In the alternate universe in which the bat that gave rise to this pandemic would have flapped its wings differently, I would have been exploring Vienna for the first time in the summer and returning to India in the autumn after being away for six years. I am instead spending a semester of leave at home. It's a luxury because I have not had time to read (or think about) much that wasn't directly related to research or teaching for a long time.* But it's also a curse because the repetitiveness and lack of structure of daily life can make this precious time go by too fast. So I've decided to keep an occasional diary reflecting on issues of both immediate and distant relevance to the universe we actually inhabit.
*Not coincidentally, I stopped updating this blog in August 2011, shortly before coming up with a dissertation prospectus in my third year of graduate school, and started writing again in February 2020, just as I was preparing to submit the book manuscript that grew out of that dissertation. Talk about a lost decade.
The first book I read after finishing my own was Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California Press, 2009). This was for two reasons: because lockdown provided an opportunity to explore the city on foot in a deeper and more comprehensive way than otherwise possible (there was literally nothing else to do), and because the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer suddenly brought long-simmering debates over monuments and memorials to an explosive boil.
Savage's masterful overview works on multiple levels, both as a guidebook and as a finely grained series of arguments. Most strikingly, he describes the overarching transition from the 19thc. notion of "public grounds," best exemplified by Andrew Jackson Downing's picturesque plan for the Mall as a wooded Arcadia (see above), and the 20thc. concept of "public space" as abstract, empty, and homogeneous, best exemplified by the McMillan Plan of 1901 with its geometric axes and aerial dominance of the Washington Monument. As a corollary, the dispersed memorial landscape centered on the squares and circles of L'Enfant's original plan (Scott, Farragut, Logan, Dupont etc.) was centralized and rationalized.
Savage presents this transition as, of course, contested and incomplete, but more importantly dialectical. Abstraction and centralization opened up spaces of protest and symbolic meaning (think of the Lincoln Memorial as a focal point of political struggle from Marian Anderson's 1939 concert through the March on Washington, Vietnam War demonstrations, and down to the constant rallies and gatherings of Left and Right in recent years). The price to pay was losing the rich embeddedness of monuments in neighborhood life and erasing the city's layered past; echoes of James Scott and Jane Jacobs here.
Traversing the city on foot and by car during lockdown brings this dialectic into sharp relief. Walking around my own neighborhoods (Park View, Petworth, and Columbia Heights) enhanced my connection with local markers that used to be much more important in the 19th century (Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, Grant Circle). The heterogeneity of forgotten or ignored monuments like the Titanic Memorial on the SW waterfront (below), originally sponsored by local associations and interest groups, provided a new way of navigating the city closer to L'Enfant's vision. Where do you go when there is nothing to do? Pick a monument and make it a destination for the day. But being able to drive down to the Mall (in the absence of public transit) reinstates the power of national narratives and symbolism. Even for residents, the Mall draws you there like a moth to a flame, forced to gaze upwards at the phallic majesty of the obelisk - which is as the McMillan planners intended.
Even when you get to the Mall, Savage's book helps excavate a hidden past, denaturalizing and historicizing a landscape you take for granted. Constitution Gardens (above) is both more recent and more ancient than it first appears. More recent because it was only built in the 1970s on the site long occupied by temporary office barracks. More ancient because its lagoons, variable green canopy, and curved pathways partially restore Downing's 19thc. vision - and, it must be said, are much more pleasant to explore and be in than the sterile median with its perfect rows of planted elms and manicured grass. The placid Grant Memorial at the Capitol end (below), which I had never been to or thought of before, conceals a fierce conflict over the relocation of the Botanic Garden and the destruction of "living" memorial trees. It also marks a turning point in sculptural practice away from the standard 19thc. equestrian statues of military leaders toward the experiential representation of warfare and commemoration of the common soldier.
The second line of argument running through Savage's book has to do with our investment in monuments and their particular forms and functions - from the heroic statue to be emulated to ambient spaces of mourning and collective memory (Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the culmination of this tendency). Some Jeffersonian Republicans in the early days of the United States proposed deconstructed and democratized monuments like a blank tablet on which common citizens could write what they wanted. In the digital age, why does the physical monument endure and become a locus of radical politics?
