Culturating

This time out, I want to explore some aspects of American culture. Not the flute-recital kind, though I’ve long thought of culture in that regard. Rather, a glance at several other aspects, some of which aren’t cultured at all.

Pop culture’s not quite like this. Although, come to think of it, sometimes people in it don’t wear many clothes, either

There’s also something called “popular culture” that, we’re told, appeals to “the masses.” We’re definitely not talking flutes there. Pop culture is hard to define, but it certainly embraces escapist movies and hit music, fan magazines and ever-expanding varieties of sports, plus some activities that are neither elevating nor especially enlightening. Soft and hard-core pornography, for example; violent, misogynist urban music; and insipid television shows. All the while pop-culture diversions consume our attention and dollars, sources of at least moderate erudition are diminishing in influence. Newspapers, for instance. They even covered the occasional flute recital.

When I first switched from print journalism to broadcasting, it was explained to me that television, in particular, wasn’t a highbrow medium, and I shouldn’t expect it to be. “The tube’s” programming was sugar and spice, not fiber – filling but hardly nutritious and aimed at the “lowest common denominator” among us. Whatever generates the highest ratings, slips even just a whisker above the bar of good taste, and attracts the most advertiser dollars is fine with us. Interesting concept, that “lowest common denominator.” The term comes from mathematics, where the lowest common denominator is “the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of vulgar fractions.”

If vulgarisms are good enough for arithmetic, they’re good enough for the “Morning Zoo” on the radio and “comedy” shows on TV.

Television was going to be a great educational tool. It’s teaching us things, all right

Standards have been diminished to the lowest level that will reach a palatable, unremarkable, “common ground” of interest among the most possible people. And the level of what’s acceptable keeps falling. Since everybody stares at highway wrecks, we’ll program police chases and car crashes! Since everybody on cable has a potty mouth, but there are certain words we can’t say over the air, we’ll joke about bodily functions and sexual dysfunctions instead. We’ll put on the overwrought love stories that we call “soap operas” day and night. Hey, opera is cultural!

Go ahead, say the producers and their financiers. Demean “trash TV.” But you’ll watch it.

This was an early set of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Fun! Balloons! $100,000!

“Pop culture” and “culture culture” sometimes converge. This was evident the other day when the National Museum of American History, one of the storied Smithsonian Institution museums that line the National Mall here in Washington, welcomed into its collection priceless objects from the 20-year-old TV reality show “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Yes, my tongue was in my cheek about the “priceless” part.

Juggler. Dog on head. Could be a winner!

What a concept that show introduced to the country! You make “home movies,” but not boring stuff like Cousin Sue’s passing the potato salad at a picnic. No, you wait for the kids or the pets or visiting relatives to act stupid or go wild. Stage something if you have to. Pratfalls are good. Wet cats and eating contests work. Dogs running into things. Then rush us the tape. Who knows? You could get on TV and win money! Disastrous developments involving weddings, animals and pets, and babies are such sure-fire laugh engines that they have their own categories. “Baby farts a cloud” of talcum powder was one illustrious example. What mirth that brought the nation! And mom and dad got on TV and won money!

Is it worth lighting the powder to get on TV?

So what if an amazon.com compilation of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is entitled, “Nincompoops and Boneheads.” We weren’t getting on TV and winning money being Ma and Pa Homeowner alone. Let’s have Uncle Martin catch his pants on a nail and run down the street in his underwear! Then we can be famous nincompoops getting television face time and cash!

Lowest-common-denominator stuff, dumbing down both television and the “culture.” Not just ours. “America’s Funniest Home Videos” is now seen in more than 70 countries and produced in 15 international versions. Who says we have an export problem?

The first of many Smithsonian Institution Buildings, called “the Castle,” once held the whole collection, from elephant tusks to everyday ephemera

The United States Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, naming it after the British scientist James Smithson, who had died 20 years earlier. Smithson, who had never visited America, mysteriously left his estate to the United States to establish an institution that would, in the words of his will: "increase and diffuse knowledge among men."

