FEATURE
The “Empire of Liberty” Viewed from the “Shrine of Freedom”
Thomas Jefferson Memorial administered by National Mall & Memorial Parks in DC. Photo courtesy of NPS / Victoria Stauffenberg.
One evening not long ago, I sat on a bench on the far side of the Tidal Basin in the evening pondering how I, as a Park Ranger, could interpret the Thomas Jefferson Memorial before me in connection with the Freedom 250 celebrations. In my mind, I tried to envision the connection between this neoclassical icon and what Thomas Jefferson would call an “Empire of Liberty” in referring to the then-new United States. My reflection was rudely disrupted by a mallard rasping his way past as if searching for the last parking spot in the lot behind me. What did he have to do with this Memorial and my reflection upon it? We will see.
Historian Amir Alexander recently noted that Thomas Jefferson, inspired by his surveyor father Peter and his College of William and Mary mentor William Small, once wrote to William Duane that “When I was young mathematics was the passion of my life.” He later wrote of mathematics to physician Benjamin Rush, in 1811, “We have no theories there, no uncertainties remain in the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction.” Jefferson soon, however, entered a life of diplomacy, politics, and public service often filled with uncertainty.
Architect John Russell Pope (1874-1937) modeled the Jefferson Memorial on Emperor Hadrian’s Pantheon of ancient Rome (ca. 128 CE). Pope honored the architect in Thomas Jefferson as well as the public servant. Jefferson modeled the Rotunda of the University of Virginia (UVA) on the Pantheon. Jefferson’s UVA campus now rests on the World Heritage List for its architectural breadth and splendor. The Pantheon of Rome, the UVA Rotunda, and the Jefferson Memorial all orient towards the yellow super-giant star Polaris, also known as the North Star, like paddleboat sailors tossed about on the wind-driven waves of a turbulent Tidal Basin seeking direction to reach the dock.
The Jefferson Memorial, dedicated by President Roosevelt on April 13, 1943 (he also laid the cornerstone in 1939). The exterior is clad in Danby Imperial marble from the Vermont Marble Company. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.
Geometrically, author William L. McDonald described the Pantheon as a sphere set within a cube resting on a square. All three geometric forms (the sphere, cube, and square), perfectly realized, imply a measure of embedded equality. Certainly, Emperor Hadrian and his architects, like John Russell Pope and Thomas Jefferson, had studied the Greek mathematician Euclid’s Elements (ca. 300 BCE). Euclid synthesized geometrical and mathematical principles from earlier works into a coherent format that has served as an anchor of mathematical learning for over two millennia.
Sitting by the Tidal Basin, I recalled American poet Vachel Lindsay’s poem “Euclid” (1914):
Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn grey-beards,
Nodded and argued much,
Of arc, of circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon.
Imagine yourself as that silent child. Like Thomas Jefferson, as a young student, you quietly examine a rendering of the Pantheon of Rome. Which of Euclid’s axioms or Isaac Newton’s discoveries stir your intellect? Thomas Jefferson, at age 33, soon will have a Declaration of Independence to draft. Let’s walk over to his Memorial in the moonlight and see what we can discover about his edited Declaration and the United States of America as Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.”
Piece of marble volute from the tops of the columns of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. Photo courtesy of Erin Turbeville / NPS.
Approaching the Jefferson Memorial
John Russell Pope designed the flattened triangle above the Thomas Jefferson Memorial entrance as a pediment filled with sculpture that is laden with meaning. Euclid defined this obtuse isosceles polygon as comprised of two equal legs and two equal acute base angles, with an upper or vertex angle of greater than 90 degrees. Like an arrow pointing up, the pediment contains Adolph Weinman’s tympanic sculpture, drawing our eyes to Thomas Jefferson standing in the center of the four men who helped him edit the Declaration of Independence: Benjamin Franklin and John Adams on our left and Roger Sherman with Robert Livingston on the right. Despite its Pantheon-like design, there are no Roman gods honored within the Jefferson Memorial; you won’t find Jefferson or committee members wearing togas here. Euclid would never call this a right triangle. The vertex angle lacks equality with the base angles; and these were men, not gods.
Adolph Weinman was the ideal sculptor for the tympanum work above. He had prior relevant experience with his creation of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition Medals referencing westward expansion in Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty.” Robert Livingston, in the sculpture above, later served President Jefferson as a negotiator who helped compel the French to lower the cost of the Louisiana Purchase from $30 million to $15 million. His later support of the steamboat Clermont on the Hudson River proved that commercial navigation from Manhattan or Brookland to Albany was viable. The Erie Canal would soon accelerate American settlement of the Great Lakes region and beyond. But, getting back to the pediment sculpture in view: delegate Thomas Jefferson is presenting his edited draft of the Declaration of Independence to the delegates of the Continental Congress with his committee colleagues.
