The Founders in Public Memory: D.C.’s Monumental Core and the Rhetorical Character of the George Mason Memorial

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the George Mason Memorial’s obscurity is due to the memorialization of its subject in a way that does not conform with broader cultural understandings of how an American founding figure “should” be remembered. To make this argument, I explore the history and motivations of the memorial and situate that history within the larger context of the increased nationalistic and patriotic impulses in American culture during the aftermath of 9/11. I then compare the rhetorical character of the memorial to two other memorials to founding figures in the monumental core – the Washington Memorial and Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The George Mason Memorial’s design differs from more familiar understandings of American founding figures as towering heroes and emblems of masculine, nationalistic ideals. An examination of this site offers insight into how a memorial’s continued existence in public memory is strongly impacted by whether it conforms to the social norms and expectations of its visitors.

KEYWORDS:

• Public memory
• memorials
• American identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By monuments to founding figures, I am referring only to those monuments and memorials located in the monumental core that are dedicated to individuals who contributed to America’s founding as a nation. This excludes the Memorial to the 57 Signers of the Declaration of Independence. I am also excluding any statues of founding figures that are a part of the National Statuary Hall Collection.

2. These quotes speak to the one major element that all three memorials have in common: they all work to ignore the fact that they memorialize slaveholders. While the lack of any real reference to Washington makes this task simple at the Washington Monument, the carefully selected quotations at both the Jefferson and George Mason Memorials demonstrate how all of these memorials work to erase the issue of slavery from memorialization of the founders. While these issues are not so easily ignored in the small exhibit located under the Jefferson Memorial, they are entirely absent from the memorial itself.