Editor's Note: In the previous issue of TAP, Michael Slevin walked readers though a varied choice of museums, church, history, and theater—all within walking distance of the APsaA 99th Annual Meeting hotel. In this issue, he guides you to even more American treasures.
As part of the Smithsonian-wide celebration of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, at the Museum of American History, “a focused selection of nationally important Lincoln artifacts” is being presented, “augmented with personal stories told by Lincoln and the people who knew him best.” Across the street from the newly designed but not yet built Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of American History displays diverse U.S. historical artifacts and curated exhibits, including flags, locomotives, Julia Child's actual kitchen, and a 40-foot stretch of Highway 66.
Now we are in the territory of memorials. Rising highest, at the west end of the grassy stretch of Mall and due south of the White House, is the monument shaped like an Egyptian obelisk honoring General and President George Washington. It is the setting for the Fourth of July fireworks in the city. In its environs are the Jefferson Memorial, on the edge of the Tidal Basin, and the Lincoln Memorial.
Jefferson played classical music and designed his ingenious and graceful Virginia home, Monticello, and the nearby classically articulated University of Virginia. He drafted the Declaration of Independence. His memorial is graced by ceremonial cherry trees presented to the American people by the government of Japan in 1912. Jefferson held slaves. One of his Monticello slaves, Sally Hemings, conceived children whose DNA-certified descendants are now acknowledged as part of the Jefferson family tree.
A solitary Lincoln, sculpted following the model of Daniel Chester French, sits in a great chair in contemplation in the central hall of his memorial, facing, past the Washington Monument, the Capitol. Marian Anderson sang from its steps in 1939 at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt. She had been denied permission, because her skin was black, to sing in Constitution Hall, owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Martin Luther King proclaimed, “I have a dream” from its steps. But Frederick Douglass, freed slave, writer, diplomat, and politician, who knew Lincoln, wrote: “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Lincoln's journey was arduous and speaks of the limits and possibilities of the political world.
New memorials honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, World War II veterans, and Korean War veterans. The Roosevelt site is located on the western edge of the Tidal Basin. This is a memorial to FDR and his era, traced through a sequence of four outdoor rooms, each one devoted to a term of office. In a “prologue room” there is a statue with FDR seated in a wheelchair much like the one he actually used. He went to great lengths during his tenure not to be seen that way, and there was a dispute when the memorial was built as to whether that part of his life should be acknowledged and celebrated, or remain hidden. To which era are we beholden in our representations: The time in which Roosevelt lived or our present?
Michael Slevin, while working on a Ph.D. in literature, graduated as an academic Associate from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. A clinical social worker finishing the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program at the Institute, he is former editor of TAP.
Nearby, on the Mall's central axis, at the foot of the rectangular Reflecting Pool, between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, sits an oval pool, with encircling pillars, a memorial to veterans of World War II. On the Western Front, Europe was liberated; on the Far Eastern Front, Asia. Sixteen million Americans served. Over 400,000 died.
Then there is Maya Lin's somber black granite Vietnam Memorial. It is a trench in the earth into which the viewer disappears and from which she rises. On its walls are inscribed a changing chronology listing 58,261 men and women, dead or missing. “The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956. His name was added to the Wall on Memorial Day 1999…. The last American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Kelton Rena Turner, an 18-year-old Marine. He was killed in action on May 15, 1975, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon, in what became known as the Mayaguez incident.” There is a kiosk where you can look up the names of your neighbors, and be directed to their place on the memorial wall.
Across the Reflecting Pool from the Vietnam Memorial is the Korean War Memorial. In it realism has a different cast: Seven-foot figures emerging from a wood; again, a pool. And a Mural Wall, “for which over 15,000 photographs of the Korean War were obtained from the National Archives….The photographs were enhanced by computer to develop a uniform lighting effect and size, and to create a mural with over 2,400 images.”
Then south on 14th Street. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There, expect to breathe in grief and loss, outrage and witness. Expect to see items, from among those collected and sorted in untold numbers by the German Nazis, that belonged to ones who perished. And, there, the “Tower of Faces: This three-story tower displays photographs from the Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection. Taken between 1890 and 1941 in Eishishok, a small town in what is now Lithuania, they describe a vibrant Jewish community that existed for 900 years. In 1941, an SS mobile killing squad entered the village and within two days massacred the Jewish population.” See a reconstructed Auschwitz barracks, a railroad boxcar. And texts. Six million men, women, and children died.
Just northwest of the museum—you can walk there—is the White House. Roosevelt did little to allow Jewish refugees from Europe into the United States; yet, through the intercession of Ambassador William Bullitt, he helped Sigmund Freud escape Nazi-controlled Vienna in 1938. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, on the other side of the Capitol, selections from the Freud Archives are on current display at the Library of Congress. Now one of the world's great research libraries, it was founded with Thomas Jefferson's personal collection of books. The library is across the street from the Capitol, to the west, the Supreme Court, to the north and the Folger Shakespeare Library, to the east. Is our political system flexible enough to meet its current demands? Can the Western culture of The Tempest adapt creatively to the spiraling pressures, demands, and exigencies of our time?
Readers may be interested in visiting to find three in-depth, offbeat narrated D.C. walking tours by Robert F. Pyles, son of APsaA president-elect Bob Pyles.
And, our third branch of government. Walk around the White House. See the South Lawn where the helicopter sets down, the Truman Porch, where Roosevelt's successor sat on summer evenings. On around, see the ceremonial North Portico. The White House has an East Wing and a West Wing. Note that this is a residence. In it resides our first African-American president. He spent early years in Indonesia; his father, a Muslim, had returned to his birth country Kenya. Our First Lady's ancestors were slaves. Have we come far enough, fast enough? Will our country, will our diverse globe, succeed?
All quotations are from the respective Web sites with the exception of the quotation from Frederick Douglass, which is from an article by Garry Wills, “Lincoln's Black History” in The New York Review of Books.