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 with the protection of the Mall that had emerged from the McMillan Commission Report. The Commission of Fine Arts was, in fact, a direct response to the controversies surrounding the Lincoln Memorial.51 Clearly, the Mall remade by the McMillan Commission represented a triumph of the national that Congress and others deemed worth protecting.52
FIGURE 2. McMillan plan. (Courtesy of the National Capital Planning Commission.)
The intense interest in building on the Mall dissipated after the major elements of the McMillan plan were completed. Between 1935 and 1979, there was another long period of relative neglect and disinterest in adding to the McMillan plan. Museums filled out the center of the Mall, and there were impassioned debates over their architectural forms, but little attention was paid to the memorial core. In fact, the western end of the Mall, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, was crammed with temporary military buildings during World War I that were not removed until the 1970s. Nixon, who flew over them in his helicopter almost daily, complained that they were eyesores.53 He wanted them to be replaced with “Tivoli-like” gardens. Although the agencies responsible for the Mall found Nixon’s plans to be too elaborate, his request resulted in the creation of Constitution Gardens. Stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, just north of the Reflecting Pool, which runs between the memorials, these gardens were dedicated in 1976 as a modest bicentennial tribute. In 1982, a few months before the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the humble Signers Memorial for the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence was dedicated in Constitution Gardens.54
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