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The Lincoln Memorial: Illusions in Marble, Whitewashed by Time

Ivy Clarice Celestial Estoesta

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bobby French for inspiring me to write on the Lincoln Memorial, David Lubin for encouraging me to explore the illusory nature of art, and Chris Thomas, author of The Lincoln Memorial and American Life, for e-mailing me back with information about the political views of Henry Bacon, as well as helping to shape my thesis. 

The last illusion is that there are none.

“If you wish to make a man look noble…”

             “…your best course is to kill him,” wrote Scottish poet and author, Alexander Smith, two years before President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865.[1]  Without intending to, Smith’s discerning comment actualized itself in the years following Lincoln’s unexpected death, as glorified portraits of America’s 16^th president cropped up around the nation.

            Exemplary of the purification process was the manner in which the Radical Republicans appropriated Lincoln’s image. In the last years of his life, Lincoln threatened the political base on which the Radical Republicans stood.  With the Civil War coming to a close, a plan for Reconstruction was in great need.  Lincoln, who declared war on the South only out of patriotic necessity, proposed that the South be treated as a prodigal son returning home to his father.  To Lincoln, a welcoming attitude would facilitate his unswerving purpose: to preserve the Union.  Radicals, on the other hand, viewed Reconstruction as a means of punishing the insurgents, evidenced by Congressional passage of the Wade-Davis Bill on Independence Day, 1864.  The Bill, which placed the affairs of secessionist states in the hands of provisional governors until half of their white, male citizens took an oath of loyalty to the Union, did not reflect Lincoln’s more accommodating view of Reconstruction.  Accordingly, he vetoed the bill.  In response, an enraged Congress issued the Wade-Davis Manifesto, which accused Lincoln of “dictatorial usurpation,” as he “holds for naught” such judgments made by Congress.[2]

Ironically, the Radical Republicans of 1867 championed Lincoln’s very acts of central authority that their own Party of 1864 abhorred.  To the Republicans of 1867, Lincoln personified the Republican Party, which was “the party of central authority, favoring the vigorous exercise of federal leadership.”  On the matter of race, it was the party that overrode Southern Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the 14^th Amendment, and later forced the rebel states to enact the bill lest they wish to lose the privilege of participating in Congress.  Entitling former slaves to citizenship, the 14^th Amendment may have been too Radical for the moderate Lincoln.  As Christopher Thomas indicates, “it is not clear that had [Lincoln] lived he would have fully supported the policies of his party’s radical right wing, in ascendant after the war, to reconstruct the devastated South as an interracial society in which whites and African-Americans would coexist on equal terms.”  But with Lincoln dead, so too was the threat he posed.  Thus, the Radical Republicans could mold his image unchallenged.  To them, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, as well as his use of unprecedented power—even if against Radical Reconstruction—afforded the convincing portrayal of Lincoln as a martyr for the Republican, if not Radical cause.[3]

            But the imagery of a secularized Christ did not stop there.  Even the people participated in apotheosizing the man born in the backwoods of Illinois.  After his assassination, prints, such as D.T. Wiest’s In Memory of Abraham Lincoln, were circulated throughout the United States.  Such images portrayed the 16^th President adorned in flowing robes in preparation to be assumed into heaven.[4] 

And like Christ, who was both god and man, Lincoln’s image simultaneously acquired humanoid characteristics.  Again, art was the medium.  Countless stories of Lincoln as a man of the people wove themselves into the creation of his persona: “typically the good neighbor in Illinois, or friend in the White House who makes an appearance at a key moment in the story to aid the main characters.”  Even the two major biographies, written twenty-five years after his death, eulogized Lincoln as a “folksy Westerner” and “towering political genius.”  And, perhaps in the most human of all portraits was the Lincoln who fell in love with Anne Rutledge, a gentle and beautiful woman who died before the two could marry.[5]

            With the array of images, there certainly existed a Lincoln for every man.  Which image would dominate, however, remained tentative. One thing was certain, though: the generalized, and often inconsistent images of Lincoln fated whatever monument to be erected in his honor to be a political battleground.

