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Editor’s note—This latest chapter of “The Measure of a Nation,” explores the role that America’s national monuments—and its capital city—play in shaping how we see ourselves.



WASHINGTON—The 32nd president stares resolutely from his wheelchair, cast in the kind of immortal bronze reserved for the leaders we remember as distant paragons of national virtue. Yet something seems ... amiss.

First of all, he is at eye level: man, not god; among us, not above. Then there are the thighs, their metal worn down to a shade lighter than the rest of the statue. A schoolgirl runs up and reveals why. She clambers onto the statue and, ready for a photo op, takes a seat.

These days in Washington, D.C.—the carefully planned capital of grand avenues and stone giants named Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington—you can sit on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lap. Anyone can.

When the nation was new, its founders designed their capital as a blank canvas that would become America’s formal foyer—physical embodiment of the lofty principles that had been deployed to unite a new kind of country.

And so it grew, and the visitors came. Awaiting them today, as Charles Osgood puts it in a tourist-bureau vanity film shown a few yards from the White House, is no less than “the skyline of the American experience, where the stones tell the stories of the American dream.”

But along the way, as America grew into the grown-up clothes it had sewn for itself, something strange happened to Washington. The showpiece came alive.

The granite, the marble, the doric columns receded a bit, and We, the People, became the point. The history we dished up to ourselves became about not just Lincoln in the sky above us but FDR in a chair in front of us, his fatherly lap available for mass reassurance.



The Iconic

“It’s hard to be a cynic here,” says Debbie Cowell, a retired Army aircraft worker from Hays, Kan.

It is a warm evening just after dusk, and she is sitting on one of the lower steps of the Lincoln Memorial, several strides from where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

In her glasses are reflected the Washington Monument and the enormous glistening oblong pool that separates it from the Lincoln Memorial—the centerpieces of Tourist Washington. Her eyes are moist behind the lenses. “When I come here,” Cowell says, “I feel cleansed.”

She is almost whispering. Around her, everything is abuzz.

Walk through the crowds and hear Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese. Hear Canadian railroad worker Stan Bell, who says of our iconic monuments: “I think you guys do it the best.” Hear, too, the constant drone of planes landing at nearby Reagan National Airport, which will never sound the same after that September morning in 2001.

We come here in our school buses, our tour buses, our minivans, our trains. We sweat in queues for museums and monuments to show ourselves what it means to be an American. We look for the CliffsNotes of our history in a place where everything represents something else. We persuade ourselves that our shiny best is actually our reality, and sometimes we’re right.

But Tourist Washington has changed deeply since your grandparents’ day. It is more human, more accessible, more populist. And much of it is because of American patriotism’s more gimlet-eyed twin brother, capitalism. New markets, new ideas.

“Each generation has their monuments,” says Mike O’Connor, an artist and former social-studies teacher from Sudbury, Mass., visiting Washington on a recent afternoon.

“The newer ones are not designed to show power over the people,” he says, restraining his pair of golden retrievers from sniffing FDR’s knees. “They’re designed to show us back to us.”



The Intimate

At 13 years old, the Korean War Veterans Memorial comes as close to the immersion of a videogame as a monument can, particularly after dark. The young servicemen commemorated in its statuary are walking through a lonely, far-off battlefield, unsure of what lies ahead.

And you are there, standing next to them. They are your size. They feel present, still under threat, their stories still unfinished, and the low voices of visitors accentuate this mood.

Average people, just like you or your dad or brother or uncle, caught in stone and metal not as they posed in magnificent contemplation but as they really were, uncertainties and all.

Here at the Korea memorial, their faces actually stare back at you, eye to eye; over at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, the thousands of names that make up the Wall are more abstract but just as powerful in their intimacy, and you’re actually walking in a trench with them.

What historians have long called the “great man” school of viewing the past has, in the past few generations, yielded firmly to the regular-guy school. We have met history, and it is us.

“The big memorials—Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington, too—were built to trigger a mythic sense among the viewer,” says Peter Lamal, a North Carolina behavioral analyst who studies American cultural practices.

But with newer monuments, something different emerges. “The Korean memorial, that’s people who could have been from your hometown. You could have met them on the street,” Lamal says.

The contrast is not only within the monuments. Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson are memorialized on something of a grid. They feel part of a planned city that presents a sense of order and placidity incongruent with the disorderly nature of democracy.

The newer memorials—FDR, Korea, Vietnam—feel as haphazardly placed as the events and eras they commemorate, as if they were shoehorned in and the landscape had to find a way to digest them. With these more recent monuments, democracy’s chaos peeks through; they’re about real people, and people tend to be messy.

This holds true, too, in the blocks beyond the central monuments, where a panoply of new museums in recent decades invite visitors beyond America’s foyer and into more specific, and intimate, inner rooms.

In these examples of regular-guy history, the national quilt is explored through its individual panels rather than a sprawling whole—from the National Building Museum to the National Museum of the American Indian, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

These museums are monuments as much as their more static counterparts down at the mall. Like so much else in Tourist Washington, they help us process our national experiences and reaffirm the values we have adopted—that in a country founded on individualism, each of us matters and each contributes a thread to the larger tapestry.

That, in essence, it’s all about us.



Seeking Meaning

“How do you spell Hitler?” asks the schoolgirl, holding her class quiz sheet and standing in front of FDR at Yalta during World War II. “H-I-L-T-E-R,” responds her classmate.

No one corrects her. They have already run off to ascend a series of enormous blocks splayed around the memorial with words like “hate” and “war” etched upon them. Try climbing on the Lincoln Memorial or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The FDR memorial, dedicated by the Baby Boomer president Bill Clinton in 1997, reflects the intimacy of modern Tourist Washington better than anywhere else, and not just because he sits in the wheelchair so steadfastly hidden during his life.

The place is laid out as a labyrinth of rooms that propel visitors through time but do not permit them to see ahead—just like real life. It is an honest monument, depicting external enemies like Hitler but also the enemies within. In one nook, somber, broken men stand in line waiting for bread; nearby, a slumped couple sit glumly outside their dust-bowl shack.

We see the bumps, scars and pimples of FDR and his epoch—things lacking in the Lincoln Memorial, where the only intended imperfection is the mole on the Great Emancipator’s face.

The most telling diorama excludes Roosevelt entirely. It is a statue of a man sitting in a wooden chair, leaning forward, ear cocked toward the radio listening to one of FDR’s famed fireside chats. Roosevelt himself is only implied, and he speaks not to us but through us—just like the names on the Vietnam Wall and the servicemen of the Korean War and Iwo Jima monuments.

FDR wanted his memorial to be life-sized, no bigger than his desk. He got his wish in spirit, if not in fact.

Fifty years ago, we had a few channels on TV and a few must-see places in Washington. Today we have the Internet, hundreds of channels and a capital that reflects the marketplace it serves. And just like it got harder to sell soap, it gets harder to sell American history to the Wii generation if you don’t change with the times.

At the Jefferson Memorial, on the Potomac River tidal basin, classicism reigns. A 19-foot statue of the third president towers over visitors, and quiet contemplation prevails. Near the entrance, a sign warns: “Respect, please.” Barely a mile away, the kids are running around and climbing on the FDR memorial as park rangers watch approvingly.

The feel couldn’t be more different. You wonder, though, what the future holds for Tourist Washington.

If this is, as many believe, a pivot point in American history, how will we eventually commemorate today? What will the Iraq War Memorial look like? How will our descendants interact with the Reagan Monument?

However it turns out, it will be another part of America’s evolving mirror, showing us to ourselves. Until then, we can just climb onto Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lap and dream.



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