Here are some of the items that will become part of the American History museum’s “Funniest Home Videos” collection

That knowledge, the Smithsonian now wants us to believe, was “increased and diffused” by the addition of an “America’s Funniest Home Videos” camcorder, the first winning video to be shown on the show, a machine that the studio audience uses to pick winners, and more. The items were presented to the Americana museum by Vin Di Bona, “Funniest Home Videos’” creator and executive producer, whose other TV triumphs include “Battle of the Network Stars” and “Entertainment Tonight.”

Believe it or not, the Smithsonian’s American History museum’s holdings include a small stretch of Old U.S. Route 66 - concrete, cracks, and all

To be sure, the National Museum of American History has never been terribly stuffy. Its collection does include U.S. First Ladies’ gowns, the flag that flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore when Francis Scott Key scribbled the words to our national anthem, World War II ration books, plus early automobiles, clocks, engines of various sorts, and household appliances. But it also houses daredevil Evil Knievel’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Kermit the Frog puppet from the children’s show “Sesame Street,” the ruby-colored slippers worn by Judy Garland in the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” a gumball machine featuring a likeness from the early Pac-Man video game, and Archie Bunker’s easy chair from the TV show “All in the Family.” Bunker was the bigoted, loudmouthed, but warmhearted lead character.

Band member falls offstage. This could be big. Did anybody catch it on camcorder?

Now, at last! tourists visiting the museum can see the first episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” in which a man tumbles off exercise parallel bars, a bride falls on her face while dancing, and a baby licks the camera lens! The show hadn’t found its oeuvre yet. The genius of inadvertent kicks to the groin and baby farts with talcum powder was yet to come.

“One of my thrusts has been to collect artifacts of comedy,” noted Dwight Blocker Bowers, the museum’s curator of music, sports, and entertainment. “We’re very interested that part of the American character is laughing at ourselves.”

Don’t get me started on the “American character.”

Of late, Newton Minow, now 83, hangs out in Chicago, where he’s honorary consul general of Singapore

In 1961, Newton R. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television and other broadcast media to a minimal degree, delivered a speech for which he is still remembered. That’s because the relevance of his remarks has intensified with time. That day 48 years ago, he said:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

“But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Ah! The substance of much TV fare, captured in one photograph!

Wasteland then. Source of carefully cultivated refinement today. Consider the 10 top-rated U.S. TV shows for the week ending April 5::

(1 and 2): The Tuesday and Wednesday airings of “American Idol,” in which thousands of unknowns sing, some get savagely ridiculed, and the winner gets a big recording contract. (3) “Dancing With the Stars,” in which celebrities – often sports notables – sashay around a ballroom with professional dancers. (4 and 8) “NCIS” and “CSI,” two shows involving scientific investigation of dastardly deeds (5) “The Mentalist,” in which a psychic helps the white-lab-coat crowd solve crimes (6) “ER,” a rather bloody emergency-room drama (7) a country-music awards show (9) “Two and a Half Men,” a comedy about a “freewheeling,” hedonistic bachelor, his divorced brother, and his “underachieving” nephew, and (10) a college basketball tournament game.

Some day, if he’s still at his post, curator Bowers can add artifacts from these shows to the nation’s Americana collection.

***

We Don’t Want No Knowledge

For about a year I’ve held onto a New York Times clipping whose content seems to fit perfectly here. Entitled, “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” it’s a story about Susan Jacoby, a scholar of American intellectual history, and her book, The Age of American Unreason.

Magnificent Budapest, the capital of Europe!

The story’s writer, Patricia Cohen, described two truly humiliating examples of the woeful ignorance that many Americans exhibit when it comes to events beyond their noses. In one, a contestant from “American Idol” appears on the TV game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” – a risky premise if there ever was one. She was asked, from a third-grade geography book, “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” Her answer: “I thought Europe was a country.”

Guffaw.

Then in the Times story, Jacoby described overhearing a conversation in a New York bar on September 11, 2001, the day that terrorist-piloted planes leveled the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” she heard one of the men say.

The Pearl Harbor attack did occur in a harbor. But half an ocean away from Vietnam

“What is Pearl Harbor?” asked the other.

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” came the reply.

Ignorance used to be bliss. Now it’s just ignorant.

Nattering Nabob of Negativism?

Spiro Agnew, who needled the media with zippy putdown lines, once said, "If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all."

