four carved marble heads for his monument. The inscriptions on the monument’s dies name the portrait heads above them. The one facing east identifies “Annie G. Ross, beloved wife, died in New York City, January 29, 1891” (Fig. 4). The words “beloved wife” point back to Ross, identifying her primarily in terms of her relationship to him. Ross had her body moved from Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City, where it had rested for eight years, to the foot of the monument (Denver Sunday Post 1899). Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Detail of Annie Cora Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Detail of Annie Cora Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Facing north, at the back of the monument, is the only full-frontal portrait (Fig. 5), that of “Margaret Ross, revered mother, died in Scotland, August 29, 1881.” Again the words “revered mother” not only honor the woman but also point back to Ross; I will return to these family relationships below. Margaret Ross’s body remained in Scotland, marked by a typical Kilmuir Easter headstone (Fig. 6) that also served as a memorial for Ross’s sister and his eldest brother, William, a Presbyterian minister. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Detail of Margaret Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Detail of Margaret Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Unknown maker, Margaret Ross Headstone, c. 1881, Parish Churchyard, Kilmuir Easter, Scotland. Photo by Roddie Macpherson, 2010. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Unknown maker, Margaret Ross Headstone, c. 1881, Parish Churchyard, Kilmuir Easter, Scotland. Photo by Roddie Macpherson, 2010. Returning to the Ross monument, the inscription facing west identifies the profile above (Fig. 7) as “Maggie A. Ross, deeply lamented niece who died in Denver, November 24, 1894.” According to cemetery records, her body, too, was moved from its original location in Fairmount Cemetery to the newly acquired plot. All three inscriptions identify the people whose bodies lie decomposing underground, the places those bodies were last seen intact, and the stone portraits that restore them to sight in monumental bodies. Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Detail of Maggie Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Detail of Maggie Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. These marble portrait heads play multiple roles, preserving the individuals’ features as a means of remembering the appearance of their natural bodies, while also conjuring their souls and the glorified resurrection bodies that Ross remained convinced God would give to his family members at the delayed second coming. Annie Ross’s portrait has eroded, but the others attest to the skill of the unknown carver, who probably worked from photographs that Ross supplied. The white marble portraits gleam in the Colorado sun, contrasting with the dark red granite. In The Time Appointed, Ross likened the appearance of resurrection bodies to the transfigured person of the living Jesus: “Like Him our faces shall shine and our raiment [shall be] transformed into brightness white as the snow” (Ross 1898, 31). Ross emphasized the face in this description, as he did on his monument. He also associated radiance and the color white with spiritual purity, and he was not alone. One of the most famous American sculptors of the nineteenth century, Hiram Powers, was said to prefer white marble because “the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region” (Nelson 2007, 65). Not only the material but also the shape of the portraits suggests the spiritual. All four busts occupy tondos reminiscent of the classical imagines clipeatae, circular relief portraits found on early Christian and Roman sarcophagi (Fig. 8). Among the hotly contested interpretations of this motif in ancient tomb sculpture, one of the earliest considered it an image of the deceased’s soul separated from the earthly realm by its circular molding.11 Art historian Erwin Panofsky embraced this idea, claiming that “the ubiquitous imago clipeata also symbolizes an ascent to the heavens” (Panofsky 1964, 35–36). Imagines clipeatae reappear with multiple purposes at various times and places, including as status symbols on eighteenth-century headstones in America’s British colonies (Fig. 9). The persistence of imagines clipeatae in sepulchral art, where concerns with immortality are never far distant, reinforces interpretations that consider the soul or spirit as well as the body. The Ross monument’s use of imagines clipeatae serves as a reminder that physical representation of the spiritual is an impulse with ancient roots. Figure 8. View largeDownload slide Roman Sarcophagus with relief portrait held aloft by Eros and Psyche, personification of the human soul, c. 190–200 C.E., marble. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Joseph V. Noble, 56.145. Figure 8. View largeDownload slide Roman Sarcophagus with relief portrait held aloft by Eros and Psyche, personification of the human soul, c. 190–200 C.E., marble. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Joseph V. Noble, 56.145. Figure 9. View largeDownload slide Mary Owen Headstone, c. 1749, slate, Circular Congregational Church Burying Ground, Charleston, SC. Photo by Elise M. Ciregna. Figure 9. View largeDownload slide Mary Owen Headstone, c. 1749, slate, Circular Congregational Church Burying Ground, Charleston, SC. Photo by Elise M. Ciregna. In the context of Ross’s failed expectation of seeing the glorified new bodies of wife, mother, and niece, we can understand these white marble faces as both portraits and temporary symbolic substitutes for their resurrected spiritual bodies. Ross reassured readers that they would be able to recognize their loved ones in their new bodies, asserting, “There is no reason to think that the spiritual body is different in appearance from the natural body” (Ross 1898, 31). In other words, his idea of the resurrected or glorified body resulted in portraits with recognizable facial features that shone bright white with