Journal of the American Planning Association

ISSN: 0194-4363 (Print) 1939-0130 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpa20

The Nation's First Comprehensive City Plan

A Political Analysis of the McMillan Plan for
Washington, D.C., 1900-1902

Jon A. Peterson

To cite this article: Jon A. Peterson (1985) The Nation's First Comprehensive City Plan A Political
Analysis of the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., 1900-1902, Journal of the American Planning
Association, 51:2, 134-150, DOI: 10.1080/01944368508976205

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01944368508976205

Published online: 26 Nov 2007.

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The Nation’s First Comprehensive City Plan
A Political Analysis of the M c M i l l a n Plan for Washington, D.C., 1900-1902

Jon A. Peterson

Why the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., became the nation’s first compre-
hensive city plan and so greatly influenced the beginnings of the city planning
movement in the United States is rooted partly in its hidden political origins. This
article identifies three of those origins: a now-forgotten battle over the future
development of the Mall; a behind-the-scenes bargain among the American
Institute of Architects, the Washington Board of Trade, and Senator James McMillan
that enlarged the agenda to include citywide park system design; and a successful
effort by architect Daniel H. Burnham to persuade McMillan to support an
ambitious general plan rather than a tentative one. The story underscores the
critical role of power and politics in the making of workable comprehensive plans,
then and now.

No city plan exerted greater influence on the beginnings
of the American city planning movement at the open-
ing of the twentieth century than the McMillan Plan
for Washington, D.C. Issued early in 1902 by the U.S.
Senate Park Commission, the plan crystallized the
idea of comprehensive city planning as a novel basis
for the physical shaping of existing American cities.’
Before the McMillan Plan, even the most ambitious
efforts to shape urban centers had not evolved much
beyond programs that served specific and limited
purposes. Designs for college campus and exposition
sites, for citywide park systems, for water supply, for
land reclamation, for sewerage, for suburban tracts,
and for mass transit represented the most advanced
schemes formulated during the late nineteenth cen-
tury.2 No matter how ambitious and thoroughly
worked out, these programs never envisioned the
fusion of all forms of physical design into a single,
coordinated plan applicable to the entire city.
But that idea, soon to be extolled as comprehensive
city planning, would grip the imagination of many
interpreters of the McMillan Plan. It did so because
Peterson is an associate professor of American history at Queens
College of the City University of New York. H e teaches a course
on urban planning in the American past and is working on a
history of the origins of modern American city planning before
World War I.
the McMillan Plan possessed such extraordinary
breadth and complexity for its day. The plan not only
revived and extended the original eighteenth-century
design for the ceremonial core of the city, it also called
for such modern ideas as the building of a union
railroad terminal and a Potomac fiver memorial bridge,
the establishment of major sites for groups of public
buildings, the eradication of a slum area, and the
development of a sizable public recreation complex.
For the fringes of the city, the plan outlined a vast
park, parkway, and scenic preservation program that
rivaled the open space arrangements of any metropolis
in America (Moore 1902).
Across the nation, urban leaders would recognize
in the ambitiousness of the McMillan Plan a fresh
approach to the shaping of cities. Their efforts to
emulate it by appointing their own local commissions
and employing their own expert advisers soon gave
rise to city planning as a recognizable movement and
to the making of comprehensive plans as the root
instrumental purpose of that movement. As a result,
planning thought and action would increasingly aspire
to be a n all-encompassing field of endeavor-as op-
posed to the diffuse, fragmented art it had been in the
nineteenth century (Peterson 1967, 197-361).
This article asks why the McMillan Plan became
the nation’s first comprehensive plan. One can find
part of the answer by examining the currents of public

134 APA JOURNAL


thought that prepared the ground for the plan. This
investigation, however, focuses on various political
events that took place in Washington, asking why and
how they account for the plan‘s unique breadth and
complexity and the sense of novelty it inspired.
Traditionally, the political history of the plan has
been explained chiefly in terms of two interacting
chains of events (Hines 1974, 142; Reps 1967, 70-93).
The first involved a series of efforts by prominent
Washingtonians to sponsor a patriotic memorial of
lasting value to the city to mark the one hundredth
anniversary of the removal of the nation’s capital
from Philadelphia to the District of Columbia. The
second was a n adroit campaign by the American
Institute of Architects to seize control of those initiatives
and turn Washington into a showcase city displaying
the profession’s most advanced ideas of civic art. That
way of telling the story credits the McMillan Plan
chiefly to the architectural profession.
Going beyond that explanation, this article explores
three hidden origins of the plan that provide fresh
insight into its unusual breadth and complexity. The
first of these, which will be called the battle of plans,
pitted Senator James McMillan of Michigan against
the U S . Army Corps of Engineers in a struggle over
the future of the Mall. The second involved a behind-
the-scenes political bargain among the AIA, the Wash-
ington Board of Trade, and McMillan that enlarged
the battle over the Mall to include citywide park
system design. And the third was the catalytic role of
Daniel H. Burnham, who, as chairman of the plan
commission, disregarded McMillan’s instructions to
produce a “preliminary” scheme for handling that
enlarged agenda, and then won McMillan’s support
for the spectacularly ambitious plan that we remember
today. Taken together, these hidden origms underscore
the importance of power and politics in the making
of any workable urban plan, then and now.
Marking the Centennial
When the Centennial celebration was first proposed
for Washington, its advocates wanted only a single,
inspirational memorial to mark the event. The pro-
moters were all local notables, many of them leaders
of the Board of Trade, then the most powerful civic
body in the capital. Having organized in October
1898, they approached President William McKinley in
mid-November, suggesting a number of ideas: a me-
morial hall, a majestic bridge across the Potomac, or
some other durable work that would ”inspire patriotism
and a broader love of country.” In December McKinley
appealed to Congress for action3
This manner of recognizing the Centennial had no
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bearing on city planning. The projects favored repre-
sented conventional, if costly, ideas typical of the
piecemeal methods of city improvement prevalent in
all American municipalities. Even so, Congress dragged
its feet. Although the U.S. Senate soon appointed a
Centennial committee and the President named a
national committee, the House of Representatives de-
layed a full year, until December 1899. Worse still,
neither the Senate nor the House authorized a specific
project. The memorial idea appeared to be doomed.
It wasn’t-but events soon gave the idea a very
unexpected twist. Its promoters decided to make
one last try at a joint meeting of all the Centen-
nial committees-local, congressional, and national-
scheduled to take place 21 February 1900 at the
Arlington Hotel. It was to be a glittering occasion,
arranged as much to honor the state governors who
comprised the national committee as to make major
decisions (The Evening Star, 22 February 1900, 11).
Before the event, the local sponsors agreed among
themselves to push the Potomac River bridge as their
most popular goal. The Centennial, they imagined,
would climax with the laying of its cornerstone. But
to nearly everyone’s surprise, the assemblage substi-
tuted entirely new objectives (The Washington Post, 23
February 1900, 10; The Evening Star, 22 February
1900, 4).
This turnabout was the work of the powerful Senator
McMillan. Known in Washington as chairman of the
Senate Committee on the District of Columbia and as
a kingpin in district affairs, McMillan won appointment
at the morning session of the February 21 meeting to
an ad hoc committee that was to evaluate the memorial
proposals, especially the bridge idea, and to make
recommendations to the larger gathering later that
day. McMillan, who became chairman and spokesman
for the group, seized the opportunity to redirect the
Centennial.
That afternoon, the senator announced a new
agenda. In place of the much-favored bridge stood
two new goals. The first called for the enlargement of
the White House, a n idea of long standing in Wash-
ington. The second proposed the building of a three-
mile-long Centennial Avenue to begin at the foot of
Capitol Hill and to run obliquely through the Mall to
the Potomac River, as shown in Figure 1 (The Evening
Star, 21 February 1900, 1). The latter idea, said the
next day’s Evening Star, was ‘:a new scheme, unverified
by official surveys, virtually unheralded and unknown,
and of, as yet, doubtful propriety” (22 February 1900,
4). But the February 21 meeting endorsed it anyway,
along with the White House recommendation, and
also agreed to stage the celebration ten months later,
in December 1900. The identity of the avenue plan’s
designer, Henry Ives Cobb, a n established Chicago
135

