Arriving in Washington today, we still see what Henry James saw at the beginning of the century, “a city of palaces and monuments and gardens, symmetries and circles and far radiations.” Washington remains a mix of the democratic and the imperial, and if for James the capital was “the place of business, the estate-office” for “a huge flourishing Family,” the family is now only larger and more contentious—it’s the whole Western world.

James was back in the United States in 1904 after almost a lifetime passed in Europe, and what struck him in Washington was how little the handsome public buildings told a visitor about the life of the nation. At the Capitol he saw three American Indians, “arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats.” They were a demonstration “of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing.” And thinking back on James Fenimore Cooper and his Leather-Stocking Tales, a favorite of his youth, James suddenly recognized in those Indians-turned-tourists “an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one’s eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the State.”

The stones of Washington still pretty much don’t speak, and crisscrossing the Mall today (which may be the worst-kept ceremonial park in the West) we