The Washington Monument is the tallest masonry structure in the world, made of some thirty-six thousand stones, and it is unlikely that it will ever relinquish that distinction. She writes, for instance, of the nation’s most famous obelisk, In lucid prose, Dupré offers an insider’s view, with a focus on architecture and design. As Monuments marches through discussions of over thirty American monuments, from the Alamo to Oklahoma City, the emphasis is usually on the small scale. This book provides an overview, but with a camera that constantly zooms in for close-ups. And it comes through in a wealth of details. The sheer energy of the American people comes through on every page. Dupré, for example, displays infinite patience when chronicling the impact of, respectively, disability activists, animal rights protesters, and anti-smoking partisans on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. The politics are often maddening but never uninteresting. Like the broad-shouldered builders of the Gilded Age, today’s monument planners push agendas, mollify constituencies, display good or bad taste, drive the project through to completion, or see it shatter. Glorious, creative, messy, and moving, democracy is the stimulus behind the current surge of new monuments. Monuments are about people, and, in America, people are about democracy. Monuments, Dupré says, are a form of “history made visible” that “frees history to move forward.”ĭupré is an architectural historian, and the filter through which she expresses her thesis has mainly to do with the building process. Monuments let us define the past and move on. As in the post-Civil War era, Americans today are experiencing a monument-building boom. Monuments matter more than ever because they are anchors in a sea of change. Dupré is a scholar with a novelist’s eye for detail and a journalist’s easy style. Her beautiful book should make them change their minds. And Americans, as a publisher once told her, “aren’t much for the past.” Monuments are for yawning, our fellow-citizens seem to think.

Even worse, monuments are about the past. As Judith Dupré writes at the outset, monuments often get ignored because they come off as impractical and, in a digital era, hardly cutting-edge.

Monuments rile up the masses, then? We should be so lucky. Like parades and anthems, they may have “official” stamped on them, which tends to bring out our inner anarchist, from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to a kid with a can of spray-paint. They may end up as almost part of the landscape, like Mount Rushmore, or they may start out by causing a firestorm, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. They risk being taken for granted or taken to task. Monuments generate awe or anger but rarely love.

Carved in Stone by John A. Cowgill