Anyone who follows my blog on a regular basis knows that I love history and, especially, the history of the Civil War. If asked who my favorite historical figure is my answer would always be Abraham Lincoln. There are many myths surrounding Lincoln, as there are most people in American history, but the overriding thing that makes me admire him so much was his focus on maintaining the union at any and all costs, including his own life. He once mentioned - shortly after his election - that he would rather be assassinated where he stood than to see the Union dissolved.
Having grown up in Washington, D.C., one of my favorite places to visit has always been Lincoln Memorial. I used to sit on the steps and ponder the greatness of the words engraved on the walls and marvel at what happened in his lifetime, as brief as it was.
The site was once called Kidwell Flats, an insect-ridden tract on the Potomac River that had been reclaimed with mud dredged from the bottom. Bedrock was 50 feet down, and a prominent member of Congress called it a swamp.
Back then, it was a remote spot, two miles from the Capitol - yet fitting, many believed, for the noble project at hand. So there, over 100 years ago, builders began sinking concrete pilings, gathering earth, and hauling in blocks of marble and limestone to erect one of the nation’s most hallowed shrines, Lincoln Memorial - the 38,000-ton columned edifice built to honor Lincoln.
On May 30, 1922, the Memorial was dedicated during an event attended by thousands, including President Warren G. Harding and Lincoln’s 78-year-old son, Robert, on what was then called Decoration Day.
It was the unveiling of the monument that would captivate Americans for a century, draw visitors as if pilgrims, and stand as a global symbol of courage, possibility and solace in times of grief.
The weather in Washington was breezy and warm that Tuesday. Footage from National Archives shows women carrying parasols, men in straw hats, and people clustered in the shade of trees along what is today the Reflecting Pool.
Inside the memorial, the 175-ton marble sculpture of a seated Lincoln had just been cleaned and seemed to shine in the soft light. The memorial itself, with its 44-foot-tall columns tilted slightly inward for architectural effect, was majestic in its isolation by the river.
It was modeled on Parthenon, the Greek temple to the goddess Athena. Lincoln, too, was “of the immortals,” his former close aide and biographer, John Hay, had said.
“You must not approach too close,” Hay said. “His monument should stand alone, remote from the common habitations of man … isolated, distinguished and serene.”
But people could not resist approaching. Fifty thousand were there for the dedication - African Americans, as was the cruel custom in segregated Washington, shunted off to the rear.
And over the next century millions more trudged up the steps to stand by the seated figure of America’s most revered president, invoke his words, and add to the story of the Memorial.
The memorial was supposed to represent the healing of the country after the Civil War. But Lincoln knew the war had been about slavery, and “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,” as his words carved in the memorial proclaimed.
And in 1922 the United States was unhealed. It was still harshly segregated and racially oppressive. Fifty-one black Americans were lynched that year, and six months after the dedication, the Senate killed a federal anti-lynching law, according to Library of Congress.
On Easter Sunday 1939, the African American opera star Marian Anderson elevated the meaning of the memorial when she sang there after she was barred from performing at whites-only Constitution Hall, seven blocks away.
“When Marian Anderson stepped on that platform and sang, ‘My country tis of thee’ … it was transformative,” Harold Holzer, wrote, in his 2019 book, Monument Man, about sculptor Daniel Chester French.
“Suddenly this statue and this building became a symbol of aspirational equality, instead of just a symbol of Northern and Southern brotherhood,” Holzer said during an interview. “And I think it’s held that place now for four score of its hundred years. It means much more. And that’s why it’s so mesmerizing and so moving to this day.”
Twenty-four years later, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech before 250,000. The speech’s powerful legacy adds another assassinated leader to the memorial’s story. And 50 years later, President Barack Obama, spoke there on the anniversary of King’s speech.
Hundreds of gatherings to protest, celebrate, pray, mourn and entertain have unfolded against the backdrop of the memorial. Fourth of July fireworks, and formations of warplanes have appeared overhead. (A single airplane buzzed the 1922 dedication, too.)
In recent years, United States presidents-elect have visited the memorial the night before their inaugurations, “as if to touch base with Lincoln and to be as one with America’s greatest president,” Holzer wrote.
The impulse to create a memorial to Lincoln began shortly after he was assassinated in Ford’s Theatre.
