Pennsylvania Avenue and Georgetown: the funeral procession

On the day of the funeral, the full cortege walked from the Capitol to the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue, a street that was then just beginning to take on its current appearance of the country’s civic stage. It was already an imperial way. Since Thomas Jefferson’s second term as president (1805-9), it had served as the route for inaugurals, parades of departing and returning troops, victory celebrations, and presidential funerals. Such official ceremonial uses, when linked together as a remembered whole, connoted a cycle of joy and grief. Nor were its ceremonial uses exclusively official. The Emancipation Proclamation was annually celebrated on it by

Washington’s African-American population. Protesters, both male and female – Coxey’s Army of unemployed (1893) and suffragists seeking the vote (1916-17) – marched on it to draw attention to their causes. Thus, even in its single role as a processional way and parade ground, its meanings had been multiplied by its somewhat opposing historic uses, as, for example, in the pairing of Lincoln’s inaugurals and funeral, and its grandness had been fractured by its different users, celebrators and protesters, military and civilian, male and female, white and black.

In addition, Pennsylvania Avenue was a commercial artery, which, by 1921, was only just undergoing the changes foreseen by the Beaux-Arts McMillan Plan. A range of types and qualities of services to consumers of different races and classes was offered. Closer to the Capitol, it was a ‘blighted region of saloons, gambling dens, lodging houses, quick lunchrooms, cheap-jack shops, and catch-penny amusement places’. Toward the mid­point, its urbanity was dislocated by the Central Market and Chinatown, and their associations with the ‘otherness’ of the countryside and of another race. Formality, power, and racial and material whiteness returned as it neared the White House and the Treasury (Robert Mills, 1836-42), surrounded by the leading hotels and the city’s most important legitimate and vaudeville theatres. In short, the Avenue was physically, symbolically and historically an in-between place, a hyphen between the executive and legislative branches
of government, the races, and the production of the country and the consump­tion of the city, as well as the nation’s ceremonial centre stage. The latter cannot therefore be considered its only identity for the citizens of Washington.45 The funeral column proceeded from the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery along Pennsylvania Avenue, and it was recognized that it was transformed by it. It was, the Washington Post wrote, the ‘same old avenue, yet it was different. It was Pennsylvania Avenue, changed momen­tarily into a chancery, a sacristy, a sacred, serene street.’46 With the nation’s highest ranking officer, Pershing, and the president both on foot and with two presidents present, instead of one – for ex-president Wilson and Edith Bolling Galt Wilson were, finally, included in the procession – the composition of the cortege was also unorthodox. The presence of two presidents in separate positions disturbed the natural ranking of elected officials. At the sight of the Wilsons in their open horse-drawn carriage, with most of the onlookers catching a glimpse of the disfiguring effects of the president’s stroke on his person for the first time, the otherwise hushed crowd exploded into cheers, in a ‘continuous outburst’, and an impromptu honour guard of veterans in uniform formed around him. Other interruptions also occurred. The composi­tion of the civic contingent, a standard feature of all state ceremonies, offered another opportunity for bystanders to become participants. The funereal silence was broken by applause for the Medal of Honor winners, and for the War Mothers, for whom ‘the cheers became a roar’. They were ‘glorified and honoured, . . . [and] bowed to… by everyone’. The women’s group, composed of the nurses and the Salvation Army’s war workers known as ‘Doughnut Girls’, were also especially hailed by the observers. Thus the scripted commemorative message of the funeral – the honouring of the dead, and by extension, the military service, of men in combat – was disturbed by the active remembering of the war service of women and the sacrifices of mothers. Similarly, the proximity of the ex-president’s horse-drawn conveyance to the horse-drawn caisson bearing the coffin equated the man that many counted among the war-wounded with the war’s premier victim and present object of national affection.47

At the White House, the members of the government left the parade, leaving only Pershing and the Secretary of War to march on as principal mourners through Georgetown. The significance of this choice of route should not be underestimated. An area never penetrated by national processions, it was chosen by the Army because it was, as they described it, ‘the most "populous"’. In fact, Georgetown was then a multiracial, ‘working class "checkerboard"’. The second half of the parade was thus composed entirely of present and past soldiers, of men and women who had rendered service on the home and war fronts, of civilians with historic or hereditary

connections to the military, and of civic groups representing all creeds and the black and white races. This reshuffling effectively redefined the official and voluntary mourners. No longer the representative of a consolidated and spelled-out state, they were now a coming together of groups with emotional or historic relations to the Unknown Soldier, a diachronic and synchronic extended family.

How did the spatial setting of the funeral act as a frame? By following Pennsylvania Avenue into Georgetown, the procession in all proba­bility called attention to the Avenue’s dual nature as ordinary street and ceremonial way; the tension between the significance of its central portion and the banality of its ends; its interstitial position between the two nodes of governmental power, and its common significance in the lives of several races, black, white, and ‘yellow’. The funeral procession’s structure was homologous with the procession’s route. Just at the point when the ordinary urban character of the Avenue was reasserted, the representatives of the civil government abandoned the cortege and left the Unknown Soldier to its military and civic family.

But space was acted upon as well. Wilson’s appearance and the response it elicited fractured both the spatial performative of the structure of government, with its contingents for each branch, and the spatial role of Pennsylvania Avenue as the route taken by a president in the normal course of ceremonial events only twice, upon taking and leaving office. Some of the occurrences were also a precise inversion of an easily remembered previous use of the Avenue during the war. The disabled Wilson in his horse-drawn carriage recalled the able-bodied president who had marched in Preparedness and Liberty Loan parades, just as Pershing on foot recalled by opposition the mounted leader who rode at the head of his personal victory parade of 1919.