PETER: So, it's clear that monuments can be very controversial today, but what's interesting is that they always have been controversial, even the monuments that now we all agree on are important and meaningful to all Americans. Well, they generated a lot of controversy in their time.
ED: Take for example a monument that everybody recognizes, the Washington Monument.
PETER: So, let's take this back to December 15, 1799. George Washington has just died at Mount Vernon, and as the news spreads across the continent, the nation plunges into mourning.
ED: There are mock funerals all across the country. And in Philadelphia, cannons fire every half hour, a parade winds through the city led by a riderless horse done up in black and white eagle feathers, and in the eulogy, the famous lines, "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen."
PETER: And people start to say, "Hey, shouldn't we build a memorial to Washington?" Brian, I wonder if you could get into my century and read this quotation. It's from Light Horse Harry Lee, a revolutionary war hero.
BRIAN: "Is there, then, any other mode for perpetuating the memory of such transcendent virtues so strong, so impressive, as the monument we propose." Wow, you guys had a lot of words back then.
PETER: You bet.
BRIAN: You want me to keep going?
PETER: Yeah.
BRIAN: "The grandeur of the pile we wish to raise will impress a sublime awe in all who behold it. It will survive the present generation. It will receive the homage of our children's children."
PETER: That reading will certainly survive through the generations, but listen. The story gets complicated now, because this is a new country and we don't really know who we are. And there are a lot of disagreements among Americans, and there's even disagreement about how to honor the memory of George Washington.
So think about this situation. It's 1800 and the revolution was not that long ago. If you'd grown up in colonial America, well, what kind of statues would you have seen? Come on, guys.
BRIAN: Not many.
PETER: Yeah, well, you would see a big one in New York, a statue to the other George.
That's King George III. And the great thing about our George is that he was not a king. He voluntarily stepped down. So to some people, putting up a monument to him seemed like a step backwards to the days of monarchy.
Ed, let me ask you to represent that side of the debate, that's the republicans.
Would you read this?
ED: Yeah, please pass that on. Yes.
"Before gentlemen act in this business, let them look to Egypt. There, they will behold precedence and perfusion. Men made gods and statues and monuments and mausolea covering the whole face of the country. But where will they find the virtues or the talents of the men they were meant to commemorate? Now is the time to make a stand against this monument mania."
PETER: Yeah, well, that's a speech from the anti-maniacal Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina. He's a republican, speaking in Congress in December 1800.
ED: Wait, republicans...
PETER: They are the opposition party to the federalist administrations of George Washington and the current president, that would be John Adams.
ED: Oh, okay.
PETER: Now, republicans are defenders of the revolution against the government. Okay, so they're afraid that the whole experiment republican government is going to be hijacked by these closet monarchists and aristocrats who want to remake America in the [crosstalk 00:09:18].
ED: And a statue would be a great way to start doing that.
PETER: Yeah, it is the slippery slope. And in 1800, the republicans are just not happy because the other guys, that would be the federalists, the supporters of a strong central government, have just proposed an enormous, expensive monument to George Washington. The proposal kicks off a really big debate in Congress, with the federalists saying, "The monument should be a top priority," and therepublicans saying, "The idea is dangerous and, hold onto your seats 20th century guy, un-American."
BRIAN: The first proposal was for 100 feet high, then as they revised the proposal it grew to 150 feet high.
PETER: This is Kirk Savage, a professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Monument Wars.
KIRK SAVAGE: So you'd walk up the steps into a fairly dark room that was lit by windows and see a huge sculptural image of George Washington. And that would be your experience from the inside. From the outside, you would see a very large building that was going to out-top, in height, the U.S. Capitol Building.
PETER: Guys, you can see why this plan would really irritate the republicans. The Washington Monument becomes a proxy war for everything these two groups disagree on. It becomes an argument over what kind of country this is going to be.
KIRK SAVAGE: In a way, it crystallized the ideological dispute the federalists and the republicans. And the republicans realize that if republicanism meant anything, it meant that they could not support a huge pyramid erected to George Washington. What more authoritarian form could you find than a pyramid?
PETER: So, this proposal died in Congress in 1801, but private groups took up the cause and raised money to build a monument themselves. Construction started in 1848, but the group ran out of money in the 1850s. Work stopped.
KIRK SAVAGE: And it wasn't until the federal government took over the project in 1876 that it was restarted. And so, an engineer was put in charge of the construction and he really wanted a pristine, abstract obelisk. The people who were opposed to him, and they were most of the art world and most of Congress, they couldn't agree on any alternative. So, he kind of won by default, in a sense. The great irony is that in order to get that thing built, it was stripped of every possible reference to George Washington. In fact, there's no imagery or inscription at all, except on the very, very tippy top of the monument, where there's a small inscription that's 555 feet above the ground.
PETER: Hard to see.
KIRK SAVAGE: And that only the birds can read. So, a lot of people who visit the Washington Monument today don't even realize that it's a monument to George Washington. They think that maybe it's called the Washington Monument because it's the biggest monument in Washington.
PETER: So, Kirk, would you say that, inadvertently, the republican iconoclasts merge with the federalist monumentalists and both impulses are felt?
KIRK SAVAGE: Yes. It is an interesting combination of the two, because it's, in a sense, an iconoclastic monument because it did away with all imagery and all didactic content. You know, this is not a monument that tells you anything or that teaches you anything. And that was very much in line with the republicans kind of ideology of every man should figure it out for himself. But at the same time, it was the federalist pyramid proposal blown up to this enormous scale.
PETER: New heights.
KIRK SAVAGE: It was the tallest building in the world, with the highest passenger elevator in the world.
PETER: Yeah. So, this was a technical triumph and it told the world something about the United States of America.
KIRK SAVAGE: Yes.
PETER: It didn't tell the world that the United States of America was a republic, though, did it?
KIRK SAVAGE: No, it didn't at all. And in that sense, it was very different from the republican notion of commemoration back in 1800. And that idea that the monument should only survive as long as it lives in the feeling of citizens, that the true memory is really within peoples hearts, and not in a pile of masonry. And so, in a way, the Washington Monument, as it's finally finished, is nothing but a pile of masonry.
PETER: That was Kirk Savage, professor of Art History at the University of Pittsburgh. His book is called Monument Wars.