Field Trip Friday: How Gathering On The National Mall Shapes Memory And Democracy

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Welcome back to Field Trip Friday, Civics of the Year.
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I am a little, this is bittersweet, because as of now, this is gonna be our last field trip through the National Mall with our good friend Jeremy Goldstein from the Trust for the National Mall.
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And today we're just talking about the mall as a living civic forum and a First Amendment space.
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And I know that Jeremy, you have talked about, you know, First Amendment spaces in a lot of our episodes.
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So welcome back again.
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Why is the right to gather on the mall such a powerful thing?
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Well, it's always great to be here.
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And I always love the opportunity to talk about the work that I do on the National Mall.
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So a great question.
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You know, the right to gather is foundational to the National Mall in that we often think of those structures, the monuments and memorials.
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But we we have to realize that it's such a large space that allows for multiple free speech demonstrations, advocacy, events going on at the same time.
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So I think in our last episode, we talked a little bit about, you know, unity and progress.
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I, you know, this is the way it's done in our country, is that we often gather.
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I remember being a civic student a long time ago.
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And I always there was this big aha moment.
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It was like, oh, you know what?
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You can write, you can get a petition to try to change something, and you can also gather people to try to change something or to try and commemorate something.
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Either way, you know, you have the intention of gathering people.
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Now, I I think to start with, I'd love to quickly tell you about what it takes to get a permit on the national market.
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Yes.
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Because you can't just show up, right?
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You can't just show up and decide that you're gonna do this.
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You know, and and the thing is, is that you you have a right to free expression in any space, but if you are gathering groups of people, there is gonna be a permitting process.
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Not super expensive, but it is really sort of like we want to guarantee that people are safe.
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We want to guarantee that we preserve the national mall.
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That's another aspect of it.
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So, first you have to determine whether you need a permit, and that's like a special event, First Amendment demonstration, definitely for filming and photography.
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I know this through personal experience that we had to get a permit to use a tripod to shoot on certain parts of the mall because it is a you're you're putting a structure down on the mall and you have to make sure that you have permission and ranger oversight from the National Park Service, which is fantastic.
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They're always supportive of it.
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I would say that they're the most flexible and reliable group of folks that you'll ever meet because they're like, Yeah, we'll be there.
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We shot our pictures at 4:30 and five o'clock in the morning.
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So uh wow, it was pretty wild.
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So, and then, you know, weddings occur, sporting events, military ceremonies, you know, runs and private events as well.
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But the, you know, you have to get a permit and then you have to pick an application.
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There's a couple of National Park Service forms.
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That's the nuts and bolts.
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You submit that application in person.
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You can take it to the Ohio Drive offices, um, just around the corner from the mall, or you can submit it in the online application portal, which is um uh through the uh login.gov.
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And, you know, you you do these two applications, you time it.
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There's some funding required.
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So it's kind of like I think around the rates are a little bit over$100 for a special event,$90 for a wedding on the mall.
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I've seen a wedding on the mall at the World War II, World War I memorial, the DC World War I memorial, which is really cool, you know, and you have to pay for filming and photography.
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It's a small uh marginal fee.
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The other piece that we have to make sure, because it is a historic property, is that large events may be asked for monitoring, cleanup, restoration, and utilities like recovery fees.
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If there's any damage to the turf, that's a really big thing.
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They're very sensitive to that.
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And then you also submit a site layout, equipment lists, and all of those things and any area-specific requirements.
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So the National Park police have a station on the mall.
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They have, you know, they have a horse mounted police on the mall.
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They need to know that something's going on, whether there's crowd capacity questions or pieces like that.
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And then you really kind of submit, you get the you know, approvements if there's any uh approvals and if there's any security requirements, and you are ready to go.
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So that's a big piece, is that any citizen can do this, any person can really do this, and any organization can do this.
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And it's really it's it's beautiful to my from my perspective.
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Sorry to get sentimental on that, but oh I I a wedding.
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Like I just there's so many powerful things that can happen.
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And I think that sometimes, you know, I definitely as a lover of history and civics have moments that I've seen and studied on the mall that just really bring me a lot of hope.
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So, what moments stand out to you as kind of defining civic gatherings?
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I always start with Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King as two events.
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You know, Marian Anderson in the 1930s, singing on the steps of the Lincoln, Martin Luther King's march on Washington over six.
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I it just hit me it's over 60 years ago that that happened.
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And I was talking to someone the other day when I was at an elementary school performance, and you know, they said this performance has been going on for 22 years, and over 60 years ago, this is the speech occurred, the I Have a Dream speech.
