Mcmillan Commission Case Study

The arduous process of creating the McMillan Commission, officially called the
Senate Park Commission, let alone implementing it, revealed the consequences of the sharing of powers between the different institutions of government in the American regime and the negotiations needed to navigate competing interests within and without those institutions. Instead of asking the president to create a commission on his own, Senator McMillan had to pass resolutions through two houses of Congress whose members did not always agree with his vision. Those disagreements sometimes ended in failure for McMillan or in his plan being watered down or amended considerably. The most telling evidence of the McMillan Commission’s reflection of the American political regime came from an admission from Senator McMillan himself. In his papers, member of the commission Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. accounted that “McMillan wanted a ‘comprehensive scheme’ but feared that ‘it might be turned down by the other Committees if it were made too complete and pushed too far.’” In 1910, the McMillan Plan received de facto endorsement from the White House when President Taft created the permanent Fine Arts Commission, a body that helped to execute the McMillan Plan over the next few decades. Although the House of Representatives, led by Speaker Joseph Cannon of Illinois, initially resisted funding the implementation of the McMillan Commission’s vision for the Mall, they took action on what they liked in the plan, such as the construction of the newly proposed Union Station to replace the old railway depot on the edge of

As Nathan Glazer writes in the introduction to his edited volume of essays on the National Mall:
The creation of the present-day Mall was and is a remarkable demonstration of how a pluralist democracy can plan and build,