Christopher Hamner: We're going to look at a couple of monuments today, and I want to approach it from this idea of what is it telling us about the moment and the way that Americans are struggling with their memory of a particular event. Think about the Mall. There will be a thousand people passing through Air and Space between 9am and 9:10 this morning; so in 10 minutes, that's a career's worth of people who may be getting all their history out of just going through those exhibits. The World War II Memorial, which we're going to visit in the afternoon, gets 4.4 million people per year. So in terms of shaping the way people think about events and history, this is really powerful stuff. And I think it's important to think about, well, who made this? And what did they make it for? And what were the circumstances under which this was put up and why does it look the way it looks? For my money, the one that we're going to look at first is the single best, most interesting, most fascinating memorial in the entire city. It's the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial. What makes it so interesting is that you can walk past it and only get a tiny, tiny piece of what's going on. You have to really study…you have to spend a little time kind of engaging the monument to kind of get the full experience. And one of the thinks that's so cool [is] that you can talk about it as a piece of history [and] you can also talk about it as a piece of art. And this is one of the neater sculptures, both on this side and on the other side. The sculpture is so well done that if you walk around it, it almost seems to move. You see different things at different spots as you kind of make the semicircle. So maybe we should start there. Just kind of start here—and just like we've been talking about, you know, images, music, all sorts of things that you can read closely—look closely for the detail and try to figure out what's going on here. Teacher 1: He's riding one of the horses. Each one. Teacher 2: There's two riders. Teacher 3: Are they both shot? It looks like this guy's shot over here; he's shot here. This guy's avoiding being shot just like these guys, they're ducking, they're using them as shields. Christopher Hamner: Alright, if you just look at it—if you're just standing here for example and you just take the most cursory look at it what does it look like? If you only spend 40 seconds like most tourists, you take a shot from here and you move on, what do you get out of it? Teacher 4: It's a wagon, going from one place to another. It's moving. Christopher Hamner: It's kind of the heroic—it looks like a standard—you've got the horses rearing back, it's soldiers, it's kind of heroic, there's a guy leaning back, he's got the U.S. artillery flag. It looks like a pretty standard war memorial. When you take a little more time to look at it, what's going on? What is it, first of all? We've got a bunch of guys on horses— Multiple Teachers: It's artillery. Christopher Hamner: It's horse-drawn artillery, it's got an artillery caisson, it appears to be moving up to the front someplace. Everybody got that, right? What's going on? Teacher 5: They're stuck in the mud. Teacher 6: They're under fire. Teacher 7: Yeah, they're in battle. Teacher 5: I got stuck in the mud and cold, suffering. Teacher 8: And this guy looks like he's getting shot. And it looks like they're avoiding being shot. Christopher Hamner: Okay, that's one way to interpret it. One thing, if they were close enough to the front that they were taking fire the battery would probably be disengaged and wheeled in. So it would be rare to get that close. But everybody's kind of gotten the sense that it's in the process of crashing. Right? Let's go around to the other side. What's happening over here? Teacher 9: From this side you can definitely tell that it's more tilted, the part where they're sitting. Christopher Hamner: Okay, so. Teacher 5: The axle is breaking. Christopher Hamner: The axle is snapping; you can see the slack in the tackle there. But notice there's a lot of slack here, they're rearing up, it's in the process of crashing. I mean look at the wheels are akimbo. I think what's happening here is not that these guys are getting shot but, the horses have reared, it's just at this moment—it's full of energy, it's just at this moment where it's about to crash. These guys, I don't know if they're ducking fire of if they're just tired in the back. Especially this guy on the right, I mean, that is just exhaustion in his face. These guys have been towing this thing around for months or years. But they're not even aware that in four tenths of a second the momentum of the artillery case is going to carry them into this huge mess of horseflesh. And these guys are trying to rein in the damage. But, this is a picture of a crash about to happen. Think of how different that is from what you would normally see in a heroic military monument. This isn't a tribute to efficiency, or a tribute to the sheer power of the army, so much as a honest portrayal of how easy it is for things to go wrong. I especially like the guys riding in the back, just the exhaustion there. And think about how atypical that is for a military monument. When do you think this was put up? Teacher 10: After Grant died. Christopher Hamner: Yes! When? So that would cover roughly 130 years. Teacher 10: I was thinking post-World War I. Christopher Hamner: Good! I like that. Post-World War I is a good guess, why? Teacher 10: Because we struggled with modern warfare there and lots of people came home, and Veterans Affairs was formed. Christopher Hamner: That is a great guess, but not correct. That's what's interesting about this. This is pre-First World War by like 20 years, which is really kind of unusual when you think of all the other Civil War statues that we've looked at. We looked at Stonewall Jackson, you know, superhero, Superman, steroids, muscles bulging—that's much more traditional, that's sort of heroic, he looks indestructible, he looks incredibly powerful. This is not indestructible. Teacher: On the right, on the back he's got both of his hands bracing him on the other side like he's getting ready— Christopher Hamner: This is kind of the sense of energy…there's nothing that these guys can do. This is going to go very badly for them in a second or two. And there's a kind of resignation and exhaustion and a realism that is really unusual. You don't normally see a country putting up a military monument that depicts a crash and I think it says something kind of interesting about where the nation was 25 years after the Civil War when they started putting this up. How do we want to remember this event? What are we going to put up? What are we going to show? How are we going to show it? Teacher: Maybe like you were saying, when you really look at war and teach it you should look at the tough side of it and don't glorify it. Like you were saying, it was a struggle, it broke our country apart. Christopher Hamner: I think that's exactly where we're going with this, there's even more interesting stuff on the other side. But think about how unusual that is. And it will become, I think, even clearer as we get to World War II, which does not have this kind of gritty realism to it.

