LEWIS MUMFORD Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization, 1924
In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war, William Howard Taft, sent his fellow Republican, architect Daniel Burnham, to the Philippines (where Taft had recently served as the new U.S. territory’s governor). Burnham’s assignment was to draw a new plan for the city of Manila. Burnham had been the mastermind behind the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That fair was an architectural watershed. The “White City,” a neoclassical enclave on the shores of Lake Michigan, would spark what came to be known as the City Beautiful movement of urban design, involving Greco-Roman buildings and monuments erected on geometric street grids among grand boulevards and restful, pretty parks. After the success of the fair, Chicago businessmen hired Burnham to draw up new plans for the lakefront and eventually the city as a whole. Before he did, like so many artists and architects of his generation, Burnham took off on a European study trip, where he got religion — pagan religion. Always drawn to classicism, Burnham described Rome as a “delight.” His travels in Greece, and especially staring at the Athens Acropolis crowned with the Parthenon, converted him from a Sunday classicist to an evangelist of columns and pediments. “I have,” he claimed, “the spirit of Greece once and forever stamped on my soul.”
At the same time Burnham was trying to turn the Philippine capital into Chicago — and Manila could do a lot worse — Burnham was making his mark on our nation’s capital by serving on the 1901–02 McMillan Senate Park Commission for the Improvement of Washington, D.C. If you have gone sightseeing in Washington, you have walked around inside Burnham’s head.
Burnham and his fellow commissioners hoped to turn the Mall into “a work of civic art.” They decided to carry out Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the Mall as an unobstructed open space, which required tearing down the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station where President Garfield got shot. (They replaced it with the present-day depot a few blocks away, Union Station, designed by Burnham.) Also, the commission ratified the digging of the Reflecting Pool, the construction of a bridge to Arlington Cemetery, and the radical notion of erecting a memorial to Abraham Lincoln on the drained swamp next to the river.
The McMillan Commission begat the 1902 Lincoln Memorial Commission starring Secretary of State and former Lincoln secretary John Hay. Pleased that the shrine honoring his late boss would go up in what was then a remote location, Hay remarked that Lincoln “was of the immortals. You must not approach too close to the immortals. His monument should stand alone…isolated, distinguished, and serene.”
In 1910, William Howard Taft, now president, established the United States Commission of Fine Arts — Washington loves a commission — to advise the government on aesthetic matters having to do with art, architecture, planning, and design. (It still does.) Taft appointed men to his commission who were boosters of the previous commissions, including architects Burnham and Cass Gilbert and sculptor Daniel Chester French, whose cronies would soon offer him the gig of sculpting Lincoln.
Three years earlier, Gilbert and French had collaborated on the new neoclassical New York Custom House near the docks downtown. It was built to replace the old stomping grounds of Chester Arthur and Herman Melville. If trade and the money that comes with it were cash cows during the administrations of Hayes and Garfield, the influx of goods from America’s new colonial ports in the Caribbean, as well as the anticipated booty from the Panama Canal, the new improved Custom House symbolized the emerging economic global dominance of Theodore Roosevelt’s America. French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I’ve ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head. (Ironically, after U.S. Customs decamped to offices in the World Trade Center in 1973, Gilbert’s building became the National Museum of the American Indian. Thus does a sculpture about native subjugation guard the door to a place devoted to preserving and celebrating Native American culture.)
One afternoon, I walked downtown from my apartment in Chelsea to look at Gilbert’s design and French’s sculptures. When I was researching the people and places having some connection to the McKinley administration, I came across the names of architects and artists Burnham, Gilbert, and French about nine thousand times. But I never studied them in school, and I have a master’s degree in art history. Standing downtown looking at French’s 1907 America step on the Mayan mask next to his similarly questionable Africa reminded me of what I had been taught about the art and architecture of the period — Pablo Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Picasso was of the generation of young Spaniards who made their mark after the war they called “el Desastre del 98,” the disaster in which the United States won the remnants of the Spanish empire, known here as the Spanish-American War. In 1907, the same year French sculpted America, Picasso made one of the most influential paintings of the twentieth century, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Back in school, I took essay exams and wrote papers about this painting all the time. And one thing the A student is supposed to say about it is that three of the five nude prostitutes in the picture have the faces of African masks. Picasso saw the beauty in African art, just as Frank Lloyd Wright saw the beauty in Mayan architecture. To Wright, the Mayans weren’t a people to step on, they were a people to learn from, a people with ideas worth stealing. (If you want to get a clear picture of this turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetic and moral clash, go to Buffalo, where you can leave the Burnham-inspired neoclassical white columns of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum, built for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, and walk basically around the corner to see the earthy horizontals of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie-style Darwin Martin house built in 1903. Those two years between the buildings might as well be two centuries they look so different. One is ancient history, the other sci-fi.)