“Erecting a monument in the city of Washington…”

“…commemorative of the great charter of emancipation and universal liberty in America,” was next on the political agenda of the Radical Republican-dominated Congress.  The task looked easy enough, especially after Congress had accustomed itself to wresting control from President Johnson.  The ease with which Congress expanded the Freedmen’s Bureau and subjected the rebel states to martial law met the Radical Republicans once again in 1867, as a bill to create a private Lincoln Memorial Association was passed. [6] 

Consistent with the purpose to cement their image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the Association, with the aid of the Western Sanitary Commission, chose Clark Mill’s design, which followed the advancement of African-Americans from slaves to freemen.  Ironically, Mills owned and exploited slaves up till the end of the Civil War, which may have subliminally affected his design.  Criticized by Kirk Savage, Mill’s design is a “betray[ing] an unshakable condescension toward the people it represents and supposedly commemorates.”[7] 

As if this paradox were not troubling enough, ideological tensions within the Radical Republicans likewise threatened to undermine the project.  By the end of the 1870s, the Radicals had split into Stalwart and Liberal Radicals.  The split, however, did not prevent both sides from simultaneously abandoning the Negro in place of social order.[8]  In fact, Stalwart Radical Benjamin F. Wade—a key Senator in the drafting of the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864—wrote to his wife of his troubles with Negro servants who were not docile enough.  Wade was, as he put it, “sick of Niggers.”  Alternatively, Liberal Radical George W. Julian—a Senator who aided in the makings of the party’s antislavery platform—fell “in love with the South” and quickly absorbed the racist belief that the Negro was “ineffably corrupt.” [9] 

With the Radical Republicans no longer championing the rights of Negroes, the fervor to build their revolutionary monument fizzled.  In the end, the only image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator was Thomas Ball’s Freedmen’s Memorial, which Savage condemns as a monument entrenched in and perpetuating racist ideology.[10]  More importantly, the split between the Stalwart and Liberal Radicals signaled an end to both their partisan hold on Congress and Lincoln.  Lincoln’s image was, again, up for grabs.

“Greatness for a state…”

            “…doesn't require some huge monument for all to see,”[11] declared Republican Governor Sonny Perdue more than one-hundred years after his party’s second attempt to erect a memorial to Lincoln.  What makes Perdue’s statement so profound is how it challenges the pretext on which the Lincoln Memorial was built: the single task of paying homage to the man who saved the Union would be expanded to venerate his party, specifically the Republicans of the late 1890s.  To erect such a partisan monument was not as daunting as it might appear today, for in 1896, America was again under the control of a dominantly Republican government.  Under the Grand Old Party, domestic prosperity and triumphs abroad painted the portrait of a great country.  Following ever so surely was the patriotism that filled the hearts of men, which manifested itself in their request of the President for a “permanent structure which would commemorate not only the [centennial] but also the exceptionally happy condition of our people at this time, when to so marked a degree there is noticed the absence of all sectional feeling.”[12]

            In response, Congress created the McMillan Commission, which channeled the people’s request through the lens of Republicanism.  As Thomas contends, “the commission was Republican through and through,” for both the Committee and the Senate to which it would report comprised mainly Republican advocates.  The commissioners—Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. Mckim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and Augustus Saint-Gaudens—were former Unionists, and more likely than not Republican in sympathy.[13]  

            Yet unlike the Radical Republicans who envisioned their Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the Republicans of the early twentieth century imagined a Lincoln less polemic and more reflective of the sentiments of the time.  With the Civil War more than thirty years in the past and triumphalism at hand, America was suited to welcome a Lincoln overshadowed by the Radical Republicans but venerated by turn-of-the-century Republicans.

            Theirs was the Lincoln who saved the Union.  Indicative of their image of Lincoln was the site on which the Commissioners chose to construct their memorial.  Occupying the far, east end of the mall, located opposite Confederate General Lee’s Virginia home, the memorial would embody the sentiments during that period of unity.[14]  Furthermore,

Lincoln’s monument would be aligned with monuments personified by President George Washington and his later successor, Theodore Roosevelt.  Forming a visual continuum with the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument would thus secure the Republican’s image of Lincoln as a leader, equally wise as “the president responsible for the country’s foundation.”[15]

            To celebrate Lincoln as the man who unified the nation was of great importance to the Republicans: doing so would echo the contemporary Republican victory of solidifying the nation as an emerging super power.  Military and economic successes overseas—specifically Cuba, the Philippines, and China—were mirrored on the homeland, as America annexed Hawaii.  Thus, the Lincoln Memorial found its beginnings in celebrating Lincoln the Unifier, as well as early twentieth century Republican ideology.