The ‘nattering’ quote was uttered by President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who was speaking in 1970 about “eastern effete” members of the media. Agnew, a former Maryland governor, was a rumpled and, we all soon learned, corrupt man who had also opined that an intellectual is “a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.” He did not share his views about women and bikes.

De Tocqueville expected to find a backward country but came away from his trip stunned by Americans’ drive and grit

A VOA colleague with whom I shared some of my disillusionment about popular culture did not call me a nattering nabob or a poor bike-parker to my face, but she did remind me that cultural pessimism is hardly new or revolutionary. Nineteenth Century French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville, after a long expedition across the young United States, concluded that we were a shallow, restless, ever-changing, money-driven lot. And my friend pointed out that our newspapers once produced sensationalist and scurrilous “yellow journalism” of little substance, our early television brought us such classics as “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Elvis Presley was denounced in his day as someone whose pelvic gyrations might bring down the republic, and whose rock-‘n’-roll music would ruin the entire world.

Some of today’s rappers have demonstrated keen insight into the human condition, she pointed out. Television has hundreds of channels whose intellectual fare would impress a Rhodes Scholar, and the Internet has put us in contact with concepts and cultures that some of the smartest among us never knew existed.

Cultures like you find in that country over there. Europe.

***

We’re On Our Own

Washington Post columnist John Kelly recently profiled what surely must be one of the last elevator operators in the area. Charlie Patterson was retiring after 44 years of manually closing the elevator door and yanking the control lever that directed the cab to various floors. Most Americans over 60 remember nattily attired elevator operators in big office buildings and department stores. They were virtual tour guides: “Six! Ladies’ apparel, sportswear, costume jewelry,” they would cry out.

This elevator operator in Washington’s Barr Building was caught on film in 1941, the very year VOA’s elevator ops began their work across town

Here at the Voice of America’s headquarters building, just off the National Mall in Washington, some old-timers dimly remember operators on duty inside our nine gleaming, polished-brass elevators. I found two women who worked as clerks in the building shortly after it opened in 1941 as the temporary home of various War Department branches and commissions. One of them, Marjorie Downey, remembers these “lift” operators – along with cafeteria workers – as some of few black faces seen in the building in those highly segregated days, when we also had separate sets of bathrooms for whites and “Negroes.” These operators wore crisp, maroon uniforms with white shirts and ties, Marjorie recalls. She can even quote what she calls “their standard phrase": "All the way to the back and face the front!"

And since the building was full of military types, people no doubt did what they were told.

What really caught my eye was Kelly’s aside that, in the years since Charlie Patterson first ran elevators in Washington’s Ring Building, “we’ve gotten used to doing things for ourselves – things that others once did for us.” Besides running our elevators way back when, he noted, someone pumped our gas, bagged our groceries, and “rang up” our purchases at the store.

Kelly’s list can be greatly expanded. While Americans think of ourselves as pampered, speed, convenience, and, especially, cost-saving have imposed self-reliance upon us. My Miami friend, Marc Kuhn, helped me compile some examples:

Note the relaxed driver, foot on the rear bumper, watching as someone besides himself pumps his gas

• We pump our own gas. I can’t remember the last time anyone spoke these words: “Check your oil?” Forget cleaning the windshield. You’re lucky to find your own vat of dirty water and a torn squeegee wedged between the pumps. This may be the one and only reason I love the State of New Jersey. There by law, only attendants may pump gas, yet the price somehow manages to be cheaper than in the surrounding states.

Sometimes it took three or four switchboard operators to get your call from one part of the country to another

• Where an elite corps of “long-distance operators” once placed all of our out-of-town telephone calls, we now do our own with the push of 12 or 13 buttons. Delivery people used to bring us our milk, bread, pastries, clean laundry, and, to some houses, coal. Now we schlep out and get these things ourselves. And of course we make our own ice; no one that I know of hoists blocks of it on his shoulder, using unwieldy tongs, any longer. If we get a hankering for a sweet ice confection called a “Popsicle” – or a Creamsicle with a dab of filling or an “Eskimo Pie” ice-cream bar – only a drive to the supermarket or “convenience” store will satisfy it. The white trucks of “Good Humor men,” with their tinkling bells and freezers full of treats, are a rarity, although I’ve heard there are some “Mr. Softee” trucks still around.

