With private financing, he opened the memorial and a museum in 2018, then a few years later a sculpture park and, this spring, a town square. In town halls, Mr Stevenson recalls, some locals used to be sceptical. That changed when they saw tourists, and cash, roll in. Each month 50,000 people visit the “legacy sites”, some coming from as far as Europe and Asia. Demand is such that, in the past year, the EJI has partnered with for-profit groups to open a five-star hotel, two restaurants and a coffee shop, ventures that might inspire reluctant admiration from a certain New York developer turned politician. Profits go back into funding the museums and memorials. The hotel, named Elevation, has some unusual features: the architects included a library and “reflection garden” and reduced the number of rooms to make communal areas for visitors to talk to each other. High-end tourism to grapple with racism is either a triumph or caricature of American capitalism, depending on your view. For Montgomery, though, the legacy sites have clearly been a boon. “It’s been a game-changer,” says Ron Simmons of the Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce. Tourists stay in town twice as long as they did a decade ago. Last year 1.4m visitors spent $1.4bn, roughly four times the city’s annual budget.
Combined with big new investments from Amazon, Meta and manufacturers, surging tourism means that Montgomery’s economy is, according to its mayor, Steven Reed, in its best financial position in 30 years. The city is using new revenue to raze abandoned buildings, give grants to small businesses, hire more police and invest in financial-literacy programmes. In May the city launched a “midnight basketball” league, to occupy young people when they might otherwise get into trouble. Last year, in an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Mr Trump instructed federally funded museums and parks to remove exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race”. The president has taken particular exception to the Smithsonian Institution for emphasising “how bad Slavery was”. Mr Stevenson’s projects are immune to this pressure—because he is in the business of litigating against the government, he has never taken a penny of state or federal funding. Mr Reed notes that “pointing out truths doesn’t mean pointing your finger.” Asked what Montgomery now represents to its visitors, he says, “an enduring patriotism”. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/07/01/transforming-the-cradle-of-the- confederacy
Donald Trump’s reflecting-pool debacle is a gift to America What a fitting way to honour its birthday July 2nd 2026 Just what message Washington, DC, means to send about itself, and about the country of which it is the capital, has always been uncertain. Is the city out to intimidate or inspire? To overwhelm visitors with the potency of centralised authority, or to summon the potential of every citizen? The mixed signals reflect varying ambitions at the foundation of the city and then muddled execution in developing it. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a compact, modest capital, in line with his republican values. But the French engineer hired by George Washington to design the city, Pierre L’Enfant, was inspired partly by Versailles, where his father was a royal painter. He planned a governing seat of grand proportions, suitable for what he believed would be a “vast empire”.
Washington forced the irascible L’Enfant out after a year, in early 1792. A decade later, when President Thomas Jefferson took solitary horseback rides through the soggy wilderness, along rutted tracks L’Enfant had designed to be elegant boulevards, sceptics doubted his vision would ever be realised. When Mark Twain visited after the civil war, he found a jumble of grandiosity and squalor, a suitable backdrop for the pomposity, incompetence and corruption of the elected denizens. Yes, the Capitol was noble, he wrote in 1873, in the novel that gave its name to the era, “The Gilded Age”. But the cost overruns in its construction were shocking and it lorded over “a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding houses”. As for the Washington monument, “that memorial Chimney”, it was still unfinished, with cow sheds at its base and pigs dozing in “its protecting shadow”. The executive mansion was an ugly “white barn”, and the streets so sodden Twain wondered why “they do not dilute the mud a little more and use them for canals”. In fact, L’Enfant had designed a stately canal, but it became a health hazard—Washingtonians used it as a sewer—and it was filled in. At the turn of that century, after the Spanish-American war extended America’s dominion into the far Pacific, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing Washington, James McMillan of Michigan, assembled some of the country’s most eminent architects to design a capital worthy of a global power. They dug out L’Enfant’s plan and magnified it. They not only removed clutter such as train tracks from what L’Enfant imagined as a central garden, they expanded that space into a National Mall, with a reflecting pool stretching towards a new memorial to Abraham Lincoln. In a metaphor of national healing, a broad new bridge would connect that memorial to Arlington cemetery in Virginia, where so many lay who died in the war between the states. Those were just some elements of a project whose ambition seems unimaginable today. But in that confident era, L’Enfant’s dream of a magnificent capital at last became reality. And ever since, as citizens, architects and politicians have bickered over each new design, the buildings and memorials of varying success that sprouted along the National Mall have honoured the framework laid down by L’Enfant and the McMillan commission.