            Even the man selected to build the monument reflected Republican values.  Henry Bacon was born in Illinois, and though his childhood belonged to the South, Bacon returned to the North in 1884 to attend Illinois Industrial University.  In 1889

Bacon won the Rotch Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to travel abroad and survey the forms which would later appear in his most famous work, the Lincoln Memorial.  Surely, his travels fueled his interest in classical—particularly, Grecian—architecture, which was initiated by his brother Francis, who assisted in the excavations of the Greek site, Assos.[16]  Bacon’s use of Grecian imagery suited McKim’s vision for the Lincoln Memorial.  Specifically, McKim trusted Bacon to use a visual vocabulary that would suggest the “moral authority and fiscal sobriety of Republicanism.”[17]  The monument certainly fulfilled what Republicans envisioned.  As Thomas eloquently argues, “the Lincoln Memorial, regardless of how it has subsequently been used, was an emblem of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt’s and William Howard Taft’s era, of the Grand Old Party at just the moment when Gilded Age plutocracy and laissez-faire were giving way to Progressive system and regulation.”[18]

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space”[19]

That will belonged to an epoch shaped by Republicans.  If Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s claim is true, then the Lincoln Memorial would be made to sing the victorious tune of Republicanism. With thirty-six columns forming the colonnade of the monument, the significance of the number manifests itself to the erudite viewer.  For those unacquainted with American history, Bacon annotates each column with the name of a state: it would be a “symbol of the Union.”  In addition to the “Union” colonnade, the thirteen steps on which the Lincoln Memorial stands can be seen as the thirteen original colonies from which the United States originated. [20]  Taken together, the patriotic symbolism of the monument boasts of the Republican victory of preserving the Union: the colonnade is elevated, despite being burdened. 

Despite victory’s laurel wreaths bedecked onto the exterior frieze of the monument, it cannot help but hint at the solemn side of Republicanism.  For instance, the exterior columns are Doric—the simplest of the Greek orders.  Residing within the colonnade is Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln, as a man of the people.  Unlike Horatio Greenough’s George Washington who is swathed in flowing robes or Sarah Ames’s togaed Lincoln,[21] the French’s Lincoln wears only a simple suit, and is embellished by nothing—not even his famous top hat.  Thus, the austerely designed shrine actualized McKim’s vision that the monument bespeak the “fiscal sobriety of Republicanism.”[22] 

With its colonnade of Doric columns constituting the periphery of the rectangular shrine, it resembles the Temple of Athena Parthenos.  As if to enhance the sanctity of the memorial grounds, only “the purest marble” would be used to erect the monument.  The search ended when Colorado Yule caught the attention of men like Henry Bacon for its pristine white and delicate veining.  Gleaming white in the sun, the building was christened sacred and eulogized the moral authority of Republicanism.[23]

“The illusion which exalts us…”

            “…is dearer to us than 10-thousand truths.”[24]  No words could more eloquently undermine the notion that the Lincoln Memorial articulates an effective Republican identity.  Or any identity, for that matter.  Rather, the Lincoln Memorial is merely a blank canvas, and the viewer its artist.  In fact, upon being unveiled to the public, various reactions to the memorial precipitated. 

Perhaps the least publicized is how African Americans perceived the monument when it was first erected.  At the dedication ceremony of the Lincoln Memorial, race was not an issue, as both white and black invitees dotted the seating area.  The utopian illusion, however, was quickly erased as the African Americans in attendance were “Jim Crowed.”  They were led to their seats “across the road by the reflecting pool,” while “military ushers taunted them with racial epithets.”[25]  While most invitees heeded the bigoted demands, others left in protest, suggesting that they viewed the Lincoln Memorial as a site where all men truly were created equal.[26]  Similarly infuriated was the black press, which “denounced the biased speeches and segregated seating as a mockery of Lincoln’s ideals.”[27]  In fact, Robert Moton, the successor to Booker T. Washington, saw the Lincoln Memorial in a similar light.  Asked to speak at the dedication ceremony, Moton wrote a speech inconsistent with Republican bureaucrats’ view of the monument.  Just as those African Americans who disputed segregated seating, Moton saw the Lincoln Memorial as a paragon of racial equality.