• Most of us book our own airplane reservations and buy and print our tickets, rather than relying on airline or travel agents. Airlines, in fact, charge us extra if we ask them to do it. We scrounge for most of our own motel and rental-car reservations, maps and directions, and theatre and sports tickets online as well.

• We mostly pick out our own clothes, including shoes, on the Web or from piles on tables in stores, rather than enlisting the counsel of suave sales personnel and tailors. And if we find a grocery-store clerk who knows where to find the peas, or someone in a work apron in a home-improvement store who can navigate through 400 kinds of screws, we’re giddy with joy.

Not only do scanners “ring you up” at the checkout counter, but now there are devices that customers carry down the aisles to record purchases as they go

• There are still checkout cashiers, but more and more store lines lead to unmanned machines. Like dutiful ants, when we reach them, we scan our own crackers or minestrone soup or fresh avocados, and then bag ‘em ourselves. I, for one, defeat the store’s best labor-saving intentions. Staring at the evil, blinking, beeping beast of a machine, I grow hopelessly confused, mistaking arugula for bibb lettuce and entering entirely the wrong code, thus requiring the assistance of an understanding clerk after all.

• Physicians – and TV repairmen – used to come to our houses! Now it takes an executive order, or two weeks’ notice, to get an appointment at the doctor’s office, there to wait another hour next to other sick people, beneath the scowls of the office staff, who must not be disturbed while they enter various billing codes for the “treatment” other patients have been privileged to receive. By the time you get in, you’re well! As for TV service, when a set breaks down we mostly junk it, go to a “big box” electronics store, buy a bigger one, somehow lift it into the trunk, tie it down with a piece of greasy rope we found under the tool kit we've never opened, and lug it home.

Lemme tell you: This doesn’t look like the lunch places across from VOA. They're strictly pay-up-front and pick-up-your-food joints

• Waitresses or waiters used to bring us our coffee or sandwiches at lunch counters or diner booths. Now we stand in line to pay $4 for a barista-brewed Cup of Joe, buy sandwiches out of a machine or from a vendor, and, as often as not, eat lunch at our desks. Lunch places still have tables, but increasingly you go get your own food and beverage at a counter, pay for them, and bring them there.

• And speaking of service, I’d like to know the last time anyone found a strolling cigarette girl, a nightclub photographer, or a shoeshine boy. (Never saw a shoeshine girl.) Now we bring own tobacco products, take our own photos – on our cell phones! – and polish our own shoes.

• Tellers took our money, or gave us some, at the bank. Now, “automated teller” machines do most of this, and different machines count and deposit our loose change. We don’t tote our paychecks to the bank. One computer at the office whisks our meager earnings via still more computers straight into our accounts.

• Not just top executives but also mid-level professionals used to employ the services of their own secretaries or, at a minimum, clerks in the “typing pool.” Now the word “secretary” is an epithet, beneath the dignity of the boss’s “executive assistant.” Call her – or him, he said, enlighteningly – a secretary, and you’ll be brought up on charges. We type our stuff, do our own research using computer search engines, and buzz our own way into buildings that long ago eliminated their “front desk” personnel. Usually, too, we open our own doors – “doorman” being another fast-disappearing occupation.

Do this! Do that! And don’t expect me to do it for you, bud

So we’re not so pampered after all. And one of the results is that we sometimes feel like the ball in a pinball machine, whacked here and there amid a lot of noise. If we’re lucky, we schedule some contemplation, maybe on a vacation whose arrangements we make for ourselves. I don’t mind pressing my own elevator button, or opening my own door, or typing this blog for myself. But writing about all this makes me want to pack the car and hit the road. For New Jersey, where someone might ask me, “Check the oil?” once again.

***

Vision of Things to Come?

One of the recent “Bizarro” cartoons by the brilliant Dan Piraro showed a reasonable likeness of New York City’s central library, with its lofty set of stairs, regal columns, and sentinel lion.

Out front, Piraro drew an ornate stone tablet into which is chiseled:

MUSEUM OF THE INTERNET
Formerly the New York Public Library

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Cup of Joe. A cup of coffee. The term could relate to the average American – the “average Joe,” or perhaps it dates to World War I, when U.S. admiral Josephus Daniels broke with naval tradition by banning alcohol, including wine in the officers’ mess, aboard American ships. Thereafter coffee – deridingly called a ‘cup of Joe – was the strongest brew on board.