The BLM protests in June provide several answers. Long-neglected axes and focal points orthogonal to the Mall, like Sixteenth Street and Meridian Hill/Malcolm X, acquired new importance for moving bodies through space and redrawing the map of the city (BLM Plaza emerging as an ad hoc memorial to the present, so to speak). Consider the below images of Scott Circle and Lafayette Square taken on June 6 - quintessential 19thc. "great military man" landmarks turned inside out.
On this point, Savage shows how current protest targets like the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square and the Freedmen's Memorial in Capitol Hill (Lincoln paternalistically bestowing emancipation on the kneeling slave) were criticized and contested from the start. The former for aesthetic reasons (it was considered garish in its crude, triumphant militarism) and the latter for political reasons (while funded by Black Union soldiers, it was designed by white officers and was "out of step" with the radical impetus of Reconstruction in its own time). Needless to say, the "preserving history" argument has no legs to stand on. But what's interesting is that these particular statues resurface from the national and local subconscious, picking up old battles right where they had left off. If you want to debate slavery (or Manifest Destiny/Native American genocide), start with the statues. The seemingly axiomatic nature of this statement obscures our continual reproduction (even performance) of monument politics - even as we may disavow our investment in their physical forms as obsolete or ossified in the past as "history" to be "preserved."
Looking ahead to the future, certain sites contain both radical potential and expose the limits of monument politics. For example, the MLK and FDR memorials are surely tailor-made for a year of protest and economic crisis (the greatest since the Great Depression?). Yet they are both suffused with an anodyne nationalist narrative of progress that has long outlived its usefulness. When I visited them on May 30, a few days after George Floyd's death and when the national unemployment rate stood at 13%, a smattering of white tourists were taking selfies in front of MLK and it was impossible to imagine a concerted push for UBI or Medicare for All catalyzed by the figurative bread line on the other side of the pond.
Reflecting on Savage's central animating dialectic, I couldn't help but wonder whether the inescapable limits of inclusion and incorporation into a centralized national memorial landscape shouldn't inspire a return to a decentralized and localized model - but one that is more inclusive and democratic than the 19thc. neighorhood associations and their preference for generals on horseback. If being "emplaced" by lockdown forces us to spend more time in our neighborhoods, or at least pay more attention to them, could this open up a different set of possibilities?
Shortly after finishing Savage's book, I listened to a brilliant lecture by Johanna Bockman on "The Other Washington DC: Remembering Socialism in Washington, DC" (delivered in late 2019), which presents DC's memorial landscape as a "terrain of struggle" between socialism and capitalism. As a city of Black Power deeply connected to anticolonial and Third World movements from the 1960s to the 1990s, DC experienced neoliberalism every bit as much as Eastern Europe and at the same time, with gentrification and private real estate displacing a vibrant local cooperative economy. It is both an abject colony, still blithely denied self-government, and the capital of a mighty empire.
What interests me most is the transnational aspect of her expanded definition of "monuments to socialism." The poignant memorial to Orlando Letelier, an exiled Chilean economist assassinated in a car bomb attack by Pinochet's secret police on September 21, 1976, and his coworker Roni Moffitt, stands in front of the Romanian embassy on Sheridan Circle (its passion and pain contrasting with the staid 19thc. equestrian statue). It features in hipster guidebooks like Atlas Obscura but is otherwise ignored - I know I've passed it without looking down when going to the embassy to renew my passport. Bockman asks why there is no memorial to CLR James, who taught at the Federal City College (today UDC) throughout the 1970s. The absence of a memorial to Eric Williams at Howard, in the midst of my own gentrifying neighborhood, is equally striking. The campus itself is arguably the preeminent memorial to the "other DC" and its suffocating encirclement by private capital.
Walking the city and its surroundings in lockdown prompts endless questions. What to make of the (unintentionally?) ironic juxtaposition of a despairing Andrei Sakharov in front of the swanky Russia House restaurant - a memorial to the "transition" years? Do the Art Deco facades of Greenbelt serve as a living legacy of the cooperative movement and the radical potential of the New Deal (even more than the FDR memorial), or are they just one more piece of "heritage" to shrug at? It would be a pity to stop asking such questions when we eventually go back into our offices, restaurants, and plane cabins.
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