reflected light. Referring to the rapture, Ross wrote, “The sky, not the grave, is our hope and expectation” (Ross 1898, 20). By lifting the white marble portraits high above the bodies decaying in the ground, he caused viewers to look toward the heavens, not the grave, in a reiteration of the message of resurrection in his Bible inscriptions. As often as he went to the cemetery, Ross could behold the foundational authority of his favorite Bible passages supporting physical portraits of his loved ones represented as redeemed and resurrected spirits. Ross’s marble portrait and its inscription on the front of the monument above the family name (Fig. 10) play different roles to those of the women. Apparently still reluctant to accept the idea of his own physical death, he did not include his birth date or a place for a future death date. Instead, he presented himself in the guise of monument patron, writing on the die: “Erected by Alexander Ross in Cherished Memory of Dear Ones.”12 Immediately beneath his proclamation of patronage, Ross returned to eschatology, quoting I Corinthians 15:26, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” These choices suggest his continued faith in his Savior’s imminent arrival, a common reaction to failed prophecy (Stone 2000, 4; Weber 1979). They also hearken back to his condemnation of “pulpit theologians” whose “false and unscriptural assumptions” include the idea that “‘we must all die,’ which has also no support from Scripture, for the Holy spirit distinctly says, ‘We shall not all sleep, we which are alive and remain shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air’” (Ross 1898, 20). This ongoing hope for rapture and translation in place of death and burial probably contributed to Ross’s decision not to treat the monument as his grave marker, but when he died sixteen years later his body was interred at its foot (Denver Post 1915). Figure 10. View largeDownload slide Detail of Alexander Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 10. View largeDownload slide Detail of Alexander Ross portrait, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, marble, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. The Cap The draped urn on top of the monument is a motif with a long history in American gravestone design, mourning jewelry, and stitched or painted mourning pictures that would have been instantly recognizable (for a brief summary, see Morgan 2007, 80–85). It remained a popular choice for monuments throughout the nineteenth century. The draped urn signals Ross’s mourning for the loss of his loved ones and for the absence of the flesh-and-bones Jesus whose advent would have heralded their return in new bodies. But reunion with family was not the only thing to be delayed indefinitely. According to Ross, the return of the Messiah would have begun the process of reuniting Israel by joining the Anglo-Saxon descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel with the Jewish descendants of Judah (Ross 1898, 23). He shared this belief with the Sons of the Ten Tribes, an obscure national organization that looked to the Baptist minister Thomas Howlett as a spokesperson (Denver Post 1898). Howlett, whose death Ross eulogized, wrote the book Anglo-Israel in which he explained, “Since prophecy relates largely and chiefly to the fortunes and destiny of all Israel, including the ten lost tribes as well as the two known to exist in the Jew, it is immensely important that the lost should be found and identified” (Howlett 1894, 2). The Sons found and identified the lost tribes in themselves, Anglo-Saxons whose recent history of imperial expansion throughout the world seemed to them the fulfillment of promises made to the ancient Israelites. Their arguments are too intricate to enter into here, but having proved to their own satisfaction that after the Assyrian conquest the northern tribes of Israel “migrated westward, carrying their religion with them to the British Isles, to North America, to Australia, and to all lands in which Anglo-Israel dwells,” it was a foregone conclusion that, in Howlett’s words, “The same race of men who were the ‘people of God’ under Moses are the people of God under Jesus” (Howlett 1894, 10). The Montana-based chaplain of the Sons, Martin Streator, also held “a firm and deliberate conviction that the origin and destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race . . . were foreseen and foretold by the Hebrew prophets” (Streator 1900, 13). He wrote a book identifying and advocating the gathering of the ten tribes into an Anglo-American Alliance that “foretells a racial alliance on a world-wide scale. . . . Then comes the climax in the history of the chosen race, for this is the decree of the Almighty: ‘The children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint themselves one head’” (Streator 1900, 76). Howlett agreed that “this gathering of the ten tribes does not wholly restore the Israelitish nation; since the two tribes represented in the Jews are still dispersed among the nations,” but predicted that “the reunion of the whole house of Israel will be accomplished in the citizenship of the Jews among the Anglo-Saxons” (Howlett 1894, 85–86). Reunification of Israel is the event that Ross placed at the end of the rapture when Jesus and his church would descend to meet the Jews, writing: “From Deut. 30:3. Jer. 23:5. Acts 15:16, and hundreds of passages of like utterances, we learn that the purpose of His return is also to gather Israel from all the nations, and to restore and convert them, and set up the Kingdom of David. . . . His return is ‘The Blessed Hope’ of the Church, of Israel, of the Nations, and of Creation” (Ross 1898, 23). Even after the failed advent, Streator still understood this gathering of Israel to have begun in 1898 and, in light of contemporary Zionist activity, he taught that “the time for the reunion of the two houses of Israel and Judah, their return to their home land, and the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, is rapidly drawing near” (Streator 1900, 51, 135). Reunification—and “the restitution of all things” (Acts 