            My fellow citizens, in the great name which we honor here today, I say unto you this memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hallow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make real our national life, in every state and in every section, the things for which he died.[28]

To Moton, Lincoln died not for the reasons embraced by the likes of Taft and Harding.  Rather, Lincoln died for the end of slavery and the beginning of equality.  His memorial, therefore, embodied for Moton those very virtues. 

            While the Lincoln Memorial as a symbol of racial equality pervaded the minds of African Americans, white male citizens, typically from the Midwest, denounced the work.  In general, they saw the work as an affront to Americanism, with its elitist reference to classical antiquity.  American architects, likewise, were displeased with the structure.  To architects F. W. Fitzpatrick and Lewis Mumford, the Lincoln Memorial improperly honored the “son of the Western prairies” [29] and later, “the leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War.”  Rather the monument, Lewis believed, served “the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean.[30]

            From the women’s sphere, however, little dissent to the memorial was heard.  Of the few female perspectives that exist are those of critic and Sun writer, Leila Mechlin and French’s niece, Mary P. Webster.  In response to the flurry of criticism surrounding the Lincoln Memorial’s un-Americanism, Mechlin argued, “such criticism is never constructive; it never takes into consideration the fact that we Americans are…the children of the old world, with a full right to carry on their traditions.”[31]  Webster, likewise, praised the memorial in a letter sent to French.  Inspired by the inscriptions on the wall, she wrote, “These are the words I read this morning at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.  They are true words.” What exactly was true to Webster remains vague.  Yet her act of copying Lincoln’s equality-themed Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses word for word suggests that they are what captivated her; they were the what that are true.[32]

Were Moton and Webster presumptuous to see such positive symbolism in the memorial?  No; for there exist enough visual clues to support each one’s interpretation of the monument. Despite the instruction Bacon received from art critic Royal Cortissoz to “say nothing about slavery,”[33] hidden from public view is Jules Guerin’s mural titled, Emancipation of a Race, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address—references that Moton may have construed as the exalting illusion of racial equality.

What Moton saw in the Lincoln Memorial as racial equality may have been similarly construed by Webster as gender equality—a reasonable projection since the memorial does include images of women.  The more evident are illustrations of female allegories present in Guerin’s murals, while the more ambiguous: the Ionic columns inside of Bacon’s monument.[34]  Paired with the just recent ratification of the 19^th Amendment which enfranchised women, Webster’s optimistic view of the memorial appears plausible. 

Yet the very images that support both Moton and Webster’s views likewise undermine.  As observed by Dixon Weeter in 1940, the inscriptions so admired by Webster and Moton have been “worn so smooth by a million tongues that we are not apt to feel the edge of Lincoln’s words.”[35]  Moreover, Guerin’s murals are placed so high on the walls that they easily become a parenthetical aside glossed over by most viewers.[36] 

Yet the murals of Guerin can just as easily be made to speak the language of white supremacy and patriarchy.  In the Emancipation of a Race stands a classical, winged figure unshackling the black race.  As observed by Savage, “classical sculpture served as the benchmark of whiteness and, indeed, served that function…in the writings of the racial taxonomists.[37] 

Furthermore, the winged figure of the Emancipation group engenders President William Taft’s declamation that, “on the whole it is fair to say that the immediate enfranchisement of women will increase the proportion of the hysterical element of the Electorate.”[38]  While Edward Conklin refers to the allegorical figure of Truth as a “she,” closer inspection reveals an androgyne.[39]  The breasts and medium length hair point to effeminacy, but simultaneously lack the feminine grace found in murals of the 1890s, such as Edward Simmons’ The Justice of the Law.  As Bailey Van Hook explains, “the increased role of murals in the official, public sphere led some artists to move away from passive women in a poetic mood or lyrical role.”  Typical of that practice was the depiction of women in such a way that they posses a commanding image—be it by a dynamic twist of the torso or an erect stance.  The reason, Hook suggests, was the artist’s consciousness to the discord of portraying feminine grace in the masculine, public sphere.  Thus, to engender the female body with a subtle masculinity was an attempt to harmonize the dissonance.  Nonetheless, there exists a softness about Simmons’s women that is absent from Guerin’s.  Why?  The turn of the nineteenth century brought with it masculine values of “energy, vigor, and courage”[40] that displaced even the most energetically portrayed female subject.  Accordingly, the male figure began to dominate—at the very least encroach upon—the traditionally, feminine mural space.  The androgynous characteristics of Guerin’s figures can thus be attributed to the shifting nature of mural painting and more importantly, gender roles.

