The solution, mostly effective, has been to think in terms of connection, both to the city which hosts it, and to the deeper currents of history that led to its creation. Now, well into the 21st century, the challenge is how to disentangle and even dismantle those ideas while salvaging the arch as a cultural object. The arch, in short, has always been beloved because it binds together two feel-good ideas that are essential to American identity: a heroic past of grit and conquest, and a triumphant future of innovation. It also honors historical events that are now understood as deeply problematic within the larger trajectory of American history, including the dispossession of Native American land, cultural genocide, the extension of slavery, centuries of conflict and ill will with Mexico, environmental degradation and the emergence of a myth of American exceptionalism. Saarinen’s soaring arc of steel is an icon of the automobile age, an attraction that has always been more about playing to the passing audience of the interstates than any particular relevance to the idea of national expansion. The name change, however, also reflects two facts that have long bedeviled the arch and its role within the National Park Service. There is no intention to downgrade Jefferson’s importance or the park’s original purpose, which was to memorialize “the men who made possible the western territorial expansion of the United States,” including “the great explorers, Lewis and Clark, and the hardy hunters, trappers, frontiersmen and pioneers,” according to a 1933 statement by a local civic group that championed the idea of building something monumental on the Mississippi waterfront.
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