3:19) with which the Sons associated it— was a deeply racial concept in their hands (Streator 1900, 263–304, 412–60). Streator claimed that “God has chosen one race above all others because that race is the fittest to perform his work. Those who attempt to thwart this manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race do so to their own confusion and ruin” (Streator 1900, 128). “This manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race,” the belief that God commissioned WASPs to spread his message from east to west around the globe (Horsman 1981; Howlett 1894, 10, 66), was a doctrine to which the Sons, and therefore presumably Ross, were strongly attached. In an unconscious, personal enactment of manifest destiny, Ross had traveled westward from his native Scotland to New York City, Chicago, and finally Denver, bringing the Good News of Jesus’s salvation and a promised New Eden with him. Among other things, then, the draped urn monument reminds us of Ross’s grief at the failure of a manifest destiny that should, by his account, have culminated in the union of converted Jews and Anglo-Saxons in that Edenic new kingdom of chosen people (Ross 1898, 82–83). The monument’s embodiment of Anglo-Israelism is subtly expressed through its material. Although many Denverites had their memorials made locally from the abundant Rocky Mountain granite, Ross ordered stone from his native Scotland. It was quarried and carved in Aberdeenshire (Granite 1900) and shipped at great expense to Denver, where it was assembled in Fairmount cemetery in September 1899 (Denver Sunday Post 1899). To the untrained eye, there is no visual distinction between red granite quarried in the United States and that from Scotland, so the fact that the otherwise frugal Ross ignored readily available, less expensive material to import rock from Scotland sounds a note of ethnic pride. Scottish thistles (Fig. 11) engraved on pediments above the portraits of Annie, Margaret, and Maggie Ross further branded the monument as Scottish. Figure 11. View largeDownload slide Detail of thistle, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. Figure 11. View largeDownload slide Detail of thistle, Alexander Ross Monument, 1898–99, granite, Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. Photo by Annette Stott. The Sons drew a sharp distinction between themselves, as Israelites whose ancestors had followed Christ to form the Church, and Jews whose ancestors bore “the guilt of innocent blood, even the precious blood of Christ” (Ross 1898, 53).13 Ross’s ambivalent attitude toward Jews combined admiration, “the wonder of all nations . . . they stand at the head of literature, science and art,” with such old slanders as “it is said that the palms of their hands are still red with the blood of God’s beloved Son” (Ross 1898, 53). The contradictory nature of such stereotypes confused him enough to put it into words: What a mysterious problem among the many which confront us, why God selected such a peculiar people for Himself! By marvelous providence they have been preserved, for purposes clearly prophecied, their conversion to Christ, and their agency in converting the heathen world, … the Jew survives, and is now preparing the way for the world’s millennium. (Ross 1898, 53) Such distancing from Jews by Anglo-Israelists has been noted by many scholars (Barkum 1997; Benite 2009; Kidd 2006, 210) and explains the lack of overt reference to anything that could be mistaken for contemporary Judaism on the monument. Yet despite the subtlety of the Anglo-Israelist reference, almost everything about the monument, starting with the stone of which it is comprised, signals Ross’s racial, ethnic, and class pride, which were an integral part of his social and religious identities. Identities, as philosopher Judith Butler reminds us in describing the slipperiness of her attempts “to consider the materiality of the body,” are impossible to pin down because they are always in process of formation (Butler 1993, viii). This monument became part of that process for Ross through the choices he made when he ordered it. These choices reflect his beliefs, hopes, affections, and priorities at that moment in his life, causing the monument to embody some of Ross’s premillennialist, Anglo-Israelist Christian identity. This monumental body became a substitute for the natural body, as did other nineteenth-century American grave markers whose project was to carry the memory of an individual’s or family’s identity into the future after the flesh-and-blood bodies were no longer visible to do that work (Stott 2008, 274–82; see also Llewellyn 1991, 93–105). The Ross monument, with its four white busts on top of a stone body, its foot in biblical proof texts, and its mourning cap in mid air, became an abstract Ross family body. Before leaving this discussion of the monument as a material embodiment of religious beliefs and identity, I want to elaborate on one other aspect that is less obviously about adventism but that, like the creation of the monument itself, suggests Ross’s desire to exert control in a post-1898 world radically altered from his expectation. Although widowed since 1891 and childless, Ross assumed the role of male head of the family. He chose a sepulchral form new to the late-nineteenth-century American West that scholars label a family monument, that is, a large stone placed in the center of a family plot on which the patronym is recorded and around which individual headstones identify family members. With its individual inscriptions and portraits, Ross’s family monument is more detailed than many, but it is still of this general type; his monogram fills the pediment above his portrait, and the family name appears in capital letters below. It is centrally located and surrounded by low headstones of matching red granite to identify individual graves. The family functioned as the most basic unit of American Christianity, and its male head commanded special authority. Family carried additional significance for Anglo-Israelists, who based their claim to be descendants of God’s chosen people on their ancestry. As