            Solidly rooted to the ground, the Angel of Truth appears more than just a passive decoration.  She—if we may call her that—is a visual rhyme, albeit in two dimensions, to what Vitruvius sees as the three-dimensional, architectural female: the Ionic column.  While both bear weight (Bacon’s column in the more literal sense), neither could achieve the roles still reserved for men.  In the presence of turn of the century anti-feminist sentiment, which “sought to press women back into the private sphere,”[41] it comes as no surprise that both mural and Ionic columns adorn only the interior space of the Memorial. 

            As conceivable as all these views may be, African-Americans, women, and anti-imperialists did not hold positions powerful enough to effectively invoke his or her respective image from the Lincoln Memorial.  Jim Crow laws and anti-feminist backlash prevented blacks and women, respectively, from acquiring power.  As for anti-imperialists, newspaper columnists such as George Ade and Finely Peter Dunne managed to exercise a degree of influence.  In fact, Ade composed The Sultan of Sulu (1903), which gathered audiences in Chicago and in Eastern theaters for quite some time despite its anti-imperialist sentiments.[42]  Nevertheless, anti-imperialists were like the African-Americans and women of the time: only a pocketful—if that—dared to speak out against the ruling class of Republican, white men.

“Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory…but there is collective instruction”[43]

That public instruction originated from men empowered by the government.  Thus, the image of the Lincoln Memorial that would dominate during the 1920s was rooted in Republican ideology.  The ideal time and place would be the dedication ceremony of the Memorial, where Republicans could easily inculcate the minds of the men, women, blacks, and whites of the attending audience with their image of the Lincoln Memorial. 

On the thirtieth of May, 1922, throngs of people surrounded the memorial grounds for its dedication.  Hundreds were in attendance, for the government declared the day a national holiday.  And for those who could not attend, amplifiers and radio broadcasting enabled even the remotest of locations to hear the Republican-pitched addresses.[44] 

Impressed on the minds of those who listened that day was an image of Lincoln, Savior of the Union.  White dignitaries, like Chief Justice Taft and President Harding, avoided the subject of slavery at all costs.  As indicated by Sandage, not once did Taft mention slavery in his lengthy speech.  Harding, too, focused on national unity—between North and South.  Harding dared to declare that “Emancipation was a means to the great end—maintained union and nationality”.  Furthermore, he “reassured the South that Lincoln ‘would have been the last man in the republic to resort to arms to effect…abolition.”[45]  Even Edwin Markham’s dedication poem, “Lincoln, the Man of the People,” extolled Lincoln for preserving the Union when “thunders split the house.”[46]  The only African-American asked to speak at the dedication would be Robert Moton. As the successor of Booker T. Washington, who favored political accommodation over economic progress, Moton was a safe choice for the Republicans.  What few realize, however, is the fact that Moton “intended to deliver a passionate plea for racial justice.”  Inconsistent with the Republican Party was Moton’s view of the Lincoln Memorial as a “moral symbol of the African-American fight against discrimination.”[47]  Accordingly, they censored his speech so that any mention of the African-American plight or criticism of the government would be deleted.  In the end, any chance to include Lincoln as the Great Emancipator into the collective, public memory was lost.  That day, all dwelled on the theme of national unity—a unity extended to neither African Americans nor women.[48]  Smug patriotism and Republicanism triumphed, as the addresses elevated Lincoln to more than just a man of the people.  He became a man for the people—and those people were white, Republican men.

“ ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”[49]

            How perceptive is Percy Shelly’s poem: even one-hundred years after it was written, its warning that all great things fade neatly describes the transformation of the Lincoln Memorial.  Indeed, the Lincoln Memorial stands in just as much grandeur today as it did in the past.  But what the Lincoln Memorial once stood for—“a metaphor for real government and power [Republicanism]”[50] –has suffered the fate of Ozymandias. Just when it seemed that the Republican memory would be carved indelibly into the marble house, sentiments dominant during the 1930s whitewashed the stones of Republican ideology.