Christopher Hamner: What's the kind of tone of the memorial? Teacher 1: Charge! Teacher 2: The cavalry is making a charge. Christopher Hamner: It's a cavalry charge and it's kind of got those iconic touches: there's the captain in front, he's got his saber up, and they're pointing forward, and there's flags streaming and there's muscles rippling in the horses. It kind of feels like a traditional, heroic celebration. What's going on when you look at it more carefully? Teacher 3: This guy on the side here he's shielding his face. This guy is about to get his day ruined. Christopher Hamner: What's happened to this guy? Teacher 3: His horse is down. Christopher Hamner: His horse has either been hit or has tripped. What is about to happen, what is the story that's going to unfold here? Teacher 4: It's going to be a domino effect. Christopher Hamner: There's a cascade of—the guys in the back are totally unaware of what's happened in front. And the officer leading the charge has got this heroic pose and a heroic look on his face, but is oblivious to the fact that this is, like the other one, kind of in the process of falling apart. What's gonna happen to this guy? Teacher 4: He's going to have his head stepped on. Christopher Hamner: There's a pretty good chance he's gonna be trampled because the horses are going to be unable to stop. That is supposed to represent Shrady, the sculptor, in fact, the face is modeled after his face, which is a kind of odd touch. He didn't live to see the entire thing cast and commissioned. But you've got the same kind of sense that there's energy coming, but if you look closely there is the beginnings of a sort of disaster happening. You have to look for it. If you just step back and say oh, standard cavalry charge, it looks a lot like the heroic monuments you would see at Gettysburg or Antietam; look more carefully and it's kind of brutal realism. Not everybody—the charges didn't always work, the horses fell down. What's going on on the ground in both of them? There's like mud in motion. How many monuments do you recall seeing where there's so much attention to the ground and how nasty—I mean, there's a chopped-down tree trunk on the other side. It recognizes that these Civil War battles didn't happen on a manicured golf course, that they happened in really nasty conditions and there's—it's all in motion too, it's mud that's being kicked up. It's kind of a dirtier, grittier, more realistic version of warfare. This is pre-World War I, and this is really, really different. If you look at most statues of generals, particularly from the Civil War, or a statue of Washington, they're turned out in their general regalia, their officers coats, and their insignia, standing erect and their chests are out—it’s a heroic celebration. This is something different. You get a little bit of that in the front, but it's kind of got this ironic twist in that this glorious charge that he's leading is about to meet with a sort of disastrous end. Teacher 5: I was noticing a few of the other elements that usually you don't see in statues. As you mentioned the mud and the tree back there, but look at the horses' mouths. About three or four of the horses they're exhausted, the tongues are hanging out, especially the one on the far side here. The one on the near side has a wide-open mouth. So they've been charging for a while, this isn't automatically happening, you know, we're not just starting it. Christopher Hamner: That one sort of looks terrified, too. In the horses and on the artillery side there's a sense that they're portraying the fear, which is a real part of the experience, that again you don't normally see. What do you think that the people who put this up, who donated money to it, who designed it, who cast it, who erected it—how do they want you to think about the war? Teacher 6: A more realistic view. Which is kind of before their time. Teacher 7: It's certainly—for me, I'm trying to contextualize it within the end of the Gilded Age and the beginning of imperialism and I'm trying to make sense of it and it doesn't jive with my preconceived notions of what to expect out of a monument during that time. They were in to stuff that was grandiose and heroic; and this is heroic in a very raw way. It's not— Teacherr 5: Raw. Raw, I like that word. Christopher Hamner: If—this should have been erected in 1918 or 1919, right? That would fit in with the narrative of how we understand that people kind of gave up their glorious view of warfare and adapted a more realistic tone. But it doesn't.

