Within the newest twist in one of the strangest ongoing scandals in Washington, D.C., U.S. Lawyer for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro introduced that the federal government could be dropping costs in opposition to the 4 individuals accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the 2,000-foot long water basin that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Pirro stated defective building – not vandalism, as President Donald Trump had claimed – brought on the pool’s liner to peel off in June 2026.
As I’ve followed this bizarre saga, I’ve discovered myself reflecting on the historical past of the pool itself. It was constructed within the Nineteen Twenties, when Washington was remodeled by formidable building tasks, even because the nation grappled with political division, racial conflict and clashes between religion and secularism.
To me, every thing about the pool’s early history – the debates over its placement, the innovative engineering techniques used throughout its building, and its proponents’ eager for one thing visually and metaphorically unifying – stands in stark distinction to the slapdash renovations, blame video games and abuses of energy enjoying out right now.
Coming to a consensus
In 1901, the U.S. Senate shaped the McMillan Fee, a gaggle of architects, panorama designers and artists, to develop a parks system for the nation’s capital.
The fee’s 1902 report also recommended a location for the future Lincoln Memorial. Though proposals for a memorial had emerged shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, many years of political disagreement over its design, location and goal had delayed building.
The report proposed situating it on the western finish of the Mall, close to the Potomac River. Impressed by the waterways of Versailles and the reflecting basins of the Taj Mahal, the fee envisioned a reflecting pool linking the longer term memorial to the Washington Monument. On this manner, these two magnificent monuments could possibly be mirrored in an enormous mirror of water, framed by manicured, inexperienced grass.
Over the following decade, the plans continued to elicit debate and controversy, pitting supporters of the fee’s imaginative and prescient in opposition to members of Congress, railroad pursuits and actual property builders.
The American Institute of Architects and American Federation of Arts backed the report, arguing that isolation from town’s bustle created a dignified space for reflection. Additionally they known as consideration to the {qualifications} of the artists on the fee, and to the financial viability of the location: The land was owned by the federal authorities, so the venture’s funds might go towards the memorial itself moderately than buying land.
However some Home leaders insisted that the memorial be constructed on Capitol Hill, two miles to the east, since Lincoln had preserved the Union and labored carefully with Congress in the course of the Civil Conflict.
Railroad interests wanted the memorial close to the soon-to-be-completed Union Station, a proposal backed by some actual property builders. Even the Nationwide Highways Affiliation joined the fray, arguing that the US$2 million Congress had authorized for the memorial in 1911 could be higher spent on a memorial freeway named for Lincoln linking Washington and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The Union Station plan drew ridicule within the Washington press and failed to realize congressional help. When the proposal to exchange the memorial with a freeway got here earlier than Congress in 1912, the Home of Representatives rejected the concept, too – despite some fears that moneyed pursuits would win out – and moved forward with plans for a conventional monument.
Across the similar interval, plans were also put forward for Lee Highway. Named for Accomplice Basic Robert E. Lee, the street mirrored the period’s ongoing debates over how Individuals memorialized the Civil Conflict.
A pool on a swamp
With the riverside location for the monument settled, building of the Lincoln Memorial started in 1914. The excavation of the basin for the reflecting pool began in 1920, two years earlier than the memorial itself was accomplished.
Writer J.W. Duffield, writing in 1922, compared the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the one in entrance of the Taj Mahal, that “exhalation of a dream.”
“It’s in accord with the everlasting health of issues,” he continued, “that these memorials to America’s two biggest Presidents – Washington, underneath whom the nation got here into being; Lincoln, by whose labors it was preserved and by whose blood it was hallowed – ought to stand in shut proximity, as shrines to which posterity might pay pilgrimage and tribute.”
The Military Engineer
But there were several obstacles concerned within the building of the pool – specifically, the realm was swampland, so the settling of the bottom and the drainage offered sensible building challenges.
Engineer Charles A. Peters Jr. labored on the pool. In a 1923 article for the journal The Military Engineer, he described a number of the inventive options.
To take care of the settling, Peters and his group developed versatile flooring lined with an impervious three-ply cloth. The drainage system needed to empty the pool in lower than 24 hours with out leaving puddles. So it was designed with a sloped basin and drainage system that allowed crews to empty the pool for upkeep whereas stopping water from amassing in low spots.
A further consideration was chilly climate. Engineers needed to account for the stresses of freeze-thaw cycles, which may progressively harm waterproofing layers, crack concrete and masonry, and create leaks.
The waterproofing labored: It held up for many years, and in its early years, members of the general public could possibly be seen ice skating on the frozen reflecting pool.
Library of Congress/Interim Archives via Getty Images
From Lincoln to Trump
On Might 30, 1922, 50,000 individuals – together with Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president’s solely surviving son – gathered on the Nationwide Mall for the disclosing of the monument for the person whom some name “America’s secular saint.”
Through the ceremony, President Warren Harding declared Lincoln’s accomplishments “so colossal that none will dispute that he was incomparably the best of our Presidents” as a consequence of “the greatness of his mind, his honesty of goal, and his kindness and gentleness.”
The identical 12 months that the Lincoln Memorial was inaugurated, the tomb of Tutankhamum was discovered in Egypt, fueling a broader fascination with historical civilizations, monuments and the methods societies preserved reminiscences of highly effective figures. The Egyptian pharaoh Menes seems first among the many lawgivers represented within the inside frieze on the South Wall of the U.S. Supreme Courtroom constructing, accomplished in 1935. These friezes mirrored the aspirations of the nation’s leaders to put America on the continuum of nice civilizations.
The deliberative, considerate strategy of remaking the nation’s capital within the early twentieth century bears little resemblance to Trump’s insistence on remaking the capital in his image.
After Trump introduced his want to change the colour of the pool to what he calls “American flag blue,” the Nationwide Park Service awarded a no-bid contract to a politically related agency, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, to restore leaks and paint the pool. It signed one other no-bid contract to put in a filtration system with Greenwater Providers, a building firm whose owner had donated to Trump.
The rushed renovation that ensued – and the squabbling over whether or not the peeling liner was the results of vandalism – led to costs in opposition to four suspects that were eventually dropped.
Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
The pool debacle got here on the heels of different attempts to modify the nation’s capital, from a brand new White Home ballroom to a proposed monumental arch. In October 2025, Trump dismissed all six members of the U.S. Fee of Superb Arts as a way to circumvent the impartial design overview board.
The Nineteen Twenties weren’t devoid of partisanship, graft and scandal. Far from it. However not like Trump’s top-down strategy, the method for constructing monuments and civic areas concerned Congress, artists, architects, engineers and metropolis planners who debated, supplied their experience and listened to public.