Doing so was simple, since the past had already laid the foundations necessary to depict the human qualities of Lincoln.  In fact, Carl Sandburg’s portrait of Lincoln, which dominated during the 1930s, relied on the “anecdotal and legendary dimensions” of past Lincolnian images.  Cullen suggests that, “Sandburg fused the Herndon and Nicolay/Hay viewpoints into a single coherent image…[that] can be found in the second volume of The War Years.”  That image was of a Lincoln who is, according to Cullen, “of the world but never quite in it.”[51]

Such an image was a fitting response to the current troubles that faced the nation.  As a man of the world, Lincoln gave the people of the Depression’s decade a figure with whom they could identify.  Sandburg, for instance, depicted Mary Todd Lincoln as the demanding and oppressive wife to Lincoln.  Saddled with such a wife, Lincoln, nevertheless transcends his personal burdens to become the hero of the nation.  Sandburg’s moralizing tale of overcoming personal obstacles struck at the hearts of men, for during the Great Depression, men were burdened by feminists competing for financial stability during the time of economic instability and scarcity.[52]

            Transformed into a hero, Lincoln, paradoxically became otherworldly.  Nonetheless, it provided the messianic Lincoln that could be invoked for support and encouragement.  Exemplary of this is Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which the Lincoln Memorial is used as a site of secular prayer by Jefferson Smith.  Played by James Stewart, Mr. Smith is a wide-eyed man appointed the position of state Senator upon the unexpected death of his state Senator.  Unbeknownst to him, Smith wins the office not because “he’s the greatest American we got,” but because, in the words of a corrupt political boss, he’s “the simpleton of all time”—a puppet that can be controlled to vote in a way beneficial to his appointers.  As the movie progresses, Smith unhappily learns the true reasons that brought him to Washington, D.C..  Faced with the decision to conceal or reveal the truth, Smith, as an honest man, decides to unveil the scandal during the senatorial meeting.  But before he can do so, Smith’s childhood hero and fellow senator, Joseph Paine, accuses Smith of graft in attempts to divert attention from the real scandal in which Paine is involved.  Disillusioned by the political process, Smith visits the Lincoln Memorial in an act of communion with the Great Man.  The camera focuses in on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and pauses momentarily on the speech’s closing:

WE TAKE INCREASED DEVOTION TO THAT

CAUSE FOR WHICH THEY GAVE THE LAST FULL

MEASURE OF DEVOTION ~ THAT THESE DEAD

SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VEIN ~ THAT THIS

NATION UNDER GOD SHALL HAVE A NEW BIRTH

OF FREEDOM ~ AND THAT GOVERNMENT OF THE

PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE SHALL NOT PERISH

FROM THE EARTH.

With a tinge of sadness on his face, Jeff picks up his bags and heads for the exit.  Just as he is about to leave, he encounters his secretary Saunders, and declaims the monuments of Washington, D.C., referring to them as a “rotten show.”  But the film does not end at denouncing the monuments.  Rather, Capra offers a more hopeful vision in which the monuments of Washington, D.C. are given new meaning.  Through Saunders, Capra insists that Lincoln is “waiting for someone to come along…someone with a little plain, decent, uncompromising rightness.”[53]  With the film reaching people nationwide, the stage was set for Americans to view the Lincoln Memorial as a site of solace from the troubles rampant at the time.  But as with the past, a new image of Lincoln and his memorial could not be shaped by a scattered and powerless people.  Solidifying Lincoln’s new image would rely on a collective effort commanded by someone with power.  That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“…it is time for us Democrats…”

            “…to claim Lincoln as one of our own,” wrote FDR in 1929, five years before he became America’s president.  Full dedication to that task, however, did not begin until FDR occupied the position to wrest Lincoln’s image from the Republican Party.  Politically, FDR faced an added burden: revitalizing the people’s belief in the government.  Invoking Lincoln’s words and image, FDR initiated the process of transforming the people’s views on both Lincoln and the duty of the government. [54]  Words, however, simply would not do.  FDR would need something greater—an act of some sort—to successfully claim Lincoln’s image for the Democrats.

