Adam Gopnik on what we have lost with a building where Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy once presided, and which came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government.
And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring.
The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation. The same restrained values of democracy have always marked the White House—a stately house, but not an imperial one. It is “the people’s house,” but it has also, historically, been a family house, with family quarters and a family scale. It’s a little place, by the standards of monarchy, and blessedly so: fitting for a democracy in which even the biggest boss is there for a brief time, and at the people’s pleasure. As Ronald Reagan said, after a victory more decisive than Trump could ever dream of, the President is merely a temporary resident, holding the keys for a fixed term. That was the beauty of it. The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory. All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. As many have noted, one of Trump’s earliest public acts, having promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art the beautiful limestone reliefs from the façade of the old Bonwit Teller building, was to jackhammer them to dust in a fit of impatience. Trump apologists say that earlier Presidents altered the White House, too. Didn’t Jimmy Carter install solar panels? Didn’t George H. W. Bush build a horseshoe pit? Didn’t Barack Obama put in a basketball court? What’s the fuss? And, anyway, who but élitists would object to a big ballroom that looks like the banquet hall of a third-rate casino? Who decides what’s decorous and what’s vulgar? Even the White House Historical Association, with a caution that has become typical of this dark time, confines itself to stating that it has been allowed to make a digital record of what’s being destroyed—as though that were a defense, rather than an epitaph. This, of course, is the standard line of Trump apologetics: some obvious outrage is identified, and defenders immediately scour history for an earlier, vaguely similar act by a President who actually respected the Constitution. It’s a form of mismatched matching. If Trump blows up boats with unknown men aboard—well, didn’t Obama use drones against alleged terrorists? If Trump posts a video featuring himself as the combat pilot he never was, dropping excrement on peaceful protesters—well, didn’t Lyndon Johnson swear at his aides from his seat on the john? What’s the fuss? The jabs and insults of earlier Presidents, though, however rough, stayed within the bounds of democratic discourse, the basic rule being that the other side also gets to make its case. Even Richard Nixon sought out student protesters one early morning—at the Lincoln Memorial—and tried to understand what drove them. So it was with the White House. Earlier alterations were made incrementally, and only after much deliberation. When Harry Truman added a not very grand balcony to the Executive Residence, the move was controversial, but the construction was overseen by a bipartisan commission. By contrast, the new project—bankrolled by Big Tech firms and crypto moguls—is one of excess and self-advertisement. The difference between the Truman balcony and the Trump ballroom is all the difference in the world. It is a difference of process and procedure—two words so essential to the rule of law and equality, yet doomed always to seem feeble beside the orgiastic showcase of power. That is the rhetorical fragility of liberal democracy: its reliance on rules rather than on rage. If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption. It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness. It is the breaking of them that is the indulgence of insecure tyrants, who feel most alive in acts of real and symbolic violence. Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it. ♦
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