Nathan Hale

At at time when many groups were laying claim to the colonial past, Frederick MacMonnies was commissioned by the Sons of the American Revolution to create a sculpture of the American patriot Nathan Hale for Manhattan's City Hall Park. They required that it represent "a well-built man of American type, dressed in a simple costume of the end of the last Century . . . at the moment immediately preceding his execution by the British."

MacMonnies researched the life of Hale, a young schoolteacher who infiltrated British camps in occupied Brooklyn and New York, and he was determined to produce a forceful memorial for an increasingly diverse urban audience: "I wanted to make something that would set the bootblacks and little clerks around there thinking something that would make them want to be somebody and find life worth living."