mentioned earlier, the memorial inscriptions on the monument carefully delineate each person’s relationship to Ross. Unlike other family monuments, though, Ross’s memorial represents a family he deliberately assembled from amongst his friends and relatives. For unknown reasons, but consistent with the patriarchal culture of his conservative evangelical Christianity, Ross chose only women to grace his monument, including the later addition of a friend about whom almost nothing can now be learned. He placed the inscription for Helen Anderson below his mother’s: “Helen Anderson, a dear friend, died Aug. 18, 1908.” She has no marble portrait, but a separate headstone marks her grave beneath the monument. Male relatives might be thought to have had a greater claim on Ross than a mere friend, and since he did not hesitate to include at least one living person—himself—they need not have already died to have been considered.14 A brother, George, brought Annie’s corpse to Denver for reburial (Denver Sunday Post 1899), and the existence of at least five nephews can be determined from the lawsuit they filed (and lost) after his death, when Ross’s will was revealed to have favored his Scottish housekeeper Catherine Aitken with half his estate (Denver County Probate #17847). Ross divided the rest between a niece and a Denver friend whom he named executor. Without exception, Ross passed over the men of his family; yet gender alone cannot account for this choice. He also had at least one sister in Scotland who joined his nephews in contesting his will and whom he also neglected to include in his monumental family. Making himself the only man and the only living member of this monumental family gave him an authoritative position. Although Ross’s criteria for determining whom to include on the monument remains obscure, his selectivity recalls the theological concept of election, by which Scottish Presbyterians understood that God predestined some people to be saved.15 Ross supported a conservative position on election and predestination, as evidenced by his reaction in 1903 when Presbyterians voted to revise the Westminster Confession of Faith, de- emphasizing the doctrine of divine election and recognizing salvation for all those who die in infancy. Ross raised his voice in public protest (Alamosa Journal 1903). He retained the strong conviction that only a few would enjoy salvation and these would apparently be adventists. As he wrote in The Time Appointed, “Graves shall be in the same cemetery, some shall be opened and some remain as they were. . . . The Christian who is looking for His coming will be taken, and the unbeliever will be left” (author’s emphasis, Ross 1898, 27). This sentiment does raise the suspicion that one factor in Ross’s election of members to his monumental family may have been their stance on adventism. Ross’s quite public dispute with the evangelist Dwight L. Moody when Moody came to Colorado for a two-month evangelical campaign in November and December 1898 demonstrates the intensity of Ross’s convictions on this point. Newspapers in Denver (Denver Evening Post 1898), Chicago (Inter Ocean 1898), and even Kansas (Leavenworth Times 1898) carried stories about a rift involving Moody’s request that Ross contribute $75,000 to the YMCA (which Ross refused), Ross’s suggestion that Moody did not sufficiently emphasize the importance of the second coming in his public presentations (which Moody denied), and both men’s lack of tact. It was Moody who orchestrated an equally public reconciliation at a Christmas Day church service by bringing Ross up out of the audience to share the stage with him (Denver Evening Post 1898b; McFarland 1899). The subject of Jesus’s imminent return dominates the surviving historical record about the uncompromising Ross. It is not unlikely that he chose only adventists for his family monument. Whether or not Ross intended to assemble a particular type of Christian family under his symbolic leadership as family head, Ross’s belief that God chooses who to save and who to damn is consistent with his own actions in marking people for inclusion or exclusion from the monumental family. The God-like power to designate family members and to render them in white spiritual bodies on the family monument is consonant with Ross’s privileged place in Denver society. When Ross arrived in Denver in the early 1890s, it was the second largest city west of the Mississippi River, trailing only San Francisco (Noel 2007). He lived in an elite hotel, traded in gold mines, and entertained the governor, mayor, and other socialites (1899 Denver city directory; Denver Evening Post 1900; Telluride Daily Journal 1900). Local newspapers referred to him as a millionaire.16 In his religious writing, he rejected financial wealth as a moral value (Ross 1898, 117) and died relatively poor (Denver County Probate 1915–16), but this did not remove the social status he enjoyed. The privilege embedded in his position as a WASP man in nineteenth-century America aligned with his Scottish-Presbyterian Christianity, his Anglo-Israelism, and his materialism. WHITENESS In his Introduction to Whiteness, sociologist Steve Garner describes its many contemporary academic meanings, affirming its connection to race as a social construct without any biological basis and noting scholars’ predominant interest in whiteness as an issue of power (Garner 2007, 64–7). It is generally agreed that white became a social identity in North America between about 1700 and 1850, one that became tied to racial difference as a way of explaining cultural, political, and technological inequalities among the earth’s peoples (Garner 2007, 64–67). Nineteenth-century Americans were deeply invested in forming and justifying categories of race that tended to solidify positions of power for some and deny them to others. In an investigation of Whiteness and American Visual Culture, art historian Martin Berger writes, “having internalized discourses that supported their self-interest as whites, European Americans unselfconsciously impressed their values onto the visual products around them” (Berger 2005, 