Philip Kennicott writes:

The Mall is a place of public reconciliation.

Although originally conceived as a wide avenue in Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city, the Mall and its surrounding parks were configured in the early 20th century as a grand symbol of national reunification, centered on a monument to Abraham Lincoln, the man who led the country through civil war. From the Lincoln Memorial, one looks down the long expanse of the Mall to the Capitol, at the base of which is a monument to Ulysses S. Grant, who won the war against the South. And from the opposite side, one looks across Memorial Bridge, which connects the District to Virginia, and by extension, the loyal North to the defeated South. Memorial Bridge also joins the Mall to Arlington National Cemetery, where Civil War dead are honored along with those who have fought in battles ever since.

The Mall is fundamentally a civic rather than a military space.

The grounds around the Lincoln Memorial have become cluttered with war memorials, but the best of those, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was also conceived as a place of reconciliation. It doesn’t celebrate the war whose fallen it honors. Rather, it focuses entirely on the pain of loss, and the memory of those who died. It is the opposite of bellicose, a place for national healing rather than a patriotic display, which is why it was so controversial when it was new.

The drama of Civil War reconciliation was often hollow, a whitewash of sentiment over the divisions of a country that was fully engaged in the racism of Jim Crow and segregation. But over the past century, the monumental central axis of the nation’s capital has evolved from a particular statement about post-Civil War reconciliation to a broader one about reconciling national ideals with national realities. The Lincoln Memorial, which has the words “to bind up the nation’s wounds” inscribed on its walls, isn’t just a grand edifice ideal for photo-ops and television spectacle. It exerts gravitational pull on people who sense a contradiction in what the nation claims to be and what it is in fact. A memorial to this country’s most thoughtful president is now the locus of a basic kind of civic thinking: How can we reconcile our treatment of African Americans, people of color, ethnic and religious minorities, women, the poor and the unemployed, and LGBT people with the basic thesis that “all men are created equal”? [Continue reading…]