The Washington Monument: Shutdown, Slavery, Subjugation, and Okinawa

[This post is in response to a commenter’s observation of the quasi-pharonic majesty of the ostensibly democratic monuments in our nation’s capital.  On 10/8/13 I tweeked the sequencing of the paragraphs and, on further reflection, drew a parallel between the antics of the Know-Nothings and the current shutdown/default rumpus.  PL]

Tourists cannot visit the Washington Monument—or even its National Park Service websites--at present, thanks to the suspension of non-essential services on the occasion of the government shutdown.  As an alternative, China Matters offers a virtual tour of the Washington Monument highlighting lesser known aspects of its construction, such as the possible role of slave labor, and the remarkable participation of the Ryukyu Kingdom a.k.a. Okinawa in providing commemorative stonework for the edifice.

At the time of President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, the use of slave labor to build the Capitol and the White House was extensively reported in an ironic “look how far we’ve come” vein.  Here’s a link to a piece on PBS interviewing historian Jesse Holland about his book Black Men Built the Capitol.*

It is likely that slaves worked on many Washington D.C. construction projects before 1862, either directly in the capital district or at the Maryland quarries which provided the sandstone, limestone, and granite that went into government buildings and monuments.  However, because of incomplete records, slave participation in the creation of antebellum edifices like the Washington Monument can often only be inferred, not proven.

In Maryland and Washington D.C., the pure, labor-intensive plantation economy—and the year-round need for slave labor--was less pervasive than in the Deep South.  Therefore, to maximize income, owners sometimes rented out slaves as contract laborers by their owners for the harder and dirtier jobs such as quarry work or temporary projects like capital construction during the slow season.

Use of slave labor in the quarrying of the red sandstone for the Smithsonian Institute has been documented. 

It appears likely that slave labor was also involved in the quarrying of the marble used in the first stage of the construction of the Washington Monument.  Construction began in 1848 during the antebellum era and utilized marble from Cockeysville, Maryland.  The owner of the quarry held slaves, but apparently leased out actual exploitation of the quarry to outside contractors, so there is no “smoking gun”.  However, given the labor patterns prevailing in northern Maryland at the time, slave participation in the quarry workforce appears likely.

Embarrassingly, construction of the Washington Monument proceeded in fits and starts since the Washington National Monument Association--the private foundation in charge of building the edifice--proved incapable of raising the requisite funds from the public, despite the offer of a 15% bounty offered to agents soliciting funds.

Embarrassment turned to humiliation in 1854, as the monument became the focus and ambitions of the Native American Party, the virulently anti-foreign and anti-Catholic movement known to an unforgiving posterity as the “Know Nothing Party” for the stock reply “I know nothing” that members were supposed to give in response to queries concerning the semi-secret group’s activities.

The Know Nothing’s most spectacular clandestine coup involved its shenanigans relating to the Washington Monument.  

Over its history, the W.N.M.A. had solicited or accepted a number of memorial stones to be mounted on the stairwells of the monument.  The monument—commemorating America’s foremost Mason and also a pile of cut stone (rather than monolith structure characteristic of obelisks of antiquity)—was obviously a Freemason’s wet dream.  A Mason presided at the laying of the cornerstone, and dozens of memorial stones from various masonic organizations line the monument’s interior walls.  Many more stones came from state governments and various municipal organizations.  But a handful of stones were contributed by foreign governments or jurisdictions like Bremen, Siam, Brazil, etc.

Fatefully, in 1854, Pope Pius IX donated a stone from the Roman Temple of Concord for inclusion in the Washington Monument.  Agitation against the “Stone from Rome” and the dark shadow of papal domination it allegedly represented became a high profile media crusade for the Know Nothings.  After an escalating barrage of petitions and letters to the editor, the stone was stolen from the construction site in an elaborately choreographed operation seemingly meant to obscure the fact that the seizure was accomplished with inside assistance; the offending stone was carted off, then probably smashed and pitched into the Potomac. 

The grievous offense of the papist stone provided justification for a further Know Nothing coup to “protect the monument.”  With the connivance of a sympathetic clerk of the monument association, an illegal election of directors was called, and a packed meeting of recently registered members of the association elected a slate of Know Nothing directors.  The new group seized physical control of the construction site, announced it was saving the monument from construction and management at the hands of Catholics and foreigners, and embarked on a fund-raising appeal limited to members of the American Party.

There was more at work than lumpen goonery.  The Know Nothings benefited from the sub rosa assistance of people of position in the Washington elite, some of whom had hitched their political wagon to the American Party and its political platform of combating the alien/Catholic menace.  Ex-President Millard Fillmore ran on a Know Nothing ticket two years later, in 1856, in an unsuccessful effort to win a second, non-consecutive term.

The Know-Nothings Washington Monument operation looks a lot like one of those hot-button right-wing fundraising scams: hyping the threat to some high profile cherished traditional value—guns, right to life, freedom from Kenyan socialist healthcare, The Washington Monument!—in order to wring money out of the frantic faithful and mobilize the base for the upcoming election.

In 1858, after four years of Know Nothing management, the faction surrendered control of the monument association.  No construction of significance had taken place and the directors passed on only a few hundred dollars its successors.  Maybe the funds raised had been diverted to the uses of the American Party, which performed adequately as a third party in the presidential election with Millard Fillmore as its standard-bearer, but evaporated in the furnace of the Civil War.

With the monument about one-third completed, construction was halted for several decades and the monument took the form of a short, squat stump that Mark Twain likened to the chimney of a sugar mill.

Only in 1885, with a significant assist from a $200,000 Congressional appropriation (and the injection of several hundred cubic feet of Portland cement by the Army Corps of Engineers to overcome some alarming foundational flaws), was the monument completed and dedicated.  The bottom of the monument—the part that quite possibly was quarried and constructed using slave labor—is of a distinctly different color than the remainder, providing an inadvertent mulatto flavor to the proceedings.

There is also an interesting Asian backstory to the Washington Monument and its commemorative stones.  As noted above, in addition to native, probably slave-hewn marble, the interior of the Washington Monument also includes 190-odd memorial stones along its staircases, primarily from domestic donors, but also a smattering of foreign gifts.