The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress (LOC) has long been among my favorite buildings in Washington, D.C. Built at a time when only a half-dozen blocks separated squalid tenements from robber barons’ townhouses in Manhattan, the Jefferson Building, inside and out, heralded the ideal civitas of an imperfect Gilded Age. In the main, however, it reflects the best aspirations of America, through architecture, sculpture, and the decorative arts. 

In 1950, it became both stage set and metaphor for Judy Holliday’s best film, Born Yesterday. The Garson Kanin/Ruth Gordon script, directed by George Cukor, lays bare the grotesque and optimistic extremes of American democracy. Ironically, it probably contributed to Holliday’s being subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigating “un-American activities.” 

Several scenes were shot on location in Washington, including the then recently completed National Gallery of Art (1941) and Jefferson Memorial (1943), both by John Russell Pope. In one memorable scene, William Holden’s character, newspaper columnist Paul Verrall, tutors Holliday’s Billie Dawn on the basics of democracy in action on the Jefferson Building’s elevated parvis with the U.S. Capitol dome in the distance.

Born Yesterday has rightly been called “a love letter to Washington.” Writes film historian Ariel Schudson: “This celebration of our museums, archival institutions and cultural preservation stations is essential. The film reveals (both narratively and visually) the kind of access and engagement with America’s heritage that is every citizen’s right, allowing the audience its own Billie Dawn-like epiphany.“ That was then.

Designed by three different architectural firms (owing to political intrigue) in the Beaux-Arts manner, the Jefferson Building was completed in 1897 using 15 varieties of marble and over 400,000 cubic feet of granite. Its jaw-dropping main lobby, which leads to the iconic domed reading room, has long been graced with one of the three extant perfect copies of the Gutenberg Bible.

Having lived in the nation’s capital at four different intervals, the first time on the heels of completing my undergraduate architecture degree, I came to enjoy the city’s campus-like feel and relatively youthful populus. Congress and the White House attract legions of recent college graduates as aides and interns, many of whom lived in the once almost-affordable housing in the Capitol Hill, Dupont Circle, and Adams Morgan neighborhoods. Right in line with that tradition, the 47th president’s current press secretary was first appointed to that position when she was barely 21. 

Few have experience conducting research in the LOC, but for many years it was my neighborhood library, and eventually I was afforded a special status to borrow books as a fellow at Harvard’s Research Library in Washington, Dumbarton Oaks. January 6, 2021, changed what had long been a deep personal connection to the city and its many monuments: For years I lived just two blocks from the site of the Capitol insurrection. On January 20, 2025, it changed more so. Kanin and Gordon’s “love letter to Washington” no longer resonated as it once did.

The nation’s capital is a very different place today, for all the wrong reasons. Most Americans haven’t a clue how things work there, especially those who continually carp about high taxes and lazy public servants. The worst of these are the pseudo-philosophical/political group, the libertarians, who gladly use what others have made and paid for while complaining about inconvenience and inefficiency. 

Until recently, this fringe movement (and their current Project 2025), long skeptical of three co-equal branches of government, was kept far from the levers of power. Today they control them while occupying the buildings and city constructed through a unified republic and the democratic process that put them there. The results range from a full-scale retreat from the international arena to the defunding of cancer research as well as critical services for the destitute, homeless, and uninsured. The results are reported in varied ways by most cable news outlets and papers: a rollercoaster stock market; downgraded U.S. bonds; tariffs tossed about higgledy-piggledy; federal workers fired, rehired, and ordered to report to offices that no longer exist; and Americans paying taxes fearing that no one’s there to collect them. It’s a libertarian dream state where no one “engage[s] with America’s heritage.”