In 1867, Congress approved the incorporation of a Lincoln Monument Association.
But nothing came of this effort, according to a 1927 history of the memorial by Edward Concklin. And the focus changed with the times from emancipation and liberty to reunion. Other plans were raised and fizzled. Finally, in 1911 an official Lincoln Memorial Commission was set up to carry on the project.
But who would build it? Where would it be located? And what would it look like?
Designs were suggested that showed the memorial as a huge pyramid, or a giant ziggurat topped with a statue of Lincoln, or a large circle of columns around a statue of a seated Lincoln.
Officials quickly settled on 44-year-old New York architect Henry Bacon Jr., to design and build the memorial. In 1915 his friend, 64-year-old New England sculptor Daniel Chester French, was picked to carve the statue.
Bacon had come up with an elegant design suggested by the 2,000-year-old Parthenon, in Athens, and he built a detailed seven-foot-wide wooden model to show the commission.
Inside the memorial, a statue “of heroic size … will occupy the place of honor,” he wrote in 1912. One of the interior walls would display the carved words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Another wall would show the words of his Second Inaugural Address.
But where to build it? Some suggested Washington’s Meridian Hill. Others preferred a spot near what is today Armed Forces Retirement Home, or a place near the Capitol, or Fort Stevens, or somewhere in Virginia. Some thought the memorial should just be a special road from Washington to Gettysburg.
The site on the former marshland by the river was preferred by Bacon. But one powerful opponent was Representative Joseph G. Cannon, former speaker of the House, who called the place a swamp. A memorial there “would shake itself down with loneliness and ague,” he said. He was overruled, and ground was broken on February 12, 1914. The first task was to create a solid foundation. A special railroad spur was built to get stone to the site, and a special river pier was built to carry earth and gravel, according to old newspaper accounts.
Workers began by sinking 122 hollow steel cylinders through the soft ground down to solid rock, according to Concklin’s history. Huge stone slabs were stacked atop the cylinders to press them into the earth. When the cylinders reached bedrock, the dirt was scooped out, and they were filled with concrete to create solid pillars.
Over this was built an upper foundation, which raised the floor level of the memorial about 25 feet above ground. Dirt was packed around the foundation to create an artificial hill. And upon that, the memorial itself was constructed.
On February 12, 1915, the 17-ton cornerstone was lowered into place. An old photograph shows a team of African American workers guiding it as it was lowered on what looked like a cold day. A small chamber had been cut into the stone to receive a sealed copper box filled with mementos.
The box contained, among other things: Copies of the Bible and the United States Constitution, Lincoln's signature, a map of the battlefield at Gettysburg, a dollar bill, $2.06 in change, a copy of the February 12, 1915 Washington Post, and a small silk American flag.
That same year, French started on the sculpture. He pored over literature about Lincoln and studied casts of the president’s face and hands, feeling inadequate at times, according to Holzer.
The first thought was to make the statue in bronze, but that was scrapped in favor of a marble statue that would be about 12 feet tall. In 1917, though, French realized that a 12-foot-tall statue would be dwarfed inside the giant memorial. It needed to be seven feet taller.
Twenty-eight blocks of Georgia marble were brought in and carved with French at the New York studio of the Piccirilli brothers, a team of renowned Italian stonecutters. The blocks were then shipped to Washington and assembled inside the memorial in 1919.
At least two workers were seriously injured during the project, and one was killed when he was crushed by a huge block of stone that fell from a toppled wagon, according to news reports at the time.
On January 28, 1922, officials announced that the dedication would be May 30.
When the day came, Lincoln’s son, Robert, received an ovation when he arrived. Speeches were carried via loudspeakers and radio. The Marine Band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A poet said Lincoln was made of “clay of the common road.”
The lone black speaker was Robert Russa Moton, head of Tuskegee Institute, who had written a speech suggesting that the “unfinished” work Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address remained unfinished for African Americans.
Holzer wrote that the White House frowned on what he had written and told him to tone it down or lose his chance to speak. Moton changed the speech but ended it: “I somehow believe that all of us, Black and White, both North and South, are going to strive on to finish the work which [Lincoln] so nobly began to make America an example for the world of equal justice and equal opportunity.”
A goal we have yet to reach in our still divided nation.
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