Thomas Jefferson, from life, c. 1791-1792, by Charles Willson Peale. Looking back at the Declaration of Independence nearly 50 years later, Jefferson explained that “[The Declaration] was intended to be an expression of the American mind... its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.” (Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825.) Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
Installation process for bronze Thomas Jefferson statue, ca. 1947.
Remember the tension in the room: George Washington had emplaced artillery on the Dorchester Heights above Boston to compel British troops and ships to evacuate that city and harbor. But now, the British had returned in greater strength to occupy New York’s harbor with dozens of ships and ultimately, thousands of more troops. On July 2, 1776, as the Continental Congress adopted delegate Richard Henry Lee’s resolve to absolve the United Colonies from allegiance to the British Crown and to dissolve all political connection of the United Colonies with the State of Great Britain, British troops landed on Staten Island. Twelve of the thirteen United Colonies had agreed: New York’s delegates awaited instruction but believed approval was forthcoming. Two days later, the delegates approved Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. By Fall, all of the New York harbor area was under the control of the British. The delegates had committed treason against the British crown.
From below, looking up, the pediment sculpture reminds us that these men and their families risked everything to declare independence. The pediment rests on Danby, Vermont-quarried Imperial marble Ionic columns which appear perfectly round, white, and smooth. They reflect light no matter which side is struck by the sun’s rays. The radiant light spreads within the portico to reveal two symmetrical, concave, and empty niches known as exedra. Architecturally, the Pantheon’s exedra would host allegorical figures complementing the Roman gods honored within the chamber. Emperor Hadrian never filled the Pantheon’s exedra, but could we imagine that a failure of funding or resources contributed to a precedent for empty exedra in the later honoring of Thomas Jefferson here?
We find architect John Russel Pope’s name as the principal architect above the bronze exhibit door on the left, but Pope did not live long enough to see the Jefferson Memorial constructed. His last great neoclassical design proposal was vigorously opposed by modernists. Pope passed in 1937; his associates, Otto Eggers and Daniel Higgins, built Jefferson’s grand memorial on a reduced scale. Pope’s plan suggested a Jefferson Memorial construction cost at $9 million, but his associates reduced the Memorial size by half and built it for $3 million from 1939 until 1943 amid a Great Depression and the onset of World War II. Exedra sculpture remained uncarved and unnamed. We found a degree of inequality in the triangular pediment, and now we see evidence of an unfulfilled vision in the exedra. Are there more challenges within the chamber? Mathematically, Thomas Jefferson might tell us yes. Architecturally, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt might tell us no.
Bicentennial Commemorative Stamp, 1976. By artist Johnathan Trumbull. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.
Inside the Chamber
We enter a cylindrically round chamber to find four Georgia-quarried marble panels bearing abridged inscriptions on four panels. Passages from the Declaration of Independence grace the southwest panel, but fear not: the rest of the Declaration is held in the left hand of sculptor Rudulph Evans’s bronze Thomas Jefferson standing in statue form in the chamber center. Just as the inscriptions are abridged, we note that the geometric sphere we envisioned from the outside is, in fact, a hemisphere: a sphere cut in half. Where the Pantheon of Rome had an oculus (or skylight) above, enabling light to reach each Roman god tribute within, we find light streaming within the Jefferson Memorial from the four cardinal points of the compass instead.
We are reminded of an important edit to the Declaration of Independence made by Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson initially wrote that “we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal.” In effect, these “truths” were not anchored solely by reason and rationality (enlightenment and shared human experience) versus revelation and religion (“sacred and undeniable”). Franklin instead had Jefferson define these truths as “self-evident.” Here lies the power and international appeal of the Declaration of Independence not only to peoples of now-sovereign former colonies, but to our collective conscience as a new nation and to future believers in self-government around the world.
Similarly, John Adams is most likely responsible for the modified but retained Declaration phrase that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” These men were not atheists. Light from above, often referred to as “divine light,” was not rejected by John Russell Pope in the omission of an oculus. It was balanced with a geometry of reflective enlightenment emanating from many points.
Thomas Jefferson statue within the Memorial. Photo courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial is along the Tidal Basin with an excellent view of many other prominent D.C. memorials and the White House. The memorial is a nod to Jefferson's appreciation of architecture and full of symbolism and connections to his life and legacy, featuring some of his most influential writings inside the chamber. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
A Study of Light
Consider Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: “Every object perseveres in its state of rest [...] unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.” This law defines inertia. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence tells us that American citizens should not change established governments for light and transient causes. Thus, colonists then often suffered while government evils were sufferable, rather than righted themselves by abolishing the customary and familiar.
