Visitors to AEI's Wohlstetter Conference Center are often struck by three original pictures of the U.S. Capitol, White House, and Supreme Court building that hang in the reception room. The paintings were commissioned by AEI from the noted New York artist Elliott Banfield and installed on September 11, 2002. Following are remarks at the installation by AEI president Christopher DeMuth, by Mr. Banfield, and by the late Daniel P. Moynihan whose career included many successful efforts to improve the public architecture of Washington. Small renderings of the pictures, along with artist's notes and information about purchasing them, are posted at www.elliottbanfield.com/pages/Landmarks/LandmarksIntro.html. Extended artist's notes on the pictures are pasted at www.aei.org/landmarks
Remarks at the installation of Elliott Banfield's
Landmarks of Washington, D.C. at the
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
September 11, 2002
CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH:
The terrorist attacks of one year ago were directed not only at people but at famous architectural symbols--one of American commerce, one of American might, and one of American democracy. The World Trade Center was not distinguished architecture but was thrilling to behold--an icon of the great skyline of our greatest city and also of the audacious ambitions of global capitalism. The Pentagon was and is the very opposite: not lofty and flamboyant but hunkered down and preparing for the worst--stolid, methodical, premonitory. The Capitol, spared by civilian heroics, is the architectural union of the other two: at once hugely horizontal and hugely vertical, a man-made mountain of perfect proportions. Like the Constitution it embodies, the Capitol is both intricate and balanced, separated and combining, grounded and aspiring. A thing of beauty with no message of its own, it indiscriminately accommodates the highest and lowest avatars of our democracy, furnishing their relentlessly practical and often ungainly pursuits with a setting of dignity, nobility, and awe. To paraphrase Frost: never stooping from its sphere, it asks of us a certain height.
Washington's commercial architecture lacks these forms of public-spiritedness: it is neither towering nor brooding nor ennobling. It is a sprawling expanse of squat utilitarian boxes that exemplify rather than modulate the work of the lawyers, lobbyists, and publicists than inhabit them. Its domes are the HVAC units that Jefferson did not anticipate when he sited the capital in a malarial swamp to keep the central government small and lethargic. But we downtowners have got the views if we crane our necks; we have business and visitors that take us regularly to the magnificent places; and most of us are engaged in work that we conceive of as part of the affairs of government. We, too, are part of what the city's magnificence was designed for.
Policy research institutes such as AEI aim to amend the defects of our political institutions. We mimic and try to improve on every congressional function short of actual law-making--fact-finding, evaluation, and deliberation. We try to provide worn-down Executive officials with intellectual spark and freshness, and judges with relief from their crabbed inbred doctrines. We like to say that we 'frame the debates,' and we try to focus those debates on the public interest rather than the cacophony of private interests. In all these respects our work is akin to that of the public architect. So we thought it would be appropriate to decorate our plain headquarters with grand illustrations of Washington's three constitutional landmarks, portrayed on important public or political occasions. We are deeply grateful to Elliott Banfield for executing this commission with such seriousness, originality, and verve.
Elliott is well-known for his brilliant and often wonderfully satirical illustrations for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, Claremont Review of Books, and other publications. I am particularly fond of his original illustrations for the Spectator--for the Politics column, a donkey and an elephant tugging furiously over a ribbon of patriotic bunting, thereby strangling an American bald eagle caught in the tussle; for the Public Policy column, a legislator portrayed as a portly French farmer, whetting his knife as the geese look on apprehensively.
Several years ago, Elliott prepared a splendid series of drawings of architectural landmarks of New York City, which were the inspiration for and the artistic precursors of his new Washington series. His works perfectly capture and celebrate the spirit of our great public buildings and spaces--the identical spirit that makes them inspiring to us and targets to those who hate and envy us.
When Elliott first suggested that the buildings would be presented at important political moments, I naturally assumed that, for AEI, he would portray the Capitol at the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the White House at an Easter Egg Roll during the administration of Calvin Coolidge, and the Supreme Court on that glorious day in 1905 when the Court handed down Lochner v. New York--announcing that the Fourteenth Amendment had enacted Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics and therefore forbade all forms of government regulation.