Christopher Hamner: Turn around and take a look at U.S. Grant up there. There's some interesting stuff going on with the depiction of Grant, just the way he's portrayed. But there's also the relationship between the two lower pieces, the cavalry on this side and the artillery on the south side and where Grant is located. What do you know about—what is your sort of thumbnail understanding of Grant as a Civil War general. This is after his presidency, which is generally regarded as something of a disappointment. So he's depicted here in his more successful incarnation as a general. You can kind of work backwards from there and one of the reasons that Grant accepted the surrender is that he was the victorious general, he is the general after that incredibly torturous process of trial and error, plugging these guys in and we cover this a little bit in the summer, that there was this revolving parade of generals who had been disastrous—you know, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, these guys who just could not get it done. And then in the summer of 1863 Grant distinguishes himself at Vicksburg, comes west, and it's Grant who is the head of the armies in the last two years of the war. And who finally grinds down the army of Northern Virginia and forces its surrender. How does he do that? Teacher 1: He picked up on the war of attrition. Christopher Hamner: The thing that Grant did differently that none of the generals previous to him did—So many of those generals were about maneuver and about trying to get behind Lee's army or trying to get between Lee's army and Richmond and trying to win the war without fighting a really bloody battle. Grant was one of the first to embrace a more modern sensibility that said you cannot win a war in this day by capturing the enemy capital, you have to win the war by destroying the enemy army and they only way you can do that is by meeting it on the battlefield and fighting it. Remember the Union had that huge advantage in its, the manpower pool it could draw on, its productive capacity; and the South didn't. The South had a much smaller population and they had much less capacity to produce ammunition and weapons. What had happened in the first two years of the war in a general way is that there that would be a big battle and both armies would kind of pull back. That allowed the South to keep fighting for a long time. Grant is the first commanding officer who really understood that they were going to have to fight them and keep fighting them. Remember when we did the campaigns of 1864; there is just horribly bloody battle after horribly bloody battle from May to July of 1864. They are fighting a massive, deadly engagement every couple of days, this is the Wilderness qne Spotsylvania Courthouse. There were more than 60,000 Union causalities in a six-week period during that point. That’s—they're fighting a major battle every couple of days. Remember, we were talking about the bottom-up experience, what it's like not just to be a soldier, but to be the wife of a soldier, or the mother of a soldier, someone on the home front, and imagine what it's like to get that newspaper every other day and to flip right to the back page, which was called the "Butcher's Bill," and to read over the individual names and be praying that it's not your loved one that's going to be listed there. And that's kind of an interesting contrast to our 20th-century experience. We do a lot of the same things today, but in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts four deaths in a day is a horrible tragedy—and it is—but imagine that there are 400 deaths every day and that it just keeps going on and that there are 4,000 deaths some day. It's a kind of warfare that reaches into Union homes, homes in the North, in a way that was really unprecedented. Grant was extraordinarily unpopular. They began to get a real kind of respect for Grant—who was the total antithesis of a lot of the generals they had had before. McClellan was a little Napoleon, he was always very turned out in polished brass and very much looked the part of a general. You can see that Grant doesn't. A lot of the soldiers saw him as someone that was more relatable. At the same time this is a guy who's continually plunging them into battle. In the spring of 1864 it's not at all clear that that's going to have a successful conclusion.