Guffaw. A boisterous laugh.

Highbrow. Having or demonstrating culture, refinement, and taste.

Nabob. Originally a Mogul high official, the term came to be associated with executives of the British East India Company and, later, of any highly placed – and perhaps a tad pompous – individuals.

Nattering. Chattering, usually about things of little importance.

Oeuvre. A work, or life’s work, of art, music, or film. This word is often used somewhat pretentiously, since “one’s oeuvre” sounds terribly cultured.
Pratfall. An often humiliating slip or fall, fast, onto one’s backside. “Prat” was an Old English term for one’s buttocks.

Schlep. From Yiddish: to tediously drag oneself someplace.

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Mall of Americans

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to work in an ordinary office or veterinarian’s clinic or wine shop next door to some historic landmark, say the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

What would it be like to walk to work each day past the Taj Mahal, or live in a little cottage half a block from the Louvre? Would these iconic attractions quickly fade into the background and seem no more remarkable than a bus shelter or branch bank?

Surely not, you say. Scurrying along the Neva in St. Petersburg, day in and day out, one could never ignore the Winter Palace.

Well, don’t be so sure.

At the end of every day that I am at work in Washington, I pack up my books and papers and empty lunch container and walk out of VOA headquarters, heading north. I trudge – or stride jauntily if it has been a good day – straight ahead a kilometer or so to the Judiciary Square Metro subway station, where I can catch a Red Line train for the short hop to my hometown across the Maryland state line.

Break in the Monotony

The National Mall extends from the U.S. Capitol past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. There are reflecting pools at each end

En route, I cross the wide expanse of the National Mall. Mall, as in public open space, not stores and escalators and crowded parking lots. Often there’s a soccer or kickball game in motion, or people throwing Frisbees to their dogs. Sometimes a big tent or two or 20 has appeared on the grass, signaling some sort of festival. Or roustabouts are assembling risers and a stage for a concert. Knots of tourists amble about, some turning their maps this way and that to get their bearings.

“Need directions?” I always ask, as if it weren’t obvious. Out of stubborn pride but with thanks, they often reply in the negative and go back to running their fingers along their maps.

Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his memorable “I have a dream” speech on the Mall at the conclusion of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

Quite often, large hunks of the Mall are roped off and inaccessible, either to give the trampled grass a fighting chance at regeneration or to get the grounds ready for a zillion-person march or a fireworks display or a presidential inauguration. Or just for a “movie under the stars” in the summertime.

In cranky, self-centered moments, I sometimes think they throw up rope lines or snow fences just to drive me into that deep puddle where the storm drain has backed up, or to spoil the view.

One, Two, Three . . . SMILE!

Ah, that view! Which people from Kansas and Korea and Kuala Lumpur alike spend good money, and lots of it, to come see. Our monuments don’t lean, thankfully, but visitors can’t help taking each other’s pictures in front of them.

Construction of the Washington monument began in 1846 but halted in 1854 because of a lack of funds. The obelisk stood as a 46-meter-high stump for 25 years until work resumed

I get a special kick out those who fire off their flash attachments when they’re shooting the United States Capitol, half a kilometer away, on a cloudy day or in the dead of night, as if this puny candlepower would emblazon more than the parking meter directly in front of them. And it amuses me to watch a determined shutterbug trying to squeeze ten assorted friends and the impossibly tall (169-meter) Washington Monument obelisk, or “National Pencil,” as my kids preferred to call it, into the frame of a palm-sized disposable camera.

On each little sally to the Metro, I practically brush against the striking, curvilinear sandstone of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and I could reach out and touch the funky sculpture beside the modern-art wing of the National Gallery of Art, or take a healthy 3.2-kilometer detour to the far end of the Mall to contemplate the impressive Lincoln Memorial.

Tuned in but Dropped Out

Like the Parisian cottage owner near the Louvre, I suspect, I don’t pay much attention to these places any more. My thoughts drift elsewhere, my headset is tuned to news or sports, and my gaze is at the display of the number of seconds remaining on the street-crossing signs rather than familiar monuments and museums.