173). He argues convincingly that nineteenth-century works of art need not have racial subject matter for whiteness to come into play, because “by the end of the nineteenth century, the perspective that came with being white was sufficiently ingrained in the European-American mind that it consistently structured whites’ interpretations of the visual world” (Berger 2005, 7). This “perspective that came with being white” and its association with Anglo-Saxon heritage is manifest in the Ross Monument. When Ross likened the resurrected bodies of the elect to the transfigured Messiah, he chose the mountaintop moment when Jesus appeared in a position of special authority and divine favor, suggesting that Ross associated resurrection bodies with such sacred authority. He claimed that those who were watching for Jesus’s advent would be raised on high in glorified bodies to receive their just rewards and become “assessors with Christ in judging the disobedient” (Ross 1898, 47). The use of crystalline white marble for the portraits and their elevated position conveys such an idea of privilege and power, not necessarily as a conscious choice, but more likely as a result of implicit bias. American cemeteries had moved away from colonial dark slate to white marble stones around the turn of the nineteenth century (see, for example, Blachowicz 2006). Material culture historian Elise Ciregna demonstrates that the exact degree of marble’s whiteness became the mark of its quality in the early nineteenth century (Ciregna 2015, 73). Antebellum Americans ordered “the whitest” or “purest white” marble for their memorials. She illustrates a symbolic reason for this change in the first white marble marker amongst dark slates in a colonial burying ground that reads in part: “This stone is designed . . . by its color to represent the moral character of Abigail Dudley who died June 4, 1812 . . .” (Ciregna 2015, 1). White marble was recognized as a symbol of moral virtue and soon came to denote cultural refinement and gentility as well. Art historian Charmaine Nelson notes that the neoclassical style, so popular among sculptors and their patrons throughout the first five decades of the nineteenth century, allowed for only one material, what she calls “neoclassicism’s essential deference to white marble” in a phrase that neatly evokes the power of whiteness (Nelson 2000, 87). Neoclassicism, a renewal of classical Greek and Roman styles, had become the dominant ideal of beauty in the early nineteenth century and despite an awareness that the ancient Greeks had often painted their marble reliefs in strong colors, later neoclassical artists and the exhibition sculptors who followed them in Ross’s day continued to prize polished white stone (Nelson 2007, 96). Over the course of the century it became apparent that marble could not stand up to harsh weather, a fact that reduced its popularity for grave monuments in Denver by the last decade of the century. Ross had other options that were considered more permanent at the time, including zinc and granite; however, the association of white marble portraiture with moral virtue, cultural refinement, elite economic status, and social power appears to have outweighed the importance of longevity. He probably chose it more for these symbolic associations than to replicate the women’s skin color, since white marble depicted white skin no more accurately than any other flesh tone. Sculptors used it to represent all skin colors and racial categories. As Nelson explains, “the whiteness of marble in sculptural practice is also a colonial insistence on the universality of the white body and skin as the aesthetic paradigm of beauty and morality in art” (Nelson 2007, 62). The pure white marble Ross family portraits signify whiteness, the power and privileges assumed by Anglo-Israelists to be conferred on them as part of God’s favor towards his chosen people. Scholars of American religion have found that white spiritual symbolism began adhering very strongly to racial whiteness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as white men consolidated political power in the United States. As political scientist Nancy Wadsworth concludes, “Through theological racism, most white religious communities actively constructed and reproduced the racial categories that allowed white supremacy to function as a hegemonic norm” (Wadsworth 2014, 36). Discussing the year 1898 specifically, historian Edward Blum describes “an ethnic nationalism in which white Protestants and political leaders assumed the inseparability of whiteness, American-ness, and godliness” (Blum 2005, 213; see also Blum 2009; Harvey 2017, 98–132; Blum and Harvey 2012). Such associations operated on Ross and other viewers of his monument. It required no conscious decision; implicit bias inclined Ross toward white marble and a lofty position for these portraits, just as it may incline viewers to accept these features as natural. Both explicit racial preference and implicit bias were at work. By his membership in the Sons of the Ten Tribes, Alexander Ross explicitly affirmed his conscious identification as a racially white Anglo-Saxon and a Christian descendant of God’s chosen people, the Israelites. The Scotch granite and thistles materialized that Anglo-Israelist identity. Implicitly, he associated the color white with Christian virtue, bodily resurrection, cultural taste, and political power. The elevated white marble portraits materialized that position of whiteness. Through the monument, he became a patron of fine art, a modern Euro-American category that scholars have identified as itself a symbol of white privilege (Berger 2005, 99–100). PHYSICAL CONTEXT The physical context of a material object plays an important role in how that object functions. Because of its context, the Ross monument not only served as an expression of private grief and an embodiment of personal faith but also a public witness. Ross placed it in Denver’s newest and most socially prominent rural cemetery, just off the main drive between the gate-lodge entrance and the mortuary chapel, where it had high visibility. In 1898, rural