Kirk Savage on the National Mall
Author Kirk Savage talks about the history and aesthetic beauty of our nation’s monumental core
- By Megan Gambino
- Smithsonian magazine, October 2010, Subscribe
Kirk Savage was recently awarded the 2010 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Melissa Farlow
Kirk Savage is the author of Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape. For it, he was awarded the 2010 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He spoke with the magazine’s Megan Gambino.
How has America’s perception of the National Mall changed over the years?
In the 19th century, it was [just] a sequence of grounds attached to various buildings and institutions. The local residents saw it as a sort of Central Park for Washington, D.C. In the mid-20th century, its purpose changed radically. The Mall became the monumental core of the nation.
Americans were initially opposed to the idea of national monuments. Why?
After the Revolution, grandiose monuments were associated with the monarchy and the British aristocracy. There was also a lot of skepticism about what monuments could actually accomplish: Why should we spend $100,000 on a pile of stones? What is it really going to accomplish? Early Americans felt that real collective memory could only exist within the citizenry itself.
What was the impulse behind clearing the Mall of its trees and organizing it on an axis, from the Capitol to Lincoln Memorial, White House to the Jefferson Memorial?
It really began in earnest with the McMillan Plan in 1901. The idea to have a strong, symbolic core in the capital, something that really asserted the power and identity of the federal state was very important to the designers. They were going to impose order, and they were going to do it visually. Even though all those impulses and motivations did exist by the time the Mall was cleared in the 1930s, there was the added element of the automobile and the desire to use the Mall as a kind of road system for downtown Washington. That’s what actually made it a reality.
You’ve written that war monuments changed from statues of heroes on horseback to open structures, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. What explains this shift?
The obsession with great commanders and individual heroes was the prevalent mind-set in the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. But that later changed to focus on the common soldiers. That’s why, unlike the Civil War monuments, there are no grandiose statues of military commanders from World War II, the Korean War or the Vietnam War. We might call this the democratization of the public monument. It’s a shift from the great man idea of history to one that encompasses the ordinary man.
The whole idea of the monument as a space of experience is a shift that’s happened across the country. They now reach out and grab the viewer and create a psychological experience.
Can you describe an instance when you really felt the power of a particular National Mall monument?
I remember one day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I came at an early hour so I could be there by myself. A man in a business suit walked up to the monument. He put his briefcase down, and he straightened up. He was looking at a particular spot—a particular name. And he saluted this spot on the monument, then picked up his briefcase and went off to work.
Do you have any grievances with the current state of the Mall?
I think it is very inhospitable. One of the downsides of clearing the Mall was that it created this huge swath of unshaded, basically barren landscape in the center of the city. So it’s that, and also the lack of amenities and good transportation around the Mall. I think some people are going back and looking more closely at the 19th century history of the Mall because they see it as a time when it functioned more as a user-friendly landscape, a place where people could go where there was shade and nice things to look at.
In your book, you propose that the Mall be a place for temporary monuments.
My thinking was that it could allow a much broader range of monuments and commemorative activities to take place than what is currently allowed in the monumental core. It could be much more experimental. It’s lower stakes than erecting something permanent. Part of the point is to generate discussion, so works that are more provocative wouldn’t be failures. In fact, they could be thought of as successes because they might lead to some interesting conversations.
Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.
Related topics: Washington, DC The Mall
| Tweet | Digg |
Comments (2)
One possible exception to the Civil War era magnification of personal heroes is the Washington Monument - yes, it's huge....it was designed by my great, great grandfather, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gouvenor Wright - and I am interested in the history of its design. How can I find some information on the commission, design and creation of this monument? I'm also aware that the plaque that names those who created the monument has been removed - where is it and can it be restored?
Posted by Libby Hillhouse on November 27,2010 | 09:22 AM
It's very sad, I took my wife down to to DC for her first visit this past August. We started off at the Air and Space Museum (around 8pm) and biked up to the Capital, then back around down to the White House. All very impressive and bike friendly. Then we worked our way down to the stretch of pathways by the Reflecting Pool...how disappointing. Broken sidewalks, half of the lights not working, swarms of mosquitoes...I was really disappointed at how that end of the Mall was in disrepair.
Posted by Timothy Wade on September 20,2010 | 07:22 PM