Snow at the Korean War Veterans Memorial is especially dramatic because it harks back to the awful conditions faced by soldiers in the Korean conflict of the early 1950s

Not so, though, I must admit, at certain dusks when the sunset turns the Capitol Building a shimmering orangy-pink, or on rainy days when low-slung clouds kiss the Washington Monument, or snow piles high on the patrol of stainless-steel soldiers at the Korean War Veterans Memorial. Then, it’s impossible to ignore the beauty and significance of the treasure that I like to call the Mall of Americans. Indeed, I’ve never been to another place where “going to the Mall” didn’t mean a trip to a shopping arcade.

The National Mall is a historic, evolving, and quite controversial piece of real estate. As the Examiner newspaper noted in 2006, “Washington has more than 400 municipal and national parks covering thousands of acres across all corners of the city. But for the estimated 26 million tourists who will converge on the District this summer, the National Mall is the only one most of them will ever see.”

C’est Magnifique

Pierre L’Enfant was a talented but temperamental fellow. His layout of Washington was brilliant, but someone else had to finish the job after George Washington fired him

As plans for a new national capital took shape in the 1790s, President George Washington and his handpicked city planner, artist and engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant – who had served under a fellow Frenchman, Major General Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette on the American side in the revolution against Britain – tramped the banks of the Potomac River together.

L’Enfant’s baroque Plan of the City in 1791 laid out a goosefoot arrangement of wide, Parisian-style radials outward from the “Congress House,” or U.S. Capitol. And on a line due west, he drew a “vast esplanade,” along which he envisioned embassies, grand homes, and, as he wrote Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, “all such sort of places as may be attractive to the learned and afford diversion to the idle.”

He called this expanse his “place of resort.” Not last resort, I hasten to point out, but resort, meaning a useful and enjoyable pleasure ground rather than just a panoply of embassies or cultural institutions.

Click to enlarge this image of L’Enfant’s plan for Washington. The dark lines toward the center are canals, including an ill-fated one along the north edge of the National Mall

Running along the northern edge of the Mall, L’Enfant drew a canal extending from a Capitol Hill trickle called Tiber Creek. Future presidents would ride grand barges up this canal to their inaugurations, he felt certain. His patron, Washington, would get an equestrian statue. (Instead, Washington’s tribute would turn out to be that 169-meter-tall pencil.)

Not Paradise By a Long Shot

L’Enfant’s resort and ceremonial corridor would be a long time coming. Victorian landscapers filled the space with gardens and copses. Sheep and cows grazed behind the first Agriculture Department building, and the U.S. cavalry kept horses there as well.

Industrial neighborhoods that included residential shacks and stables, belching smokestacks and a huge gas-storage tank, the city’s most opulent brothel, and a muddy lane called "Louse Alley" – as in the bloodsucking insect – rose just across the Capitol’s reflecting pool. There was no need to rue the poor view of monuments, because there was none at all.

In 1873, Congress granted a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad a right-of-way across the Mall to its terminal on Pennsylvania Avenue. Soon the middle of the Mall was a dingy rat’s nest of brambles, coal piles, and railroad spurs. L’Enfant’s canal had deteriorated into a pestilent sewer. All that passed for pastoral was, as historian Jon A. Peterson describes it, “a chain of individual public parks, each associated with a different Victorian building, most of them built of red brick.” There was no government building or memorial or tourist attraction – just a fetid, oozing Potomac River tidal flat – beyond the Washington Monument obelisk.

Big-Time Beautification

In short, L’Enfant’s plan had been, to borrow a word from the report of a new set of planners at the turn of the 20th Century, “perverted” by greed and haphazard development.

The gleaming white buildings at the 1893 Chicago world expo, which were almost all temporary, infatuated a nation full of drab and dingy industrial cities

Those same, dreamy planners had returned inspired from the “Great White City,” modeled after ancient Greece and Rome, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – so-called because it marked, a year late, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s first journey to the New World. The success of this dazzling fair unleashed “City Beautiful” fervor to turn sooty old cities into classical showplaces. In Washington, its enthusiasts included New York Beaux-Arts architect Charles McKim; landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; and Daniel Burnham, the dynamo who had orchestrated the Chicago expo. “Make no small plans,” Burnham believed, and he and the others set about to tidy up the tangled National Mall.

