A Brief and Unexpected Encounter
Last week I moved to a new city. Since then, I have found myself drawn to wandering my new home in search of the locations that I knew would someday become familiar when I made my way into Meridian Hill (sometimes known as Malcolm X) Park the first time. It was a beautiful place to watch the sunset, as I have done several times now.
Due to the winter I have yet to see the trees in full bloom, which has lent most sunsets a starker quality, but I imagine it must be equally beautiful to witness in its own right.
There are several statues within the green oasis — an Italian poet (Dante), a French war heroine (Joan of Arc), and an American president (15 — James Buchanan). In the course of my research thus far, I have yet to discover the reason for the specific combination of these three persons, each of whom left a lasting impact, for good or ill, on history. The statue of Joan of Arc is apparently the only statue of a woman riding a horse in all of Washington D.C., standing on the park’s upper level. The statue of Dante is not as central by comparison, tucked away along one of the several paths between the upper and lower levels of the park.
The statue — memorial actually — of James Buchanan is not central, though impossible to miss. Residing in the Southeast corner of the park, the figure of Buchanan is situated between the anthropomorphized figures of “law” and “justice,” and is the largest of the three statues in the park. The only president from Pennsylvania, and also the only bachelor president, Buchanan is considered one of the worst U.S. Presidents for his inability to quell the sectional tensions over slavery, often instead making them worse. To name one example, in his inaugural address, in addition to vowing to serve for only one term and not run for re-election, Buchanan asserted that the slavery debate would soon be settled once and for all by the Supreme Court, referring to the Court’s infamous (though at that point in time upcoming) decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Buchanan departed from office a little more than a month before the onset of the Civil War.
I would later learn that the erection of such a monument was not without controversy when it was initially proposed either. The memorial began as a bequest in the will of one Harriet Lane Johnston upon her death in 1903, who acted as the First Lady under her uncle and adopted guardian, Buchanan. It then took 15 years for Congress to pass the appropriate joint resolution allowing for the memorial’s construction, and not without controversy. Construction proceeded over the course of ten years, with a final unveiling of the memorial in 1930 under President Herbert Hoover, after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
While I did not pay as much attention to the Buchanan memorial on my initial visits to the park, the mere idea of it stuck out. The idea of a Buchanan memorial seemed especially incongruous in the illustrious company of both Dante and Joan of Arc. Additionally, in light of ongoing debates surrounding the removal of confederate statues, I was surprised I had not heard anything about this memorial, since I would not consider Buchanan someone worthy of valorization. Yet searching online for controversies relating to the Buchanan memorial yielded few results.
Barely two miles south of the James Buchanan Memorial stand the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the memorial to Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln.
