Sure, you know the Washington Monument
in D.C. It honors our first president. When it was dedicated in 1885, it was
the tallest structure in the world, all 555 feet of it.
You may not know that the Washington
National Monument Society was founded in 1833 to build the memorial obelisk.
Why did it take 52 years to finish it?
Part of the explanation is poor management. The original society, with Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John
Marshall as president, made a silly decision to raise $1 million for the
project by asking 1,000,000 Americans to chip in $1 each. At the time, there
were only about 13 million Americans. In the first three years, they collected
about $20,000. By 1847, they had gathered in $87,000, enough to get the work
started.
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| Washington Monument, under construction |
By 1854 the base of the marble obelisk
was 156 feet high. Ugly politics brought the project to a standstill. Men
aligned with the nativist Know Nothing Party—it created a political power base
by exaggerating anti-immigration and anti-Catholic fears among a population
that opposed German and Irish Catholic immigration—gained control of the
monument society and effectively shut down the work when Pope Pius IX sent a
marble block as a contribution to honor Washington’s memory. There was
vandalism at the site, fundraising bogged down and then the Civil War pushed
the project onto everyone’s back burner.
The Congress didn’t get around to restarting the work until 1876. With
federal funding and project management, the gleaming obelisk was dedicated
within eight years.
You might ask: What does nativism,
xenophobia, religious intolerance and hatred have to do with the purpose of the
Washington Monument?
Good question.
What’s the point of nativism,
xenophobia, religious intolerance and hatred? What motivates the people who
sing those ugly songs?
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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