Christopher Hamner: What's coming across here about him as a general? What is the tone or what adjectives would you use to describe how he's being portrayed. Teacher 1: Alone. Christopher Hamner: Where do you get that? Teacher 1: Well, obviously there's no one else up there with him. You just see the sight of him looking straight, he's in his own thoughts, his own world, he's battling the elements, the wind is blowing past him, the horse's tail is swept; yet he's going to stand fast, like he's determined to have whatever he has in his mind fulfilled. Christopher Hamner: There's like three or four things we can dig into there. First in terms of him being alone, look at how separate he is from the troops that he's leading. He is, what is that, 30 feet? Maybe more? He is physically separated from them; he is also 30 feet above them. He's away from them on this axis and also on the vertical axis. Teacher 2: He could theoretically have been placed in one side or the other in terms of the way that they portray him in his dress. Teacher 3: All of these guys on both sides they don't look like they're wearing like summer—they look bundled up like the weather is bad. I mean, the mud, the rain. Christopher Hamner: And Grant's got that going on too. The adjectives that you guys threw out—resolute. But he's lonely up there. And he's not interacting with the soldiers. Teacher 4: He's in the middle of it all; he's in the weather. You have the same type of weather theme being done, but he's still somehow above it all. Christopher Hamner: Literally above it! Right? He's kind of figuratively above this but he's also literally above it. There's a kind of sense of determination, he's got a fist on his hip. You get this sense of how resolute people wanted to imagine him as. This is a guy who understood that there was not a way to win the war except to do a lot of fighting and an incredible amount of dying, and you can kind of see the weight of that on his shoulders. Teacher 3: He sort of famously internalized a lot of the—I feel like you can see that, his shoulders are kind of hunched forward. Teacher 2: He's not postured the way that you see Stonewall Jackson. Teacher 5: He seems kind of hunched forward. Christopher Hamner: And remember, they had 20 years to think about this. They did not decide to raise the money for the statue on Monday, throw it together on Thursday, and commission it on Friday. There were 20 years of planning and artist models that they work a lot in clay on miniature before they cast something in bronze. There were all sorts of different potential ways to portray Grant. They didn't have to do it the way that they did it. And unlike other kinds of historical texts, where you can say sure you can change that, it's not written in stone—this is written in stone and cast in iron! Teacher 6: One thing that's striking me is that he's also surrounded by four lions. And typically what is a lion known as? The king of the jungle. I think that's speaking out to me right there, too. Christopher Hamner: Well, and then there's something else we haven't talked about, there's the sort of relief that's on the pedestal. Can you guys make out on both sides? Teacher 3: The cavalry again. And then the infantry on this side. Christopher Hamner: The soldiers are present, they're there. And again, that's a little more of a realistic depiction of the soldiers. Teacher 1: Thinking about both sides of the relief, they could have put that relief anywhere. But look where they put it. And what is the relief supporting? Grant. So the underlying message is his men supported him and his decision that he's making on that horse right now. Christopher Hamner: And you notice it's got this kind of realism that I think is really unprecedented, particularly for the time and it's still pretty rare. But, was it Brian pointed out the lions, there's the kind of marble pedestal. It's not the Korean Memorial where you can actually walk around the figures, it still has these nods to more traditional, classical form. But it also incorporates the stuff that's new and I think that makes it just so complicated and so interesting. There's a series of choices here and I think they tell us something about where the nation was at the close of the 19th century and remembering this war and figuring out where it fit into our national narrative.

Mary Hendrickse: We're going to start off with a really simple activity—the Coke bottle—and finding out how much information we can get about Coca-Cola from this Coke bottle.

Speaker 1: I notice that the shape is made to feel good as you're holding it.

Kendra Huffbower: I notice that it's made out of glass, so it could be recycled…

Kendra Huffbower: The Coke bottle we were thinking about incorporating into our daily morning meeting routine. Where that's kind of the activity and you pass an object and you really have to think about what they're noticing and why they're noticing that and how it's used and the function and design of it.

Speaker 2: There's another image on here. There's an image of a Coke bottle printed on the Coke bottle. Maybe that's something to do with scanning or something?

Speaker 3: Yeah, going on the shape of it, it's kind of…seeing that it comes out of the 1950s-ish time, it's kind of got an hourglass shape of a slender woman's body.

Speaker 4: That was mine! No!

Speaker 3: But that's good, great minds think alike! It reminds me of Barbie or something.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, okay, so the hourglass figure type of idea.

Speaker 3: Whether that was implicit or not.

Mary Hendrickse: Why do you think—let's just go with that.

Speaker 4: Can I tell why, 'cause that was my thing?

Speaker 3: This was a joint thing between minds.

Mary Hendrickse: Why do you think they might have used that shape, that hourglass shape?

Speaker 4: I think it's advertising, because if I drink it I'm gonna look like Barbie.

Speaker 5: It has a date on it—11 February 12. I'm assuming it's either expiration date or…

Mary Hendrickse: If that is the expiration date, what do we think about that? That it expires next year, like eight months from now.

