Souvenirs of an Unexplained Past

Not far from the Capitol -- in fact, quite near Washington's real estate investment -- this monument rises several stories high:

Bells live in the very top, although I'm not sure if they ever ring, and a moat (drained for the winter) circles the bottom. The statue seems almost a silly afterthought, dressed in 20th century clothes and dwarfed by the slab of marble rising behind it.

Who could warrant such a monument, I wondered? A war hero? A great humanitarian? Even one of the lesser presidents? The text on the monument tells us:

"This memorial to Robert A. Taft, presented by the People to the Congress of the United States, stands as a tribute to the honesty, indomitable courage and high principles of a free government symbolized by his life."

Taft? I don't specialize in 20th century history, but I do know enough to recognize two Tafts: William Howard Taft, president between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson; and the Taft of the anti-labor union Taft-Hartley Act. Could there be another? A quick Google search revealed that Robert A. Taft was, in fact, the second.

A block or two down from the monument, I found this:

This juxtaposition of the Frances Perkins Building of the U.S. Department of Labor, only blocks away from the Taft monument isn't quite as ironic -- or funny -- as the placement of the Robert F. Kennedy building across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover building, but it is a prime example of D.C. This city, awash in historic monuments, buildings named after famous historic figures, and site of so many historic events, also seems completely oblivious to the narrative of that history.

Monuments and markers sit unexplained and covered in the generic language of heroism or bald facts. "Great leaders" or "event happened here" appear with no contextual explanation. As the person or event fade from currency, the monuments and markers intended to evoke memory or even awe without informing lose their reason for being.

Washington, then, begins to feel like a site of forgetting, even amid the markers to the past. This is a different sort of forgetting than in Texas, where buildings had expiration dates of 30 years and the past seemed forbidden from the landscape. Washington seems like the home of an Alzheimer's sufferer, wandering through a home filled with family photos and souvenirs from vacations, and unable to remember where they came from.

This is just a pondering as I see these random markers of an unexplained past of which I, the historian, am vaguely aware. This is not a definitive statement of the city or even of my thoughts on the subject.