A century after its dedication, the Lincoln Memorial calls us not only to memory but to action.
A century after its dedication, the Lincoln Memorial calls us not only to memory but to action.
T oday marks the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. It is altogether fitting and proper, as Abraham Lincoln would say, that we mark this date on Memorial Day. The holiday is itself a legacy of the Civil War. Local commemorations began in 1866, and in 1868, the head of the Grand Army of the Republic (the organization of Union Army veterans) declared that May 30 be Decoration Day, a day to decorate the graves of the war dead with springtime flowers.
The Lincoln Memorial’s dedication was a grand occasion drawing a crowd of 50,000 people. The dais was dominated by the leaders of Lincoln’s own party, which was newly ascendant in the 1920s. President Warren G. Harding, inaugurated the previous year after a landslide election victory, was the featured speaker, and two future Republican presidents were in attendance as well (Vice President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover), plus one former president (Chief Justice William Howard Taft) and the 1916 Republican presidential nominee (Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes).
The other living ex-president, Woodrow Wilson, resided in D.C. at the time and was invited but sent word the morning of the dedication that he could not attend. Wilson was never much a Lincoln man anyway. Democrats would build a memorial to their own founding president, Thomas Jefferson, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power.
Taft, appointed to the Supreme Court by Harding less than a year earlier, served as the chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission from its creation during his presidency through the dedication. He presided over the ceremony and spoke about the history and design of the memorial, whose construction took eight years and continued during the First World War:
Taft would go on, as chief justice, to oversee the construction of the Supreme Court building, another of D.C.’s monumental landmarks. Unmentioned that day was that Taft and other proponents had only succeeded in getting the memorial built because of the 1910 downfall of powerful House speaker Joe Cannon, an Illinois Republican who had admired Lincoln but hated the idea of an imperial-style Greek temple on the Potomac and had opposed it for years.
The most honored guest of all was Robert Todd Lincoln, the only of Lincoln’s four sons to live past the age of 18. The younger Lincoln had a substantial career of his own in Republican politics, serving as secretary of war under James Garfield and Chester Arthur and as ambassador to Great Britain under Benjamin Harrison. He was also dogged by tragedy beyond the deaths of his father and brothers: He witnessed the assassination of Garfield and was nearby when William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo. Robert Todd Lincoln went on to become the chairman of the Pullman railroad-car company for a quarter-century, retiring in 1922. The dedication was his last public event at age 78; he had to be helped up the steps. He was a year younger than Joe Biden is today.
PHOTOS: Lincoln Memorial Dedication
Abraham Lincoln’s generation was all gone by 1922. William Tecumseh Sherman died in 1891, Frederick Douglass died in 1895, and the last major figure of the era, Harriet Tubman, died in 1913. The Civil War was then roughly as far from them as the Vietnam War is for us today, and people looked back to the turbulence of the 1860s as we do today to the 1960s. A number of the young men of Robert Todd Lincoln’s generation who fought the war were still living, though they were elderly and mostly retired from public life. Eighty-one-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., gravely wounded at Antietam and still a force on the Supreme Court until his retirement in 1932, was the last of the breed.
McKinley, last elected two decades earlier, was the last president to have served in the Civil War. Taft and Wilson were the last presidents old enough to remember the war from their childhoods. Taft’s father served in Ulysses S. Grant’s cabinet; Wilson was reared in the Confederacy. Harding, born months after the war ended, represented the new generation, to whom Lincoln and the war were history.
Union and Confederate veterans alike were in the crowd for the dedication — the Confederates seated in places of honor, still donning their old gray uniforms — and while bitterness over the war lingered among white Southerners, the government was careful to treat the memorial as yet another symbol of the national reconciliation that Lincoln so urgently desired:
At the monument’s groundbreaking on February 12, 1914, Lincoln Memorial Commission member Joseph Blackburn “turned the first spadeful of sod,” according to The New York Times. Prior to representing the martyred president’s native state of Kentucky in the U.S. Congress for nearly 30 years, Blackburn served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. “This memorial will show that Lincoln is now regarded as the greatest of all Americans,” the former Confederate officer said at the simple groundbreaking ceremony, “and that he is so held by the South as well as the North.”
There are really three historical Lincolns. The young, striving Lincoln of the 1830s and 1840s was a man of high principle and great sensitivity who contained many of the signs of the later giant. At that point, though, he was still a creature of the frontier: eager to prove himself, emotionally volatile, of occasionally questionable judgment, and willing to engage in the fisticuffs common in small-town Illinois. The second Lincoln was the great anti-slavery advocate of the 1850s and the 1860 campaign: a combative and partisan debater, a shrewd and relentless critic of the Slave Power, quick to earthy jokes and raucous laughter. Finally, we see the war leader of 1861–65, the man who hunched for long hours in the telegraph office, pored over maps and pardon requests in the White House, and stared silently at length into space. The burdens of war lay heavily upon him, and the long, lawyerly barrages of logic, wit, and history in his speeches and debates were replaced with terse, poetic odes to the gravity of the moment and appeals to the better angels of our nature.
