by Ella Johnson, MLC class of 2025; published in The Spectator World.
James Madison is consistently forgotten. Admittedly, many of the Founding Fathers are forgotten. The average American could probably name two of the forty or so founders in Howard Chandler Christy’s Capitol painting “Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States.” But while Washington and Jefferson get imposing monuments in DC and Hamilton gets a musical, the father of our beloved Constitution hardly has a memorial. Asking Google why will pull up an article from the Harvard Law Bulletin quoting Professor Noah Feldman. “Unlike George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, no monument was built to honor Madison in the nation’s capital. You have to see the Constitution as his monument,” said Feldman. “His influence is hidden in plain sight.”
However, a visit to the home of the Constitution at the National Archives and a quick read of one of the plaques on the rotunda makes it sound suspiciously like he was forgotten in the first draft of Barry Faulkner’s Constitution mural there. “The members of the Committee of Fine Arts… were not easily pleased. Include more Founders, simplify the design, and what happened to James Madison? (A typist accidentally left him off the consulting historian’s Constitution list),” the plaque reads. Searching “why doesn’t Madison have a memorial” will lead you to a statue of him in the James Madison Memorial Building at the Library of Congress, the largest library structure in the world. In 1960, Congress established a commission to create a national memorial for James Madison — but merged it with the need for a third library building to ease overcrowding. Nothing like killing two birds with one stone.