Excerpt

From Chapter 5

The designers knew the adulation would not last.  The visual experience of inspecting models and renderings in an art gallery could be exhilarating, but there was still a real landscape on the ground with a long history of “tactile” associations for generations of residents and visitors.  Rick Olmsted, writing an internal memo twenty-five years later,  made clear just how well the commissioners understood this from the start.  Much of the existing Mall, he conceded, had become “locally agreeable” as the trees and gardens had matured.  The solution that he and McKim had devised in 1901 was not to sweep the nineteenth-century landscape clean all at once but to replace it piecemeal over a period of years: remove obstructive trees gradually to open up the vista; plant the formal rows section by section.  Even after some of this work had been accomplished, Olmsted still believed the surviving remnants of the grounds of the Smithsonian and the Agriculture Department were “jealously cherished,” and opposition to their destruction was “even today confidently to be expected.”

Locally agreeable facts on the ground – an old tree, a cherished garden, a house, a streetscape – are precisely what anchor people to places.  For residents of Washington and longtime visitors, such “tactile” spots did not fragment the landscape or hinder more coordinated systems.  Quite the opposite: the locally agreeable landscape knit human lives into recognizable patterns.  In the minds of the park commissioners, however, these local attachments were mere clutter that undercut the idea of the national.  The nation would have to make itself present, to find a space for itself, by replacing local attachments with an instantly grasped spatial unity, or what Burnham called “a great architectural picture.”

Connected only to their particular sites, they had no association with each other; they were even more localized than the statues outside the Mall.  Even if Olmsted were right that no monument was more patriotic than the Downing urn, most Americans would not rank high the hero of the national fruit-growers association.  With the exception of the obelisk the monuments inside the nineteenth-century Mall commemorated marginal figures in the nation’s history, while the statues that defined the squares and circles of the outer city honored presidents and military commanders.

The park commissioners were determined to reverse this arrangement.  Monuments to surgeons or horticulturalists or French inventors had no right to occupy the capital’s most potent central space.  Only the most important national figures, and the most important monuments, belonged there.   Rather than perpetuate the fragmentation of the public into multiple constituencies (photographers, surgeons, pomologists), the monuments should draw Americans together into “one people, with common purposes and aims, common ideals, and a common destiny.” Above all, to unify the space around a common national theme, the monuments needed to relate logically one to one another.  Otherwise they would continue to create disparate pockets of merely local interest.

By the time the commissioners set to work on the Mall, the Civil War had come to permeate national culture: it was the defining event of the modern nation, in effect a second founding.  Over a third of the statue monuments erected in Washington in the second half of the nineteenth century commemorated Civil War heroes.  But not a single one of these stood inside the Mall. While the statues outside the Mall reinforced the theme simply by adding individual heroes to an ever growing parade of Union leaders, the commissioners saw the Mall as an opportunity to condense the theme into a more definitive, final form. With the Washington Monument in the center, representing in abstract form the birth of the nation, the outer poles of their composition could be devoted to the solemn story of the nation’s rebirth: what Lincoln called at Gettysburg “a new birth of freedom.”