There are two reasons I find this classicism versus modernism tiff interesting to think about. First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it’s fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It’s not? Whew.
Secondly, with a building as iconic as the Lincoln Memorial, it’s such a given, seems so inevitable, I cannot imagine the Mall without it. Moreover, it’s so universally revered it’s hard to believe there were ever protests against the way it looked. But when Daniel Burnham, Cass Gilbert, Daniel Chester French, and their fellow commissioners chose Henry Bacon’s Greek temple design for the Lincoln Memorial in 1913, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, led by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, threw a fit. Understandably, the prairie school architects from the Land of Lincoln were outraged that the Lincoln Memorial was going to be so “purely Greek and entirely un-American.”
Henry Bacon’s previous buildings included a Greek-looking bank still standing on New York’s Union Square and the Greek-looking tomb for Republican boss Mark Hanna in Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery. Bacon and French had already collaborated on a tomb for Chicago retail magnate Marshall Field. So by the time they were hired to work on the Lincoln Memorial, they were the Republican Party’s top marble go-to guys.
It’s amusing to speculate on what kind of low, flat slab Frank Lloyd Wright might have come up with to honor the tall, skinny Lincoln. It’s more intriguing still to imagine what Wright’s Chicago mentor Louis Sullivan might have designed had he been asked. Sullivan is my favorite architect for the same reason Lincoln is my favorite president — his buildings are logical but warm, pragmatic but not without frippery, grand and human all at once. It’s telling that when Daniel Burnham got back from Europe he started drawing Doric columns, and when Louis Sullivan returned to Chicago from his European study sojourn he started taking long walks out on the prairie. Sulliva
n accused the classical influence of Burnham’s World’s Fair of being a “virus,” a “violent outbreak” of the “bogus antique.” Whereas Burnham’s aesthetic, shared by Henry Bacon, attempted to catapult Abraham Lincoln up to Mount Olympus — “isolated, distinguished, and serene” just like John Hay hoped — Sullivan’s buildings live here on earth. Having strode so often on the prairie that Lincoln also walked upon, Sullivan thought stalks of wheat were as inspiring as the columns of the Parthenon and hoped that his fellow Americans could build their own new country out of the one Lincoln had saved. Sullivan complained in his 1924 autobiography about the sort-of-Greek, kind-of-Roman buildings springing up all over the United States, including the recently dedicated Lincoln Memorial, that
In a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress thus did the virus of a culture, snobbish and alien to the land, perform its work of disintegration; and thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man’s follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot…when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable.
What I wouldn’t give to see what a man like that would have conjured in honor of a man like Lincoln. What if this memorial, and, while we’re at it, all three branches of government, were more courageous and sympathetic and made more sense and aspired and again aspired? What if the pallid and the academic, the fictitious and the false were banished from this Mall and from this town? Spend too much time pondering what-ifs like that about the nation’s capital and you’ll want to hurl yourself off the Washington Monument.
Thanks to congressional feet-dragging, political infighting, World War I, and the simple time-consuming process of mining then shipping tons upon tons of marble all the way from Colorado, by the time the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, Abraham Lincoln had been dead for fifty-seven years. There is a wonderful photograph of a clearly enchanted Robert Todd Lincoln sitting in the audience at the ceremony — sitting with the white people in the audience. Because the Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony was segregated. Segregated!
So it took a while for the Lincoln Memorial to come to mean what it’s come to mean. Thanks to Marian Anderson, who performed here on Easter Sunday 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall because of her skin color and of course Martin Luther King Jr., who stood on what he called “this hallowed spot” in 1963 making history with “I have a dream,” the memorial has long been physically and philosophically desegregated.
So much so in fact that one time I came to the memorial with my friend Dave and as we were climbing the steps he said, “It looks fake.”
“What does?”
“These people,” he said, pointing at the other visitors. “Look at them. Every color, from all over the world.”
“Why is that fake?”
“It’s too perfect, like they were brought here by a casting agent to make a commercial.”
He was right. The people who visit the memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out “It’s a Small World After All” flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren.
Yes, the memorial is lousy with coldhearted columns, a white Greek temple for a man associated with browns and blacks — the log cabin, the prairie, the top hat, the skin of slaves. Yes, Lewis Mumford called it a memorial to the Spanish-American War and he’s not all wrong. But loving this memorial is a lot like loving this country: I might not have built the place this way; it’s a little too pompous, and if you look underneath the marble, the structure’s a fake and ye olde Parthenon is actually supported by skyscraper steel. But the Lincoln Memorial is still my favorite place in the world and not just in spite of its many stupid flaws. It’s my favorite place partly because of its blankness, because of those columns that are such standard-issue Western civ clichés they don’t so much exist as float. Inside the Lincoln Memorial I know what Frederick Douglass meant when he described what it was like to be invited to Lincoln’s White House: “I felt big there.”
