The Vernacular Imperative: Duke Ellington's Place in the National Pantheon

Abstract

A pantheon, as you probably already know even if you don't remember your Elementary Latin because you never studied any to begin with, is a sacred place dedicated to all of the gods, whether of a tribal community, a city-state, or an empire of one sort or another. The original of such consecrated places was a domed circular temple created in honor of all the gods of ancient Rome by the Emperor Hadrian, and the idea has long since been adopted and adapted and institutionalized for secular purposes. Indeed, much goes to show that pantheons are now used for the express purpose of giving a sacred dimension to the secular. Thus public buildings commemorating and dedicated to the great citizens of a nation are now also regarded as pantheons. Such buildings may or may not contain tombs, statues, and various other memorabilia. In all events, there is also a world famous public edifice in Paris which honors the most outstanding rulers and citizens of France that is known as the Pantheon, Pantheon Francais. Sometimes, as common usage makes clear enough, a pantheon is not a natural temple of any sort but rather a metaphorical place. In this sense, it refers to all of the gods, heroes, and outstanding champions and achievers of a particular people or nation (or even an organization or line of endeavor) taken collectively as if existing somewhere in an imaginary place, say not unlike Olympus, if you will, which was not so much a mountain as it was a metaphor. As for the gods themselves of pre-Roman-Greek antiquity, certainly it was not their physical presence but their spiritual presence (always in the disguise of a human being) that counted. In one sense, the National Museum of American History (and also the Smithsonian Institution as a whole) is a temple. In effect, it enshrines and deifies and even idolatrizes human beings. At the same time, it is nothing if not a secular place, obviously concerned to a very great extent with the nuts and bolts of works and days in factories, fields, and offices, with weather vanes and windmills and so to airfoils and beyond. To many Americans, the very word Smithsonian is synonymous with the natural history of U.S. science, technology, and industry. And yet, as a repository of indigenous and vernacular artifacts and memorabilia, the Smithsonian also serves, intentionally or not, the very express purpose of pro-