            The opportunity arose when black opera singer, Marian Anderson, was twice denied the right to sing in public buildings—the first, a tax-exempt Constitution Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution; the second, a high school auditorium belonging to the District of Columbia Board of Education.  Still lacking a site for Anderson’s concert, officers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People entertained the idea of holding the event at the Lincoln Memorial.  Convinced “‘it would be far better…for Miss Anderson to commemorate the Memory of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, or not to sing in Washington at all until democracy can surmount the color line in the nation’s capital,” the board moved to secure the Lincoln Memorial as the stage from where Anderson would sing “America.”  On Easter Sunday, 1939, Anderson sang of liberty in front of attending Americans.  As with the first public gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, the event was not limited to the present audience; newsreels, cameras, and radios publicized the affair nationally.[55] 

            In a sense, the past repeated itself: Lincoln’s image was again a battleground, the contenders slightly different. What Roosevelt and the NAACP did not know was that each was vying for the possession of Lincoln.  In what the African Americans construed as a potential symbolic triumph for social justice, Roosevelt and his cabinet took as an act to attain Lincoln as the Democratic Party’s emblem.  In fact, when Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes secured the permission of Roosevelt for Anderson’s concert, he reportedly quipped, “She can sing from the top of the Washington Monument if she wants to!”  Such a response suggests that FDR did not see the symbolic impact of Anderson’s concert on tipping Lincoln’s image toward the blacks.  In fact, neither Eleanor Roosevelt nor her husband attended, or even planned to attend, the concert.  And within a year later, Eleanor crossed a picket line of black protestors to attend a segregated premiere of Raymond Massey’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940).[56]  Perhaps, FDR saw in his act the actualization of Lincoln’s words—that the “Government should do for people that which they cannot possibly do for themselves,”[57] and what Ickes later publicly declared about the concert:  “Marian Anderson’s voice and personality have come to be a symbol—a symbol of American unity at a time when a lack of it might well prove fatal to us as a people.”[58]  Mirroring the past, the Lincoln that emerged during the 1930s was meant to facilitate not the plight of the African American, but rather Roosevelt’s presidency—needed especially in the time of the Depression.  

“This world cannot exist half slave and half free”

            Spoken in 1858, Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech was made relevant once again in the 1940s.  America’s prolonged absence in World War II was coming to an end, and Roosevelt now faced the daunting task of easing the public’s reluctance to American involvement.  Lincoln’s image would again bear the brunt of the work.

This time, however, Lincoln and his memorial would come to stand not for the moral guidance that the people of the Depression saw him as, but rather for the champion of democracy.  Several recruitment posters invoked Lincoln’s image, either indirectly by extracting lines from his most famous speeches or directly by displaying images of the man himself.  Perhaps one of the best examples is a poster from 1943, which encourages the public to buy war bonds.  What is striking about this poster is that despite the contemporary image of the soldier sprawled dead on the ground, Lincoln’s words—“that these dead shall not have died in vain”—anachronistically float above the dead body. And, crowning the corner of the poster is French’s Lincoln.[59]  On the other end of the spectrum were war posters similar to the 1944 poster titled, This World Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free, Fight for Freedom!.[60]  Paraphrasing Lincoln’s House Divided speech, as well as comparing the shadowed Gestapo to a slave master cracking his whip, posters of this sort officially reversed the terms of Lincoln’s image depicted by the government.  Whereas both Republicans and Democrats wished to erase the racial overtones of the Lincoln Memorial, war posters distributed by the government during World War II brought democracy to the forefront.  As Barry Schwartz indicates, “state and media iconography in an ethnically divided society were designed to remind everyone of the values they shared.”[61]

            Whether he knew it or not, Roosevelt bequeathed his solitary hold on Lincoln and his memorial.  By using Lincoln’s image to legitimize the war effort, calling it a war for democracy, Lincoln’s image ceased to belong to the Democrats.  That process—the circulation of Lincoln’s image and words—democratized Lincoln’s image, making him a man for all people. 

Yet the transaction remained unfinished.  An event headed by the masses—the democracy—was necessary to cement the Lincoln Memorial as a site for the people.

“I have a dream…”

On 1963, the centennial of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 400,000 people marched through Washington, D.C., choosing the Lincoln Memorial as the endpoint.  Their purpose: a plea for civil rights.  This was not the first time the idea surfaced.  As early as 1941, black labor leader A. Philip Randolph organized such a march, canceling the movement only upon FDR’s acquiescence to desegregating the defense industries.  Within that twenty-two year gap, the crisis over civil rights intensified.  Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, boycotts and sit-ins, however, signaled a changing atmosphere in America.  If ever there was a time, now posed the opportunity for African-Americans to seize the Lincoln Memorial as theirs.

