Kirk Savage

On his book Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape

Cover Interview of March 02, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“I propose moratorium on permanent public monuments in Washington; experimentation with temporary memorials.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“The creation of the Lincoln and Grant memorials, intended to unify the Mall around a Civil War narrative of national rebirth, introduced notes of suffering and tragedy into what had been an exclusively triumphal landscape.”

On the second:

“Without a brilliant West Point officer named Thomas Lincoln Casey, the nation’s monumental core might never have emerged.”

history / biography / 19th century / presidency / 20th century / architecture / 21st century / urban planning / monuments / washington dc /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009