Away went the railroad tracks and slag piles, briar patches and gas-lit carriage paths. Out, too, went thousands of trees as the planners restored L’Enfant’s original breathing space and vistas. Engineers filled in the smelly canal and flats leading from the great obelisk to the Potomac River, where a Memorial Bridge would one day connect the new Lincoln Memorial with Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Terrific Treasure Troves

The first of many Smithsonian Institution museum buildings on or along the Mall was the “Castle,” which has served as both Smithsonian headquarters and exhibit space

The National Mall became open pleasure grounds at last, bounded, over time, by a parade of free Smithsonian Institution museums – Natural History, American History, African Art and more. They became powerful tourist magnets.

The Air and Space Museum, whose 23 galleries display U.S. spacecraft, the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flyer, and the plane in which Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh first traversed the Atlantic solo in 1927, is now, according to Smithsonian officials, the most-visited museum in the world.

The Lincoln Memorial, built on that landfill hard by the Potomac, was designed

The Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece, is said to have been architect Henry Bacon’s inspiration for the Lincoln Memorial

by architect Henry Bacon and dedicated in 1922. Daniel Chester French’s 6-meter-high statue of a seated Lincoln looking out over the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol Building, is made of 28 interlocking blocks of Georgia marble. The memorial’s 36 Doric columns represent the states of the union at the time of Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. And above the building’s frieze are the chiseled names and entry dates of the 48 states in the Union when the memorial was completed. Late-coming Alaska and Hawaii get a mention in an inscription on the memorial’s terrace.

Everything was going smoothly, vista-wise, until two world wars came along, and the War Department, starved for space for a suddenly burgeoning cadre of clerks, erected row after row of temporary buildings, or “tempos,” in the handiest open space available. This was, of course, the National Mall. The Washington Post called tempos “examples of the barracks school of architecture.” Built to last 10 years at most, they proved surprisingly sturdy. Most were low, two-story, wooden, un-airconditioned creations that just about everybody considered an eyesore, a fire hazard, and sitting ducks if there were ever an air attack.

There weren’t just a few wartime “tempo” buildings cluttering the Mall. These lined the north side, just above the unfinished Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool

None came, and tempos stuck around for many years beyond their projected shelf life. No sooner had the last vestige of slums been cleared from the east end of the Mall in the 1930s, for instance, than a complex called “Tempo R” popped up right across the street from what would one day be our VOA headquarters location. A 1967 plat map of Washington showed Tempo R big as life across from our building, more than two decades after World War II ended.

But tempo clutter could not deter tourists or the march of newer memorials – to Vietnam, World War II, Korean War veterans and others. The thinking went that heroes deserve their due in the greatest, albeit increasingly jammed, plaza in the capital.

Safer But Less Serene

Temporary security fencing, to be followed by slightly more attractive variations, put an end to the free and unfettered access to, and look of, the National Mall

In the security-wary aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America came bulldozers and security fences, bollards and stepped-up U.S. Park Police patrols on the National Mall. “One of the great public spaces of the world . . . is fast collapsing into a symbol of fear, restriction, and bureaucratic control,” Judy Scott Feldman, chairperson of a nonprofit citizens’ and research group called the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, wrote in 2005.

That group keeps posing a pertinent question: Just who’s in charge of the National Mall? It took some persistent unraveling to determine that eight different congressional committees oversee at least six federal agencies that have pieces of the responsibility for the Mall. Congress, the National Park Service, the National Capital Planning Commission, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, and a commission on American battle monuments elbow for authority and sometimes get in each other’s way. The District of Columbia government, the Department of Agriculture, a commission of fine arts, park police, and others also assert authority from time to time.

And there’s another source of confusion: What exactly defines the National Mall? Where does it begin and end, reach and not reach?

This is of little direct import to visitors or to residents like me who walk across the Mall, set up volleyball nets, or jog along its gravel paths. But it’s central to the Mall’s future and the degree to which new memorials or other developments are allowed into its space.

Where Are We, Exactly?

