`Bug' Monument Is A Complex Topic -- The Associated Press: The Boll Weevil Monument In Enterprise, Ala., Honors The Insect That Forced The Area To Diversify.

ENTERPRISE, Ala. - Come to the center of this small, rural town of the Deep South, and you will not find the usual monument to Confederate dead anchoring the square. The statue in residence is a classically attired woman holding aloft a big bug on a tray - like Venus dealing with a cockroach problem.

It is the Boll Weevil Monument, a tribute to the bug that wrecked the local cotton crop, and with it the local economy, in 1916. And if that strikes you as about as absurd as Chicago honoring Mrs. O'Leary's cow, or Atlanta memorializing William Tecumseh Sherman, then you've got some history to learn.

You should also know that you're seeing a fake, a replica made last year of a polymer resin. The vandalized 79-year-old original lies broken in a box, its future in the hands of city fathers and the Smithsonian Institution.

The monument's origins seem simple enough. After the boll weevil wiped out cotton, local farmers switched to peanuts, other crops and, later, poultry. That diversified the economy enough to steel it against future disasters, making the bug a blessing in disguise.

So, in early 1919, local booster Roscoe Owen "Bon" Fleming got the idea that they ought to put up a monument to the bug. He took up a collection, kicked in a few thousand bucks of his own and selected a sculptor in Italy. By year's end the statue had arrived, and it was dedicated on Dec. 11, 1919.

The longer you chat with local folks, the more complicated the subject gets. Some begin to laugh derisively. Others get peeved. And before you know it you're walking gingerly across the broken ground of the race question, where anxieties run far deeper than they ever did over any pesky bug.

Because, to some people, the boll weevil was just a more socially acceptable substitute for the real hero of the city's economic recovery, an agricultural chemist named George Washington Carver. Not only did Carver, who was black, urge ruined farmers to turn to peanuts and sweet potatoes, he worked tirelessly in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute to create a market for the crops by coming up with more than 300 new uses.

"So here's the man who helped save the state of Alabama, yet they set a monument to a bug in the middle of the street," says Michael Woods, who runs an African-American heritage shop just down Main Street from the monument.

"There are a lot of people who feel that way about it," he says.

The Carver issue has long been an undercurrent to talk of the weevil monument. A slender pamphlet on the monument, available at the local library, makes only a veiled reference to it, saying, "Efforts have been made, largely through jealousy, to discredit the motives which inspired the erection of the Boll Weevil Monument . . . but be it said here that the motivating spirit that caused the creation of the Boll Weevil Museum was both sincere and serious."

Last summer, the seditious theory got its first national forum. In the wee hours of July 11, two teenage pranksters struck. Intending to make off with only the weevil, they also tore off the arms of the statue of the woman carrying it.

It wasn't the first time thieves had struck. In 1974 someone took the woman and the bug, leaving a ransom note. They turned up at nearby Fort Rucker. In 1981 someone took only the bug. It was never recovered, and in 1992 its replacement was stolen. The city bolted down the next weevil more securely, and it has stayed, the occasional victim of other pranks - soap suds in the surrounding fountain, clothing on the statue - until last July.

It took about three weeks to catch the boys who took it and recover the broken pieces. By then, publicity over the theft had caught the attention of the cable network Comedy Central, which sent a film crew for its irreverent "Daily Show." Interviewers posing as news reporters from a major network deadpanned their way through one serious chat after another with concerned locals, then spoofed the town with a tongue-in-cheek report.

"It was actually pretty . . . funny, but people around here sort of took offense to it," says Mayor Johnny Henderson.

Greg Swim definitely did. As the town's central supply coordinator, it's been his job to help repair the damaged monument. What really burned him up was the show's parting shot.

"They said we'd rather honor a glorified cockroach than a black man," Swim says, "and we don't feel that way."

Originally, the Venuslike statue held aloft a small fountain instead of a model of the weevil. The oversized bug was a 1949 add-on, which only seemed to add to the monument's curiosity value.

"The interest has really surprised me," says Henderson, who became mayor in 1992. "I've had more calls on the monument than anything else. Even garbage rates and sewer rates and all that don't get as much interest. People have a lot of pride in it."

After the theft in July, it seemed for a while that the monument might be gone for good. Its metal "skin" had become so worn and frail through the years that it seemed impossible to repair.

So, Swim recruited an artist to make a new casting from a plaster replica at City Hall, which had been made for display at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The new version was unveiled on the night of the city's annual Christmas parade.

Now the city is waiting to hear if and when the Smithsonian Institution will take on the restoration project of the original statue.

"It's my understanding they have tentatively agreed to accept it," Henderson says. "They were talking about four years."

In the meantime, the city is taking no chances. Radio station WKMX, which overlooks the monument, has mounted a 24-hour security camera trained full time on the weevil.

The signal goes straight to a video monitor at the Enterprise Police Department.