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Saturday 22 November 2008

Walk on the wild side

James Forsyth wanders through Washington DC

Arlington also speaks to the American tendency to create a more perfect past. It is commonly thought that having America’s national cemetery in the grounds of the estate of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, illustrates how the nation bound up its wounds after the Civil War. But the reality is rather different: the Union actually started burying its dead there in 1864 as a deliberate provocation to Lee who had turned down the command of the Union army.

After Arlington, stroll across one of the bridges that span the Potomac and down to the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson sums up the paradox that America faces when it contemplates its founding: the drafter of the Declaration of Independence kept slaves. The Memorial slightly glosses over this contradiction, with a passage where Jefferson criticised slavery inscribed on one of its walls. Indeed, all the monuments in DC are adorned with large amounts of text, illustrating just how much, to borrow a phrase as Obama has, words matter in this creedal nation. Outside of the cherry blossom season, the Jefferson memorial is almost deserted, allowing you space to sit and drink it in.

If you walk back around the basin and past the White House, you will be struck by its modesty. It looks no more imposing than a decent-sized 18th-century English country house. It says something about the English-speaking peoples’ attitude to power that both Number 10 and the White House are not palaces but residences. Inside, the White House is even less grand than it appears from the outside. Those expecting it to be like it is in The West Wing will be sorely disappointed. Even the Oval Office itself is a rather small room, akin to a professor’s study.

No trip to DC is complete without a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. The view from the steps down to the Washington Memorial and beyond to Congress is magnificent. At sunset or on a clear night with a full moon, even the most hardened America-sceptic would feel moved as they look down from the steps where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech with Lincoln at his back and the reflecting pool below. It is, perhaps, the most romantic place in DC and no site anywhere in America more embodies the idea of the Constitution as a colossus striding through history to ensure that its blessings are brought to every citizen.

When the city was founded it was thought healthy that the capital of the Republic was being built on a swamp. The terrible climate, they imagined, would keep the federal government from growing too large. That hope was dashed by the unlikely combination of the world wars, the Great Depression and air-conditioning — until the invention of the latter, the Foreign Office considered DC a hardship posting for British diplomats.

Washington has not had a good press over the years. Derided by JFK as a city of ‘Southern efficiency and Northern charm’ and with, until recently, the highest murder rate in the United States, it was almost as if Peter Charles L’Enfant had designed the capital to drain the idealism out of those young Americans who are drawn to the seat of power. But in recent years, it has transformed itself, finally recovering from the horrendous race riots of 1968 and the white flight that followed. Just don’t try navigating by the Capitol dome and the moonlight.

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