architect, became known later (Fitzpatrick 1900a,
1900b).
The avenue plan and the
Pennsylvania Railroad
McMillan's sponsorship of the avenue plan signaled
a critical turning point in the Centennial discussions.
On the surface, he had raised a genuine, if farfetched,
civic art issue previously debated chiefly among ar-
chitects: whether the original design of the Mall should
be reinstated. In 1791 Pierre L'Enfant had imagined
the Mall as a wide, extended open space flanked by
"spacious houses," with a 400-foot-wide "Grand Av-
enue'' down its center. By 1900, long-matured parks
and gardens of picturesque design belonging to the
Smithsonian Institution and to the Department of
Agriculture broke u p the Mall as a unified space, as
seen in Figure 2. In addition, the Baltimore and
Potomac Railroad operated a sizable but antiquated
depot dating from 1872 in the Mall at Sixth and B
streets Northwest, also visible in Figure 2 (Reps 1967,
21, 61, 66, figs. 35, 36, 38). In 1900, few people other
than architects knew or cared much about L'Enfant's
ideas.
Figure 2. View of the Mall about 1900, showing the gardens of the Department of Agriculture (foreground) and of the Smithsonian
lnstitution (center), and just beyond and to the left of the latter, the station and sheds of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad.
Reproduced from the collection of the Libra y of Congress.
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When McMillan publicly announced the avenue
plan, he made clear that he saw it as a fulfillment of
L'Enfant's dream and as an opportunity to group
public buildings, a civic art issue he knew to be current
among architects (The Washington Post, 26 February
1900, 3). But he was not being candid. The avenue
plan had much less to do with L'Enfant and civic art
than with two major pieces of railroad legislation that
he had recently introduced in the Senate in December-
January 1899-1900 ( U S . Senate Journal).
Both bills represented complex bargains hammered
out during the previous three years with the two
railroads that entered the capital, one of which was
the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, then a subsidiary
of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The laws committed the
railroads to eliminate grade crossings by removing
tracks from the city streets, such as those seen crossing
Maryland Avenue in Figure 3. Grade crossings were
a hazard-about thirty people annually had been
killed or seriously injured at such places in the city
(Green 1963, 52). In return, the government authorized
each railroad to establish new passenger terminals. In
the case of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the old, crowded
Baltimore and Potomac depot on the Mall would be
137
Learning from the Past
Figure 3. Maryland Avenue grade crossing of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, showing a terminal-bound train, about 1900.
Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress.
replaced by an enormous, up-to-date facility in the
same location but on a much expanded, fourteen-acre
site (between Sixth and Seventh streets). The existing
depot tracks, which then crossed the Mall on Sixth
Street as seen in Figure 4, would be ripped out and
rebuilt nearby on a massive, off -street elevated structure
to be erected across the Mall (U.S. Senate 1900, 5;
Congressional Record 1900, 6089 and 6091).
Never before had anything so destructive to the
Mall-or to L’Enfant’s vision of it-been contemplated.
Yet as sponsor of the legislation, McMillan had wedded
himself to the scheme for as long as the Pennsylvania
Railroad refused to budge from its coveted position.
Viewed in that light, the proposed avenue represented,
above all, a grand approach street to the new terminal.
Its curiously oblique alignment expressed hopes to
offer travelers a direct route eastward toward Capitol
Hill and westward toward the White House, making
the depot, as one apologist explained in The l n l a n d
Architect, ”so . . . easy of access as if it were the
very pivotal point to all else” in the city (Fitzpatrick
1900a, 14).
The avenue plan possessed other virtues, however-
all of them political. Because it used chiefly public
land, it would cost relatively little to build at a time
when many congressmen were groaning about the
138
fiscal burden imposed by the Spanish-American War.
It also offered building sites at a time of much clamor
for new government structures. Finally, it extended
the proposed avenue to the Potomac River, where a
bridge plaza was suggested to win favor among ad-
vocates of the memorial bridge. Generally, McMillan’s
avenue plan bore the marks of a very clever move
(The Washington Post, 26 February 1900, 3).
It was too clever, as things turned out. Together
with the Pennsylvania terminal scheme, McMillan’s
proposed avenue ignited the battle of plans, a struggle
for power and influence over the future development
of central Washington and even its outlying parks.
The issues raised would shape not only the agenda of
the architects’ intervention but, ultimately, the agenda
of the McMillan Plan itself. The novel comprehen-
siveness of the McMillan Plan, in short, had its
deepest political roots in this hidden phase of the
Centennial.
The battle of plans
The U.S. Army engineers of the Chief of Engineers
Office within the War Department became McMillan’s
first and most determined antagonists. The engineers
were justly proud of their record in the physical care
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Figure 4. View of railroad tracks crossing the Mall on Sixth Street, looking north toward the Baltimore and Pofomac Railroad shed
and terminal tower, about 1900. Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress.
and upgrading of Washington throughout the nine-
teenth century (Cowdrey 1979).As early as 29 January
1900, before the avenue plan became known, the
army engineers had responded to an official request
by McMillan for their technical judgment of his railroad
bills (U.S. Senate 1900, 18-27). They had more than
replied; they had exploded. The most outraged among
them was Colonel Theodore A. gingham, the impet-
uous and outspoken superintendent of the Office of
Buildings and Grounds, which was then responsible
for the upkeep of most parks and government buildmgs
in the capital. Mincing no words, gingham denounced
the proposed terminal as a desecration of the Mall, a
travesty of L’Enfant’s “noble plan,” and an ”unpa-
triotic” rebuke to the memory of George Washington
(U.S. Senate 1900, 20-21). Such pointed remarks
reflected not only gingham’s style but the engineers’
formidable influence in Washington, both bureaucratic
and political.
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The avenue plan further outraged the engineers.
On March 5, less than two weeks after the February
21 meeting endorsed the scheme, gingham submitted
an alternative Mall plan to President McKinley. Ac-
cording to The Washington Post, he demanded the
