Photo of the Day: Statue, Jefferson Memorial

The other night, while watching the first episode of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, The Roosevelts, I noticed, in the background of a 1930s newsreel of Franklin Roosevelt at the dedication of Mount Rushmore, that the face of Thomas Jefferson was coming into view on the great rock in South Dakota. It reminded me of how the most important President of the 20^th century elevated a predecessor that he regarded as a crucial forerunner of his own advocacy of the common man. 

With each passing decade, that apotheosis of American’s third President has become more and more hotly debated, particularly in light of his views on the great American predicament: race. So, although I wrote briefly about the Jefferson Memorial in a prior post, that does not begin to exist what must be said about him. 

It may have been a trick of the early afternoon light that caused Rudulph Evans' bronze statue of Jefferson to appear dark when I photographed it on a visit to Washington in November 2013. But it is not an accident that Jefferson’s legacy itself looks darker than anyone could have predicted when Roosevelt helped mold the midcentury consensus surrounding the author of perhaps the most famous line in American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

That quote is among several ones carved into the walls of the chamber surrounding the statue. Among those others are this one: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” That latter sentence is part of the reason why millions the world over, in the nearly two centuries since Jefferson’s death (on the 50^th anniversary of American independence, no less), have looked to American democracy as a beacon in a dark world of legal and mental shacklement.

But the two sentences that immediately follow it, in Jefferson’s Autobiography, say just as much about why this country came to the agony of Charleston last month: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."

If your ideal is of an American government that values education as the key to an informed citizenry, that looks suspiciously on a standing army as a fiscal sinkhole and a threat to freedom of expression, that distrusts concentrated wealth, that constantly hails science over religion, then Jefferson is your man.

But Jefferson is also the man who lived off the fruit of others' labor, the first theorist of secession, and the forefather of segregation. Thomas Jefferson’s America, for better and worse, remains ours. 

For all those who, rather glibly, urge a cliched "national conversation" about race, the inevitable place to start is with Jefferson. Expect that conversation to be nothing less than ambivalent and painful.

Photo of the Day: Forgotten Founder

You’re looking at what I think may be the most approachable statue in our nation’s capital. I came across the George Mason Memorial by accident last November, when I was trying to reach the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. 

But I don’t think its subject, planter-patriot George Mason (1725-1792), would have minded in the least being in the shadow of the Tidal Basin monument to his fellow Virginian.

With no known painting from life existing of Mason, nobody knows how accurately this statue depicts the face and body of this all-but-forgotten major influence on the American Revolution and the early republic. 

But I can’t help but think that sculptor Wendy Ross has perfectly captured the personality that impressed virtually all who met him: friendly, engaged, but still, slightly removed from the world now visiting his doorstep. 

You have, after all, interrupted him in one of his favorite pursuits: reading in the garden that gave him a much-needed sense of tranquility. I photographed so much while down in Washington, but this particular image, I knew, was a necessity.

Mason’s vow to “risque the last Penny of my Fortune, and the last Drop of my Blood” for independence endeared him to younger patriots, including Washington, who saw him as a mentor, and Jefferson, who believed him to be "the wisest man of his generation." 

His most vibrant thought is echoed in this country’s seminal documents, notably this quote: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty…and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Sound familiar? Jefferson did a masterful job of editing that until he made the words sing in the Declaration of Independence. 

But, as historian Pauline Maier showed in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, it was Mason’s original words, in his May 1776 draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that were embodied in the initial state constitutions that sought to sum up the ideals of freedom that led them to separate from England. 

Moreover, his willingness to walk out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 over its refusal to include a Bill of Rights created unstoppable pressure that resulted in the eventual passage of the first 10 amendments.

The Virginia aristocrat embodied what we would nowadays call gravitas. Enormously adept at keeping his plantation profitable (a skill that would elude fellow Virginians Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe), he was treasurer of the Ohio Company, an organization that invested in land located in the Ohio River Valley, and an influential member of the vestry at Washington’s Truro Parish.

Philip Mazzei, an Italian doctor who met him in 1773, might have exaggerated somewhat in likening him to Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, or Newton. But when you trace influences on the most influential men of the early republic, Mason’s name appears repeatedly on the short list.