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Organizing a march on Washington without internet or phones or anything like that, the amount of people who showed up on the mall for Martin Luther King's you know, march on Washington, it's still almost baffling to think about how it can be done from our 2026 perspective of like all the electronics.
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We could text people, set up group texts and all those things, and using platforms to do it.
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How did you do it with just mail and phone calls?
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You know, you know, the US mail and phone calls.
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And and that's really that's one that the ones that that really stick out to me.
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Yesterday I was at the peace march for the the monks who walked from Texas.
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I do like the sort of almost occasional bumping into really important civic events.
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One I'll nerd out a little bit on.
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We participated in the HUD showcase, which was about housing and new technologies and housing.
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And my team and I, we we worked at the booth.
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I really had a lot of fun at that because I was I, as I got out there and walked around, there were like demonstration housing, there was a whole bunch of like really cool stuff set up where it was almost like a convention center on the mall to talk about housing and housing technology.
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And like I said, that's a little bit of the granular stuff, but there's always something really that corresponds to a lot of people.
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You know, some sort of group is going to have something that that applies to them on the mall.
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But those big civil rights movement moments are what a lot of Americans see that that space for.
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And to kind of go back to the Marian Anderson thing, it was important that she got to perform there because, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but the story that I know is because it was segregated in Washington, DC, she was not allowed to perform.
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And Eleanor Roosevelt is actually the one that was like, what about here?
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And that listeners, if you have not, I mean, it's easily accessible anywhere on the internet, but it is probably one of those kind of up there with Whitney Houston singing the national anthem that just gives me hope.
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It puts chills on my arms.
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Like it is is such an incredible thing because it is a public space and nobody could say no to that.
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Yeah.
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I yeah, we my plug is it's a mall moment on the gateway.
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We linked to the YouTube video of her singing My Country Tis of the.
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You know, she she performed in front of a broad crowd of 75,000 people, and it was on NBC Radio, and she was, you know, the era's rock star in terms of voice at that time.
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So, you know, they they on our there isn't a confirmation, but what's it's really interesting to think about 10-year-old Martin Luther King tuning into that broadcast at the time as well.
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So he I he in invited her to perform as well in in '63.
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So it's really, you know, it's such an interesting connection between those two major events.
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And watching the video is is it brings chills to me each time I see it.
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And listeners, I will make sure that I link that mall moment to the gateway so that if you want to see that, it'll be easily accessible for you.
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Jeremy, how do events like protests or celebrations help shape our collective memory?
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I've been thinking a lot about this, especially in 2026 in our sort of post-pandemic world.
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I taught through the pandemic, I did remote, I did hybrid remote people in my classroom and talking on the in the internet.
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Educators out there, I feel for you.
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I've I've been through it.
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It was a pretty exhausting time.
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And right now we're we're having a lot of conversations in education about the importance of gathering and that return to the face-to-face piece.
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It's hard work to gather.
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It is.
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It is, you know, you know, we can zoom all day and a lot of my work is is remote, but I really value that that gathering.
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So I think like protests, celebrations, commemorations, being intentional about gathering with people peacefully is a really important part of the American experience.
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And then I also add in there the idea that before any of these things, before phones and any of that stuff, that was a way that you amplified ideas.
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And it still is a really solid way to amplify ideas, to gather people and have them talking.
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Now, they're probably going to take a lot of selfies and they're going to post to their channels about it.
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And that's amplification as well.
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But the fact that you gathered, you know, anywhere from two to thousands for a conversation, I think it's really significant because the the idea that our collective memory is formed by the information we receive, but also that the sort of physical experience of being with other people.
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And that's really that that's something that the mall has to offer.
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That's something that's reinforced by our democratic ideals.
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Again, I love that we're talking about gathering because I I recently did a podcast episode with a professor and we were talking about Alexis De Tocqueville.
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I've never read Democracy in America.
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But one of the things, it was Dr.
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Zach Sherman and I will like that too.
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But he talked about like civics really happens in those local places, right?
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When we're together, because when we separate, we're not thinking about our neighbors and we're not having these bigger civic conversations.
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And I love when doing an interview and it links to something else because I feel like the United States, you know, all these primary source documents, all these places, there's just a big web of how they all connect.
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And it's it is gathering is so powerful.
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And in a post-pandemic world, it's so necessary.
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Because you're right, we are doing a Zoom right now, and you are completely across the country.
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And that is really, really great.
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But that gathering really is a good piece of civics.
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So what does the mall's ongoing story tell us overall about American democracy?
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This is a great question.