relocation of the proposed terminal to a position south
of the Mall, the opening of a mid-Mall boulevard
between Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument,
and the placement of any new public buildings not
along that roadway but along Pennsylvania Avenue,
Washington’s traditional thoroughfare (6 March 1900,
2). Although the President admired a later version of
the scheme, nothing he did or said ended the battle
of plans (The Washington Post, 29 April 1900, 20).
The avenue plan had alarmed other Washingtonians,
especially businessmen who had long favored the
upgrading of Pennsylvania Avenue and of the sizable
wedge of land lying to its south, between that historic
street and the Mall. Known today as the Federal
139
Learning from the f a s t
Triangle, the area was then ”given u p almost wholly
to slumdom” and was a disgrace to respectable Wash-
ington (Fitzpatrick 1900a, 11).Cheap, shabby buildmgs
filled the lots; prostitution flourished along Thirteenth
and Fourteenth streets (Moore 1903, 94). By 1900, a
solid consensus, tantamount to a plan, existed among
downtown interests that the area must be upgraded
by erecting new government buildings-a kind of
incremental slum removal. But that plan was not
advanced by McMillan’s proposed avenue and the
building sites he favored along it. It lay far enough
south to stir fears that Pennsylvania Avenue might
become a “back street“ (The Evening Star, 23 February
1900, 4). Thus, the fate of the Triangle slum and
Pennsylvania Avenue became entangled in the battle
and, ultimately, in the McMillan Plan.4
The avenue plan also impinged upon a park system
scheme initiated by the Washington Board of Trade
in 1899. Following the lead of many American cities
in the 1890s, the board had contemplated a great
chain of parks and parkways as proof of civic stature.
Washington, it was claimed, might outdo any city in
the world, for it already possessed magnificent re-
sources: Potomac Park, then a barren, 739-acre landfill
built u p since 1882 by the army engineers on the
once-malarial flats south and west of the Washington
Monument; the National Zoological Park in the north-
western suburbs; the immense Rock Creek Park, just
north of the zoo; the park-like grounds of the U.S.
Soldiers Home; and various Civil War hilltop fortifi-
cations, all loudly defended by veterans groups as
historic sites. But except for the zoo, none of
these places had been developed for heavy public
use as yet, let alone linked by parkways (Moore 1903,
79-97).
As envisioned by the Board of Trade, a grand “ring
street” would connect all of those places, creating a
system of parks and parkways. Beginning at Capitol
Hill, it would sweep westward through the Mall and
Potomac Park, then loop through the northern reaches
of the city, including the Civil War fort sites, and
return to Capitol Hill. An additional drive would begin
in the same way but cross the Potomac and proceed
as a “national boulevard along the Potomac to Mount
Vernon and the tomb of Washington” (Cox 1903, 6).
Well before McMillan had proposed the avenue
plan, his Senate District of Columbia Committee had
aired these ideas for a park system and had even
readied legislation authorizing a commission to devise
plans (Cox 1903, 10). But the proposed avenue clearly
impinged upon that initiative, raising awkward ques-
tions about how such a “grand thoroughfare” could
be sliced through the existing Mall parks for the sake
of a railroad depot and still function as the starting
point in the contemplated park and parkway chain.
Also at stake was the free grant of an enlarged chunk
of Mall parkland to the Pennsylvania Railroad by the
140
proposed grade crossing legislation, to say nothing of
the public works priorities in Washington generally
(Washington Board of Trade 1902, 102-103). The
board sought to cooperate with McMillan to achieve
its objectives.
The victorious engineers
Altogether, the plans and counterplans that were
forced into scrutiny by the proposed terminal yielded
a n extraordinary outcome: a broad battle over the
future development of the nation’s capital. Senators,
congressmen, army engineers, Centennial promoters,
local boosters, the Washington press, and numerous
civic leaders had joined the fray, debating-sometimes
incisively, often not-basic questions of civic art, park
system design, and even slum removal, all as if these
were interrelated considerations. But could the oppos-
ing and divergent viewpoints be reconciled?
On May 14, McMillan, acting on behalf of the
Centennial organizers, introduced in the Senate a
resolution that responded directly to that question.
Cast in the form of an amendment to a civil appro-
priations act, it asked the President to appoint a panel
of designers-an architect, a landscape architect, and
a sculptor-who, in association with the Chief of
Engineers Office, would devise a plan for the entire
Mall-Triangle area and also for a ”suitable connection”
between Potomac Park and the zoo (Reps 1967, 74).
These same experts also would design the enlargement
of the White House. Here was a compromise that
bowed to the army engineers by making them con-
sultants, assimilated the slum renewal strategy of the
downtown interests by i n c l u d q the Triangle, placated
congressmen by providing an architect and other
artists to select building sites, and appealed to park
advocates by offering them a critical link in their park
chain.
The amendment, which the Senate approved, had
one catch, however. As its author, McMillan would
dominate the appointment^.^ Almost certainly, what-
ever experts he favored would accept the proposed
terminal and redesign the proposed avenue in more
palatable form. Significantly, the engineers, reduced
to the role of advisers by this maneuver, would play
second fiddle in the shaping of twentieth-century
Washington. This represented a role reversal of historic
dimensions, not only for the engineers’ role in the
nation’s capital but for their position with regard to
the emerging design professions in the United States.
The final episode in the battle of plans foreclosed
this role reversal, at least for the time being. Following
the Senate lead, the House of Representatives had
enacted the same amendment with one fundamental
difference: the army engineers, not a panel of design
professionals, would carry out the work. In the House-
Senate conference of June 6 that resolved the impasse,
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the pro-engineer version, slightly modified, prevailed.
This enabled the Chief of Engineers to assign none
other than Col. Theodore A. Bingham to the tasks of
redesigning the White House-a pet project for him-
and hiring a landscape architect to plan the Mall-
Triangle area and the parkway link to the zoo. Sud-
denly, the engineers had won the battle of plans-or
so it seemed (Reps 1967, 74; Cox 1901, 203, 320;
Moore 1921, vol. 1, 135).
Six months later, as the Centennial, scheduled for
