Two stipulations, right at the start: Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, is far from being among the most objectionable members of the world’s greatest (way too) deliberative body. And bipartisanship, though overrated, should not be automatically regarded as a bad thing.
That said, McCaskill, with the support and co-sponsorship of the Republican Roy Blunt, her fellow Missouri senator, has come up with a regrettable idea. They have introduced a bill to saddle Union Station, Washington’s magnificent temple to the greatness of rail travel and food-court cuisine, with a new name. They want to call it the Harry S. Truman Union Station.
Their reasoning—McCaskill’s, anyway—is that there isn’t anything else labelled “Harry S. Truman” in Washington. (And please: no pedantic quibbling over whether it should be “Harry S Truman.”) That’s not strictly true. There’s the Truman balcony, which overlooks the South Lawn from the White House. But McCaskill and Blunt have a point. Surely President Truman, that great Missourian, deserves to have his name on something other than a home-improvement project.
An argument that McCaskill doesn’t mention—understandably, given the need to keep her co-sponsor on board—is that Republicans have been far more aggressive than Democrats when it comes to getting their heroes memorialized. Even Senator Robert A. “Mr. Republican” Taft, a Truman nemesis best known for losing every G.O.P. Presidential nomination from 1940 through 1952, has a hundred-foot-high marble slab devoted to his sacred memory, complete with a ten-foot-high bronze statue.
Here’s a particularly irritating example of Republican commemorative imperialism. At the height of the Gilded Age, when the great Second Empire pile just west of the White House was completed, it housed the entire federal diplomatic and military bureaucracy, and was therefore called the State, War, and Navy Building. In 1949, the national-security establishment having moved to roomier quarters, it was renamed the Executive Office Building and then, in 1969, the Old Executive Office Building. Fifteen years ago, it became the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
That was a biggie for the G.O.P., but not big enough, apparently. There’s also going to be a Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, one of an exponentially growing number of unnecessary monuments cluttering the National Mall and its environs, the worst of which is the supremely ugly World War II Memorial.
The most notable Republican success in the renaming wars, of course, has been the double deification of Ronald Reagan. The nation’s most gigantic and expensive civilian federal office structure, in Washington or anywhere else, is the Ronald Reagan Building, so named in 1995, three years before it opened and nearly a decade before the Gipper passed on. And the G.O.P.’s biggest triumph, which I can’t seem to stop complaining about, was consolidating its airport monopoly. Since 1998, when Washington National Airport woke up to find itself rechristened Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, travellers have had the choice of landing at either Dulles (John Foster, rigid Cold Warrior, Republican Secretary of State) or Reagan. Thanks a lot, Mr. Hobson!
Admittedly, there would be a certain rough justice in balancing Reagan Airport with Truman Station. But at some point the madness must end. I don’t mean just the arms race of seeing which party can get the most stuff named after its favorite Presidents. I mean the larger craziness of allowing politicians to arrogate to themselves the right to name every large public work, new or old, after other politicians. This mania has reached alarming proportions in New York City, where Democrats are the offenders.
It’ll be one thing to call Penn Station’s hoped-for successor Moynihan Station. That’s justifiable, given the long-ago demise of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s decisive role in getting the planned new terminal placed in the magnificently colonnaded 1912 McKim, Mead & White post office (which, in a 1982 renaming frenzy, was dubbed, in honor of F.D.R.’s political enforcer, patronage chief, and Postmaster General, the James A. Farley Post Office Building). Lately, however, the City Council has been on an alarmingly unremitting politician-glorifying binge. Six years ago, the Triborough Bridge, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel all had perfectly good names, names that doubled as helpful guides to navigation. Now they are, respectively, the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, the Ed Koch Bridge, and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel. At this rate, the city will soon run out of infrastructure to rename after politicians, of whom there is an unending supply. Before the Verrazano-Narrows becomes the Bloomberg Bridge and the Holland becomes the De Blasio Tunnel, I cry: Enough!
So what about something to name after Truman, something that’s suitably modest—bigger than a balcony, smaller than a train station—and somehow appropriate? Well, every morning at five-thirty or so, Mr. Truman used to leave the White House for a famously vigorous two-mile walk around the Ellipse and the Reflecting Pool. Why not name his usual route the Harry S. Truman Walking Path?
Above: Union Station; Washington, D. C., on April 19, 2013. Photograph by Raymond Boyd/Getty.
