Washington
The airwaves brought unexpected classical music and cold to Washington in February. When I turned on the radio one morning to listen to the news on one of Washington’s many all-news stations, classical music came out of the speakers instead. I would not have been more surprised to hear a dinosaur.
The station had switched to an all-news format, amid much fanfare, three or four years ago. After a few minutes of music, the announcer declared the station to be the new all-classical WETA.. I had to read the news story the next day to discover that the board of this non-commercial station had decided to switch back after the city’s last classical station closed down a little while ago. Apparently even Washingtonians can gorge on too much news and the all-news format was not getting the support expected. Faced with the opportunity to be the only classical player in town, the board took it; making the switch literally overnight and without warning.
While this obviously could have been done more delicately, I am grateful for the switch. There is now classical music on the airwaves of the city designed by Pierre L’Enfant at the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; music that rhymes with the many pillars, domes and stately avenues of the nation’s capital.
“. . . it is an evil thing to reduce our capital, certainly America’s most beautiful city, to shabby mediocrity. Washington, alone among the nation’s cities, is a national possession.”
So wrote Roger Tory Peterson some fifty years ago. The famous ornithologist was worried about mediocrity in the realm of the natural environment, but mediocrity is tiresome wherever one finds it.
New York without the Metropolitan Opera would be a different city and a much poorer one, even if only a fraction of its citizens ever attend. I often listen to the live broadcasts from the Met and it is always a thrill. Live singers. Discrete microphones hanging from the rafters make the broadcast possible. The voices fill the opera house and they fill my living room. Live, living, breathing, sweating human beings make this wonderful sound, without benefit of notes in front of them, without benefit of the big microphone that pop music performers seem to have permanently attached to their hands and positioned in front of their mouths. Watching live opera is like watching an athletic contest in that one never knows how it is going to turn out. Will this new star be as good as her billing? Will the understudy, now that the great Luigi so-and-so is ill, rise to the occasion? One never knows until it happens.
A city should be a place where one can find the best and find it all over town. The Chicago Symphony played concerts in the city’s parks a few summers ago, parks all over town, not just in wealthy neighborhoods. Maestro Barenboim, born in Argentina, fluent in Spanish, made sure the Orchestra played in Hispanic neighborhoods as well, and introduced the programs himself. How differently did people look upon their neighborhood park the next day? What if professional athletes occasionally played in a public park? Could that possibly lead the voters, or a corporation looking for benevolence, to keep the asphalt and playing fields in better shape? One can imagine people saying, “Hey, keep this place lookin’ good. Kobe’s playin’ here next week and the LA Phil next month.”
Meanwhile, a storm that buried parts of the Northeast brushed the nation’s capital and left a few inches of snow. Rain fell upon the snow, which froze to an icy crust that one could walk or slide upon as ability permitted. As the cold persisted, I walked into my living room one morning to find that I had company: some four and twenty blackbirds warming themselves in the sun on my windowsill. Off they flew; coming back every now and then, only to leave again whenever I moved.
A walk around the neighborhood of the White House on a cold sunny day turned up dozens of squirrels frisking in Lafayette Park, more squirrels than people taking pictures in front of the iron fence of the Executive Mansion. A red-tailed hawk swooped in and sequestered itself in the top of a tree, feathers fluffed up against the cold, apparently uninterested in the squirrels. Didn’t move.
Anti-terrorism measures have closed Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic in front of the White House. The street in back is closed as well, not to mention the streets on either side, which were closed off long ago. The White House grounds thus essentially include the Old Executive Office Building, the Treasury Department and Lafayette Park, along with some adjacent statues and memorials. One can visit all them all without encountering moving automobiles. So I decided to walk the circle, circumambulate what has become the seat of government in this day of the powerful presidency. First I checked on my old friends, the General and the Secretary. Uncle Bill Sherman looked even more imposing upon his horse against the blue sky of a winter afternoon, the common man as cavalier.
I walked along the southern border of the White House and curved up towards the Old Executive Office building that flanks the White House to the east. South of this building, as south of Treasury, stands a monument, to the First Division, erected after World War I. The two monuments, to Sherman and to the First Division, show how much had changed in just sixty years. While the Civil War was fought essentially by state militias organized into armies, soldiers from all over America were mixed into the army for the First World War and all subsequent wars. This practice spreads the risk. It is less likely than a town or a county’s entire contribution can be wiped out in one engagement, which occasionally happened during the Civil War.
Veterans of the Army of the Tennessee erected the statue of their commanding officer. Veterans of the First Division erected a monument to every one of them. Their monument features a golden angel holding a flag atop a slender eighty-foot column of pink granite. An eagle rests atop the angel's flag; a plumed helmet crowns its head. Is it Michael, the Archangel? The guidebooks say she is Victory and the monument is based on Joseph-Louis Duc's July Column in Paris, which commemorates the dead of the 1830 revolution. It is well-sited just south of the Victorian baroque Old Executive Office Building, which has so many pillars under its mansard roofs and dormers that it looks like a French chateau on steroids.
The names of all the men of the First Division who died during the Great War (5,599 of them) appear on brass plaques on top of the base of the monument, listed by unit. To the west, an addition to the monument honors those who fell during World War II, listing all of their names as well; to the east, those who fell in Vietnam and during Operation Desert Storm. There is no mention of Korea because the First Division did not take part in that conflict.