December 12, drew near, the apparent balance of
forces had not altered. In late October, Bingham
published his White House plans in the Ladies Home
Journal, little sensing the alarm they would soon
arouse among professional architects. On December
5, one week before the celebration, the War Depart-
ment issued the new design for the Mall by Samuel
Parsons, Jr., a New York landscape architect hand-
picked by Bingham for the job. The Parsons plan,
though it bore his imprint, fulfilled the purposes of
the engineers, banishing the railroad terminal from
the Mall. “A lightning express,” Parsons remarked,
“is quite incompatible with a green garden and singing
birds” (U.S. House 1900, 8). Thus on Centennial Day
the army engineers looked as entrenched as ever, as
if they would preside over the future of Washington
just as they had for much of the past century.
The architects intervene
The American Institute of Architects assembled in
Washington for its annual convention on Centennial
Day, 1 2 December 1900, having rescheduled its meet-
ings to coincide with the celebration. A basic political
strategy lay behind this maneuver: to persuade Con-
gress to entrust the planning of the ceremonial core
of Washington to the nation’s professional architects
and artists, the same aesthetic elite who had made the
Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and its dazzling Court
of Honor a symbol of civic art aspirations in America.
What lured the profession was the heart of Washing-
ton, with all its public buildings, monuments, and
patriotic aura-almost precisely the same area jeop-
ardized by the battle of plans. Indeed, the architects
can be seen as reopening that struggle.
The fact that the architects had plunged into a
situation where they would need political allies ac-
counts for the second hidden origin of the McMillan
Plan: a behind-the-scenes bargain among McMillan,
the AIA, and the Washington Board of Trade intended
to advance each other’s cause.
As is well known, the mastermind of the architects’
intervention was Glenn Brown, the national secretary
of the AIA (Reps 1967, 82-83). No architect in America
was better prepared to conceive and direct the assault.
During the previous decade, in the course of making
an exhaustive study of the U.S. Capitol, Brown had
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rediscovered the significance of the long-neglected
L’Enfant plan as a still-viable blueprint for the future
of Washington. As early as 1894 he had launched a
personal crusade to arouse the architectural profession
to the goal of entrusting the nation’s elite architects
and artists with the redesign of the Mall in accord
with L’Enfant‘s intentions. Even that early, he had
opposed the appointment of the Army Corps of En-
gineers for the job. That body, he had remarked
acidly, had “never been accused of being artistic”
(Brown 1894, 28).
As AIA secretary, Brown served as a watchdog for
an organization already steeped in pressure-group
tactics learned from a decades-long struggle to enact
and implement legislation to upgrade the quality of
federal building design (Hines 1974, 126-133; Peterson
1967, 155-58). Only recently, in fact, the AIA had
shifted its headquarters from New York to Washington
to protect its hard-won gains (American Institute of
Architects 1898, 12).
When Senator McMillan unveiled the ill-fated av-
enue plan on 21 February 1900, Brown proved his
worth as secretary of the AIA. Immehately recognizing
its touted L’Enfant pedigree as meretricious, Brown
persuaded the AIA leaders to stage their annual meet-
ing as a protest against haphazard city building in
Washington. He had in mind neither the design of
the city as a whole nor the design of its park system
but what he called the “Grouping of Government
Buildings, Landscape, and Statuary” (American Insti-
tute of Architects 1900, 92).
The architects’ planning vision
The “grouping“ concept, it should be noted, was
contemporary architectural jargon for the civic art
enthusiasm inspired by the Chicago World’s Fair.
Specifically, it referred to the formal arrangement of
buildings in outdoor space. More broadly, it evoked
the taste and style preferences then ascendant among
the nation’s elite architects and artists and their rich
patrons, especially in the big urban centers of the
Northeast. Dubbed the “Renaissance complex” by art
historian Oliver Larkin, the new taste registered zeal
both for classic forms of architecture and for the
Renaissance ideal of artistic collaboration among ar-
chitects, sculptors, painters, and fine craftsmen (Larkin
1960, 293-300).
The “grouping” idea, however, centered on the
artistic shaping of public space: city streets, public
squares, the land around government buildings, and
the like. In such settings, both the classicism and the
artistic collectivism of the ”Renaissance complex” be-
came symbolic of public, not private, aspirations. A
well-ordered, well-decorated group of official buildings,
designed and built to the highest attainable standards,
would symbolize order, civilization, and, above all,
141
Learning from the Past
the new ethos of citizenship, public service, and civic
duty then prominent in political discourse (Peterson
1967, 199-206; Wilson 1979, 11-25). Public art also
would celebrate the new pride of the American people
in their country’s recently attained stature as a world
power.
The battle of plans and the subsequent decision by
Congress to assign responsibility for the Mall-Triangle
design to the army engineers determined much of
Brown’s approach to all these concerns. From March
to November 1900, Brown recruited his speakers and
orchestrated their assault. Information provided by
Brown enabled each participant, though he were per-
sonally ignorant of the battle of plans, to pick u p
where that struggle had left off.6 In October Brown
implored one participant to advocate an art commission
led by architects, landscape architects, and sculptors
as the solution to Washington’s problems. Bluntly, he
warned against any such body being “dominated in
any way by the army engineer^."^ Later that month
he alerted his speakers to Bingham‘s piece in the
Ladies Home Journal.
When the architects finally assembled, they heaped
public abuse upon Bingham’s White House scheme
(The Washington Post, 14 December 1900, 2, 9; 15
December 1900, 6) and, on December 13, staged their
well-publicized evening session on the design of the
capital city. For our purposes, the general thrust of
the speakers’ remarks, not the details of their proposals,
best reveals their intentions. Above all, they thought
only in terms of the ceremonial core of Washington.
For that area, everyone sought a formal, monumental,
aesthetically unified composition of buildings, statuary,
and public grounds, all styled in the classic manner
and all rendered consistent with the L’Enfant plan as
they understood it. Significantly, none of the speakers
that evening discussed the park system of the city or
