THE CENTRAL COMPOSITION REACHING COMPLETION 11 dryly remarked: "The only thing I know about your plans is that, if they are not the very finest ever made, the people of the United States will have none of them." Yet when that same James Wilson would have narrowed the Mall at the behest of enemies of the plan, President Roosevelt and Secretary of War Taft came valiantly to the rescue. The burden of the fight fell on Charles F. McKim. "You may compromise anything but the essence", he said, "the Mall width is the essence of the plan. That cannot be compromised." And the plan stood. "I intend, while I am in office", said Elihu Root, "to drive as many stakes as I can to fasten that plan down." As Secretary of War and Secretary of State, as Senator from New York, and in private life, his intelligence, executive and legislative tact, and his deep conviction exercised over many years and never yet remitted, have been a guiding and restraining force. William H. Taft gave unhesitating support to the plan in fixing the site of that vital element, the Lincoln Memorial; and President Harding stood by the plan in the proper location of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Space fails to tell of the many others in public and private life who have done valiant service in upholding and promoting the plan of Washington. It was the bigness and the fineness of the plan that enlisted their enthusiastic support. THE CENTRAL COMPOSITION UNION SQUARE The plaza planned by L'Enfant as the great approach to the Capitol from the west has been restored by the elimination of the obsolete Botanic Garden and the relegation of the more valuable plant collections to a well-designed and well-administered greenhouse erected south of Maryland Avenue. The monument to General Grant, 30 years after its inception, now gets the setting originally planned for it, at the head of the Mall. The statue to General Meade takes its own place in the composition, and space is made for a Farragut or a Porter to give the naval element to Union Square. Standing on the pedestal of the Grant Monument one looks over the completed carpet of green to the very base of the Washington Monument, with the Lincoln Memorial beyond at the extremity of the axis. There are still temporary war buildings to come down on the north and south of this tapis vert. But already the rows of elms flanking the central space are sufficient to make the picture. The greatest and the finest central composition ever devised by man for a capital city is today so far completed that its grandeur THE CENTRAL COMPOSITION REACHING COMPLETION 15 and magnificence may be seen and appreciated by any trained observer. In length it is greater than the distance from the Palace of the Tuileries to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; greater also than the distance in London from Saint Paul's Cathedral to Buckingham Palace. How much of the cities of Paris and of London lie between the boundaries mentioned? Such comparisons make one realize the truth of the old saying that Washington is a city of magnificent distances. What was once said in jest has now become true. The plans for the development of Union Square were prepared by Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, whose father laid out the Capitol Grounds, and who himself was a member of the Senate Park Commission of 1901, which restored and extended the L'Enfant plan of the Mall. THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT In the plan of 1901 artistry reaches its highest point in the treatment accorded to the grounds of the Washington Monument—a treatment consonant with the place George Washington holds in the history of the Nation and the hearts of its people. Quite naturally, therefore, criticism has been focused on this particular item. The Commission of Fine Arts are convinced that the treatment to be accorded to the Washington Monument grounds is of the essence, and, therefore, cannot be compromised. When it is objected that the stability of the Monument might be seriously affected by shifting the dirt load, the Commission have replied that if the Monument is not absolutely proof against such a trivial contingency the American people would want its stability established beyond doubt or question. Then and only then can a proper landscape setting be provided. It is not necessary now to proceed with this portion of the plan. It is better to wait a quarter of a century rather than resort to any compromise plan. Public taste is of slow growth. When the Mall shall be completed, Union Square finished, Columbia Island laid out, the Rock Creek Parkway extended, public taste will call imperatively for the treatment of the Washington Monument grounds as the gem for which the other parts are but a setting. Time is not the essence of this problem. Such has been the reason of this Commission in rejecting three tentative plans which seemed so small, so inadequate, as to appear but futile. The Director of the National Park Service, Arno B. Cammerer, submitted to the Commission of Fine Arts a report, dated March 7, 1934, by John B. Nagle, engineer, on the subject of necessary repairs to the Washington Monument, for which an allotment of $100,000 had been made by the Public Works Administration. This report premised that the monument was struc |