Never underestimate the corrective lens that is sentimentality. Take, for example, the new National World War II Memorial next to the Washington Monument. Each state gets its own bland stone pillar. The first time I see it I hate it at once, think it mucks up the Mall, but nevertheless search for the granite Oklahoma pylon because my late uncle, John A. Parson, served in the Philippines. Damndest thing, but the instant I spot it, “Oklahoma,” I burst into tears. One time I asked him about his service and he told me about fighting the Japanese for control of a hill. It took a month and it was raining the whole time. He said they only gained a couple of inches every day, every day in the rain. His socks, he said, were never dry. A month to get up a hill while being shot at in wet socks. John A. died a couple of years ago. Suddenly and forever the World War II Memorial stopped being clunky architecture and turned into the sound of my uncle’s voice telling me that story. Now I don’t care what it looks like. They could have carved it out of chewed bubble gum and I would think of it fondly.
On the Saturday before Easter, there is an empty bandstand set up at the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. I ask a National Park Service ranger what it’s for. He replies that a church from suburban Virginia is hosting an Easter sunrise service here in the morning.
I snap, “How did they get permission to do that?”
He shrugs, nonchalantly answering, “They applied for a permit.”
Then I remembered that a couple of weeks from now there is an abortion rights rally scheduled to take place here on the Mall, that the pro-choice people probably applied for the exact same permit. I like that. I like that the Mall serves as our national Tupperware, reliable and empty, waiting to be filled with potluck whatever.
Besides, an Easter service at the Lincoln Memorial does make historical sense. Booth shot Lincoln on Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ’s crucifixion. By the next morning, Lincoln was dead. How stupid was Booth? What kind of moron does away with the president he hates at the kickoff of Easter weekend? Sunday morning, pulpits across the land shouted analogies comparing the martyred president to the martyred Christ. Richard Eddy, pastor of the First Universalist Church of Philadelphia, asked his congregation, “Was there ever since the death of the savior of the world, a more brutal, a more uncalled-for murder?” A D.C. local, J. G. Butler of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, called Lincoln the country’s savior, proclaiming,
He lives where the martyred men of all ages live — we believe, where the Great Martyr, our Lord Jesus, lives — in that heavenly City, whose air is not pregnant with treason and malice and death; but, where the heart, cleansed and inspired by the blood and spirit of Jesus, is in perfect and eternal sympathy with the great Redeemer, whose name is love.
A controversial politician widely blamed for the casualties and hardships of war, Lincoln was suddenly and forever upgraded to the persecuted savior who died so that the country might live.
A poster advertising the sunrise service stops me cold. It assumes, “You’ve seen The Passion of the Christ. Now celebrate the resurrection of the Christ.”
I do enjoy a good movie tie-in. Plus, an event in the nation’s capital rejoicing in the holy trinity of Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and Mel Gibson witnessed on four hours of sleep — count me in.
The next morning, the Capitol dome is lit up white against the still black sky. I’m at the Lincoln Memorial by ten past six to strategize my seat location. Am I para
noid, or does the Easter service’s powerful combination of a major Christian religious holiday celebrated on the National Mall in a patriotic shrine at the deep fond center of the American heart make the event the perfect target for a terrorist truck bomb? Before I left my hotel room, I e-mailed a friend where I was and where I was going and that if he saw an explosion at the Lincoln Memorial on the news he should phone my parents and break it to them I’m probably dead. I added a halfhearted “ha ha” at the end of the e-mail in an effort to fake breeziness, but truth is, I’m nervous.
As I stand before the front row of seats making a threat assessment, I rule out sitting in the folding chairs closest to the bandstand; it’s fine if these born-again musicians want to call themselves the Resurrection Orchestra, but us nonbelievers flying without the net of an afterlife will be avoiding the blast radius of center stage.
Then, as if getting blown up is not enough to worry about, after I take a seat on the steps, I get a look at the choir. Thirty singers and from where I’m sitting it looks like only two of them are black. It’s not like I’m saying suburban white people shouldn’t sing. Because I love Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” But as I suspected, at six-thirty sharp the choir does stand up to perform the first of their competent renditions of generic, mid-tempo pop ballads that sound like they were written by a computer using a database of Easter vocabulary. In fairness, I should mention that other people here love the choir. The crowd is clapping and swaying and raising their arms. For me, however, where gospel music is concerned, my taste is more conservative and narrow-minded than a Reverend Falwell commencement address at Oral Roberts U. Unless it’s an old holy-roller hymn Johnny Cash would have learned from his mama back in Arkansas, I’m not interested. So the only musical selection I sing along with is when the preacher, Amos Dodge, does a Martin Luther King and climbs halfway up the steps to lead us in an old-school, a cappella “How Great Thou Art.”