Speaker 6: Lots of preservatives.

Mary Hendrickse: Lots of preservatives, okay.

Speaker 2: That it has an expiration date, though, at all. That's better than if it doesn't!

Rachel Blessing: We talked a lot about visual literacy today and trying to incorporate that in a meaningful way in the classroom is my hope. I've been writing down how she's [Mary Hendrickse] been teaching us, because that's something that she's modeling for us. I don't know if she knows that, but she is.

Rachel Blessing: It's from Mexico.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, it was made in Mexico. So what does that tell us?

Kendra Doyle: I think sometimes we can just get so caught up in day-to-day things that we don't take the time to look at the outside of a building and just see what does this tell us, what does this mean? Taking the time to just slow down and observe and analyze, that’s something that I've learned.

Kendra Doyle: I noticed the label, it's red, and the way the Coca-Cola is written it looks like a ribbon almost, the script. It's like a repeating sound, it's like a catchy sound—Coca-Cola—it's like the same letters.

Mary Hendrickse: So, I wanted to point out that it took us one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13 people to get to the logo that's written on it. Because that's something that we expect to see, so we don’t really think about it very often.

I have some disks that I'll give you at the end of the day in an electronic form so you can use it again if you want to and it's got the reason behind some of the design parts. They did go for the curvy bottle on purpose, for both easy gripping and attractiveness—because it looked like a woman—and the red and white because it was bold colors. So there's a reason behind even the smallest details of a Coke bottle, and the same thing goes with buildings. Even the smallest detail in a building has importance and has meaning.

Mary Hendrickse: Visual literacy is really about slowing your students down and asking them to articulate why they are making the assumptions they are. What did they see that makes them say that? We're very quick to say, "Oh, that's a school." Well, why does it look like a school? What about it makes it look like a school? It's about looking closer and longer and further. Drawing is one way that you can do that. It's also important to ask questions that bring you to more questions and more ideas. And it's also important to get your kids to ask questions too.

There's a handout over there called "50 Ways to Look at a Big Mac Box." These are good questions to use about anything. You can use them about a Coke bottle, you can use them about a building, you can use this as a reference. I'm going to give each group two pictures of buildings you may not be familiar with. You can either work on them together, you can pick one to work on as a group, or you can split up into two smaller groups. I would like you to use those questions and look really closely at the details to see if you can figure out more information about this building. Okay? Does that make sense to everybody?

[Group 1:]
Speaker 1: That's the entrance.

Speaker 2: And are these windows?

Speaker 1: Ah, could be, letting in some light.

Speaker 2: Or ventilation.

Speaker 3: So describe the shape—

Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say planetarium or an arena.

Speaker 4: I was thinking like a rec center.

Speaker 1: Yeah, a sports center.

[Group 2:]
Speaker 1: We said that we noticed the landscape in this one. We noticed the intentional barriers. The park area is set up to where you can enjoy the view of the building and set up to where you might want to just go and take a walk.

Speaker 2: There's shade because there's trees; if it's sunny you can do a picnic underneath them.

Speaker 3: And I think that's juxtaposed with the symmetrical almost like prism, to me, structure.

Speaker 1: The straight lines.

Speaker 3: It's straight, the windows are tiny and narrow and dark.

[Large-group discussion:]
Mary Hendrickse: We're going to go around and I'd like each group to tell a little bit about what they think about these buildings. What did you…what do you think about this one?

Speaker 1: The design is different. When you look inside of it, it looks kind of like the chandelier crystal things hanging down. The top looks very translucent. We were kind of thinking if it's like a memorial type thing.

Speaker 2: There's a variety of materials because the bottom level is like these pillars but glass in the front and in the back, and then there's this marble layer. We can't really tell what exactly the material is at the top, but it's like this mesh, it looks like a metal sort of mesh glittery something.

Speaker 3: And when you look up through the center of the building, you can see it glows a little bit, almost like it's open. So there's offices or some functioning room up top.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, yeah, absolutely. So this is one proposed design for the National Museum of African American Culture and Heritage. You guys were absolutely on target when you were thinking about what the different parts mean. The design was supposed to look like a crown—this idea of a crown—it was supposed to look like it glows. I mean, you guys were able to get a lot of information out of this just by looking at it.

[Group 3:]
Speaker 1: See what the people are wearing.

