Making America Beautiful Again … Again
Trump’s Neoclassical Building Program and “City Beautiful”
On February 4th, Architectural Record broke the story that the Trump administration was considering an executive order titled, “Make American Beautiful Again” (MABA), which would mandate classical architecture as the standard for all federal buildings moving forward. The executive order is the result of lobbying efforts by The National Civic Art Society (NCAS), which promotes the “classical tradition” of federal architecture because of its long history of use harkening back to “the founders” (Washington & Jefferson), its “legibility to the common person” and, of course, its beauty, which is “time-honored” and “timeless.” For such a (seemingly) noble goal, MABA has met with near universal condemnation from the press and pretty much anyone with professional credentials in architecture or preservation.
In order to better understand what exactly might be “legible to the common person” in neoclassical architecture, we need look no further than the historic values that animated the last large-scale “beautification” movement in the United States that used the neoclassical style — City Beautiful. As we will see, the last neoclassical movement was used to exclude people of color, women, immigrants, and the poor from public spaces, particularly civic spaces, and thus American democratic life; and there’s every reason to think that this latest neoclassical move will be a return to the same.
Most “classical,” architecture in the United States is not as old as one might think; in fact, that’s why it’s often called “neoclassical” architecture. The “timelessness” — or, one might argue, “datedness” — of the style makes it seem older than it is. A great deal of neoclassical architecture in the U.S. hails from the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries and is a product of the City Beautiful movement. Despite the recentness of this neoclassicising trend, the NCAS attempts to locate classicising architecture within a continuous tradition, saying that “The Founders launched a national idiom using the traditional vocabulary and grammar from the ancient classical world. Evolving over time, classicism set the precedent for federal government architecture for 150 years,” continuing from the L’Enfant plan (1791) for Washington, D.C. through the 1930s. The problematic invocation of the “founders” aside, the NCAS is just wrong: in actuality, by the late 1800s, the neoclassical style was already largely considered passé when it was revived by the City Beautiful movement.
What the NCAS actually seems nostalgic for is City Beautiful-era projects — in particular, the Senate Park Commission Plan (1901), often referred to as the McMillan Plan, for the National Mall in Washington DC and New York’s Pennsylvania Station (1910–1963), which the NCAS calls, “one of the greatest buildings in American History.” In many respects, it feels like MABA is calling for a return to City Beautiful. So, what exactly was the City Beautiful movement?
According to historian Jon Peterson, City Beautiful was a progressive-era urban planning and beautification movement that brought together municipal art (sometimes called “decoration”), outdoor art (landscape architecture), comprehensive city planning, and city services (city water, sewer, trash and snow removal). City Beautiful, according to William Wilson, took its ideological beginnings from Frederick Law Olmstead and Daniel Burnham. It was popularized by The Columbian Exposition (1893), which Burnham and Olmstead, among others, planned. City Beautiful was spread throughout the United States by Charles Mumford Robinson, whose book The Improvement of Cities and Towns, according to Peterson, was published in 11 editions between 1901 and 1916. It served as the handbook to city beautification leagues all over the U.S., which were usually run by middle-class and upper-middle-class women.
The iconography of City Beautiful, or what the NCAS calls “the traditional vocabulary and grammar of the ancient classical world” grew out of a desire, particularly at the Columbian Exposition, to show that the United States was on par with Europe in terms of culture and had surpassed Europe in technological innovation. Like anything else, the Columbian Exposition and City Beautiful were products of their time. That time included “scientific” racism, which conflated culture and biology and the related narrative of “cultural evolutionism” (that’s “culture” singular — the idea of “cultures” plural in a Boasian sense hadn’t kicked in yet) that positioned the United States as the inheritor of Greco-Roman culture and often relied on the juxtaposition of “savagery” and “civilization” in order to define the latter.
At the Columbian Exposition, sometimes called the Chicago World’s Fair, this narrative of the progress of civilization took a variety of forms, including a midway display of “living ethnological exhibits of ‘savage villages,’” which, according to Jacqueline Fears-Segal, “were arranged in an obvious evolutionary and chromatic hierarchy, with darker people situated at the bottom of the Midway and the lighter peoples at the top, closest to the White City” — that is, the constellation of 14 gleaming-white neoclassical buildings that formed the Court of Honor at the Columbian Exposition. The White City, according to Wanda Corn, represented “the height of civilization.”