The setting of Ross’s statue, dedicated in 2002, illustrates both why so many were drawn to Mason, and to an extent, why he repeatedly drew back. You might have caught him while he’s reading, but now he’ll be happy to explain why those two books to his left should matter to you. And yet…there’s something in reserve. He is, after all, leaning back.

So much conspired to keep Mason where he was, at his estate, Gunston Hall. The ingeniously landscaped grounds that he himself surveyed and laid out find their counterpart in the Tidal Basin memorial site I visited, which was created as a Victorian garden, then redesigned as a pansy garden in 1929.

The cane to Mason’s right at the memorial tips you off to something else that kept him largely stationary: his medical condition. 

Traveling from Virginia to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention might not sound like much to us, but to someone like Mason, who suffered increasingly from gout as the years went by, the experience was enormously painful.

Pain of an emotional kind also plagued Mason in the revolutionary period: His wife of two decades died while bearing him a child in 1773. The widower, distraught over losing a woman he had come to cherish, also now found himself, he said, playing the role not just of father but also mother to his children. (Nine managed to survive to adulthood.)

In the end, Mason shied away from heavier involvement with politics because he sensed how much it would cost. Nowhere was this borne home more forcefully than in Philadelphia in 1787. He was bothered not just by the lack of a bill of rights, but by accommodations made to the slave states. 

Despite owning numerous slaves himself, Mason disliked this system in which “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and he correctly predicted, “By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.” 

He could not have been more dismayed, then, when the convention ignored his advice to ban the slave trade immediately, as South Carolina and Georgia worked out a deal with the New England States that the institution would not be touched another 20 years.

Mason’s vehement disagreement on this and the lack of a bill of rights led him to reject a document he had worked to support until near the end of deliberations. It also drove a wedge between him and Washington that lasted through Mason’s death in 1792.

The original memorial for Mason had envisioned only a round bas relief in his honor, but Ross won out with her proposal for a full-figure representation. Mason did not found a country, like Washington, or even a political party, like Jefferson, and so the sculptor has not created a demigod of the American civic religion or even a man on horseback. 

But the representation here is unique: a patriot who comes off as someone you would love to spend the afternoon chatting away with, by which time you were bound to be infected by his love of ideas and his passion for liberty.

Photo of the Day: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, DC

Millions of visitors to Washington, DC, will marvel at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and other major attractions in the U.S. capital without having a clue about a key person behind these structures. Today, the birthday of the memorial’s architect, John Russell Pope, is a good time to assess this legacy.      

Pope, born in New York City on this day in 1874, converted the New York mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick into a public art gallery and designed highly acclaimed additions to Tate Gallery and the British Museum in London. But his supreme triumphs may have been in Washington, where he influenced public construction both through his own designs and as a member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and of the Board of Architectural Consultants. His own work in the capital included the Temple of the Scottish Rite of Freemasons, the National Archives Building, the National Gallery of Art, and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

Pope died in 1937, six years before the Jefferson Memorial opened. It would be interesting to see how he would have worked with Franklin Roosevelt, whose pet project this was (and who, it is said, monitored daily its construction from the White House).

The erection of a memorial to Jefferson was approved by Congress in July 1934. But, in the last three years of his life, Pope became embroiled in some controversy over his design. Modern art was already rearing its head, and the neoclassical style that Pope advocated—the same kind that Jefferson himself favored—was out of fashion with such parties as The League for Progress in Architecture (which denounced the memorial as “serving no purpose whatsoever”), the faculty of the Columbia University School of Architecture (which termed the design  a “lamentable misfit in time and place”) and Frank Lloyd Wright (who wrote President Roosevelt that the work was an “arrogant insult to the memory of Thomas Jefferson”).

To his credit, FDR backed the design, which was modeled on Rome’s Pantheon. Now it dominates the Tidal Basin, a powerful tribute to lasting ideals of freedom, an embodiment of the perfect ideals of the imperfect creator of an imperfect republic.

(I took this snapshot last November, while I was visiting DC.)