The Lincoln Memorial is decidedly a memorial to the third Lincoln, the somber man of humanity, the martyr to a Confederate-sympathizing assassin’s bullet, the wartime leader who, in the words of his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, “belongs to the ages now.” The memorial was built to commemorate Lincoln’s leadership and the causes for which the war was fought. It also stood as a reminder of the ghastly costs of a conflict that took the lives of some 750,000 American soldiers: the equivalent of 7.5 million dead in today’s America. Even without counting the cost to civilians, that is more killed in one war than in all of America’s other wars combined. Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s white men between the ages of 13 and 43 were killed in the war, plus some 36,000 black men — nearly a fifth of the black soldiers and sailors who enlisted in the war’s final two years.
For the assembled crowd in 1922, the open wound of war was once again fresh. Three and a half years earlier, a million men of the American Expeditionary Force in France lurched into the largest and bloodiest battle in American history, the six-week Meuse-Argonne offensive. The “War to End All Wars” took over 116,000 American lives in a year of combat. The New York Times account of the ceremony noted as “conspicuous” the presence of the German ambassador. A month earlier, Coolidge had dedicated the memorial statue of Grant at the opposite end of the Mall, bookending the capital’s formal remembrance of the Civil War.
The world had changed a lot since Lincoln’s death in the age of the railroad, the telegraph, and the steamboat. Thousands of spectators arrived by car and heard speakers amplified by microphones. The ceremony was broadcast nationally on the radio and captured on silent film:
Lincoln, a devoted promoter of new technologies as a railroad lawyer and wartime innovator, and the only president to hold a patent, would have approved. An airplane also accidentally buzzed the ceremony and interrupted Harding’s speech. Secretary of War John Weeks, thinking it was an Army plane, tried frantically to wave away the pilot with semaphore signals from the ground. This prompted more airspace restrictions in D.C. The Lincoln Memorial itself was slightly damaged by accidental anti-aircraft fire in 1942 from the capital’s air defenses.
Some things, however, had changed less than they should have. Black spectators were forcibly segregated far from the dais, an arrangement W.E.B. DuBois (in attendance) found “most shameful.” Tuskegee Institute president Dr. Robert Russa Moton, a protégé of Booker T. Washington, was chosen to give the black perspective on Lincoln, but he had to sit by himself away from the other speakers. The Harding White House then cut from his remarks his call for progress on black civil rights: “This memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make real in our national life, in every state and in every section, the things for which he died.” Most white newspapers gave only cursory coverage to even Moton’s expurgated remarks.
The Lincoln Memorial’s story did not end with its dedication. Like Lincoln himself, the memorial represents something that still lives in our history, and is still being written. Marian Anderson sang there in 1939 when, because she was black, she was barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from singing at Constitution Hall. Martin Luther King Jr. chose the memorial as the backdrop for the “I Have a Dream” speech he delivered at the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, a century after the summer of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. King was not the only American figure to make his own history on the steps of the memorial, but his speech that day entered into the American canon, in good part because he had the greatest claim to represent the business Lincoln left unfinished in 1865.
The very presence of Anderson and King on the steps represented visible progress from 1922. Today, pro-lifers in D.C. often gather there for the March for Life. The two political faces of Lincoln — progress against the injustice of slavery, alongside conservative preservation of the Union and its institutions — cement his appeal to Americans of all causes and persuasions.
Visiting the memorial today remains a moving experience. Sculptor Daniel Chester French’s 19-foot-high statue of Lincoln, seated and staring into the distance, conveys the somber gravity of the war. Lincoln sits with his right hand open and his left hand clenched, a posture that captures the mixed emotions of a man who prosecuted a relentless war yet always insisted that his opponents (some of them his own old friends) were fellow citizens of “our one common country.” In American Sign Language, Lincoln’s hands also appear to spell out “A” and “L,” although French denied that he had done this intentionally. Given that the memorial was designed without knowing when it would be completed, it also appears that its 57 steps were coincidental to its dedication 57 years after Lincoln’s death.
Countless Hollywood films and television shows have featured the Lincoln Memorial, typically choosing it to lend gravitas to any depiction of the federal government and the people who serve in it. Most memorable of these is Mister Smith Goes to Washington, in which an idealistic young senator visits the memorial on his first day in Washington for inspiration, then returns there at night in crisis, feeling the weight of Mr. Lincoln’s gaze before mustering his courage to stand for his principles.
Lincoln remains alive to us today because, for all that has changed since his time, he is familiar to us. George Washington, great a man though he was, is distant. He was remote even to his contemporaries: self-consciously heroic, a man who wanted to leave his nation a founding myth. Lincoln was all too human, a lawyer and a party politician who grew up in the nation Washington made. He wrestled with issues of big business, corrupt government, congressional dysfunction, immigration, trade, cultural conflict, racial prejudice, the death penalty, religious liberty, press freedom, demographic and technological change, and with legal debates over the original meaning of the Constitution. He was the first president nominated largely on the basis of his use of the national media to spread his message. Yet, most of all, his presidency was defined by a war that cost the lives of three quarters of a million men.
“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said in his most famous speech, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Today, we remember.