Speaker 2: See what the people are wearing or doing.
[This seems odd…should this group discussion be here?]

Mary Hendrickse: This building was built a long time ago to be both a Pension Bureau for Civil War soldiers so they could come in and pick up their retirement checks or pensions, and also a space to have inaugural balls. As we're going through we're going to be drawing things and looking at different aspects of the building and seeing how they can reveal different information about how this building was used.

Rachel Blessing: I can't tell you the last time I've drawn a picture, so just being forced to do those things and remembering what it's like for the kids, and also just learning new things. I grew up in DC, and I've been to this building but I didn't know half of what I learned today.

Speaker 1: Look, there's a clue. There's a Civil War clue right there. There's people coming to get their pensions.

Mary Hendrickse: The first thing that I want you to do is to open up your sketchbooks. We are going to do a 30-second quick sketch. I want you to get a sort of big picture, overall impressions of what you see in this space, okay? What were you able to capture in 30 seconds?

Multiple Speakers: Nothing. Columns. Arches.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, so columns, arches. So maybe something that the architect really wanted you to look at and focus on when you came into the building. What about those arches and columns? What do you notice about them?

Speaker 2: They look like aqueducts.

Mary Hendrickse: They look like aqueducts, okay. Aqueducts from today or from—

Speaker 3: No, like Rome.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, so like the Roman aqueducts.

Kendra Doyle: Ancient Greece and Rome—what connection does it have to that? What message are they trying to send? So I think being here sometimes reinforces some of those ideas about those things we've discussed in class.

Mary Hendrickse: What is this?

Multiple Speakers: It's the seal.

Mary Hendrickse: It's the seal. The seal of what?

Multiple Speakers: The United States of America.

Kendra Doyle: We might be able to actually do a field study to a site. If not, we also discussed just starting by analyzing the buildings that we're in. So many DC schools have this history and if we just take the time to look at what's around us, the buildings themselves tell an important story.

Mary Hendrickse: Doesn't have to be perfect, you're just recording clues. Your own interpretation of what you see.

Judy Leek Bowers: Drawing, I thought that was neat, because then you really do get to see what different people think is important. None of our drawings were the same.

Mary Hendrickse: We're going to do a really quick share; this is the easiest way to share. Everybody hold up your sketchpads like this. There you go. Take notice of what other people have drawn. Did they draw things that are similar to you? Different?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I did. I don't see what other people see.

Judy Leek Bowers: There's always a new technique. There's always somebody that you meet that has a different perspective. In just this short length of time it's opened my eyes to other ways to address the children. Really having more instruction that's almost individualized to each child so that they can think more deeply about the place and the power it might have.

Mary Hendrickse: What were some of the things that people drew?

Multiple Speakers: The doorway.

Speaker 1: The columns.

Mary Hendrickse: What can the door tell you about how the building was used? Is it like a normal door you would see on a house? How else is it different from a normal door?

Speaker 2: It's huge, it's inviting. The window above it at the same time—it's not a stained glass window, but still you [can] see an old castle or church.

Mary Hendrickse: It's a little bit elaborate; it's not really a plain door.

Speaker 3: What about the sculpture around the door? It's so different from that.

Mary Hendrickse: The sculptures around the door. Anybody want to guess who those people might be?

Speaker 4: You've got different ones. You have the Navy kind of on this side and then you have the Army maybe on this side.

Mary Hendrickse: We know it's from the Pension Bureau, so these were some of the people who were going to be coming into the building. So they had a visual clue on the outside of the building about what this building was used for.

Mary Hendrickse: Let's start off with the Capitol Building. Who was looking at the Capitol Building?

Speaker 1: The fact that there's the two houses—Senate and the House of Representatives—kind of link this idea of states and the nation, and then the dome in the middle kind of unifies the two. There's the Greek-style columns, which pay tribute to the birthplace of democracy.

Speaker 2: Everything else paled in comparison; the marble, the white symbolized purity.

Mary Hendrickse: Ideal, pristine, we're doing good things here. Perched upon the hill to add to the importance.

Speaker 1: Stately, powerful in itself; but not overdone, not overblown, not too elaborate.

Mary Hendrickse: A house for the president rather than a mansion for the president, or a castle for the president. So not towards the realm of king and royalty, but still important enough that a president can live in there.

Speaker 2: It's got kind of a plantation house feel to it, too.

Mary Hendrickse: Anything else that anybody wanted to add? We still have that continuation of the white coloring again and that reference to classical architecture with the columns and the capitals.