What are the boundaries of the National Mall? Click this and pick! Various entities draw the lines differently

Because of those odiferous swamp flats, the National Mall originally stretched only from the Capitol to a hillock upon which the Washington Monument rose. The landfill completed the long rectangle from the Capitol westward to the river that most Americans associate with the Mall. But those City Beautiful planners in the early 20th Century considered the entire Capitol Grounds to be part of the National Mall as well; and they stretched the boundary southward across a tidal basin so that the memorial to President Jefferson could be included. The local government and National Park Service define the Mall in four different ways as well, marked in aqua, red, green, and pink in the accompanying illustration.

“Is it any wonder that Congress – and the agencies with management and review authority – seem confused?” asked the National Coalition to Save Our Mall just last month. “A Congressional Research Service report concluded in 2003 that there is ‘no statutory description or map of the Mall.’ It’s time for one.”

Almost six years later, no one can yet say precisely where National Mall does and does not extend. And this makes it hard to get straight answers when tougher questions get asked:

• Should huge, privately sponsored events such as concerts and kick-off rallies to mark the opening of the National Football League season be allowed to literally take over whole sections of the Mall, kicking out the soccer players and Frisbee throwers and strolling tourists?

The National Mall belongs to all Americans. But it’s not always pure public space. Private entities can rent parts of it, and advertising is not a stranger to its grounds

• To what degree should corporate sponsorship be allowed to advertise in a space that is, if not hallowed, at least revered?

• Who’s responsible for keeping the National Mall safe? Park Police have weightier priorities, including the direct security of a democracy’s grandest monuments, than trying to catch muggers. Yet local cops rarely make pinches in what is generally considered federal space.

• And when is enough enough when it comes to new edifices in what was meant to be an open park? In 2006, ground was broken on a new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial along the Tidal Basin.

No Longer Our Little Secret

That year, the Dallas Morning News editorialized:

“The museums and memorials on the Mall in Washington are about to elbow out your everyday American family. The area is simply overcrowded and becoming more so each year.

“Sure, the stretch from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial remains an inspiring vista, but in its midst is such a clutter of other monuments, security barriers and commercial kiosks that you'd swear you were visiting an amusement park loaded up with Twist-a-Ramas and cotton candy stands.

“What happened to the stateliness? The place where visitors from Idaho and Germany alike stop, reflect and breathe in America?”

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, stands to the south of the traditional Mall, across a tidal basin. It is now included in many Mall maps

The National Mall, which is sometimes called the nation’s “front yard,” has become an expensive (yet also crowded) yard, stretching, by some reckonings, across golf courses, paddleboat basins, and security fences far beyond anything Pierre L’Enfant had in mind. Numerous visions of the Mall’s third century have been floated, down to and including construction of some sort of beach along the Potomac River.

What Would L’Enfant Say?

In 2005, the D.C. Preservation League, which the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson uncharitably called “a well-meaning group of aesthetes, hobbyists, architects, and civic-minded buttinskis,"[too wild a word even for Wild Words! – but it means meddlers who “butt in” where they don’t belong] placed the National Mall on its list of the region's most endangered places. The National Trust for Historic Preservation had already done the same.

“Preservationists have a weakness for extravagant overstatement,” Ferguson grumbled. “Yet even a non-preservationist would have to admit that the League is right to draw attention to policies that choke the Mall, threatening to change it irretrievably, and for the worse.”

Having written all this, I resolve to turn off my headsets more often and pay closer attention to all that surrounds me on the Mall of Americans.

***

My title is a bit of a play on words on the better-known Mall of America, which is plenty large itself. The retail and entertainment complex, in Bloomington, Minnesota, includes 500 specialty stores, 50 restaurants, seven nightclubs, and the largest indoor theme park in America.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Copse. This copse has nothing to do with robbers. It’s a shortened version of the word “coppice,” which is a grove or small thicket of trees.

Plat map. A plan or chart of a piece of land that depicts architectural features such as homes and stores and schools. These maps are often huge and bound in what look like giant scrapbooks. Invaluable historical documents, plat maps show the progression of development in a neighborhood over the years.

Sally. To rush forward, as in a military maneuver. We sometimes add a word and speak of “sallying forth.” In fact, Sally Forth was whimsically borrowed as the name of the main character in a popular newspaper comic strip that debuted in 1982.

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