Historic Double Jeopardy and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial


Alois Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments” (1903) is, as Kurt W. Forster wittily declared, a “touchstone” for those who wish to put the monument/memory relationship on a firm foundation. Even in our memorial-building age, we acknowledge the wisdom of Riegl’s observation that for all its look of rock-hard incorruptibility, the “intentional” or commemorative monument enjoys only a limited life span. As Riegl saw it, within one generation the intentional monument is exposed to what Forster called “historic double jeopardy: memory is all that sustains its meaning but its physical form will have to survive the vagaries of changing perceptions and values,” which include, but are hardly limited to, taste, those “ripples created by fashion.”


The Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., commemorating the man who was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, was designed by John Russell Pope between 1935 and 1937 and built by the federal government between 1938 and 1943. It is a monument that bears the indelible signs of this early exposure to the fluctuations of memory and the oscillations of taste. Although the political and architectural genesis of the Jefferson Memorial has been studied, the role played by memory in its history has gone unexplored. It is retraced here with the help of a new theorization of memory by and for historians, in the hope that this recording can be of aid for those who wish to grasp that most elusive of the historian’s terms, collective memory, and that most evanescent of relationships, monument/memory.


The history of the Jefferson Memorial is recalled here with the help of a previously unknown drawing made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who asked the Congress to create the memorial. The drawing is attributed to him by an anonymous hand, who entitled it the “Sketch of Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial by Franklin Delano Roosevelt—on his desk in his White House Office—When he asked Mr. Kent E. Keller—to take hold and put it over” and dated it May 7, 1938.


Not despite the fact, but because the drawing does not correspond to the project approved by Roosevelt in March 1938 and constructed from 1938 to 1943, it can be said to reveal the manner in which exposure to the double jeopardy of surging and receding memories and capricious aesthetic preferences shaped the Jefferson Memorial’s form and meaning...