Lincoln Memorial & American Life, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Winter 2003 by Marty, Myron A

The Lincoln Memorial & American Life. By Christopher Thomas (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxii, 236. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $35.00).

Rare is the visitor who remains unmoved by the Lincoln Memorial. Entering it, musing within its walls, meditating while walking around it, and even when circling it in a car or bus, fills one with awe.

Why does the memorial move us so? Is it our gratitude for Abraham Lincoln's leadership in saving the Union and abolishing slavery? Is it then the seated figure with oversized hands and penetrating eyes? Is it Lincoln's memorable words inscribed on the interior walls? Is it Lincoln's anomaly-a Greek temple honoring an uncommon man from America's heartland? Is it our memory of events that occurred in the Memorial's shadow, such as Martin Luther King's portrayal of his dream for America in 1963?

In raising these questions, we acknowledge the Lincoln Memorial's effectiveness in doing what it was designed to do. But a key to its effectiveness, Christopher Thomas writes, "is the way it evades questions," including such as those raised here. It does this in part because the circumstances that brought it into being left its purposes ill defined. Granted, the dedicatory inscription on the wall behind Daniel Chester French's statue of Abraham Lincoln reads: "IN THIS TEMPLE / AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE / FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION / THE MEMORY OF LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER."(xix) But that inscription conceals the struggles encountered in the memorial's design, placement, and construction and its evolving place in American life.

This impressively researched book offers details about those struggles. It is apparently a distillation, reprocessing, and updating of the author's four-volume 1990 Yale doctoral dissertation, "The Lincoln Memorial and Its Architect, Henry Bacon (1866-1924)." Christopher Thomas, an assistant professor of history in art at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, has studied the history of the memorial for more than fifteen years and probably knows more about it than any citizen of the United States.

Two points in the introduction are unfortunate distractions. First, after identifying as an illusion the belief that the Lincoln Memorial is "a universal site honoring an indissoluble Union founded on indisputable ideals" and asserting that the memorial demonstrates "the suavity with which American civil religion transfers sacred ideals and symbols to the state," Thomas makes a curious assertion: "A key argument of this book is that that illusion is, precisely, an illusion." He seems somewhat surprised that the memorial was the product of "material historical circumstances," that it is "utterly of this world," a "product of politics," and "an emblem of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt's and William Howard Taft's era."(xix-xx)

More problematical is Thomas' attempt to place his work in the context of the Deconstruction movement that invaded literary and historical studies in recent decades. This movement placed emphasis on "interconnected systems of signs rather than objective, independently existing phenomena." It claimed that "what we regard as natural realities are actually screens of representations or signs pointing toward other realities." The process of representation, he says, has signs continuing in endless cycles pointing to other signs.(xxi) Fortunately, one does not have to decipher Thomas's attempt to condense complicated theory into four paragraphs to appreciate the uncluttered story he tells.

The story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with a plan crafted by Senator James McMillan and his allies. The McMillan plan called for extending the Mall from the U.S. Capitol, through the Washington Monument, to a terminal point known as Potomac Park. To the Republicans in command, what could be more fitting than to honor their hero with a monument at the end of the Mall, near one honoring George Washington?

Congressional tussles and tangles, however, delayed decisions concerning the nature and location of the memorial for years, and the McMillan Commission's plans faced stubborn challenges. Some challengers advocated a Lincoln Road, to run from Washington to Gettysburg. Others pushed for a monument on enlarged Capitol grounds. John Russell Pope, who had designed the Greek temple in Hodgenville, Kentucky, that shelters a cabin purporting to resemble the one in which Lincoln was born, presented yet another proposal. Thomas traces the debates surrounding these proposals in tenacious detail.

Eventually, of course, the Commission's plan prevailed and the design and construction of the memorial proceeded. Were Thomas writing about a subject intrinsically less interesting, many readers would likely conclude that he is telling them more than they care to know about such things as architect Henry Bacon's designs and redesigns of the memorial, the budget battles, the quarrying of the Colorado limestone, the assembling of the statue by Daniel Chester French, and the interior and exterior lighting of the memorial. Perhaps the only topic treated insufficiently concerns the astute criticism of the memorial's classical Greek design by prominent architects, including Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as by architectural critic Lewis Mumford.