THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 27, 2021
He topples a nonpartisan arts commission for much the same reason vandals topple old statues.
‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” Augustus Caesar said of his reign. If only the president consulted his Suetonius. Joe Biden found Washington a city of marble and has set out to throw bricks at its defenders. The latest target is the nonpartisan Commission of Fine Arts. In a break with more than a century of tradition, on Monday the executive branch, writing “on behalf of President Biden,” ordered a majority of the fine-arts commissioners, including the chairman, to resign by the close of business or be terminated that evening. Next, Mr. Biden named four new appointments in their place.
“I respectfully decline your request to resign,” shot back Justin Shubow, the commission’s chairman, who was appointed to a four-year term in October 2018. “No commissioner has ever been removed by a President, let alone the commission’s chairman. Any such removal would set a terrible precedent.”
Mr. Shubow is right to stand firm against executive overreach. Established by Congress in 1910, this independent federal agency has overseen “matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation’s capital,” according to the commission’s own description. Composed of seven members with expertise in the arts, the unpaid commission has historically risen above partisan politics—in part by being appointed as terms expire, not at every change of administration. From Taft to Trump, no American president had gone against this tradition.
The four commissioners on the chopping block are seasoned architects, artists and preservationists. Mr. Biden’s move against the peaceful transition of power for these design professionals reveals the high stakes of aesthetics in a newly woke Washington. As Trump appointees, all four are assumed to be defenders of Washington’s classical forms. Coming out of a period of astonishing violence that has sought to destroy symbols of America’s classical inheritance, the four commissioners are for the left but the latest monuments to “white supremacy” to tumble.
One wouldn’t think preserving and extending Washington’s classical order should invite controversy. This is a city where a Senate meets on a Capitol Hill, named after the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The Commission of Fine Arts was established to promote classical unity. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement that began in the 1890s, the agency played a key role in tying together the architecture of the White House and the Capitol with a program of new buildings and monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial of 1922.
In 2020 an executive order called “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” brought renewed attention to this mission by again giving classical forms priority in federal design. The order overrode a 1960s mandate that had allowed modernist and often Brutalist architecture to squat around the National Mall. Writing in these pages last year, the journalist and historian Myron Magnet observed that the order “would thrill lifelong amateur architects George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. ” America’s Founders “wanted the new nation’s public buildings to embody its ideals of self-governance, rooted in Greek democracy and Roman republicanism.”
In one of his first acts in office, Mr. Biden overturned Mr. Trump’s executive order. Now, by moving against the commission, Mr. Biden looks to extirpate classical roots. In “Paideia,” a magisterial three-volume study of the ideals of Greek culture, the historian Werner Jaeger noted: “Our history still begins with the Greeks. . . . Without Greek cultural ideals, Greco-Roman civilization would not have been a historical unity, and the culture of the western world would never have existed.” First published in the 1930s, this work by a scholar who fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. well understood how “other nations made gods, kings, spirits: the Greeks alone made men.” It fell to the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal of such men, to restore these ideals of humanistic self-governance.
Those ideals have been embodied in America’s elected institutions as well as the buildings that house them. Recent critics have sought to malign America’s classical forms through facile associations with Nazi Germany and the antebellum South. Yet it is Brutalism and other forms of recent architectural supremacy that most align with authoritarian regimes, reflecting through impenetrable design and inhuman scale the totality of the state. By attacking the nonpartisan commission, Mr. Biden further undermines our democratic classical inheritance in both institutional and physical form. For a president who has already staked out his imperial ambitions, one might say, how could he not?
Mr. Biden’s affront to the Fine Arts Commission foreshadows greater challenges ahead for democratic institutions. Formed in April through his executive order, the Commission on the Supreme Court similarly looks to overturn precedent by threatening new presidential pressure and power over the appointment of Supreme Court justices. “Tell your president,” Justice Louis Brandeis said of an earlier attempt to pack the courts, “he has made a great mistake.” The same should be said of Mr. Biden’s move against the Commission of Fine Arts. When it comes to classical forms and classical norms, we don’t need a little Caesar.