Outside and Inside: A Cemetery and A Museum

Elbridge Gerry

Congressional Cemetery
It's two miles east of the Capitol and a tourist attraction in its own right. I took the Metro. It is my first visit to a cemetery in DC, so eventually I will be posting some pictures from the nation's capital on Geographically Yours Cemeteries. In my cemetery rambling, I usually depend on serendipity to find graves of interest, but this time I had one particular grave in mind: the final resting place of Elbridge Gerry. He was from Massachusetts (and served as governor) but died in Washington while serving as Vice-President. You may have never heard of him, but you will hear is name almost daily for the next year as states re-draw congressional districts on the basis of the 2020 Census. Many will be tempted to gerrymander those districts to favor one party or another. Guess where the name gerrymander comes from. Its a portmanteau of Gerry + salamander (which is what the original gerrymander looked like on the map of Massachusetts). Perhaps Elbridge Gerry should be considered one of the fathers of applied political geography. 

Of course, there are other public servants interred in the Congressional Cemetery. That would include Senators and Representatives and the longest-serving director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, one of the scoundrels of my generation, but popular among many as evidenced by his honorific and well-maintained grave site. I also found the grave of DC Mayor Marion Berry, someone else whose career hit a few ruts along the way. As for members of Congress: Today, if one of them died in DC, we would expect the body to be flown back home. But, in the early days, you were buried where you died. If you died in DC, you were probably buried in DC. That was the origin of Congressional Cemetery's pedigree. And, even after bodies could be transported long distances, the cemetery continued to erect a cenotaph (memorial without a body beneath) to commemorate members of Congress who died while on Capitol Hill (or nearby).

International Spy Museum

Ghillie suit

Washington is the perfect place for a spy museum. Evidence: the old one quickly outgrew its original home and relocated to a new, massive structure at L'Enfant Plaza, one of the Metro hubs in Washington and basically the "downtown" of Southwest DC. The museum covers just about everything from the Trojan Horse to kings who spied on their people by reading letters carried by their postal services; from Mata Hari, who was executed for espionage during World War I, to Allen Dulles, the longest-serving CIA director; from the blood-stained axe used to kill Leon Trotsky to a model of the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan and an interactive game that lets you decide whether there was enough intelligence for President Obama to give the go-ahead for Seal Team 6. My favorite artifact was billed as the original invisibility cloak: a ghillie suit (seen here) worn by Malcolm Nance in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. I must admit, I thought about the ghillie weed that Harry Potter took advantage of to survive.