Now comes Donald Trump. With his iron grip on his party and some Nixon- to-China audacity, he might have made history by achieving immigration reform or rationalising the tax code. Instead, he has done what no Democrat could, by siphoning resources into the swamp he had promised to drain, pulling tens of millions of dollars out of national parks across the country and pouring it into Washington. In an era of unapologetic American hegemony, he wants his capital to send an unambiguous message. The city is surely as beautiful as it has ever been, if you can ignore the embarrassing tough-guy images of a squinting Mr Trump that toadies have hung from cabinet buildings. Fountains dry for years are gushing water. Regilded statues gleam in the sun. Mr Trump is not interested in mere restoration, of course. So far, his most impressive monuments to himself are the pit where the East Wing was and the corresponding pile of dirt, known as Mount Trump, dumped by the ninth hole of a public golf course in East Potomac Park. Courts have reversed Mr Trump’s most obscene attempt to aggrandise himself, adding his name to the performing-arts centre honouring a slain president, John F. Kennedy. The fate of Mr Trump’s most egregious assaults on Washington’s design remains uncertain. His bloated ballroom would block the line of sight from Congress to the executive mansion, destroying L’Enfant’s visual metaphor honouring the Founders’ emphasis on congressional oversight. Mr Trump is also planning a massive triumphal arch by Arlington cemetery, though the precise triumph remains unclear. (”Me”, he replied, when asked whom the arch was for.) It would block the line of sight the McMillan commission planned between the Lincoln Memorial and the cemetery, where L’Enfant himself, who died penniless, also now lies. Mr Trump’s greatest contribution, however accidental, has been his work on the Reflecting Pool, meant to seal its leaky bottom and paint it blue rather than grey. He said he had fixed the pool for 50-100 years. Instead, he undercut any image of omnipotence, mixing Washington’s message once again and restoring the city to a very human scale. As the new seal peeled away and algae bloomed a bilious green, one could almost hear Twain guffaw alongside the tourists who flocked to chuckle at the sight.
Even if Mr Trump succeeds for a time in fixing his previous fix, the pool’s underlying failings, such as leaky pipes, will remain. Maybe all the attention to this spectacle will provoke some future generation to confront the real problems. In the meantime the water, whatever its colour, continues to mirror the sky and monuments in all their glory. Somehow, regardless of the flailing of those temporarily in power, the thing still works. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//united-states/2026/07/02/donald-trumps-reflecting-pool- debacle-is-a-gift-to-america
Promised reforms could change Cuba radically Venezuelans are furious with the American-backed regime The Caribbean has a problem with pesticides Brazilians are going gaga for Chinese brands
Promised reforms could change Cuba radically But only if they actually go ahead July 2nd 2026 CUBA’S RULING Communist Party first cracked open the door to private business in the 1990s, when it lost the Soviet Union as its patron. Starting in the 2010s it went further, pushed first by the global financial crisis and then by the covid-19 pandemic. Will Donald Trump, whose measures have plunged the country into unprecedented hardship, achieve the next and most drastic economic change? In an emergency session on June 18th Cuba’s National Assembly approved a package of 176 reforms. It is the most radical attempt to overhaul the economy since the revolution in 1959. On paper the measures push the country towards a market economy, while preserving the state’s control.