cemeteries—park-like burial grounds with picturesque landscaping on the outskirts of cities—had enjoyed more than six decades as the sites where urban Americans chose to lay their remains;17 and in the western United States, they still functioned as city parks and sculpture gardens for the relaxation and edification of the public (Stott 2008, 240–44, 283–84).18 From the day Fairmount opened in 1891, no entrance fee or admission system impeded public access. Although located on the plains almost six miles from Denver center, the cemetery enjoyed a steady stream of visitors. Local newspapers regularly advocated a trip to the cemetery for recreation, first by horse or street car and after 1893 on the Fairmount Cemetery Railway (Halaas 1976, 47–66). Situated and designed to have a visual impact, Ross’s towering memorial overshadowed most of its neighbors. In the days before the recently planted trees could obstruct any views, all visitors must have seen it. This public visibility occurred in a space considered sacred by many people of that time (McDannell 1995), including Fairmount’s owners. Their Prospectus enumerated ten regulations, culminating in a reminder “that the grounds of the Cemetery are sacredly devoted to the internment and repose of the dead, and that a strict observance of the decorum due to such a place will be required of all” (Fairmount Cemetery Association 1891, 16). The idea of sacred space prepared some visitors for a solemn contemplation of memorials and related questions about life, death, and afterlife. Thus Ross could expect that his monument would be seen by many people in a proper frame of mind to consider its eschatology. In the preface to the third edition of The Time Appointed, Ross claimed that thousands had read previous editions of his book that were circulating throughout the world. In reiterating the proof texts for a literal second coming on the base of the monument, Ross caused the monument to carry on his book’s evangelizing work, this time without a target date. That Ross remained focused on advent is clear from the Moody incident later in the year of failed prophecy and from an obituary on the front page of the Denver Times (1915) that announced he was writing a new book: “Death, the physical fact of which Dr. Ross dreaded as much as he believed in the triumph of the soul, staid his hand in the completion of a work on the millennium in which he intended to embody his ideas on the subject and the pronounced religious beliefs he has expounded for so many years.” The public visibility of the monument also testifies to this zeal for proclaiming the second coming that was such an important part of Ross’s identity. How effective Ross was as an advocate for advent is another question entirely. His claims for an expansive public audience were almost certainly exaggerated. The Time Appointed is a precious little paper-bound book in royal purple with a gold crown embossed above the author’s name, visually a keepsake. Yet only three copies seem to have survived, a second edition in the Mary Baker Eddy library in Boston and third editions in the libraries at Loma Linda University in California and History Colorado Center, Denver. Even if many people threw it away when its chronology failed, one would expect a greater survival rate if there were as many copies in circulation as Ross implied. In addition, there is reason to believe that Ross’s contemporaries found the monument’s emphasis on family, social status, and artistic merit more noteworthy than its religious message. A Denver Sunday Post article (1899) that described the new monument to the general public when it was first erected, failed to mention the second coming and omitted one of the proof texts. Instead, the reporter focused on the women’s beauty and the man’s love for them, further describing the monument as “an exquisite and original scheme of art,” and “the most expensive funeral shaft in the Rocky Mountain region.” Monument makers often bemoaned the supposed low quality of the typical grave marker, criticizing repetition and lack of originality. Mail order monuments had recently made their appearance and came in for special disparagement, so a product from the opposite end of the scale drew admiration. In case anyone remained in doubt as to its artistic merits, the reporter concluded his article by confiding that the executor of a millionaire’s estate in Kansas City had seen the Ross monument and lost no time obtaining Ross’s permission to copy his design (Denver Sunday Post 1899). The public presentation of Ross’s monument in a prominent cemetery brought him recognition as an art patron but failed to garner attention for his deeply held religious beliefs. The monument’s greater success may lie in expressing a personal response to private tragedies. CONCLUSION Alexander Ross’s monument—thirty-five tons of granite piled twenty-six feet high (Denver Sunday Post 1899)—is a massive material object that came into being only because Jesus’s body did not materialize on April 10, 1898. In the preface to his book, Ross had written that “the day is at hand when our faith will change to sight” (Ross 1898). In other words, 1898 adventists’ faith in Jesus’s return that year would be rewarded with the sight of his flesh-and-bones body on earth. Although no substitute for this unrealized event could have satisfied someone as fervent as Ross expressed himself in his book, the great weight and mass of his monument countered the continuing absence of Jesus. It made Ross’s faith concrete at a moment in time when he may most have needed such tangible reassurance. His faith did not “change to sight” in quite the way he had hoped, but he ensured that it did acquire visibility for himself and the cemetery-going public. Ross’s action provides historians of date-specific adventism with a case study that reveals personal rather than denominational or societal reactions to failed prophecy. His material response to the adventist’s disappointment differs from the most common earlier reactions investigated by scholars, in part because Ross had prepared for the possibility that Jesus would not come