A recent event underscores our nation’s precipitous plunge, along with its capital, on the world stage. On May 14, 2025, a banner carrying a 30-foot image of Donald Trump was hung—pre-2003 Baghdadi style—alongside a similar graphic of Abraham Lincoln. The menacing portrait spans two monumental Corinthian columns on the Department of Agriculture building. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins apparently ordered the decoration, claiming the 47th president is “ushering in a Golden Age for our farmers.” The supersized veneration, on a federal building adorning public space, is the sort of thing that set Billie Dawn’s teeth on edge, squawking “fascism!” at the top of her substantial lungs. 

No less disturbing are signs of America’s “freedom of the press” being cowed by the current administration. Imagine this banner-hanging happening under Presidents Biden or Obama and remaining under the radar for so long. The day Trump was hung, so to speak, the story was covered by only the UK’s The Independent and Yahoo.com. The Washington Post, headquartered less than 2 miles from the Department of Agriculture, didn’t run a story on it for over a week, and only then in its District of Columbia section, despite the building’s facade fronting the National Mall. The same kind of go-slow reporting happened with the grifting of the Qatari 747, which Trump visited at the Palm Beach airport on Valentine’s Day, but wasn’t reported in the Wall Street Journal until May 1. 

Trump’s gentling of the Fourth Estate notwithstanding, post-Weimar theatrics such as this are designed to distract us from the real human toll. Since January 20, hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been fired without cause or forced into early furlough by executive orders based on the stratagems of radical ideologue Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025 and now director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. 

Among the fallen and perhaps most inexplicable is Dr. Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress, appointed by President Obama in 2016, who was fired in a two-sentence email. Although she earned her doctorate at the University of Chicago, as woman of color, Project 2025’s rubric assigned her the status of yet another DEI hire, despite her being the first librarian of Congress with a degree in library science since 1974, with a card catalog of academic accolades. Underscoring this personnel pettiness, and more egregious still, Dr. Hayden was in the final year of her 10-year appointment. There was little point to her firing—which, in part, was the point of her firing.

It’s no accident that so many implausibly constitutional executive orders, debasements of longstanding policy and political customs, and major personnel terminations are issued on Firing Day, as the last day of the workweek is called in the Trump West Wing, or in the middle of the night. Most of which are the product of Vought and his General Sherman–like march through Washington’s bureaucracy. His work goes largely unnoticed owing to the clownish misdirection of Tesla’s CEO, who has trained the press to follow the shiny object—DOGE—while missing Project 2025’s larger picture. The National Socialist theatrical at the Department of Agriculture, and to a lesser extent Dr. Hayden’s firing, are maladroit extensions of a cheap magician’s ruse.

Always ready to make matters worse, not long after Dr. Hayden received a two-sentence fuck-you-very-much email thanking her for her service, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt preened from the Press Room podium about the “concerning things” Dr. Hayden had done as she lawfully fulfilled federal mandates and apparently shelved “inappropriate books in the library for children,” despite rules requiring one to be 16 years of age to register for an LOC library card.

This last bit would be funny if it weren’t so pitiful. While subterranean bars are set for Mr. Trump (who apparently has no first language and has published more books than he’s read), we expect a president’s press secretary to sound more informed and less like a MAGA mom at a school board meeting carping about exposed penises in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. 

You’d think the White House press secretary would know that visitors to the largest collection of books in the world, especially young children, do not roam freely, casually bumping into the Kama Sutra or a reading of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. With over 173 million books, manuscripts, photographs, films, federal documents, and other items in the library’s collection, and a staff of over 3,000, a child would need a SWAT team to make a dent in that bulwark to access a naughty bit of literature or imagery. 

Chockablock with chutzpah, Leavitt continued: “We don’t believe that she was serving the interests of the American taxpayer well, so [Dr. Hayden] has been removed from her position, and the president is well within his rights to do that.” Sadly, no one in the neutered press corp had the wherewithal to ask Leavitt what she believed to be the purpose of the librarian of Congress in the service of the American taxpayer, or the difference between right and authority.