the suburban districts through which such a system
might reach.’
Civic art, in short, expressed a vision of urban
planning that was limited essentially to architectonic
forms of design. For all its complexity and sophisti-
cation, it was as circumscribed in its outlook as were
the viewpoints that had long justified the design of
municipal park systems, the engineering of citywide
sewerage and water supply, and the pursuit of still
other limited-purpose forms of urban planning. In
that respect, the speakers can be seen as still rooted
in the fragmentary and specialized forms of urban
planning that had typified nineteenth-century attempts
to shape established cities.
The behind-the-scenes bargain
No sooner had the architects assembled than the
politics of their intervention propelled them into the
twentieth century. Abruptly and unexpectedly, as will
142
be seen, they found themselves advocating a park
system for Washington as a means of advancing civic
art. As a consequence, two major, previously distinct
forms of urban planning joined forces. This result
ultimately would require the McMillan Plan to be as
concerned about the natural environment and the far
reaches of the city through which the park system
would pass as it would be about the built environment
and the center of the city. Thus it would anticipate
and, by force of example, inculcate the comprehen-
siveness that became the conscious goal and root
principle of much twentieth-century urban planning.
The behind-the-scenes bargain that produced this
outcome took place December 13, the second day of
the convention. Five representatives of the AIA, ap-
pointed that day, met with McMillan (or possibly with
Charles Moore, his secretary) and, almost certainly,
someone from the Board of Trade.’ The senator and
the AIA representatives shared antagonism toward
the army engineers. Not only had the architects de-
nounced Bingham, but they would ignore the Bingham-
commissioned Parsons plan for the Mall-Triangle at
their public session on the design of the city held later
that same day.
McMillan, for his part, still had his eyes riveted on
his grade crossing legislation, especially his bill au-
thorizing the Mall terminal. Even as they met, his
opponents in the House of Representatives were pre-
paring to cite engineering criticism and the Parsons
plan as justifications for voting down McMillan’s
legislation (The Washington Post, 12 December 1900,
4; The Evening Star, 15 December 1900). McMillan
needed the architects to sanction his claim that he
had the beauty of Washington at heart. The architects,
in turn, met the senator’s needs in one critical respect:
they accepted, as a matter of realism, his terminal in
the Mall.”
Once allied with McMillan, the AIA had no choice
but to embrace park planning. The reasons were
elemental. Powerful as McMillan was in Washington
affairs, his District of Columbia committee lacked
authority over civic art. Control over building location,
for example, belonged to the Senate Committee on
Public Buildings and Grounds, while jurisdiction over
statuary lay with the Joint (Senate-House) Committee
on the Library (U.S. Senate 1901, 68). But McMillan
did have power over park matters and, as noted,
already had worked with the Board of Trade to
prepare park legislation. Thus the AIA agreed to
address this issue, and the Board of Trade, the chief
promoter of the park system, agreed to add the
subjects of buildng and bridge placement to its publicly
stated goals for the city (Cox 1903, 17). Ostensibly,
McMillan had fathered a new coalition for the physical
improvement of Washington and a strategy for regain-
ing the planning initiative from the engineers.
In fulfillment of this bargain, McMillan introduced
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Joint Resolution No. 139 in the U.S. Senate. Intended
to win the support of both houses of Congress for the
planning of Washington, this measure authorized the
President of the United States to appoint a commission
consisting of two architects and one landscape architect
to ”consider the subject of the location and grouping
of public buildings and monuments . . . and the
development and improvement of the park system”
of the district. An appropriation of $10,000 was sought
for expenses (American Architect 1901, 47-48).
Joint Resolution No. 139 would never clear the
Senate, let alone the House. As Charles Moore,
McMillan’s trusted aide and personal secretary and
chronicler of these events, later remarked, a “multitude
of councillors” defeated the measure (Moore 1929,
183). For example, between 17 December 1900 and
mid-January 1901, at least two other commissions
were proposed in the Senate and the House to address
roughly the same tasks (The Evening Star, 17 December
1900, 15 January 1901, 4; The Washington Post, 16
January 1901, 12). By early February, three additional
bills had emerged, each designating sites for new
buildings. The latter bills, the architects realized,
threatened their hopes to make the location of public
structures the task of a commission of elite designers.
Unable to command support in either the House or
the Senate, Joint Resolution No. 139 languished. By
late February, the cause of the AIA and the Board of
Trade appeared moribund (Brown, outgoing corre-
spondence, February-March 1901).
In McMillan, however, the AIA possessed a faithful
and resourceful ally. With his railroad bills successfully
enacted, he found a way to fulfill his end of the
bargain. On March 8, during an executive session of
the Senate held after the adjournment of Congress,
he obtained last-minute passage of a resolution au-
thorizing his committee to “report to the Senate plans
for the development and improvement of the entire
park system of the District of Columbia.” Appropriate
“experts” might be consulted and expenses defrayed
from ”the contingent fund of the Senate” (Moore
1902, 7; American Institute of Architects 1901; Moore
1921, vol. 1, 137). These experts, once appointed,
would become known as the US. Senate Park Com-
mission, or the McMillan Commission, but their au-
thority, it must be emphasized, rested upon a far more
tenuous political base than had been envisioned in
Joint Resolution No. 139 back in December. Further-
more, the new measure said nothing about public
buildings and monuments.
Constance McLaughlin Green, in her history of the
federal city, has castigated McMillan’s action as a
“politically egregious error” (Green 1963, 138). Sub-
sequent obstruction of the resulting plan by House
Speaker Joseph Cannon, she argues, stemmed from
McMillan‘s failure to obtain concurrence from the
House. But Green misconstrues the situation. Support
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from the House had never been forthcoming. McMillan
had no other option but to invoke his real but limited
power as committee chairman to oversee park devel-
opment. In reality, he honored his bargain with the
AIA by playing virtually the only card remaining in