The history of civilization presented at the exposition, according to Corn, showed that “the African and Native American cultures were presented at the Fair as primitive societies that had not evolved to the advanced stage that Euro-American cultures had.” This notion was very much in keeping with the 19th-century concept of “cultural evolutionism.” These themes were apparent in the art displayed at the exposition, which often relegated women to decorative uses in the form of allegorical figures.
Burnham saw the value of the Columbian Exposition as largely educational. In a speech he gave in 1895 titled “Uses of the Exposition,” he equated the educational work of the fair with “missionaries” creating “civilized men.” Burnham claims, “We cannot perfect the race, because the Town of Lake and other barbarous peoples do not respond to argument. These semi-civilized people are not intellectually capable; they are rude, willful children.” While elsewhere in the speech, he does discuss the people who came from all over the world for the midway display and does position them as “barbarian” or “savage,” here Burnham is specifically referring to immigrants who work in the meat packing plants in Chicago, those who would a few years later becomes the subjects of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Burnham’s educational method is described as “lawful physical loveliness….order and system, which constitute the real soul of beauty.” This is what is often referred to as “moral uplift,” and is, in short, assimilation, or at least pacification, through aesthetics. I say “pacification” because the alternative explained by Burnham was “emulation,” of which he did not think “semi-civilized” people capable. It was, in Burnham’s opinion, white immigrants that were holding back the white race. While he sees everyone as capable of taking away lessons, particularly of technological or artistic advancement from the exposition, non-whites could not be assimilated. In the case of the “semi-savages,” the best that could be hoped for was that they be pacified into being productive workers; assimilation would happen in subsequent generations.
As City Beautiful moved across the country, immigrants remained a chief focus of the movement, at least in the Midwest and Northeast.The driving anxieties of City Beautiful regarding the urban poor and immigrants in the North easily grafted onto anxieties about race in the post-reconstruction South. While there is a long history of neoclassical architecture in the antebellum south, many Confederate statues in the South date from the City Beautiful era. While this is the period in which it became cheaper to mass produce statues, Andrea Douglas and Jalane Schmidt clearly connect City Beautiful with the use of Confederate statues to control public space. They explain that, following the civil war, memorials were erected and “interlaced with ideas about race,” and “part of what was beautiful was who needed to be removed, supposedly, from public space in order to beautify them.”
During City Beautiful, in the early 20th century, Confederate monuments moved from cemeteries to courthouses, which, according to Douglas and Schmidt, stemmed from a white imagined concern that there was a “black majority,” particularly in government post-reconstruction. Specifically, Douglas and Schmidt argue that City Beautiful-era Confederate monuments were used alongside other “terror campaigns” to segregate physical space and discourage civic participation, community, and commercial involvement by black people. The controversy of the last several years regarding Confederate statues has made evident how those statues were (and are) used to control public space — that is, specifically to further white supremacy by excluding black people from public, often civic, spaces.
Let’s, then, return to the NCAS’s argument that neoclassical architecture is legible to the “common person.” I would argue that this isn’t the case — and, even if it is, we should be quite concerned about what exactly is legible. The model put forth in City Beautiful follows 19th-century ideas of “scientific racism” and “cultural evolutionism.” In Burnham’s estimation, the options were assimilation, pacification, or exclusion from public space and thus public life.
This idea that people need to be civilized always risks positioning those in need of civilizing as less than human. City Beautiful’s roots in cultural evolutionism take it a step further by defining who can and cannot be civilized through assimilation.
Although I have focused on the ugly aspects of City Beautiful here, the movement has been largely recouped, separated from its ideological underpinnings, and preserved as a stylistic movement; this is clearly evident in the National Parks Service’s explanation of the McMillan Plan. City Beautiful was complicated. It was a product of its time, but I say that not to give the movement a pass. Even people at the time spoke out against the midway exhibit at the Columbian Exposition specifically, as well as against imperialism in general. I say City Beautiful was a product of its time because I hope our time is less racist, values cultural pluralism, and can acknowledge that this country was built on the backs of immigrants and people of color.
City Beautiful played a large part in cementing the narrative of Western civilization into the fabric of many American cities. MABA would indeed turn back the clock. Federal buildings would announce that there’s only one way to be American: it is white, male, and entirely fictitious, but deeply exclusionary all the same.
Kathleen Lamp is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric, art, architecture, and civic life in various settings like the Augustan cultural campaigns and the City Beautiful Movement. Follow her on Twitter @DrKathleenLamp and her new project @monumental_obj.