Elliott has instead chosen his occasions apolitically, with an eye only to the artistic integrity of his project. It is probably better that these pictures were designed by the artist rather than the patron: Some may recall Ada Louise Huxtable's review of the Rayburn House Office Building, which she said looked as if Mussolini had ordered it over the telephone. Moreover the pictures, being true to life, are an inducement to realism and a caution against intellectual introspection. A colleague who is a thoroughgoing conservative told me lightheartedly that he gets a little bit angry every time he walks past Eleanor Roosevelt; I replied that that is just the way I want him--a little bit angry, and thereby inspired to work a little harder and a little better.
These pictures inspire in many ways. They reward inspection both from a distance and up close. They have grown on everyone at AEI every day we have lived with them, and they are objects of fascination and edification to our visitors. It is immensely gratifying to contemplate the pleasure and inspiration they will provide to many generations to come.
ELLIOTT BANFIELD:
I know that many scholars and writers and artists are here tonight, and they know what it's like to hear applause for the efforts and the sacrifices they've made.
Sometimes I ask myself: How long will the applause last? How long before the work is forgotten? As a rule I'm very pessimistic about the pictures I have made.
But in the present case I have a bit of optimism regarding their longevity. That's because the pictures in my Landmark series, however badly they were made, express an idea. They have a point and a purpose that excuses their aesthetic weakness and will give them a lasting value.
The idea of the series was not mine. It was suggested by Chris DeMuth, and may have originated with Martin Meyerson. More generally, I suppose, one might say the idea was generated within a certain community. And I am very lucky to be a part of that community and to share in its knowledge and spirit.
Thank you.
CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave several people at AEI their first Washington jobs (including Karl Zinsmeister, Nick Eberstadt, and me), and he continues to give us work to do as a member of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers. Pat served for thirty years in two of Banfield's three landmarks, and throughout his long and accomplished public career he devoted constant attention to the restoration of Pennsylvania Avenue. If Washington were my kind of town--Chicago--we would have long since renamed Pennsylvania Avenue Moynihan Avenue, for he more than any other man is the architect of its current happy state.
DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN:
Jefferson decreed that "design activity and political thought are indivisible." Elliott Banfield has presented us a luminous tableau of just that. Let us look into his work for the ideas to be found there.
THE WHITE HOUSE
In 1791 in Manhattan, Jefferson and Madison reached what could be thought of as the last great compromise of the Constitution-making era, or the first of the political age that followed. The Federal government would assume the debt acquired by the States during the Revolutionary War; the capital would move to a swamp on the banks of the Potomac. New York would become the financial and cultural capital of the nation; Washington, the political capital. The separation, if you like, of powers.
There was "energy in the executive." The very next year, 1792, James Hoban, an Irish immigrant, won the prize of $500 offered by the Commissioners of the District for the best design of the 'President's House' or the 'President's Palace' as Pierre L'Enfant variously described it. A tension which remains.
As the 1937 WPA's Washington, City and Capital, far the finest guide to Washington ever compiled, records, it was "a perfect type of late eighteenth century . . . mansion popular in Ireland and England when our Republic was young." Great rooms on the first floor, open to the public at almost all times. The living quarters on the second floor, typically secluded.
Here we see Eleanor Roosevelt at an Easter egg roll on the South Lawn. These are things one did for the folk. She was the last aristo to live, reign if you like, in the White House. It is said that Queen Victoria never looked behind her when she sat down, knowing a chair would be there. I can attest that Eleanor, on the approach of photographers, would instantly set her martini glass down behind her, confident a side table would be there. In 1934, on the occasion of the Gridiron dinner, she gave the first costume ball in the White House. An exclusively feminine gathering; the wives of the Gridiron's guests that evening. The First Lady appeared as a Romanian peasant. That celebrated shepherdess Marie Antoinette would have felt very much at home.
