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[banknote]" became a popular expression, Mr. Morris succeeded in laying hands on money enough to keep the Revolution, however staggeringly, on its financial feet. It should be added that the later poverty of Mr. Morris was not the result of money advanced during the Revolution. During the time of the Confederacy (1781-1788) Mr. Morris owned almost the entire western half of New York State; 2,000,000 acres in Georgia and a million acres each in Virginia, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. It was the failure of a London bank and the dishonesty of a partner that drove him into bankruptcy. Thus the U. S. Government was not directly responsible for his predicament, though it did seem as if some effort might have been made to save him from the three years he spent in a debtor's prison. Mr. Morris died in 1806.
Salomon. Haym Salomon was born in Lissa, Poland, in 1740. In 1775, while living in New York City, he was sentenced to death by the British for a reputed attempt at blowing up the British fleet in New York Harbor. He bribed his jailers and escaped to Philadelphia. In 1778 he was considered one of the country's wealthiest merchants and bankers, and, according to the Salomon side of the statue controversy, he lent $350,000 to Robert Morris. His sympathizers also credit him with having negotiated loans from France to the Continental Government and claim that his services were purposely minimized in order that Mr. Morris might get all the credit. Mr. Salomon's total advances to the Government are estimated at from $400,000 to $600,000, none of which, it is said, was ever returned to him. He died in 1785 and his estate fell into unskilled hands which reduced it to bankruptcy.
Records. So the Salomon version —but unfortunately there has appeared little documentary evidence to support it. Salomonites say that the records of Mr. Salomon's loans were lost when the British burned the White House in 1814. But he is not mentioned in the late Professor John Osborne Sumner's history of The Financier and the Finances of the American Revolution, and Dr. Worthington Ford of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Dr. Victor Paltsits of the New York Public Library, who investigated his career for the Art Commission, found insufficient data to justify a memorial.
Chairman Robert W. De Forest of the Municipal Art Commission said that the refusal to approve the statue was based upon dissatisfaction with the site (Madison Square), and that the decision was without prejudice to the selection of another site, but Jews were not satisfied with the implied suggestion that their hero might be remembered in some less conspicuous portion of Manhattan. Mr. DeWitt M. Lockman, artist and member of the Art Commission, suggested that an excellent compromise would be a general memorial "of an allegorical nature" to all the Jews who helped in the Revolution. Mr. Z. Tygel, Secretary of the Federation of Polish Jews, who were raising $75,000 for the Salomon statue, maintained that Mr. Salomon was unfairly being denied due recognition. In connection with the racial aspect of the problem, it was recalled that authorities last winter had frowned upon an effort which two Buddhists made to erect a statue of Buddha in Central Park (TIME, Dec. 14, 1925).
Assuming that there will be no Salomon statue, what other members of the Jewish race might be candidates for monumental remembrance?