Mary Hendrickse: Who looked at the Jefferson Memorial?

Speaker 1: We talked about the columns and the architecture, the structure of the building being reminiscent of ancient Roman architecture and how Rome was the greatest power of its time so it's our expression of being one of the greatest powers in the world.

Speaker 2: We also talked about him standing as opposed to Lincoln, who is sitting.

Mary Hendrickse: What did you think about him standing?

Speaker 3: He was sort of presiding over everything and the idea that when you go to the monument you have to walk up the steps to greet him and you have to look up at Jefferson; and he's just sort of looking down—not looking down on us, but—

Mary Hendrickse: Surveying the land?

Speaker 3: Right. But just sort of overseeing, making sure the democracy stays intact.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, the Lincoln Memorial. Who was looking at that one?

Speaker 1: We talked about the Parthenon and the Greek influence.

Mary Hendrickse: Anything else? What about the size of Lincoln? He's huge! So what does that say?

Speaker 3: He's a huge figure in American history

Speaker 4: He has a huge position in our history.

Mary Hendrickse: Okay, so his position in our history, he's this huge man, huge figure in our history. The original statue was going to be a lot smaller and then when they went to start trying to figure out putting it in the building they realized it was going to be much too small and it would be dwarfed by the architecture, so they made it even bigger.

Speaker 5: I always think it's so ironic to think that they ended up making this huge statue of him and making him this huge icon, whereas what we know of him and his personality is so humble and, you know, just your everyday man. I just only imagine what he would think if he could see this.

Mary Hendrickse: It's got symbols on it about Lincoln, but the building itself has become a bigger symbol for civil rights and for rights in general. It's grown beyond what Lincoln was about to be even more symbolic and meaningful to the country.

Speaker 6:: So don't meanings always evolve? The meanings of the power of a place always is changing.

Mary Hendrickse: Absolutely, these things grow, you're absolutely right. They grow and they evolve until what we think now about the Lincoln Memorial is not the same thing they would have thought about the Lincoln Memorial in the 1920s.

Judy Leek Bowers: I'm understanding that everything that's historical is not written. Some things are based on the boulder that's in the middle of the road and it has a story behind it. Why is it significant in the District of Columbia, and why is it significant to you? And that's where I need to learn to make the connection for the students. Who really decides if the place has power?

Christopher Hamner: We had, I thought, the beginning of a very good conversation there with the teachers about choices. It could have been a different pose, it could have been different books. The quotes had obviously been selected very carefully that flank his statue. Michael O’Malley: You can problematize it really easily, you know, and it's so situated in this specific politics, so I thought that worked well. Christopher Hamner: And just kind of getting them open to this idea of monuments as texts, as sources, as something that you can ask questions about and you can approach it not just—this is not just or even foremost a monument to George Mason, the 18th-century Virginia thinker, but also to the moment in time in which the statue and the monument was designed, commissioned, erected, and opened. I thought that was also a great place to start because it kind of jolted them out of the tourist mode and into— Michael O’Malley: Into the inquirer mode. Cause you’re not at the—there’s the thing everybody is looking at, Jefferson. Instead you’re looking at this odd guy on this bench. So I would probably use that again. I thought that worked pretty well.

Christopher Hamner: Somebody who's been to the FDR Memorial describe that one.

Teacher 1: An experience.

Christopher Hamner: Okay. What does it look like? How big is it.

Teacher 1: It's huge.

Teacher 2: It's larger than life.

Teacher 3: It's the different acts or time periods in his life.

Christopher Hamner: So how much—it covers a fairly large spread of ground. It covers different phases of his life. The centerpiece is. . . ?

Teacher 4: Him in his wheelchair.

Christopher Hamner: Yeah, exactly. He's in his wheelchair, I think he's got his dog Fala—which is always a crossword puzzle answer—F A L A, if that comes up. Why is this here if we have a perfectly good memorial over by the Tidal Basin?

Teacher 5: The money? They had extra money.

Teacher 6: This one was earlier.

Christopher Hamner: Yeah, this one's first. That's a good question, but this one is actually first. And this is the one that FDR suggested during his lifetime. He had been elected president four times; it seems more likely than not that he might someday get a memorial. When asked what would be an appropriate way to commemorate his life as a public servant, I believe he was in the Oval Office, and he said a block of marble the size of this desktop with my name and my birth date and placed at the National Archives. He thought that—which I think is very understated, he picked the location, he picked the design, and that's exactly what you've got. The FDR Memorial at the Tidal Basin is totally different—in so much as he told us exactly what he wanted, it kind of flies in the face of his wishes and his explicit instructions.