at the appointed time. Widespread knowledge of the Millerites’ disappointed expectations and the public ridicule they had endured in the 1840s gave him the benefit of hindsight. Even as he expressed confidence in Dimbleby’s calculations, he wrote a note at the front of his book: “the Lord may and may not delay, after the time now proved of the end of the Gentile age. When Jonah declared to Nineveh that within forty days the city would be destroyed the Lord accepted their repentance, and extended the period. He gave them further grace.” Ross intimated that if Jesus should not return in 1898, it would be because God had granted humans more time to convert to Christianity, not because the date was wrong. This got him off the hook with his peers in terms of chronology but, as with Jonah, did nothing to lessen personal disappointment. This attitude also explains why Ross did not need to change his denomination or seek to create a new one. Erecting a memorial in the cemetery marked the end of an era in his faith journey. It acknowledged the death of his expectation to see Jesus that year and allowed him to leave the hope of a fully realized Anglo-Israelist Christian destiny in the cemetery with other bones and ashes. It expressed continued faith in Jesus’s advent as the central event in his own Christian worldview, resolidifying a threatened belief and becoming the point from which he moved forward with his life. Just a few months after his disappointment he brought a minister from New York to run an “evangelistic campaign” (McFarland 1898), and he remained active on his charity boards (Denver Post 1901, 1902) and in his social life (Denver Post 1904, 1905). But the fact that he chose to cope in part by commissioning the monument also testifies to the central role materiality played in his adventist spirituality. Resurrection of bodies and Jesus’s physical return to earth are some of the most material moments in any Christian eschatology. When these ideas, sustained by the most literal interpretation of proof texts, were combined with an emphasis on material success as a sign of divine favor (in the person of a Scottish shepherd turned wool broker turned wealthy capitalist or in the larger WASP community that understood privilege as God’s favor toward them) a material artifact resulted. Although adventists can have many reasons to desire Jesus’s return beyond those Ross articulated, seeing Jesus incarnate is an important one. Seeing him that Easter morning would have confirmed Ross’s faith—made his belief real. When all immediate expectation of seeing and touching dissolved, Ross built a different kind of body. In a study of sixteenth- through eighteenth-century British effigy tombs, Nigel Llewelyn (1991) postulates that such monumental bodies attempted to repair a rent in the social fabric caused by the death of an elite member of society. In a more general sense, this also holds true for many nineteenth-century American tombstones, but Ross sought to repair more than a rent in his family; he acted in the face of a chasm in his world order caused by the absence of God. In arguing “that materiality mediates belief, that material objects and practices both enable it and enact it,” David Morgan (2010, 12) prompts the question whether belief can exist without embodiment or material practice. Ross’s monument contributes to the evidence that answers “no.” Searching for other adventists’ material expressions of belief is beyond the scope of this article, but such a search is worth pursuing. To summarize, the Ross sculpture stands as a public testimony to faith in the second coming of Jesus, a memorial mourning Jesus’s delayed 1898 advent, and a temporary substitute for the Ross family’s glorified bodies until Jesus should return to raise them from their graves below. It embodies Ross’s racial theology as an Anglo-Israelist and a WASP man, unconsciously exercising the power and privilege invested in him by his socio-economic, ethnic, and religious positions. For observers today, it exemplifies some of the ways that American Christian grave markers may entwine belief, body, and identity in a lived and materialized expression of personal faith. Acknowledgement This article developed from a paper I contributed to the October 2015 Newberry Scholl Center American Art and Visual Culture Seminar. I thank the seminar participants for that discussion, particularly Erika Doss and Sarah Burns. I also extend my deep gratitude to Jeffrey Mahan, Eric Smith, Pamela Eisenbaum, Vivien Fryd and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. REFERENCES Alamosa Journal. 1903 . May 14, 1903, 2. Baltimore Sun. 1898 . “ Rev. Thos. R. Howlett Dead: He Advocated the Reunion of Israel and Judah in Common Citizenship of Jews and Saxons .” February 24, 1898, 6. 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The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century . Bloomington : Indiana University Press . Panofsky , Erwin . 1964 . Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini . New York : Harry N. Abrams . Platt , Verity . 2017 . “ Framing the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi .” In The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History , edited by Verity Platt and Michael Squire . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press . Ross , Alexander . 1897 . The Time Appointed or End of Gentile Times . Compiled and condensed. Denver, CO : S.T. Marshall, Printer . . 1898 . The Time Appointed and the Coming of the Lord . 3 rd ed., revised. Denver, CO : S.T. Marshall, Printer . Sandeen , Ernest R . 1970 . The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press . Shuck , Glenn W . 2012 . “ Christian Dispensationalism .” In The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism , edited by Catherine Wessinger , 516 . 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Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1925 . New York and Oxford : Oxford University Press . Footnotes 1 Ross changed this title to The Time Appointed and the Coming of the Lord for the third and final edition. He credited his sources but mentioned no underwriters and had his book produced by a Denver job printer who is not known to have published other books, suggesting that Ross financed all three editions and their dispersal. 