trumps remembrance itself.37 Memory, in the common use of the word, is both a faculty and an object. Memorializing has as one of its effects linking the faculty of memory with the experience of connecting to the meaning and value of the nation, quite apart from that other meaning, the particular thing remembered. As a result, in thinking about the memorials on the Mall, historian Joanna Bourke’s pithy observation that remembering “operates in the service of social power” is more pressing than tracking the myriad processes of memory.38
For this reason, I stick closely to the conversations about the memorials as they were planned and debated. Witnessing is a methodological imperative for this book. It witnesses the process through which social power is expressed in the minutes of meetings and published reports and stories in the press; it observes and reports on the operation of social power in the details of the process of remembrance.39 Each chapter takes up a specific memorial project and systematically tracks the conversations and debates that surrounded the memorial from the first suggestions for a memorial through always tumultuous site and design debates to the memorial’s dedication. Each chapter studies these debates as they have been preserved in the papers of key organizations, the memories of key participants, and the newspapers reporting on the memorials in progress.40 This allows us to observe the process through which the past is invented to serve the social needs of the present. It reveals complicated, confounding, uneven, and often extraordinary processes of constructing nationalism. Blight has called for studies of memory that are “rooted in deep research, sensitive to contexts and to the varieties of memory at play in any given epoch.”41 Witnessing the memorial process in this way enables us to reveal the way nationalism is constructed.
Today, Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson all occupy the Mall with such gravity that it is hard to imagine this national memorial space without them.42 But, in fact, the story of the Mall is one of periods of great investment in and anxiety about its symbolic potential alternating with periods of neglect and indifference. In the periods of neglect, it has been home to slave pens, untamed gardens, Civil War deserters, “the flotsam of the war,” Army hospitals, brothels, public markets, grazing cattle, the city’s railway station, and temporary military buildings. In periods of great interest, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and now a parade of twentieth-century wars have been reworked to define the nationalism of their moment.
In 1791 Washington charged Pierre L’Enfant with the design of the new capital. L’Enfant wanted the U.S. capital to look like the center of the mighty empire he hoped it would become. As his map shows, the symbolic center of his city was an “immense T-shaped public park”—which would eventually become the Mall.43 L’Enfant and his plan have been much celebrated since 1791, but these celebrations often neglect to mention that, before his plan was realized, he was forced to resign because he had “difficulty in subordinating himself,” and his grandiosity was not fully realized as the capital city was built.44 The Mall as a site of explicit national symbolic speech was largely neglected into the 1830s.45 In fact, to accommodate the slave trade that had become so central to American life, the early nineteenth-century Mall was home to sprawling slave pens. The brutal reality of slave pens was hardly what L’Enfant had imagined for this grand public space, but it does say something quite pointed about national life in the United States in the early 1830s.
Dramatic changes on the Mall later in the nineteenth century made it more explicitly a national symbolic space, but it was transformed in fits and starts—and with difficulty. The Washington Monument, the beginnings of the Smithsonian Institution, and the development of elaborate gardens shaped the Mall, while sectionalism, the Civil War, and its costs shook the nation. The Washington Monument Society was formed in 1833. Its members planned to spend no less than $1 million and vowed to build “the highest edifice in the world and the most stupendous and magnificent monument ever erected to man.”46 In 1848, when ground was broken, the speeches reflected the anxieties of the moment, suggesting that the size of the memorial spoke to the enormity of the project of holding the nation together.47
FIGURE 1. Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan of Washington. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
As the monument was being built, other long-lasting changes were taking place on the Mall. An 1846 act of Congress gave the newly formed Smithsonian Institution the land on the Mall from Ninth to Twelfth Streets, and in 1855, the first Smithsonian building went up on the Mall. The Smithsonian Institute Building, known as “the Castle” because of its twelfth-century Gothic-style architecture, was the first of twelve museum buildings that would line the Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Built at a rate of roughly one every twenty years, these museums eventually defined the eastern half of the Mall. These institutions established the Mall as a site of pilgrimage for the linked receipt of knowledge and the celebration of national achievements.48
Despite the great height of the Washington Monument and the potency of the artifacts on display on the Mall by the 1880s, a plan for fully developing the national monumental core was not put into place until the turn of the century, when the success of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired a Michigan senator to reclaim and redesign the Mall. The success of the “White City” at the Chicago World’s Fair in articulating a vision of a civilized, contained, vaulted, white nation is well known. Less has been made of the fact that the success of the Chicago fair inspired a revitalization of the real national capital.49 In 1900, Senator James McMillan set out to remake the National Mall in the shape of the White City. With presidential and congressional support, McMillan formed the McMillan Commission and asked the fair’s architect, Daniel Burnham, to lead the effort to realize the symbolic potential of the long-neglected national landscape in Washington.
The commission published its plan in 1902. Its principal elements involved shifting the Mall to realign the Capitol and the Washington Monument; moving the train station off the Mall; placing the Lincoln Memorial at the west end of the Mall facing east; building a Jefferson Memorial on the north-south axis of the Mall facing the White House and the Washington Monument; and building a memorial bridge, lined up behind the Lincoln Memorial, that would connect the Mall to Arlington National Cemetery. The effect of the plan was to create a clean, clearly delineated ceremonial federal space that was removed from the city itself. (This separated it from the local space, allowing for a literal whitening of the most heavily black city in the United States at the turn of the century.) The plan also added two “great men of ideas” to the Mall: Lincoln and Jefferson.
With this plan, Burnham and his associates were able to reproduce some of the successes of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. They achieved this on a grand scale. They made order out of chaos, expressed insistent national pride, and most importantly, drew sharp lines around highly charged national symbolic space. Though this space would continue to be refigured and fought over, the McMillan Mall would become, in the minds of many, the Mall—a finished work of art that defined a finished nation, a high point of democratic civilization embodied by Lincoln and Jefferson and their enormous Doric columns.
The early twentieth century on the Mall was also marked by a much less compelling, but not unimportant, centralization and federalization of patriotic practices and productions of the past in national space. A slew of federal agencies were established to oversee the Mall. It makes sense that as the Mall took on greater significance, the mechanism for maintaining and controlling it tightened. In 1916, the National Parks Service was formed as part of the executive branch of the federal government to “conserve natural and historic objects.” The National Parks Service assumed responsibility for oversight of national monuments, historic parks, national memorials, historic trails, heritage areas, battlefields, and cemeteries. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was established in 1910 by an act of Congress, and the National Capital Park Commission was established by an act of Congress in 1924 to maintain and oversee District of Columbia parks.50 In varying degrees, these agencies were created for and charged