There's a further twist there and if you remember back to the second week when Michael O'Malley came in and talked about political theater. The centerpiece of the memorial at the Tidal Basin is FDR in his wheelchair. For a president who went to such enormous lengths over the course of his entire political career to never be photographed in his wheelchair. Remember Professor O'Malley talking about how he would set up rails so he could appear to walk to the podium, so that he could carry himself to the podium, he had a car outfitted with hand controls. This is not just someone who did not make a big deal about the fact that he was in a wheelchair; this is someone who went to great lengths to disguise that fact.

Christopher Hamner: That’s a great point to talk about: Who is this memorial for? Is it for the person; is it for the generation for whom he was such a central figure? There's a whole generation of Americans and he guided them through the Depression and the Second World War, is the memorial for them? Is it for us, for contemporary generations who are trying to place him in a historical context? Those are really useful questions and they're transportable. You can ask these questions about any monument in any place.

Christopher Hamner: Why do we do that?

Teacher 5: We've got to teach now. The other memorial is supposed to be a teaching memorial. This I think was probably done fairly close after his death—

Christopher Hamner: I would imagine.

Teacher 5: It's not designed to teach.

Teacher 7: I know! There's a little marker right there that explains. It was put in by his friends of his to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death in 1965.

Christopher Hamner: Is that the right thing to do? To go…when somebody says this is how I want to be commemorated and you go and say yeah, alright, we're going to do something different.

Teacher 7: It depends on who it's for. If you're doing it for that person, yes. The other memorial is not for him.

Christopher Hamner: So who is it for?

Teacher 8: Everybody else.

Christopher Hamner: Yeah, that could be a glib but accurate answer.

Teacher 5: But it's for people who didn't experience New Deal programs. At this point—I had the reality check that I am now wholly in a totally different generation than my students this year. Their great-grandparents fought in World War II versus my grandparents. And that their grandfathers fought in Vietnam whereas my father fought in Vietnam. So you've got so many people that are so far removed at this point that this isn't going to teach them about who Franklin Roosevelt was.

Christopher Hamner: Is that what a memorial is supposed to do?

Teacher 5: That's I think what the goal of the other memorial is.

Christopher Hamner: This is where you get into the sort of interesting, undefined territory of what do we want to use this space for?

Teacher 1: There's a contrast. I think that FDR was rather shortsighted when he said I want to be remembered this way. Because I do believe that there is a teaching technique, the teacher in me comes out, but those are memories. If I wasn't an American, if I was not a history teacher, if I was just walking down the road, this just looks like a gigantic tombstone for some schmoe. Therefore, there is no memory being projected and I think that you have to honor him. I love that idea—that "I was a simple man"—but I think he was being shortsighted because we will not remember him without knowing the great things that came with him.

Christopher Hamner: I think part of the power of this is exactly how understated it is. Particularly in a city where there's Logan Circle, there are huge statues, 15-foot-tall statues, of Civil War figures that people have totally forgotten. Here is someone whose place in 20th-century history is immense and there is a kind of disconnect between the immensity of his contributions and the really plain nature of this. To that extent I think it does have some power because there's so many statues around here that are so overly grandiose and kind of hit you in the face with the importance of what they're celebrating and you think, not that important, not that significant in the long run. Whereas this, if anything I think Roosevelt's reputation has been burnished by historians over the years and this is incredibly plain and understated.

Teacher 2: How would we not remember him? That's the other component of it.

Teacher 1: Time. Time kills it.

Christopher Hamner: I think about the Martin Luther King Memorial. He talked during his life a lot about how he was a part of something, that he was not the Civil Rights Movement, but that he was a part of a larger wave. I think that that was an important statement in part because it indicates his humility but also because it underlines the rightness of the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't one person saying okay, now the country's going in this direction but a large segment of the country saying this injustice has to be corrected. I'm not sure how comfortable King would have been to be singled out with a statue of him covered with his quotes.

On the other hand, to not do something is sometimes sending as powerful a message as to do something. To have the National Mall, which celebrates Lincoln and Washington and Grant and a lot of white elite political figures, and to not have part of the Civil Rights Movement and the African American leaders who helped push it through, that's a conspicuous absence. To not put anything is kind of an interesting—that makes an interesting comment, too.