2 Carvers, companies, and monument contract are unlocated, but Ross signed the stone as patron. 3 This Post article announcing a commemorative service for a leader of the Sons in Philadelphia, Rev. Thomas Howlett, at which four Sons would speak, including Ross and the society’s chaplain, Martin Streator, is the primary evidence that Ross was an active member. Books on Anglo-Israelism by Howlett and Streator provide the clearest explanation of the particular racial theology that Ross and the fraternity shared. All three men contributed to the Sons’ Denver newspaper, The Tribes, but no copies have yet been found. 4 Throughout the centuries, Celtic Picts, Gaels, and Britons mixed with Anglo-Saxons to produce the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Scotland; thus, Anglo-Saxon is not entirely accurate as a designation for Scots. Yet this term became the common designator for modern people who share the English language and the majority culture in Great Britain, and it is in this sense that Ross identified as Anglo-Saxon. 5 White bronze, or zinc, is a classic example of this method, where patrons chose from catalogs depicting hundreds of bases, shafts, pictorial and text inserts, caps, and statues, which were then assembled in the factory. Stone monument salesmen employed a similar technique using drawings and photographs to suggest designs. 6 All four biblical inscriptions are English Revised Version. 7 All quotes from Ross’s book preserve his use of italics. 8 By contrast, like other premillenarians, he interpreted time-related texts in a symbolic or prophetic light, changing days to years and accepting, on Dimbleby’s authority, that “a ‘time’ is always 360 years in Scripture” (Ross 1898, 101). 9 Translated saints were believers still alive at Jesus’s return who would not need resurrection but would be translated from life in earthly bodies to life in glorified bodies. 10 See Mills 2015 and Doss 2010 on monuments and emotion. 11 For a recent attempt to navigate the shoals between religio-eschatological approaches epitomized by Franz Cumont and socio-cultural approaches represented by A. D. Nock, see Platt 2017. 12 Ross is not unique in asserting patronage on a tombstone, but this choice is significant in light of the non-advent that challenged his expectation of never needing a grave. His fear of death is well documented in his book and obituary (Denver Times 1915). 13 Ross tempered such condemnation of Jews with his contradictory acknowledgement that “we know who wrought this awful deed of woe. Our sin crucified the Son of God” (Ross 1898, 13). He linked both sin and sacrificial blood to the color red: “Man’s sins are scarlet, crimson, and black! But God’s purity and holiness are pure white” (Ross 1898, 86); “in spring time Calvary is covered with scarlet flowers which resemble drops of blood, covering the white limestone, on the very knoll where the Saviour shed His precious blood” (Ross 1898, 17–18). An anonymous reviewer of this article wisely suggests that the red granite could symbolize the blood of Christ in this object that appeared in place of the absent Jesus’s body. If Jesus’s blood removed humanity’s sin, as Ross claimed, then however coincidentally or unconsciously, using red rather than the more common grey Aberdeen granite creates dual material symbolism: red sin transformed by blood sacrifice to produce pure white souls. 14 Scottish census records of 1851 and 1861 reveal that Ross’s father, Robert, disappeared from his life sometime after his thirteenth birthday. Ross lived with his mother in Rosskeen Parish working as a shepherd through the 1871 census, when he was 34. 15 Raised in the Scottish Presbyterian church in Ross-shire, Ross joined Central Presbyterian, Denver, in 1894 on confession of faith and transferred to Twenty-third Avenue Presbyterian in 1896 (Central Presbyterian church records). At some point, a falling out over theology—possibly the predestination issue of 1903—caused him to leave the Presbyterian Church and join the Episcopal Church (Denver Times 1915; St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral records). 16 He apparently came to New York City from Scotland in 1875 (US Census 1910). The 1876 New York City directory lists a new Alexander Ross as a broker and in subsequent years through 1886 his business was wool. Obituaries describe him as a successful New York businessman, and he married into a prominent Chicago family (Manhattan marriage certificate #3145, March 20, 1889). His in-laws disapproved of Ross and disinherited Annie, but the day before their wedding, Ross helped her begin a lawsuit against them, continuing it on behalf of her estate until he won in 1892 (New York Times 1889; New York Tribune 1891; Inter Ocean (Chicago)1891a; Decatur Daily Republican 1892), after which he came to Denver with part of her father’s two-million-dollar estate and pursued investments in a variety of enterprises. 17 For histories of the rural cemetery movement, which began in the United States in 1831 with Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, see Sloane 1991 and Linden 2007. Note that the high plains and mountain terrain of the West required modifications to the rural cemetery ideal but did not erase it. 18 Denver’s first neighborhood park appeared in 1868, but the city grew faster than its parks and the peak of planned park development did not occur until 1904 to 1918 under Mayor Speer (Noel 2007). Denver’s art museum lay far in the future. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - A Material Response to Spiritual Crisis: Alexander Ross’s Anglo-Israelist Monument of 1898–1899
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfy024
DA - 2019-03-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/a-material-response-to-spiritual-crisis-alexander-ross-s-anglo-aTkhBeQHW4
SP - 225
VL - 87
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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