THE CAPITOL
Where the White House was finished within the decade, the Capitol was slow in starting up and seems never to be quite finished. In 1793, President George Washington chose a design submitted by William Thornton, the first Architect of the Capitol, like Hamilton a native of the West Indies. Benjamin Latrobe followed, Charles Bulfinch, Thomas Walter, in that order. The dome, modeled in part after St. Peter's in Rome, was finished during the Civil War, but additions and renovations have never ceased.
Our artist presents us with the East Front of the Capitol at its most splendid, on the occasion of President McKinley's inauguration in 1901. Alas, the grand Corinthian columns we see towering above the platform are no longer there. They were quarried from the sandstone near Aquia Creek in Virginia, as was much else of Palladian Washington. However, in time it was thought necessary to extend the East Front to give more aesthetic balance to the dome. Unhappily, by now the fine post of Architect of the Capitol had passed to one J. George Stewart, whose only architectural skills consisted of finding hideaways for senior members. In 1958 the East Front was demolished, then rebuilt.
Now to one of the few secrets Washington has somehow contrived to keep. By 1990 the original columns had risen again as a splendid assembly on a knoll in the Ellipse Meadow of the National Arboretum in far-off Northeast Washington. You reach it through the National Herb Garden. Once seen, it is never to be forgot. But painfully few have done so.
Another little known fact is that the Architect of the Capitol, in those days, was chosen by the President. Given the pillage on the East Front, Chris DeMuth and I, in our brief authority in the White House, resolved to find a pretty rare flora, a Republican architect. Which we did in the person of George M. White, who served with great distinction for the next quarter-century.
Another secret of sorts, perhaps less well kept. Visitors to Capitol Hill can hardly miss the great Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. Architect Walter drew an outline of a statue representing Liberty, turned out, of course, with the Phrygian cap, worn by freed slaves in Rome and, since the French Revolution, a universal symbol of liberty 'to be found, for example, on the Great Seal of the State of New York). But Secretary of War Jefferson Davis was not about to have a freed slave atop the United States Capitol. And so at his studio in Rome, Crawford replaced the liberty cap with a crested Roman helmet. Next time take a closer look.
THE SUPREME COURT
Some while ago, in one of his seminal studies of bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson laid down that organizations in conflict become like one another. We find this in the architectural history of the three branches of the Federal government, which the framers designed for conflict. Early in the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing of the White House. The President now had an office, much like an oil baron or a steel magnate, or a member of the Board of the American Enterprise Institute. In short order the Senate built the Russell Senate Office Building, the House built the Cannon Building. FDR built the East Wing; the Senate built Dirksen, the House built Longworth. When JFK moved out into Lafayette Square, the Senate built Hart, the House built Rayburn.
Now where was the Supreme Court amidst this building boom? I espy a pattern: one building behind. As if not to seem assertive, which is of course the subtlest form of aggression. Again, our artist shows us the Court in 1974 having just decreed that a President must resign. For a century and a half, the Court had lived happily enough in a chamber on the ground floor of the Senate wing of the Capitol when inevitably, by the Iron Law of Emulation, as I phrased it following Wilson, the Justices decided they must have a building of their own.
Chief Justice Taft ordered up "a building of dignity and importance." (Interestingly, perhaps, in 1962 I wrote the "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture," requiring that our buildings "provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American Government.") Cass Gilbert did just that with a great marble temple, a profusion of Roman scrolls, mosaic tablets, and an English crown on the exterior, a recessed temple deep within. Decrees issue forth, and they must be obeyed, if not necessarily understood. In the now lost past, the Justices would join Senators for a morning eye-opener and general chat. No more; they are now never seen. Certainly not in the company of politicians.
In due course, the Executive and Legislative branches had three office buildings each, the Court by the Iron Law required a second. A bill was enacted, I became chairman of the Building Commission, and in 1992 Edward Larabee Barnes served up a fine, luminous, transparent building, now named for Thurgood Marshall. It is set alongside Union Station, the third of the three-building complex Daniel Burnham designed to keep the Pennsylvania Railroad off the Mall. That at least worked out.
