Why the Americans Erect Some Petty Monuments and Others That Are Very Grand

I was looking at the Marine Corps War Memorial on Sunday afternoon. It is very intense from all of the different directions. The movement of the memorial is beautiful--the way that the men are pushing in one direction, and the flag rises out of them on the other. The men's hands grasping toward the flagpole at the top are also striking.

Tocqueville on American monuments:

"Individuals in democracies are very weak, but the state, which represents them all and holds them all in the palm of its hand, is very strong. Nowhere else to the citizens seem smaller than in a democratic nation, and nowhere else does the nation itself seem greater, so that it is easily conceived as a vast picture. Imagination shrinks at the thought of themselves as individuals and expands beyond all limits at the thought of the state. Hence people living cramped lives in tiny houses often conceive their public monuments on a gigantic scale."