his hand. It was a deft, albeit a necessarily weak,
move, yet a credit to McMillan as a man of his word.
And as McMillan fully understood, the political cir-
cumstances under which he had acted now dictated
caution.
McMillan instructs the commission
Thus far, we have examined how the events pre-
ceding the establishment of the Senate Park Commis-
sion made possible the novel comprehensiveness of
its celebrated report. The battle of plans had identified
the Mall-Triangle as an area requiring coherent re-
planning, and the behind-the-scenes bargain had cou-
pled this priority with park system planning. The
question now becomes how the commission itself
contributed to the breadth and complexity of its plan.
The answer requires a fresh perspective that cannot
be found in any other commentary on the plan. Briefly
stated, the commission exceeded its instructions, largely
because of its chairman, Daniel H. Burnham.
The commission might have submitted a less au-
dacious scheme. McMillan explicitly instructed it to
do so. But what emerged bore an air of ideality,
grandeur, and finality, particularly with respect to the
ceremonial core of Washington. All commentators
have recognized this result, but none has grasped its
sheer presumptuousness. What follows, therefore, is
not a history of the commission but a highlighting of
its audacity, especially on the part of Burnham, who
catalyzed the planning situation created by the events
thus far traced. His boldness provides the final key to
grasping the unique comprehensiveness of the Mc-
Millan Plan.
On 19 March 1901, McMillan and Senator Jacob H.
Gallinger of New Hampshire, acting as a subcommittee
of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia,
held an informal hearing with representatives of the
AIA. Their purpose was to discuss, as McMillan put
it, the ”improvement of the park system” and, “inci-
dentally,” the placement of public buildings (U.S.
Senate 1901, 67, 70). Landscape architect Frederick
Law Olmsted, Jr., also attended. Everyone present
agreed that three experts should be appointed, but no
one knew just what sort of plan they should formulate.
As the hearing proceeded, however, a very definite
objective emerged: the commission should devise a
”preliminary plan” as distinct from a ”matured one”
(U.S. Senate 1901, 75-76, 78). Because the resulting
scheme would be tentative, it could then be negotiated
through the three Senate and House committees that
had jurisdiction over parks, buildings, and statuary-
143
Learning from the Past
or through a joint committee representing all three
bodies (The Washington Post, 23 March 1901, 12). A
final, amended plan would be developed later. In light
of the tenuous mandate McMillan had won for the
commission, this cautious, consensus-building strategy
made excellent political sense. As Olmsted privately
noted, McMillan wanted a “comprehensive scheme”
but feared that ”it might be turned down by the other
Committees if it were made too complete and pushed
too far” (Olmsted Associates papers, box 134).
Daniel H. Burnham: Catalyst
The commission established to fulfill this under-
standing included Daniel H. Burnham, the Chicago
architect famous for masterminding the construction
of the site and buildings for the Chicago World’s Fair
of 1893; Charles F. McKim, the New York architect
whose work epitomized the “Renaissance complex”
in the building arts; and Olmsted, son of the nation’s
foremost landscape architect. Later the eminent sculp-
tor Augustus Saint-Gaudens became a fourth commis-
sioner. In effect, the design team of the Chicago fair
had been reconstituted.”
At the March 19 hearing, both senators made clear
that these experts should avoid heavy expenses. “A
scheme of extravagance,” Gallinger had warned, ”. . .
would very likely defeat the purposes we have in
view” (U.S. Senate 1901, 73). Both he and McMillan
welcomed a “preliminary plan” as avoiding this hazard.
When Burnham and Olmsted first met, on March 22,
they foresaw $22,600 as their “maximum expense,“
but McMillan favored less, informing them that costs
should run ”between $15,000 and $20,000” (Olmsted
Associates papers, box 134) and then publicizing a
still lower sum, reported by The Washington Post as
”about $10,000’’ (23 March 1901, 12). These dollar
figures provide benchmarks for judging how far the
commission soon would exceed its instructions.
From April 6, when the commission first assembled
as an official body, to June 13, when it departed for
Europe on its famous study tour, Burnham imprinted
his large sense of mission upon his fellow commis-
sioners. Repeatedly he drew upon his World’s Fair
experience (McKim, Mead & White papers). Although
all the commissioners brought to the task a spirit of
service and teamwork instilled in them by the fair,
only Burnham had held direct administrative respon-
sibility for coordinating the entire stupendous under-
taking, from dredging operations through building
layout to lighting and policing (Hines 1974, 92-94).
Largeness of view, executive ability, and skill in the
functional designing of great commercial structures
also had characterized his private work (Field 1974,
37-58). Almost inevitably, Burnham became head of
the commission and inspired his fellow commissioners
144
to perceive the nation’s capital as virtually another
exposition, to be addressed as an analogously malleable
whole.
No surviving document better illustrates Burnham’s
breadth of outlook than a hurried list that he mailed
to McKim, Olmsted, and Moore early in May. Every
item on the list ought to be reviewed, he suggested.
Under the heading of ”Transportation,” for example,
he entered ”Railways, Depots, Viaducts, Electric Lines,
Cable Lines, Horse Lines, Cab Service,” and even
“Automobiles” and “Bicycles.” At one point he focused
on residential areas, asking whether building height
and setback requirements might be proposed-regu-
latory concepts that were not to be associated with
city planning in the United States until the next
decade. Elsewhere he suggested that the commission
discuss ”methods for heating and lighting, for distri-
bution of water and sewerage, for fire protection,
policing, and care of the insane and criminal classes.”
For a man often accused of Haussmannic pretentions,
Burnham showed a keen eye for detail by raising
questions about plantings along transit lines, about
noise and smoke pollution, about the cleanliness of
depots and of “cabs, wagons, of drivers and employ-
ees,” and even about appropriate uniforms for street
vendors, elevator operators, and various public ser-
vants.12
Burnham‘s well-known success in extricating the
Pennsylvania Railroad from the Mall played the key
role in emboldening the commission to exceed
McMillan’s instructions. As is already apparent from
previous dscussion of the battle of plans, the proposed
new terminal in the Mall represented the linchpin to
the replanning of Washington. When the commission
first met officially on April 6, that linchpin appeared