What Moton saw but could not verbalize in the Lincoln Memorial as early as 1922, Martin Luther King, Jr. solidified in 1963.  Standing before the shrine, its deity gazing over his shoulder, King spoke his sermon of equality: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”[62]  The Declaration of Independence was not the only official text King quoted from that day.  He, like those before him—FDR and his Democrats, Harding and his Republicans—invoked the image and speeches of Lincoln, successfully transforming the monument into what he saw it: a site of social justice and equality.  As observed by Neil Schmitz, “King’s address extended, amplified, restated the terms of Lincoln’s text, specifying here who the people were: ‘black men as well as white men.’”[63] 

Important in the reconstruction of the Lincoln Memorial were the attendants.  Never before had the Lincoln Memorial housed such a mass.  Newscasters were among the many, broadcasting King’s sermon to those who could not attend.  As Sandage indicates, “mass meetings at the shrine were aimed at public opinion.”  Finally, African-Americans secured the vision they saw in the Lincoln Memorial—“that great marble memorial was their own memorial to the man who had emancipated them.”[64]

Still, conflicting images of the Lincoln Memorial continued to exist.  Antithetical to African-Americans’ view that the monument was a symbol of social justice and equality, racists pursued the perspective that the memorial was laden with racist overtones.  Even after it seemed as though African-Americans had claimed the Lincoln Memorial as theirs, a group of American Nazis held a wreath laying ceremony at the shrine.  Dissent sprang from within the African-American community, too. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam derided both Lincoln, who “probably did more to trick Negroes than any other man in history,” and the march, pejoratively calling it the “farce on Washington.”[65]  Perhaps, what the Nazis and the Nation of Islam saw in the memorial is what Savage would condemn: classically inspired figures, entrenched in racist ideology.[66] Nevertheless, that view belonged to the few, and as seen in the past, the view that prevails belongs to the many and the powerful.  And in 1953, the many shared the view of King, seeing the Lincoln Memorial as a site of social justice and equality.

“Blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it”[67]

            Though she was speaking of photographs, Sontag’s observations pertain to the evolving image of the Lincoln Memorial.  Since the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, the Lincoln Memorial has hosted a diverse array of polemic events: “activists there have demanded abortion rights, fetal rights, gay rights, and the right to smoke marijuana…to end the arms race, intervention in El Salvador.”[68]  The list is never ending, with each event negotiating the terms, the themes—the memory of the Lincoln Memorial.  Perhaps the most incisive was the African American community’s attempt to permanently secure the memorial as a stage for social justice and equality.  Rather than impress those themes upon the invariably changeable memory of a collective majority, the black community, in 2003, physically altered the Lincoln Memorial.  Today, a plaque commemorating Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech sits on the step where he once stood. 

            Still, the Lincoln Memorial is prone to future change.  With the addition of the National World War II Memorial on the axis of the mall, many have voiced fears about how perceptions of the Lincoln Memorial will shift.  Exemplary is congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s opinions.  Speaking before the World War II Planning Commission, Norton declared, “‘The African American civil rights community strongly objects to the proposal before you, because it trespasses both physically and thematically on the Lincoln Memorial.’…To place ‘a large, multifaceted memorial in the virtual lap of Lincoln crowds and overwhelms the universality[69] of the American ideals associated with the Lincoln Memorial.’”  In confirmation of her fears stands the WWII Memorial’s announcement stone, which refers to the Lincoln Memorial as a monument to “the nineteenth-century preserver of our nation.”[70]

            But the universality of American ideals that Norton speaks of is not limited to the lens through which civil right activists view the memorial.  A site of racial equality to some, the Lincoln Memorial, to another is the site of sectional unity, solace, war propaganda, etc.  In that sense, the Lincoln Memorial is a universal site, a battleground for all. 

Bound to no particular image or theme, the Lincoln Memorial is a canvas upon which conflicting themes have, and continue to be painted.  What the Lincoln Memorial will be in the next twenty or even two years, no one can predict.  One thing is certain, though. The politics of the time—they will determine the way we worship our civil religion at Lincoln’s shrine.

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List of Illustrations

1. D.T. Weist, In Memory of Abraham Lincoln, 1865.

2. Horatio Greenough, George Washington, 1840.

3. Sarah Fisher Clampitt Ames, Abraham Lincoln, 1868.

4. John Shute, Ionica, 1563.

5. J.C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind, 1854.

6. Jules Guerin, The Emancipation of a Race.

7. Edward Simmons, The Justice of the Law, 1893.

8. That These Dead Shall Not Have Died in Vain, 1943.

9. This World Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free, Fight for Freedom!, 1944.

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