Happily, we can look forward to a slate of lawsuits on Dr. Hayden’s behalf. In the meantime, we are left with the likes of Karoline Leavitt, clutching her gold cross like so many pearls, who believe that believing makes things so. Were that so, I suspect Mar-a-Lago and its occupants would disappear like the village in Brigadoon, reappearing once every 100 years—a cautionary tale to America, reminding us of what concerned the Jefferson Building’s namesake: an uninformed electorate. 

Writing from Paris in 1789, Thomas Jefferson, then the new nation’s minister to France, concluded his letter to Richard Price with the now famous dictum, “[T]hat wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” Kanin and Gordon put it a bit more bluntly in the mouth of William Holden’s newspaper columnist: “A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.”

Institutions such as the Library of Congress, housed in places like the Thomas Jefferson Building, administered by respected, well-educated academicians including Dr. Hayden, have long helped this nation make our country a less dangerous place through higher education and the power of knowledge over information. They parse through the static, learn to ignore the shiny object, and help us recall that while no nation is perfect, ours is at its best when others look to us, not for the might of our military, but for the breadth of our generosity. During and since World War II, we’ve expressed that spirit in concrete terms: the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations (1944), leading to the founding of the United Nations; the Marshall Plan; Fulbright scholarships; and “soft power,” the bedrock of American foreign policy since the Berlin Wall fell. 

20th century hallmarks such as these are what permit us to live today in our flawed but functioning world of nations. They’re also the kind of excesses of generosity that Vought has set his sights on leveling, brick by brick, long before Mr. Trump has taken up residence in Qatar or wherever such people go after their term expires. 

The doctrinaire libertarians behind Dr. Hayden’s firing and the dismantling of America’s civil service would never have envisioned such things; they are what they have come to eradicate. Their vision of the future should frighten anyone born outside of generational wealth, or who values the accumulation of wealth other than for its own sake. In short, their vision of the future is not a future at all; it’s just a tarted-up version of the past, before self-governance, when those who toiled in the fields worked land they would never own. Their future is the past that America has been repudiating since its founding documents were first ratified and amended. 

The question remains, however: When will enough Dr. Haydens be ignominiously fired, when (in the words of Jefferson) will “things get so far wrong as to attract our notice” to stop the end of the American experiment? As anyone in the construction industry can attest to, demolition is quick and easy, while construction is slow and hard. We will have already passed the tipping point before schools open again for fall term.

Returning to Dr Hayden’s former workplace, the LOC’s exterior, while well-proportioned and lively, with a striking Neptune Fountain at street level and its generous elevated parvis, includes disturbing decoration often unnoticed by tourists and residents alike. The keystones of ethnographic heads are critical to the building’s iconography, announcing it as a new Library of Alexandria. Saxon, Nordic, and other European faces span the main façade. Few visitors, however, follow the heads all the way around to the library’s backside. Populating the keystones above the library’s loading dock and recycling and trash bins are faces from “other continents,” variously identified in the library’s official handbook as Australian, Negrito, Zulu, Papuan, Soudan Negro, and Akka. That Dr. Hayden didn’t have the heads demounted and reordered during her tenure is testimony to her forbearance and professionalism. 

The library exists for senators and representatives to conduct research. The president appoints its chief administrator. And yet it’s America’s library. 

Our national institutions—the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress—and those privileged to head them should indeed be part of “the kind of access and engagement with America’s heritage that is every citizen’s right.” These are not straw men to be made small by the subterfuge of a small band of extremists, or any single project. They loom monumental in the soul and sinew of the American project, of which we are all part and for which we are all responsible to preserve for every generation to renew. Not all monuments are built of granite, and not all memorials are by artifice made. Some walk among us still. 

Acknowledgements: This article would not have been possible without the assistance of Sarah Bseirani, archivist, Still Picture Branch (RRSS), National Archives & Records Administration; the community manager, National Archives Catalog; Mary Andrews and Uma Dodd, The Independent; Michele Hadlow and Doug Fallone, the Everett Collection; and the United Nations Photo Library.

Featured image: Reading Room, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C, Photo: Courtesy of The Office of The Architect of the Capitol.