more firmly in place than ever. Nearly two months
before, Congress had enacted the long-agitated grade
crossing legslation and President McKinley had signed
it. The new terminal, McMillan told his commissioners,
must be regarded as “a fixture upon the Mall” (Brown
1931, 79).
Burnham refused to accept this reality. Instead, he
maneuvered in a fashion not understood until now.
Approaching McKim and swearing him to secrecy,
Burnham confided that he, Burnham, might well be-
come the architect of that very terminal. With this in
mind, the two men together plotted its removal from
the Mall. Thus, on May 20, when Burnham arrived at
the Philadelphia headquarters of the Pennsylvania
Railroad empire, hoping for the assignment, he did
not come as a passive supplicant. He brought rough
plans for a n alternative, off-Mall site. In two excited
letters to McKim written immediately afterward, Burn-
ham reported that Alexander Cassatt, president of the
Pennsylvania system, and his chief engineers had
“had no idea of the development we had worked
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out” and had still been thinking of “the old location.”
“The new idea,” he made clear, ”has been received
with much more open-mindedness than Ihad hope
of.” In fact, the railroad officers even had agreed to
halt land purchases “for the old scheme,” at least
until a more detailed proposal for ”the new location”
could be p r e ~ e n t e d . ’ ~
This breakthrough, coming significantly earlier than
heretofore realized, made possible the special contri-
bution of Burnham and the commissioners to the
comprehensiveness of their plan. By seizing the linch-
pin to virtually the entire complex of events that had
given rise to the commission, Burnham established a
new basis for replanning the core of Washington. It
was as if L‘Enfant himself had won a second chance.
Only this dazzling prospect, combined with Burnham’s
celebrated persuasiveness and the ready support of
McKim and Olmsted, explains why McMillan, for all
his earlier qualms about costs, soon agreed to expend
an additional $13,000 to hire George Carroll Curtis, a
Boston model builder, to construct two three-dimen-
sional representations of central Washington, one to
show existing conditions and the other the area as
replanned (McMillan papers; McKim, Mead & White
papers). A preliminary scheme would not have justified
such a lavish dramatization.
The fact that McMillan consented to this action
before the commission departed for Europe is indication
enough that its members ventured abroad already
knowing that they were aiming for something of
grand and enduring worth. Even Moore, who accom-
panied the commission, would later recall having
warned the designers while still on shipboard that
their “ideas were too overpowering to receive consid-
eration in Congress,” only to be “silenced if not then
convinced by Burnham’s downright assertion that it
was the business of the Commission to make the very
finest plans their minds could conceive” (Moore
1929, 188).
The commission also may have known that in their
absence McMillan would follow u p Burnham’s initia-
tive by inviting Cassatt (of the Pennsylvania Railroad)
to his vacation home in Manchester, New Hampshire.
As Moore recalled the story off the record years later,
the two men had settled the much-vexed terminal
question while playing a game of golf (Partridge
papers).
Cassatt’s decision to remove the proposed terminal
from the Mall, even after obtaining legislation guar-
anteeing a Mall site, stemmed from many factors:
McMillan’s offer to persuade Congress to meet the
increased expenses involved; the existence of an alter-
native site northeast of the Mall, made available to
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by the recently
enacted grade crossing legislation; and a recent decision
by the Pennsylvania to merge its Washington lines
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first Comprehensive Plan
with those of the B&O, which gave it control of the
alternative site. But without Burnham’s initiative in
May, boldly suggesting the relocation of the terminal
in the first place, neither Cassatt nor McMillan would
have altered his course, nor would the commission
have been as zealous in pursuing “the very finest
plans their minds could conceive.”
The McMillan Plan
Plans framed in such a spirit, of course, cost far in
excess of the original expectations. The records of the
Contingent Fund of the U.S. Senate tell the story. The
entries, when summed, reveal that the commission’s
expenses reached $53,621.66-as against the $10,000
once publicly estimated and the $20,000 maximum
originally prescribed by McMillan. George Curtis’s
models, which the commission prized so highly, alone
cost $24,500; disbursements to McKim, chiefly for
draftsmen to work u p the Mall design and for artists
to illustrate the intended effects, exceeded $17,000.’4
The completed scheme, lavishly displayed at the
Corcoran Art Gallery in mid-January 1902, featured
two main components. First, it addressed the cere-
monial core of Washington, especially the kite-shaped
expanse anchored by the Capitol to the east, the
Lincoln Memorial site to the west, the White House
and Lafayette Park to the north, and a formal building
group to be constructed adjacent to the Tidal Basin to
the south, as diagrammed in Figure 5 and as partially
illustrated in Figure 6. Within this area the commission
imposed the civic art ideas then ascendant among
American architects. This portion of the plan also
addressed the issues raised by the battle of plans
preceding the appointment of the commission: the
placement of the Potomac River bridge, the location
of the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal, and the fate of
the Triangle slum, all of which added to the complexity
of the overall scheme (Moore 1902, 23-71).
Second, the plan outlined a n extensive park system,
shown in Figure 7, that reached through the outer
limits of the District of Columbia (and well beyond in
the case of a proposed “national highway” to Mount
Vernon). Olmsted, who developed this part of the
plan, incorporated many of the ideas promoted by the
Washington Board of Trade, veterans, and other
groups. But he went much further, proposing a state-
of-the-art system based on his firm’s national experi-
ence and the commission’s European tour. Among the
ideas within this portion of the plan were suggestions
for beginning a system of neighborhood parks, for
constructing an immense quay along the Potomac
near Georgetown, for preserving the Chesapeake and
Ohio Canal as a scenic-recreational amenity, for build-
ing a sizable public recreation complex south of
the Mall, and for reclaiming the notoriously malarial
145
Figure 5. Design for the ceremonial core of Washington-the McMillan Plan. From Plans and Studies: Washington and Vicinity,
by the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Ofice, 1929). Reproduced by photo
department, Fogg Museum.

