To The Immortal Name And Memory Of George Washington

The Washington Monument is one of the most easily recognized structures in America, if not the world, yet the long and tortuous history of its construction is much less well known. Beginning with its sponsorship by the Washington National Monument Society and the grudging support of a largely indifferent Congress, the Monument's 1848 groundbreaking led only to a truncated obelisk, beset by attacks by the Know Nothing Party and lack of secured funding and, from the mid-1850s, to a twenty-year interregnum. It was only 1n 1876 that a Joint Commission of Congress revived the Monument and entrusted its completion to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.In "To the Immortal Name and Memory of George Washington": The United States Corps of Engineers and the Construction of the Washington Monument, historian Louis Torres tells the fascinating story of the Monument, with a particular focus on the efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey, Captain George W. Davis, and civilian Corps employee Bernard Richardson Green and the details of how they completed the construction of this great American landmark. The book also includes a discussion and images of the various designs, some of them incredibly elaborate compared to the austere simplicity of the original, and an account of Corps stewardship of the Monument up to its takeover by the National Park Service in 1933. First published in 1985. 148 pages, ill.

What does a nation give a man who has everything? If a man happens to be the country's first citizen, he may be rewarded with honor and fame and the respect of high office; after death, his name can be assigned to the archives of public memory. All of this happened to George Washington, who was certainly first in the hearts of his countrymen. Why was it so difficult to erect a memorial to this, the nation's greatest and more significantly least controversial hero?

Between 1753, when he was commissioned as a major of Virginia militia, and 1775, when the Second Continental Congress named him Commander-in-Chief of all colonial military forces, George Washington rose from anonymity as a minor landowner and surveyor to become America's first national hero. With little military training he led the thirteen fledgling colonies through six years of grueling war against formidable British forces, steered the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and served two terms as the first president of the United States. His accomplishments were so stunning and he was so revered that by the end of the war some of his generals urged him to install himself as king, an idea he looked upon with "abhorrence," calling the very thought "painful." Nor would he consider standing for a third term as president. In this revealing book, James Crutchfield writes of Washington as an enigmatic man-"No more elusive personality exists in history" as an eminent Harvard historian observed. His outward commonness concealed a quick, analytic mind, capable of learning from mistakes, gauging his successes not on winning battles but on the effect his decisions would have on the future of his country. "Washington remains an American hero, in every definition of the word," Crutchfield says. "He was a man who rose above the political uncertainty of the infant United States to chart its destiny for two centuries into the future."