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December 1968 | Volume 20, Issue 1
George Washington’s Monument
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
What does a nation give a man who has everylflrthing? If a man happens to be the country’s first citizen, he may be rewarded with honor and fame and the respect of high office; after death, his name can be assigned to the archives of public memory. All of this happened to George Washington, who was certainly first in the hearts—though not, as it turned out, in the pocketbooks—of his countrymen.
The easy, inexpensive gestures, such as memorializing his name on everything in sight, including counties, towns, a state, a mountain and the Federal City itself, were accomplished readily enough. But building an appropriate monument, the cost of which was reckoned at twenty-five cents for each citizen at the time of Washington’s death in 1799, was something else again. It took more than a Century from conception to completion, and its progress was marred by turmoil, rancor, niggardliness, religious bigotry, theft, and incompetence. But the ultimate disgrace to the memory of this decisive man of unity was that the project (viewed on these pages through the lens of Francis Hocker about 1875, from a tower of the Smithsonian Institution) was left untouched, in Mark Twain’s phrase, like “a factory chimney with the top broken off” for twenty-one years.
Why was it so difficult to erect a memorial to the nation’s greatest and, more significantly, least controversial hero? The problem was financial. Naturally, different people had vastly different ideas for the monument. But even when there was agreement, the funds were seldom appropriated—starting with the unanimous decision of the Continental Congress in 1783 to put an equestrian statue of General Washington wherever Congress itself would eventually be situated. Washington was flattered, and said so. And he later approved the plan of Pierre L’Enfant, designer of the capital city, to locate the tribute on the projected Capitol Mall at the point where it passed the front of the proposed President’s home.
But nothing happened until Washington’s death, when Representative John Marshall interrupted the eulogizing to remind his fellow legislators of their sixteen-year-old unfulfilled promise. What Marshall had in mind, however, was not a statue but a tomb, located not on the Mall but beneath the rotunda of the Capitol. Even though the late President had specifically stated in his will that he wished to be buried at Mount Vernon, Martha, “taught by the great example which I have so long had before me never to oppose my private wishes to the public will,” reluctantly agreed. But several decades of debate later, when Congress finally acted upon Marshall’s resolution, the Washington heirs reneged, and the Capitol mausoleum has since remained empty except to store the black-draped presidential catafalque.
Then in 1833 a concerted effort was begun to implement the dream of the Continental Congress and the vision of L’Enfant. That year a group of citizens, exasperated by the failure of the two houses of Congress to agree on an appropriate memorial, organized