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Millions of visitors to Washington, DC, will marvel
at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and
other major attractions in the U.S. capital without having a clue about a key
person behind these structures. Today, the birthday of the memorial’s
architect, John Russell Pope, is a
good time to assess this legacy.
Pope, born in New York City on this day in 1874, converted
the New York mansion of industrialist Henry Clay Frick into a public art gallery
and designed highly acclaimed additions to Tate Gallery and the British Museum
in London. But his supreme triumphs may have been in Washington, where he
influenced public construction both through his own designs and as a member of
the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and of the Board of Architectural Consultants.
His own work in the capital included the Temple of the Scottish Rite of
Freemasons, the National Archives Building, the National Gallery of Art, and
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
Pope died in 1937, six years before the Jefferson
Memorial opened. It would be interesting to see how he would have worked with
Franklin Roosevelt, whose pet project this was (and who, it is said, monitored
daily its construction from the White House).
The erection of a memorial to Jefferson was approved
by Congress in July 1934. But, in the last three years of his life, Pope became
embroiled in some controversy over his design. Modern art was already rearing
its head, and the neoclassical style that Pope advocated—the same kind that Jefferson
himself favored—was out of fashion with such parties as The League for Progress
in Architecture (which denounced the memorial as “serving no purpose
whatsoever”), the faculty of the Columbia University School of Architecture (which
termed the design a “lamentable misfit
in time and place”) and Frank Lloyd Wright (who wrote President Roosevelt that
the work was an “arrogant insult to the memory of Thomas Jefferson”).
To his credit, FDR backed the design, which was
modeled on Rome’s Pantheon. Now it dominates the Tidal Basin, a powerful
tribute to lasting ideals of freedom, an embodiment of the perfect ideals of the imperfect creator of an imperfect republic.
(I took this snapshot last November, while I was visiting DC.)
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