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I I also will add a kind of a little bit of a plug.
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I'm on the advisory council for Made by Us, which is a um a Gen Z-focused civic engagement effort that is nationwide.
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And when you said gathering, one of the things that they do is they also list opportunities to gather for people of the 18 to 30 year old group.
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There's one initiative called the Pizza Party where you just sit and have pizza with other people.
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There's really no structure.
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It's kind of like I had this vision of like 50 coffee shops on the national mall and people sitting down to have a cup of coffee.
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There's great value in that informality, which I think is really a part of it.
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But in that, I I love that you cited that the local spaces, that's that's really and really what's happening.
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And ironically, the national mall is a local space for people in DC.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, your question about that that ongoing story of American democracy, I'm gonna use the term loosely because I I I also used to teach a world religions course when I was a DA classroom teacher.
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There are sacred spaces or and and I don't use it in a holy sense, but the mall is one of those sacred spaces where it's like we are, you know, I work for an organization that preserves and enriches and and promotes the the the national mall.
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But the the idea is that when I talk about it, it it isn't just a bunch of grass and buildings, it's got this sort of smaller being small in front of the face of in front of the face of history feeling about it.
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And that that kind of like sacredness of being like, oh, people have gathered and said very important things here, and we seek to build commemoration that is in stone.
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You know, we're going to have new, we're gonna have a new memorial on the mall this year with the Desert Storm Desert Shield Memorial, and that's gonna be in October.
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We commemorate points in our history.
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Now, it's also an opportunity for reflection and to go in there because it's a different experience for everybody.
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As whenever you go into any card kind of large, you feel smaller than history space, you're bringing your own personal perspective in there and your own biases, but you're also bringing in this sort of like, I'm taking a moment.
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There are silent moments on the National Mall, believe it or not.
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And those are really important moments.
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Some of the most moving experiences I've had have been at the Vietnam Memorial and the World War II Memorial when I got to meet a hundred-year-old veterans and I'm speechless.
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And how how do you kind of capture that sort of sacred space feeling for people?
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We've tried, we've done our best digitally with the gateway, you know, but also when people come on the mall, it's sort of like, yeah, there are curricula, there are things that you can you can give your students to study and memorize about them all.
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And there's, you know, all these small facts about them all.
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But what really happens is how do you feel when you walk out there?
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That's where the the physical and the the you know, the sort of sacred memory piece.
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Didn't mean to go sentimentally on you that way.
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No, I I'm thinking about it too, about the places I've been on the mall that have have made me reflect and have made me really think.
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And you know, I know that Senator former senator, or not former, he's past Senator Bob Dole used to go to the World War II memorial all the time.
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Right.
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And it's like what a powerful thing.
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And when you talk about a sacred space, it is, I feel like regardless of the administration, regardless of things, you know, happening in national and state politics, the mall is always the same.
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The mall always holds that hope and that, you know, sacred piece of what America is.
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And what if, you know, we've talked about this more perfect, right?
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That this is always something we're striving for.
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And going through these last eight episodes with you has been, I mean, I love field trips.
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Field trips were always my favorite part of being a student, sometimes being a teacher, because when you do field trips as a teacher, it tends to be a little exhausting, yes.
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Um but this has just been a place to have that hope and have that joy as we go into America 250.
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You know, sometimes the world can feel really heavy.
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And we know that teachers shoulder a lot of that because you have kids who are coming in, they're asking questions, and I've just really appreciated going through the national mall with you and looking at these pieces.
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And my hope is listeners, you know, you've listened to this.
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If you go to the national mall and you get to see these things, and I know I keep saying it, but I'm I feel like I need to schedule different trips to go so I can do each of these tours and really, you know, I love my walk through the national mall usually to start my trips.
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But now I kind of just want to go and be more intentional about the spaces I'm in and thinking and reflecting.
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Jeremy, I feel like the word thank you is just not good enough.
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It's so small, but thank you so much for taking us through this, you know, America's front yard and this amazing place that is public and that is sacred and that really does exemplify what America is and can be.
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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And uh right back at you.
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Thank you so much for this opportunity.
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I I of course love talking about this, but I've also loved the opportunity to talk as an educator as well.
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This is a great conversation with you, Liz.
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I and you know, keep listening, everybody out there.
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I really enjoy listening to every one of these episodes because, like you said, the connections made between episodes are really fascinating.
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And I use this term we have America 250 coming up, we've got the 250th, but I always use the term, you know, the mall and all of this this conversation is for the 250th and beyond.
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We have to continue this national reflection, we have to continue this national commemoration.