As early as 1919, students discussed the idea of having a statue that symbolized the “Volunteer Spirit.” The class of 1928 collected $430 toward a fund to be $1,000 in gold for a prize to the sculptor preparing the best model representative of the Volunteer Spirit. The classes of 1929 and 1930 also contributed to the “symbol prize fund” and the All Students’ Club raised funds. In 1929, with the $1,000 in gold in hand, a decision was made by the All Students’ Club to have a contest among student sculptors in all American and European art schools.
Truman Benedict was chair of the committee that presided over the contest. The committee also included Tennessee Governor Henry Horton, in addition to UT President Harcourt Morgan and UT Alumni Secretary Vic Davis. The contest rules called for a symbol to represent “youth holding high a torch of intellectual and spiritual beauty.” The figure was to portray “the spirit of volunteer service, not only in the time of war, but in economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual development of the Commonwealth.”
The contest was announced on May 31, 1930. Four-page booklets giving the details of the composition were mailed to some eleven hundred art schools and sculptors. A publicity campaign was undertaken, with contest details to appear in 2,200 newspapers and several magazines devoted to sculpture. An article prepared by history professor P. M. Hamer provided the history of the tradition of the Volunteer.
The winning design (which had to be submitted in the form of a plaster casting) was to be cast in bronze in heroic size and placed in front of the new (James D. Hoskins) library, with floodlights assuring a view from Cumberland Avenue. The contest closed on April 5, 1931. More than 80 models were submitted, two coming from students in France. The panel of judges was headed by one of America’s foremost sculpture authorities, Lorado Taft (1860-1936) of Chicago, the author (1903) of The History of American Sculpture. Two local judges, Charles Barber and Robert Lindsay Mason, assisted Taft. The local judges chose 25 finalists, and Taft arrived by train on May 8 to choose the winner, which he announced at an evening lecture in Jefferson Hall on May 12.
The winner was a model submitted by Theodore Andre Beck, a student at the Yale University School of Fine Arts. The model depicted “a sturdy youth, his mantle over one arm and a lamp in the other.” Some critics objected to a noticeable paunch on the otherwise classical figure, and others questioned the substitution of the lamp for the torch. After visiting the university and attending the 1931 Aloha Oe ceremony, Beck submitted a modified design, a slimmed-down figure holding aloft a torch. Many people favored the entry of Noel Turner of New York City, which was a youth in work clothes holding a coat in one hand and a torch in the other. Taft indicated that he did not choose that entry because the clothes dated and typed the symbol.
In 1937 the design of the statue was changed again, at the request of the campus symbol committee, to add a globe beneath the winged goddess of victory, in the statue’s left hand suggesting that victory over the challenges of the world, both in times of war and peace, lay in the individual’s own hands. The design was trademarked in 1956. Final changes were made—slimming the statue again—at the time of its 1968 casting. Theodore Beck donated a six-foot plaster model of the symbol to UT in 1940.