National Monument Quotes
Without any fanfare, TR’s official stationery had a picture of the building with the text “White House”. At the time it was built in 1792 for President John Adams, a rather pompous man, it was the largest private home in America.
Marcus Porcius Cato. The title was given by many to George Washington and it still often refers to him in America.
There was a private committee that was established to construct the Washington Monument. It’s cost was estimated at the huge sum of $1 million. Congress was willing to contribute the large amount of $200,000 but the rest had to be raised privately. The Committee invited all nations to contribute a block of stone to help build the monument. Pope Pius IX responded by sending an important, and historical block of marble which soon arrived in Washington, However, at the time, there was much anti Catholic prejudice in the United States. There was a very active third party populist movement and party—called the “Know Nothings” that, like the Tea Party of 2010, emerged rapidly and were quite influential politically. In particular the Know Nothings, self-professed great patriots, vowed that took no “Catholic Monument” would be part of the memorial to Washington, A group of them broke into the warehouse storing the marble block on October 20, 1853. The defaced the surfaces of the block and then dumped it in the Potomac River. Then they politically gained over of the Committee to see that such “anti-Americanism” would not corrupt Washington’s monument. The committee under the new leadership could not make any progress, and the monument, was not completed until 1884, long after the Know-Nothing Party was merely a historical footnote.
