Revisiting the Washington Monument
Written by DCist contributor Benjamin Schuman-Stoler
Last week in our “revisiting sites we’ve walked by a hundred times" series we presented the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This week, we’ll look at that huge phallus in the exact center of the original D.C. map -- the Washington Monument.
Screaming nothing but glory and testament, it is the classic D.C. monument. But we know its background isn’t as simple as its geometric profile. The National Park Service commissioned a fascinating history of the Monument in the early 1970s. The text of the resulting book, A History of the Washington Monument, 1844-1968, Washington, D.C., by George J. Olszewski, is now available in full online, and history buffs will find it worth a thorough read from the proposals to the dedication.
We’ve all seen that point where the stones abruptly change color, but even though we know the Monument’s construction was delayed because of funding or the Civil War or something, we don’t really think twice about it. Though it's tempting to list the number of times the organizers behind the Monument’s construction ran out of money, marble, or public enthusiasm, we were intrigued by Olszewski's take on how one antebellum political party managed to derail the entire project and, by stealing the Pope’s Stone, add further infamy to their already ignominious reputation.
It was the American Party, in fact, that wrecked the project and left the 176 ft. stump of a monument standing for 21 years. The American Party was a group of xenophobes who hated immigrants—especially Catholic immigrants—so much that they had to keep it a secret. When asked about the political actions of the American Party, its members said they "knew nothing," hence the name history remembers them by.
The Know-Nothings were so virulently against Catholicism that they were willing to attack the Monument itself, no matter that it stood as patriotic symbol for the nation as a whole. The U.S. had sent a call out for friends around the world to donate blocks in order to help allay yet another funding crisis. When the Know-Nothings got wind that Pope Pius IX had sent a block of historic marble from the Temple of Concord in Rome as a gift to be included in the construction of the Monument, they decided to act.
Between 1 and 2 a.m. on Monday, March 6, 1854, four to ten Know-Nothings barricaded the door to the watchman’s hut with stones found from the then-swamplike surroundings, fixed the Pope’s Stone onto a handcart, and took it away. The poor watchman was fired for not shooting warning shots from his shotgun, and the Pope’s Stone has never been found.
Rumors say it lies at the bottom of the Potomac. Some say it was dredged up from there, but then lost again. For a while it was thought to be located at the intersection of P and 22nd streets in Georgetown, but a power company did some digging and couldn't find it. Some Catholic sources say that it was ground up into mortar and used on the Monument itself. One report from 2001 says a large marble stone was found in New Mexico with an inscription saying something about the Washington Monument, but it turns out it was a block meant to be donated by a local Native American tribe that lived there in the 1850s. In any case, the theft of the Pope’s Stone remains, like Jimmy Hoffa and Atlantis, one of the world’s most curious missing objects.
Alas, stealing the Pope’s Stone was not the Know-Nothings’ only act of influence on the Monument. The night before a February 1855 congressional vote on whether or not to give $200,000 to the Washington National Monument Society, a meeting of 750 Know-Nothings (many of whom were also members of the Monument Society) voted 17 more of their own officers into the Monument Society. The next morning, they split from the Monument Society and announced that they, the Know-Nothings themselves, were in possession of the Monument. In reaction, Congress tabled the vote and it was to be 21 years before they appropriated any more funds for the Monument’s construction.
During the almost three years after the split, the Know-Nothings superficially continued with construction, but utterly failed at it. They only built 26 ft. of masonry -- which was so atrocious it was later torn down -- and had raised a treasury of only $285 by the time the Party collapsed and they relinquished hold over the Monument.
Their control of the Monument was so catastrophic that Congress passed a law in 1857 naming a specific list of incorporators to assure that the Monument Society would remain on track, “for the purpose of completing the erection now in progress of a great National Monument.”
The Monument was eventually erected, of course, and dedicated in February, 1885. Find the rest of its history here.
Photo by Flickr user Ryan Orr.