Jefferson’s account of King George III’s tyranny, which initially followed the Declaration preamble, became a compelling force to overcome colonist inertia and sustain an eight-year revolution. But Benjamin Franklin would not retain Jefferson’s condemnation of King George III for the institution of enslavement. Enslavement would dim the promise, as well as the truth, of the Declaration preamble for many until US Americans fought successfully to remove this and other inequitable institutions from this “Empire of Liberty,” and in effect, from our charter documents.
As a nation, when Americans struggled in enough numbers to reject inertia in petitioning the government for change, they seem also to rediscover Isaac Newton’s study of light. By passing light through a prism, Newton showed that light is composed of several colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Newton also proved that these colors could again combine to produce a singular white light.
When the peoples of the United States struggle together in enough numbers to overcome inertia, the light emanating from the Declaration of Independence preamble, furthered in our Constitution, and secured in our Bill of Rights, enabled us, as a nation, to build a transcontinental railroad, an interstate highway system, improve civil rights, extend suffrage to women, and, in President Franklin Roosevelt’s time, aid our allies and triumph in World Wars I and II.
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial at Night. Photo courtesy of Carol Highsmith.
Inside the Dome
Yet none of these achievements came to this “Empire of Liberty” or its peoples easily. Look up, again, as if our pediment arrow still directs our gaze. The Indiana-quarried limestone dome interior has coffers to reduce its total mass. Five rows of ascending squares decrease in dimensions in each course ascending. The optical illusion created by this arrangement makes the dome appear taller than its true apex height (about 129 feet or about 39 meters).
Is there also an illusion in the statue? Thomas Jefferson was taller than most in his time, at 6 feet and 2 inches (or slightly more than 2 meters); his statue is about 19 feet in height. Despite his upright stature, bronze statue, and powerful words on these walls, the third President had a soft voice and never personally delivered a State of the Union Address to the U.S. Congress. Someone else read it on his behalf. Look up again and imagine the dome of the Pantheon above you. Emperor Hadrian had each square painted a deep navy blue with goldleaf rosettes resting in the centers. In our imagination, the Pantheon hemisphere might become the night sky.
Under the Confederation Congress in 1784, Thomas Jefferson submitted a plan for surveying the territorial lands of this new nation. Jefferson’s plan would create a mathematical Cartesian grid for measurement of time and distance from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains and ultimately, to the Pacific Coast and beyond based on cardinal compass directions.
Jefferson’s vision was that of an agrarian nation of autonomous settlers. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (published in 1785), Jefferson noted:
“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue [...] Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished example.”
Unhindered by tradition, overseas royal authorities, or the many diverse communities and governments of Indigenous Americans who long stewarded these lands, the newly arrived citizens of a newly created United States would endeavor to settle and farm “new” lands across an “empty” abstract grid of equality in pursuit of their “inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Although survey measures and terms changed in subsequent legislation, Jefferson’s grid still frames about 75% of the lands of this republic today. As Catherine Maumi wrote, “the inflexible grid structure would provide a guarantee for diffusion of the values of liberty and democracy across the territories of the United States”—however imperfectly realized these values would remain.
Can you imagine Jefferson’s grid defining this “Empire of Liberty” in the dome above, with Emperor Hadrian’s stars providing guidance? Maybe when we imagine ourselves as the silent young child of Vachel Lindsay’s poem, here in the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, we still can.
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial at dusk. Photo courtesy of Carol Highsmith.
The “Shrine of Freedom”
That mallard who disrupted us as we sat on the Tidal Basin bench has an inherited ability known as unihemispherical slow wave sleep. Unlike all of us humans, mallards rest with one eye open and the opposite half of their brain always monitoring the environment for threats. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated as a “shrine of freedom” by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 during World War II. The Declaration of Independence in the National Archives’s viewing chamber was brought from Fort Knox to the Memorial dedication.
Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” was sustained by millions of US Americans working together, who jointly kept one eye open to preserve the future of this experiment in self-government. American children recycled scarce metals like tin across this land to keep the military supplied with what this nation and its allies needed to defeat tyranny once again. President Roosevelt dedicated a plaster statue of Thomas Jefferson to honor this commitment to national defense and allied victory. Engineers raised this nine-ton hollow bronze statue later in 1947.
Mathematician and scientist Isaac Newton once humbly stated, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Newton and Euclid became giants to Thomas Jefferson in his youth. While we cannot stand on the physical statue of Thomas Jefferson to see further, we have a Thomas Jefferson Memorial to help us remember what the Declaration of Independence once promised and still commits us to work toward. The struggles of each succeeding generation lay before us. But the lofty prose and luminous premise contained in the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson once prepared continue to sustain us through the darkest of nights, like the bright North Star above guiding our way.
