Changing Times at Arlington National Cemetery

A world-class landscape, wars coming and going, and a new look for Lee’s mansion

O n Thursday I wrote about the history of Arlington National Cemetery (“Arlington”), the flagship of our national system of cemeteries for veterans.

Arlington’s a place to honor the dead, but in that context and as a projection of history, it’s first a work of landscape architecture, which is art. About 400,000 veterans are buried there. Service, not necessarily heroism, is the key to admission, though heroes of all stripes are there. Arlington is one vast history book, too, and I see American history as a blessing, not a curse or an embarrassment. Anyone having common sense, empathy, and gratitude would feel the same way.

Today’s story and Thursday’s complement a piece I wrote a couple of months ago on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. On Thursday I looked at the source and design of Arlington’s signature white-marble grave markers, which come from a quarry in Danby in southwestern Vermont, close to my home. Art starts with raw material, and marble, along with the distinct, hilly earth, make the look.

Mount Auburn was planned in the early 1830s as a designed garden cemetery of high horticultural standards. There’s a wide range of Neoclassical and Gothic Revival monument sculpture styles, mostly from the 19th century, but into the 20th century, the look’s largely Neoclassical. Years ago, I visited a cemetery near Treviso in Italy dominated by the Brion tomb and designed by Carlo Scarpa and constructed in the 1970s. It’s a Modernist masterpiece and, at 2,000 square feet, bigger than my house. Nothing of the kind exists at Mount Auburn in scale or style.

Arlington’s known for sweeps of white markers looking like soldiers in formation. Until the last few years, future dead or their families could opt for a big stone monument, though nothing like what Scarpa created but personalized to taste. They’d have to pay for the monument and pledge to pay for its upkeep. There are more of these personalized gravestones than I imagined. Most of them climb the hill toward Arlington House, and most adorn the graves of generals and admirals.

What Arlington does have and Mount Auburn doesn’t is large memorials like the one for the USS Maine, which overlooks the graves of those who died when the ship sank in Havana Harbor in 1898. The memorial stars the Maine’s mast, exhumed from the harbor and transferred to Arlington. It’s big but funky enough — and relevant enough — to foster rather than impede contemplation of the dead. There are dozens of other memorials. A large sandstone cairn memorializes the dead from the Pan Am Flight 103 terrorist bombing in 1988. It was a gift from the Scottish people. A cairn is an ancient Scottish tomb design, and the stone was quarried near the crash.

Some of the memorials are better than others. Washington, D.C., has a natural mania for monuments, and in my opinion, the fewer, the better. The new Eisenhower memorial near the Mall, for instance, is conceited, decadent, dull, and, worse, a monument to the architect, not to Eisenhower. At Arlington, a monument to nurses is Art Deco and banal. Art Deco’s a style suited to chrome and Bakelite, not buff marble.

The Philip Kearney memorial is standard-issue bronze Beaux-Arts equestrian sculpture. General Kearney lost an arm in the Mexican War and his life at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He was first buried in New York, then dug up in 1911, reburied at Arlington, and disinterred yet again in 1914 to be buried near the monument. At the time, Congress felt a monument to him would be construed as a monument to the cavalry, which, whether Congress understood this or not, was about to be supplanted by the tank.

The JFK gravesite is haunting, but an immense marble plaza and open grass lawn built on the hill leading up to it seem aggressive. It’s nearly three acres. The Kennedy grave and eternal flame are moving and simple. They’re in keeping with Arlington’s egalitarian spirit.

It takes an enormous degree of discipline and courage, especially in Washington, to say no to seekers after monuments. Arlington has monuments for the two space-shuttle disasters, the Battle of the Bulge, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, the 1983 barracks attack in Beirut, and the 1980 Iran rescue mission. There are lots of catastrophes without monuments, so it seems arbitrary and, here and there, undermines the egalitarian perfection of Arlington.

Arlington, unlike Mount Auburn, has always been a work in progress. Mount Auburn’s basic scheme of roads, paths, and setbacks for family plots hasn’t changed from the 1830s, though the cemetery has expanded a bit, installed new gardens and water features, and built a chapel and observation tower at its highest point.

Arlington has made lots of major, transformative changes. Memorial Avenue, the boulevard entrance to the cemetery, opened in 1932. It crosses the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. A grand amphitheater opened in 1922. It’s a Neoclassical marble pile with lots of inscriptions listing names of generals, admirals, and battles.

Nearby is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, established in 1921 and replaced with a grander cenotaph in 1931. With the Kennedy grave, it’s Arlington’s biggest draw. It’s impressive, especially when the guards change. The marble block, from Colorado rather than Vermont, has serious cracking problems, alas. Historic-preservation groups and the military have squabbled for years over whether to replace it with another block of marble from the same quarry, which would have the same propensity to crack, or to reimagine the tomb altogether. As a practical matter, given DNA science, are future unknown soldiers even possible?

