I submit that the answer to all those questions is yes.

As a start, existing monuments could be augmented to keep visitors engaged with historical figures rather than deified myths. The virtues and achievements of George Washington are spectacular. The fact that he he died owning 318 slaves should not be forgotten. Let's attach 318 lengths of chain at regular intervals to the foot of the Washington monument. Their links could correspond in number to the years a slave was held. A plaque would explain the chains and note that Washington was "the only slaveholding Founder to put provisions for manumission in his will." Visitors would be reminded that even far-seeing leaders can be blind to or participate in historic injustices. Wouldn't we do well to remember that?

The existing Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial includes men in a bread line to celebrate his efforts during the Great Depression. It might also include some representation of interned Japanese Americans being forced from their houses into camps. FDR did much good. He did shameful things too. To gaze on only the good is to deceive oneself. A historic injustice toward an ethnic minority in wartime is part of FDR's legacy. It ought to be prominently displayed with the rest of it.

The Vietnam War Memorial has always moved me.

Some distance away from the wall, I'd like to see a statue of Lyndon Baines Johnson with a pointed finger urging young men toward their deaths. That is, after all, what happened. And the J. Edgar Hoover Building could feature a statue of its namesake trying to foist a suicide note and a gun into the hands of Martin Luther King. I don't mean to dwell on the negative. But it's been ignored so long there's a lot to cover. We've done a much better job publicly celebrating what's good about our history. I'm glad those bits of public architecture exist, but we need not dwell on them here. This isn't about self-flagellation. Indeed, you and I did not do these things. The point is that a full understanding of our history is valuable in a self-governing nation.

As for Woodrow Wilson, I'd find a plaza in the capital to remember his civil-liberties abrogations. Imagine a circular fountain with 10 plaques around the periphery, each corresponding to a separate provision in the Bill of Rights. At the center of the fountain: a statue of Wilson himself on a rotating circular pedestal. Every 15 minutes, his body would rotate and spurts of water would emerge from his pursued lips as he "spat" on only those amendments he violated. Their text would erode over time. And my Washington-based colleagues, who work in the Watergate, might volunteer to help with upkeep on a whimsical, wax Richard Nixon figure in a burglar mask atop a ladder trying to wriggle into a third-floor window.

Of course, every suggestion of this sort is bound to be contentious—just as every celebratory monument and somber war memorial is contentious—and it would probably be best to have a standing rule against negative monuments that portray the living or even the recently dead. Let's say nothing should be commissioned until 15 years after someone is gone. Even so, proposals for future monuments could have a salutary effect on public policy. In present-day D.C., the legacy-minded official can look around his or her city and be reasonably sure that no deed, however infamous, will one day make him or her the object of disdainful, ashamed tourists.