In warm weather, beds of tulips, well-maintained, separate the new wings from the main monument and a flower bed in the shape of a numeral one, the symbol of the division, stretches south of the memorial, always planted with red flowers: The Big Red One. But snow covers all today.
It is too cold to linger long under the blue sky and golden Victory. I complete my circuit at the statue of Andrew Jackson in the middle of Lafayette Park, the first statue to make a permanent home in Washington, dedicated on January 8, 1853. Jackson’s contribution to the debate over national union is characteristically terse and immortalized on the base of his statue. General Jackson, hat raised in salute, rears forever on his steed above the words:
"OUR FEDERAL UNION. IT MUST BE PRESERVED."
While ancient sacred and governmental sites (the two were the same then – are they really different now?) were surrounded and symbolically protected by stone lions and dragons and other mythical figures, the White House is surrounded mostly by representations of real people, historical figures.
If the President could just go out for a walk one day for inspiration, which presidents once did, but essentially can no longer, he would find monuments to two treasury secretaries (Gallatin and Hamilton) who believed in a strong federal government, to a general who made secession impossible, to the first unit organized to fight on the battlefields of France and to a populist Democrat who was ready to go to war to preserve the Union. These monuments are lessons in stone, bronze and gold leaf for anyone interested, especially a president.
Democrats put up the monument to Albert Gallatin in front of the Teasury Building in 1947, some twenty years after the statue to Hamilton, whom they considered a Republican. Gallatin, the longest-serving treasury secretary (1801 – 1814), criticized Hamilton throughout his tenure, then maintained many of his policies for the next thirteen years. He resigned in order to negotiate an end to the War of 1812. Hamilton himself made many decisions and many compromises, including the one that brought the capital to the banks of the Potomac, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, in return for some southern states paying off the war debts of some northern states.
General Sherman ordered one disastrous frontal assault during his march south, at Kennesaw Mountain. He never made that mistake again, capturing Atlanta by repeatedly outflanking his opponents. Every name printed on the monument to the First Division reminds us of the cost of war. President Jackson may have prevented civil war in 1833 by ordering warships to Charleston, South Carolina, which had passed an ordinance of nullification. He said, "The Constitution ...forms a government not a league.... To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation.”
Threats. War. Compromise. Preserving a nation. Leadership. The stuff of government. How does a president put it all together? A study of history is essential.
All over Washington this month, life goes on an usual, amidst whatever gaiety people can muster during winter; during war. Every morning we hear more news of bombings, IEDs, suicide bombings, Americans killed, Iraqis killed. We try to ignore it and talk about something else.
This month’s best read has been Tournament of Shadows: The Great game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, by Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac. A most apposite section begins with the appointment of George Eden, the second Baron Auckland, as Governor-General of the British East India Company, making him, in effect , the ruler of India, in 1835. He installed himself at Simla, in the hill country north of Delhi. There he began to receive reports of threats to the empire by distant Russia. After conquering the Caucasus, Russian armies were pushing eastward and Russian operatives were probing the desert grasslands from Oxiana to Chinese Tartary. Russia’s eventual goal was believed to be India, which could be invaded through Afghanistan or Persia. Auckland pondered this threat for a few years, not knowing what do, until a key advisor, Sir John McNaughten, Secretary of the Political and Secret Department - I’m not making this up – convinced him that a dramatic countermove was necessary.
MacNaughten had had small experience in the give and take of diplomacy and politics, having lived too long in a world of agents’ reports and confidential dossiers. Nonetheless, he convinced the Governor-General that an unprovoked invasion of Afghanistan would somehow impart luster to the reign of Britannia’s new Queen and foil the knavish designs of the Russian Tsar.
The authors conclude: “Auckland had at last made a decision, and once dear ‘G’ was set on a course, as his sister put it, it was impossible ‘to get out of his Lordship’s head what had been put into it.’ We are permitted to imagine him at Simla, indulging an after-dinner cigar on the verandah of Auckland House, gazing meditatively at the deodar-decked Himalayas, persuading himself he was walking with Destiny. In reality, he had sentenced tens of thousands to death in a pointless and dishonorable war.”
The British sent enough troops to Afghanistan in 1839 to conquer it, but not control it. They were expelled with staggering losses a few years later. The end result was the same emir controlling the country that they had kicked out. They did not return until forty years later, when they essentially repeated the same mistake, but with slightly better results. Throughout this time, the debate at Simla and in London was between those who favored a forward, proactive strategy and those who reasoned: “If the Russians want Afghanistan, let them have it. If we control the mountain passes, they will never get to India. Besides, Afghanistan is impossibly far from their bases of supply and they will never tame that hostile population.” The proactive school won out. The British did maintain influence over Afghanistan, sort of, but at horrific cost.
Sometimes proaction works and is worth the cost. Most Americans now think that Jackson’s proaction was wise and that Lincoln’s was worth the cost. There would be no United States without them. We do not yet know how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will turn out, or the wider war on terrorism, or if it even makes sense to call it a war. The lessons of history, in books and in monuments dotted all over Washington, command our attention.
Copyright, 2007
Richard Allen Hyde
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