October 21: Old Ironsides, the Pentagon March, Wright's Spiral
Audacity has many forms. It can be engineered into the hull of a warship — a deliberate design decision to make something so powerful that the normal rules of engagement don't apply. It can be theatrical and intentional, one hundred thousand people arriving at the seat of military power with flowers and chants and the announced intention to levitate a building through the force of collective will. And it can be architectural, a decision to build a museum in the shape of a spiral and trust that the structure itself would become part of the experience of art. October 21 holds all three kinds of audacity — born 162 years apart, in three very different Americas, each one daring the world to tell it that what it was attempting was impossible.
Old Ironsides
On October 21, 1797, the USS Constitution was launched from Edmund Hartt's shipyard in Boston Harbor, sliding into the water as the most powerful warship the young United States had yet produced. At 204 feet in length and displacing more than 2,200 tons, she was one of six frigates authorized by Congress in 1794 as the foundation of a rebuilt American navy, designed to protect American merchant shipping from the depredations of Barbary pirates and European naval powers that treated the vessels of a small republic as fair game. Her design, developed by naval architect Joshua Humphreys, was deliberately radical: a ship large enough and heavily armed enough to defeat any frigate she was likely to encounter, and fast enough to outrun anything larger. She was built from live oak — a dense, curved-grained Southern timber so hard that cannonballs tended to bounce off it rather than penetrate it, a quality that would earn her the nickname "Old Ironsides" in 1812.
The USS Constitution never lost a battle. In the War of 1812, she defeated four British warships in single-ship engagements, including HMS Guerriere and HMS Java, at a time when the Royal Navy was widely regarded as the finest in the world and the idea that an American vessel could defeat a British frigate was nearly unthinkable. Her combat record helped establish the credibility of the American navy and the confidence of a nation still uncertain of its place in the world. She is still commissioned today — the oldest commissioned warship in the world still afloat — moored in Boston Harbor, where she makes an annual turnaround cruise each year to ensure that both sides of her hull receive equal weathering. She has been 2,027 years old since the current year. The ship that launched on October 21, 1797 is still in service.
Flowers in the Rifles
On October 21, 1967, approximately 100,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for a rally against the Vietnam War before tens of thousands of them crossed the Memorial Bridge and marched to the Pentagon — the physical and symbolic headquarters of the American military establishment and the war they had come to oppose. The March on the Pentagon was the largest anti-war demonstration the capital had seen to that point, and it was unlike any protest that had preceded it. The organizer Abbie Hoffman announced that the crowd would attempt to levitate the Pentagon through the force of chanting and collective energy, raising it three hundred feet and turning it orange. The Pentagon did not levitate. What the march produced instead was something more lasting: a set of images — most memorably, young protesters placing flowers in the rifle barrels of National Guard troops — that defined the visual language of 1960s anti-war activism.
The confrontation at the Pentagon lasted through the night and into the following morning. Hundreds of protesters were arrested. Norman Mailer, who attended and was himself arrested, wrote about the experience in The Armies of the Night, which won the Pulitzer Prize — one of the rare cases in which a work of literary journalism produced from a political event has outlasted the event itself in cultural importance. The march did not end the war. It did not move the Pentagon from its foundations. What it accomplished was subtler and more durable: it demonstrated the breadth and seriousness of anti-war sentiment at a moment when the government was still insisting that opposition was marginal, and it established the visual and rhetorical repertoire of dissent that American protest movements have drawn on ever since.
The Spiral
On October 21, 1959, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened at 1071 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, completing a sixteen-year design and construction process that had consumed Frank Lloyd Wright's final decade of active work and ignited a controversy that the New York art world had been conducting at full volume for years before the building's doors were open. Wright's design — a continuous spiral ramp descending from a skylit rotunda at the top of the building, with gallery space opening off the ramp at intervals — was unlike anything that had been built as a museum before. Twenty-one artists, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, had signed a letter protesting that the building would make it impossible to properly display their work. The critics who had denounced the design as incompatible with art were not entirely wrong; the sloped floors and curved walls do present genuine challenges for the display of rectangular paintings.
Wright died six months before the museum opened, having never seen his design realized in its finished form. The building opened anyway, and it has been one of the most visited museums in the world ever since — not despite its architectural controversy but because of it. The Guggenheim is a building that people go to see in the same way they go to see the art it contains, an experience in which the architecture and the collection are inseparable. The skylit rotunda, the vertiginous view down the spiral from the top floor, the particular quality of light falling through the central atrium — these are not neutral containers for art but active participants in the experience of encountering it. Wright's bet, that architecture could be as important as what it houses, paid off in a way that the twenty-one protesting artists could not have anticipated. The museum they objected to has made their work more seen, not less.
