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K. Savage, “The Self-Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight The Self-Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial Author(s): Kirk Savage Reviewed work(s): Source: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 225-242 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1181181 . Accessed: 26/01/2012 09:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Winterthur Portfolio. http://www.jstor.org The Self-made Monument George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial Kirk Savage HE 555-FOOT OBELISK on the Mall in Even in his own time Washington and the nation Washington, D.C., is one of the most con- he led were largely products of the collective im- spicuous structures in the world, standing agination. America was then-and to some extent alone on a grassy plain at the very core of national remains-an intangible thing, an idea: a voluntary power-approximately the intersection of the two compact of individuals rather than a family, tribe, great axes defined by the White House and the or race. When Washington took command of the Capitol. The structure itself lives up to its un- revolutionary army, he gave the new nation a land- rivaled site: it dominates the city around it not just mark, a visible center to which scattered settle- by sheer height but also by its powerful soaring ments of people divided by cultural background contours and stark marble face (fig. 1). This and economic interest could pledge their alle- "mighty sign," as one orator called it a century ago, giance. Necessity made Washington an instant is the nation's monument to George Washington, icon, and from the beginning necessity buried the "the Father of His Country"-a historical figure real figure beneath a mound of verse, oratory, and almost as impenetrable as the blank shaft that com- imagery, all vying to give shape to the icon and memorates him.l therefore to the nation.2 What can be made of the Washington Monu- It is useful to think of Washington as a histor- ment? The answer depends on the interpretation ical invention; history made him perhaps more of Washington himself. For both the man and his than he made history. This essay attempts to inter- monument were once the symbolic battlegrounds pret probably the most conspicuous, and certainly for long-standing disputes over national identity. the most problematic, undertaking in that histor- ical campaign: the effort to build him a national Kirk Savage is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the monument. The undertaking began in the eigh- History of Art, University of California, Berkeley. teenth century (when Washington was still alive), The author thanks Svetlana Alpers, Margaretta Lovell, ran into warfare after his death, and Elizabeth and Dell for and comment- partisan Thomas, Upton reading floundered for decades in over ing on earlier versions of this essay. unending disputes The interpretive literature on the Washington Monument designs and intentions. The controversy is all the is scanty. Two sketchy accounts are found in Frederick more striking if one looks at the achievements of Gutheim, "Who Designed the Washington Monument?" AIA local the same States Journal 15, no. 3 (March 1951): 136-41; and Ada Louise Hux- campaigns during period. table, "The Washington Monument, 1836-84," ProgressiveAr- and cities had no trouble displaying their patrio- chitecture38, no. 8 (August 1957): 141-44. A discussion of some tism in a series of impressive monuments to Wash- of the alternative designs is in Robert Belmont Freeman, Jr., a statue Antonio Canova in "Design Proposals for the Washington National Monument," ington, including by Records of the ColumbiaHistorical Society, vols. 73-74 (Washing- Raleigh, North Carolina (1821), a 220-foot column ton, D.C., 1973-74), pp. 151-86. For a recent and stimulating in Baltimore, Maryland (1829), and a colossal interpretation of the monument in the context of the Mall, see Charles L. Griswold, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Mall: on Political 2 Washington Philosophical Thoughts Iconog- On Washington as icon, see, among others, Marcus Cun- Critical no. None raphy," Inquiry 12, 4 (Summer 1986): 693-96. liffe, GeorgeWashington: Man and Monument (New York: Mentor of to the monument in the con- these, however, attempts place Books, 1982); William Alfred Bryan, George Washington in text of the historical to commemorate campaign Washington American Literature, 1775-1865 (New York: Columbia Univer- and the that controversy campaign generated. sity Press, 1952); and Wendy C. Wick, George Washington, an ? 1987 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, American Icon: The Eighteenth-CenturyGraphic Portraits (Char- Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/87/2204-00010$3.00 lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982). 226 WinterthurPortfolio trying to sort out the design process, has argued that the monument as finally built "reflects the im- print, over many years, of so many forces that in the end we are less aware of individual genius than of that cumulative genius we call culture." Or as Americans claimed when the obelisk was finished in the i88os, it was a work of "the people," a monu- ment that seemed to make itself and to make America.3 Indeed, the obelisk seems to serve as the per- fect expression of union-a great mass coalesced into a single gesture that belies all dissension. But this way of reading the monument speaks more of longing than of reality. The blank shaft was in no way built by consensus. It was instead the achieve- ment of an engineer working in virtual secrecy, outside the political process and against the pro- tests of the artistic community. In fact, Washing- ton's monument could be finished only by obliter- ating his traces in the process, not only from the structure itself but also from the discussion sur- rounding it. The more we examine the "resolu- tion" his monument represents, the more unset- tling it looks and the more unsettled the critical reactions to it appear. The engineered unity of this soaring obelisk gave the nation an image of its own destiny, an image at once powerfully appealing and yet in many ways troubling to this day. With an almost unerring instinct, Washington played a role fraught with paradox. He was the leader of a nation that had in theory renounced the notion of a leader. The of 1. Monument, D.C., republican theory Fig. Washington Washington, held 1848-85. (Photo, Kirk Savage.) government, following Enlightenment ideals, that men could govern themselves; to the extent that formal government was necessary at all, it was equestrian statue in Richmond, Virginia (1858). to be conducted by representation rather than pre- But the national enterprise forced an issue that rogative. Even the federalists, who had less confi- could not be swept away by simple appeals to patri- dence in republican man than in strong, central otism. If Washington was the founding father, authority, could not disavow the ideology of self- what kind of nation did he found? Erecting a na- government. Washington's genius lay in his adap- tional monument to Washington ultimately de- tation to this difficulty: he became the reluctant manded a symbolic construction of America. leader. He preferred Mount Vernon to power, or The trouble originated, after Washington's so he said; and the more he demurred or pro- death, in a profound ideological dispute over the tested, the more power he got.4 nature of the republic. As new disputes followed, Washington in myth embodied the very ideal of the campaign to unify around Washington's mem- self-regulation on which the republican experi- ory continued to betray significant fissures in the American Not even the Civil War could 3 self-image. Gutheim, "Who Designed the Monument," p. 136. end the it took another to discord; twenty years 4 For biographical details, see Cunliffe, George Washington; bring the memorial to completion. Commentators my interpretation owes much to his. The scholarly debate on at the time, and historians since then, have chosen the nature of American republicanism is still alive and has re- vealed variants in the interest is in how to this as a drive significant ideology; my interpret messy history pluralistic Washington himself, by virtue of his unique position, magnified toward ultimate consensus. Frederick Gutheim, those tensions inherent in republicanism. WashingtonMonument 227 ment rested; by governing the temptation to grasp power he became preeminently qualified to exer- cise it. Washington's own model of leadership was probably the "patriot-king" of English political the- ory, yet the one model that consistently appealed to his contemporaries came from the fabled past of republican Rome. It was the figure of Cincinna- tus-the farmer who dropped his plow to lead the defense of Rome, only to relinquish command as soon as the danger had passed. Significantly, the example legitimized leadership only in times of emer- gency. Americans clung to the idea that Wash- ington, like Cincinnatus, could not be persuaded to take power unless he was assured that the survival of the country depended on him; otherwise he would leave the people to govern themselves, as they were supposed to in a republic.5 If Washington could not solve the contradic- tions inherent in republican leadership, he served a more role as a model of re- perhaps important 2.
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