WASHINGTON — A group of the President’s supporters said Wednesday that the 250-foot triumphal arch planned for the capital will be triumphant enough to credit every person who walks beneath it with a victory, and released a list of 1,400 victories visitors may be awarded on passing through, including “the argument from Thanksgiving,” “the raffle,” and the boys’ 4x400 relay at a 1994 high school track meet in Pell Junction, Mo.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said last Thursday that excavation for the arch, planned for Memorial Circle near the Virginia end of Arlington Memorial Bridge, would begin within two weeks. The structure’s height of 250 feet is meant to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary. The National Capital Planning Commission gave the project preliminary approval on July 9, while noting that the design exceeds the capital’s 130-foot height limit for buildings. In May, the Commission of Fine Arts approved a revised design that removed an eight-foot base and four lions.
“You don’t build an arch that big to walk under it and lose,” said Merle Oakhurst, who leads the Freedom Fan Collective, a supporters’ group that has met weekly since June in the back room of a pancake restaurant in Alexandria, Va., to plan what she called “the receiving line.” “An arch is where the winners come home. If you come home under this one, you’re a winner. We’re just making it official.”
According to the group’s 61-page “Schedule of Triumphs,” a visitor walking beneath the arch will be awarded one victory per pass, drawn from a list that includes any lawsuit the visitor has lost, any board game played with a sibling before 1990, any parking ticket received in a city with a population below 40,000, and the 1994 relay, which the group said was “close, and should have gone the other way.” Walking under the arch twice will result in two victories. Walking under it backward will result in a victory over the person who was walking forward. Visitors who drive under the arch will be credited with a win in a race they did not know they were in, and the group said its chair has already won four, from her car, by driving beneath a cardboard model of the arch the group built in a parking lot.
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the arithmetic was not complicated. “It’s called a triumphal arch. Not a ‘participated’ arch. Not a ’tried our best’ arch,” Brickhouse said by phone from a bowling alley. “If you go under it, the triumph gets on you. It’s just common sense. That’s what the 250 feet are for. It’s a lot of triumph to fall on a person.”
Oakhurst said the arch’s height had already produced its first win. “Everyone said 130 feet,” she said. “It’s 250. It beat the height limit by 120 feet, and it isn’t even built yet. Imagine what it’ll do when it’s standing.”
The group said the four lions removed in May had been added to its list as eligible visitors and would be credited with a victory over the design review process if they ever chose to come back, which Oakhurst said they would, “triumphantly, and probably from the left.”