There’s a large columbarium, also a new addition. It opened in 1980 and has been expanded. Over time, the cemetery expects to accommodate 50,000 urns. I walked through it, hoping it wouldn’t look like an enormous filing cabinet, and it doesn’t. It’s a curving structure with lots of plantings.

Arlington is, like Mount Auburn, a Level 3 arboretum, the highest designation an arboretum can get from the international horticulture community. The two are among only 24 woody-plant gardens in the world with this prestigious accreditation. The cemetery has more than 9,000 trees, some more than 250 years old. Its flowering shrubs, gardens, and stately trees together create a balance of austerity and sublimity. It’s not a lush look and very much in keeping with the rows of white markers. Color usually comes in splashes, not waves. Old oak trees with wide canopies evoke timeless strength.

The cemetery’s origin story starts with Arlington House, the Greek Revival home of the Custis family built between 1803 and 1818. The Custises descend from Martha Washington, whose great-granddaughter, Mary Anna Custis, was married to Robert E. Lee. Mary Anna inherited the house and 1,100 acres of land in 1857, though she, Lee, and their children had lived there since 1831.

The Union Army seized the house and land in 1861 for its strategic value, overlooking, as it did, Washington. Mrs. Lee fled, never returned, and lost her claim to ownership in a property-tax dispute. That Lee, heading the rebel army, once lived at Arlington House was a symbolic, political reason to use it to bury Union dead. Though the Lee family won the place back via a Supreme Court decision, by that time thousands were already buried there. The federal government then bought the land from the family. Arlington House was used for offices and housing for military brass. In 1955, Congress designated the place as a museum and memorial to Lee.

Arlington House reopened in 2021 after a three-year renovation and reinterpretation. The philanthropist David Rubenstein paid for the $12 million project, the most expensive and far-reaching ever for a National Park Service house. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, is Washington’s premiere art and heritage donor. He has given millions to restore the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial and funded the exquisite renovation of the Renwick Gallery. He gives broadly and deeply but focuses on infrastructure. Architecture is one of culture’s calling cards, but old buildings need lots of practical attention.

The project stabilized the house’s foundation, restored the exterior and interior finishes, recoated the faux-marble masonry, replaced mechanicals behind the walls, and renovated the garden. Everything was touched. I oversaw a museum renovation like that once. One measure of success is an authentic look, neat and clean but unmauled. The place looks like the Lees still lived there. Its eight massive columns, each five feet in diameter, and gold faux-marble color give it immense presence. Its views of Washington are fantastic.

It’s well done. Mrs. Lee was a saver. Though she left Arlington House in a hurry, she took lots of furniture and memorabilia with her. These stayed with her descendants and came back to the house over time. The reinterpretation of the house treats Lee himself as a part of the house’s history. Arlington House, after all, was built by the Custis family as the family seat and the center of its farming empire, but also as a museum honoring George Washington. Washington never lived there, having died in 1799, but he’s central to its story.

The extensive and well-done new house-museum galleries neither heroicize nor vilify Lee. Wall texts, photographs, and artifacts provide a straight biography of Lee and ask, “What do you think?” The descendants of slaves who worked for the Lee and Custis families were involved in the interpretation. The story of Arlington House is their story, too. Freed family slaves lived there as late as the 1920s. I think it’s clear that Lee was a traitor. He joined the rebellion when Virginia did, though he would have stayed loyal to the Union if Virginia had done so. It’s an epic case of passing the buck, but not the only one to have occurred in days tumultuous beyond our imagination today. Arlington House is good history, and that’s vitally important. The National Park Service did a thoughtful, sensitive job. I learned a great deal, as will all students who need to learn that the past is a messy thing.

The Army does a great job of preserving and managing the cemetery and honoring the dead. A mismanagement scandal in 2010 was horrifying, but the pregnant question is whether or not the Army made the positive changes it needed. It did. Arlington has done major, tasteful renovations and makes the most of its status as a world-class landscape.

After the end of the First World War, the Imperial War Graves Commission was established to build a system of new cemeteries for British and Commonwealth soldiers. There are now hundreds of cemeteries in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa where millions lie. Covering over a million acres, the cemeteries are the biggest landscape-architecture project in the history of the world. The Commission looked closely at Arlington as a model for its treatment of landscape and its simple white-marble stones. This makes Arlington an icon in art history. It’s clear to me its masters today are well aware of this and see protecting and enhancing this as part of their mission.