Figure 6. An artist's view of the proposed Washington Monument Gardens and Mall, made for the McMillan Plan exhibit of 1902.
Photo archive of Francis Loeb Library, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Reproduced by photo department, Fog8
Museum.

Figure 7. Existing public spaces and the proposed park system for the District of Columbia under the McMillan Plan. From Work of
the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Ofice, 1928). Reproduced by photo
department, Fogg Museum.
Anacostia flats as an enormous recreational water park
(Moore 1902, 75-122).
Altogether, the civic art ideals and park system
goals of the commission, once blended with each
other and with the local agenda established by the
events preceding the creation of the commission,
yielded a report of unprecedented sweep and com-
plexity. None of this would have happened but for
the hidden origins of the McMillan Commission: the
battle of plans; the behind-the-scenes bargain among
the AIA, the Board of Trade, and McMillan; and the
catalytic role of Burnham, whose leadership enabled
the commission to transcend its original instructions.
The comprehensiveness achieved as a result of these
developments would leave an indelible imprint on our
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First Comprehensive Plan
national capital and on the history of urban planning
in the United States.
Conclusion
Analysis of the hidden origins of the McMillan Plan
underscores the important truth that any workable
plan must be grounded in political realities and must
take into account the demands of powerful individuals
and groups. Although no simple lesson about the role
of politics in planning emerges from the story of the
McMillan Plan, two distinct styles of politics can be
seen at work, and it is reasonable to believe that both
styles must be blended to achieve planning success in
a democratic society.
147
Learning from the fast
The first involved the arts of behind-the-scenes
maneuvering and bargaining practiced by McMillan.
Defeated by the engineers in his first attempt to obtain
a plan for the Mall-Triangle, McMillan devised a
coalition among himself, the AIA, and the Washington
Board of Trade, hoping to regain the planning initiative.
Then, unable to obtain joint House-Senate action, he
again maneuvered, invoking his power as committee
chairman to create the commission that produced the
McMillan Plan. This style of politics led McMillan to
favor a scheme that could be negotiated through
Congress. A politically brokered plan, however, would
have compromised the commission’s ideas of the
public interest.
The commission drastically altered the politics of
the McMillan Plan by pushing for an ideal solution.
Uninterested in compromise, it turned toward the
politics of publicity and the courting of public opinion.
To that end, it did its best by glorifying its own effort,
devising impressive models, hiring the best illustrators,
and, indeed, imparting an aura of grand finality and
aesthetic authority to its work.
This new approach posed substantial risks. For
years the McMillan Plan sat poorly with Congress, its
idealism, presumptuousness, and high cost offering
easy targets, especially for members of the House of
Representatives who righteously claimed not to have
been consulted (Reps 1967, 144). Enemies watched
from the sidelines, awaiting an opportunity to subvert
the scheme (Reps 1967, 145-49). There is little wonder
that when the AIA, not fully comprehending these
repercussions, pressed McMillan to establish a per-
manent commission, he steadfastly counseled against
such action, fearing that it might crystallize the op-
position-no matter how favorable public opinion
might be (McKim, Mead & White papers).
Only a gradualist strategy that combined both po-
litical styles offered an escape from these complications.
McMillan, ever adept at the politics of maneuver, set
this strategy in motion by seeking to make the plan
stick, first here, then there. Before his unexpected
death in August 1902, he took the first such step,
initiating the legislation that soon placed the Union
Station exactly where the commission had wanted it.
This same gradualist strategy relied heavily on the
politics of publicity. Year in and year out, the advocates
of the plan worked under the burden of defending
and promoting it. Major battles over the location of
the Department of Agriculture building in the Mall
and over whether the Lincoln Memorial shrine should
even be built would be won by marshaling public
support, by clever lobbying, and by soliciting aid from
friends in high office (Reps 1967, 145-159; Peterson
1967, 319-322). Unquestionably, the public interest
idealism embodied by the plan itself helped sustain
this struggle (Green 1963, 139).
148
Advocates of comprehensive planning often have
been torn between these two styles of politics.
Tempted, with McMillan, to make planning an integral
part of the political process, they have risked compro-
mised and shortsighted results in the name of realism
and workability. Tempted at other times, with Burn-
ham, to make planning a principled expression of the
public interest, they have counted too readily on
popular support and lobbying to win backing for
programs conceived in isolation from the politics of
maneuvering and bargain making.
Needless to say, no formula exists by which to
duplicate the unique, indeed fortuitous, blending of
the two political styles that made the McMillan Plan
such a success. Yet the fact that such a blending was
achieved is important, even now. It reminds us that
successful planning must be regarded as much as a
complex political art as a knowledge-based field of
endeavor.
Author’s note
The author thanks the Charles Warren Center for Studies in
American History, Harvard University, for fellowship assistance
that supported a portion of the work in this essay, the American
Philosophical Society and the American Council of Learned Societies
for funds to collect photographs, and Queens College, CUNY, for
travel assistance. This article derives from a paper read in October
1983 at a conference on the McMillan Plan, sponsored by the
Center for Washington Area Studies at George Washington Univer-
sity, the Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians,
and the National Capital Chapter of the American Planning Asso-
ciation.
Notes
1. For more extensive documentation of the findings presented in
this article and a more detailed elaboration of some of those
findings, consult Peterson (1983).
2. For the relation of the McMillan Plan to the general development
of American planning history, see Peterson (1967). Also consult
Peterson (1976) and Peterson (1979).
3. Except as noted, all information about local promotion of the
Centennial derives from Cox (1901).
4. The then-newly built post office, a massive structure located
on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue-and still standing
today-was seen as contributing to this goal (Moore 1903, 94).
For the views of a major businessman, see The Washingtoiz Post,
6 March 1900, p. 2.
5. McMillan’s power may be inferred from an exactly parallel
situation in connection with Senate Resolution No. 139, as
interpreted by Glenn Brown in a letter to Robert S. Peabody,
29 December 1900 (Brown, outgoing correspondence).
6. Brown‘s actions may be followed in h s outgoing correspondence.
He formulated the program by mid-March and began soliciting
papers March 24. For efforts to inform speakers of the local
situation, see letters to Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Edgar V.
Seeler, and C. Howard Walker, 12 July 1900, and an article
Brown published at that time on the grouping theme (Brown
1900).
7 Letters from Glenn Brown to H. K. Bush-Brown, October 9 and
18, 1900 (Brown, outgoing correspondence).
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8. This analysis of the evening session viewpoints is based strictly
on the papers p e n on that occasion, not those of Cass Gilbert,
Paul J. Pelz, and George 0. Totten, which were published later
with the evening-session papers (Brown 1901). For a list of
those who actually spoke, see American Institute of Architects
(1900, 92).
9. For the December 13 meeting, see American Institute of Archi-
tects (1900, 47-48, 113). The presence of the Board of Trade is
inferred from the fact that it voted the very next day to adopt
the policies set December 13. See Cox (1903, 17).
10. See Mall plan drawings accompanying Brown (1901). The
design by Edgar V. Seeler, which is reproduced by Reps (1967,
88), is especially revealing of preconvention attitudes because
Brown personally escorted Seeler over the Mall grounds before
Seeler prepared his paper. See letters from Seeler to Brown, 30
October and 21 November 1900 (Brown, incoming correspon-
dence).
11. Everyone but Olmsted, who was only 29 when appointed to
the commission in March 1901 and a sort of stand-in for his
ailing father, had had a major role in shaping the Chicago fair.
Even Olmsted had worked at the fair and later recalled it as a
high point of his professional career (Olmsted Associates papers,
box 176).
12. From a letter from Daniel H. Burnham to Charles F. McKim,
including eleven-page list, 8 May 1901 (McKim, Mead & White
papers).
13. Two letters from Daniel H. Burnham to Charles F. McKim, 20
May 1901, detail Burnham’s interview with Pennsylvania Rail-
road officials (McKim, Mead & White papers).
14. Reimbursements recorded, 3 May 1901 through 5 September
1902: George C. Curtis, $24,479.57; McKim, Mead & White
and CharlesF. McKim, $17,065.98; Daniel H. Burnham, $1,556.45;
F. L. Olmsted, Jr,, $1,698.44; James G. Langdon (an Olmsted
draftsman), $1,971.29; Charles Moore, $6,099.13; Jules Guerin
(illustrator), $425.00; Architectural Press, $243.20; and J. H.
Gallinger, $82.60. (“Expenses of Select and Special Committees,”
U.S. Senate, Contingent [Fund] Expenses, vol. C-41, pp. 141-
43; V O ~C-42,
. pp. 111-18).
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