The National Mall Goes Kitsch

America's cluttered back yard shows just how hard it is to say no to special interests.

Radley Balko | November 27, 2006

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Same for the veterans of the Korean War. The Depression-era generation then moved for an FDR memorial. Then came the World War II vets. And so on. We now have a Mall that's frequently overcrowded, less scenic, less peaceful and contemplative, and is probably only going to degenerate from here.

And it's not as if recent additions have added much in the way of ambiance.  The Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and even the Vietnam memorials are simple, elegant, and poignant.

Tellingly, the Mall's most recent additions — FDR, World War II, and the American Indian museum — are cumbersome, expansive, and seem overly concerned with not offending sensibilities.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that if the nation insisted on giving him a memorial, it should be no larger than his desk. In the five decades between his death and the opening of his memorial in 1998, "no bigger than my desk" grew into a sprawling, unwieldy, 7.5-acre attempt to capture his legacy — not a bad metaphor for what's happened to the federal government under and since Roosevelt's time in the White House.

The World War II Memorial, rushed to completion after badgering from big swingers like Tom Hanks and Bob Dole, is a clunky, checklist attempt at a memorial that overwhelms with an assault of fountains, flags, plaques, obelisks, and concrete. Designers languished not to offend anyone by omission, so they erred on the side of including everything — every state, every subgroup of soldier, every military branch, every theater, and every country gets a pillar, a fountain, a flag or a plaque. Simple and elegant, it isn't.

Then there's the National Museum of the American Indian, a hulking slab of stucco concrete a stone's throw from the U.S. Capitol that upon opening was universally panned.  Slate's Timothy Noah, for example, called the pet project of former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R- Colo.) "a public service announcement" for Native Americans that had almost "no scholarly value."

None of this is to say any or all of these groups aren't genuinely aggrieved, accomplished, and/or worthy of merit or remembrance.  That's beside the point.  What the debacle that's become of the National Mall does demonstrate is just how difficult it is for the federal government to say "no" when interest groups — especially sympathetic ones — come calling.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for Reason.  This column originally appeared at FoxNews.com.