On 100th birthday, Lincoln Memorial still beckons a nation divided
For a century, an American icon carved from 175 tons of white marble has presided over the nation’s capital, beckoning thousands of visitors each day up his steps and into his hallowed chamber.
The Lincoln Memorial is by far the city’s most popular monument, attracting about 8 million people in a normal year. But what draws so many from every corner of the country and the world is as complicated as the slain president that the building immortalizes.
They come to learn, to give thanks, to protest, to be inspired, to propose, to eat lunch, to walk dogs, to peddle T-shirts, to snap selfies, to launch school trips, to shoot movie scenes, to share a kiss, to have a nightcap, to give speeches, to ask for votes, to pray for change, to mourn America’s greatest sin and remember its greatest ideals, to hope that the union Abraham Lincoln died to preserve will endure.
On May 30, a nation nearly as polarized as it was in Lincoln’s day will mark the 100th anniversary of the memorial’s dedication. And though he doesn’t appear to have aged much through the decades (kept youthful by a rigid skin-care routine of dusting, brushing and pressure washing), the centenarian has borne witness to history countless times.
On the steps in front of him, Marian Anderson sang for the nation in 1939, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream in 1963. Beneath the 16th president’s steadfast gaze, African Americans, Native Americans, liberals, conservatives, independents, theists, atheists, hippies, veterans, anti-vaxxers, comedians, Juggalos and hundreds of other groups have gathered to demonstrate. On Jan. 6, 2021, he caught glimpses in the distance of insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol.
It was at the Lincoln that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith had an epiphany, that Forrest Gump reunited with the woman he loved, that the bachelors from “Wedding Crashers” finished a bottle of champagne, that Lisa from “The Simpsons” sought wisdom.
History doesn’t happen at the memorial every day, but something compelling or strange or funny or sad certainly does. In honor of the anniversary, Washington Post journalists chronicled one of those days, from sunup to sundown.
Lincoln logs
Dozens of people in athletic shirts and Spandex shorts raced up and down the memorial’s steps as six workers in yellow vests powered up their leaf blowers. The scent of gasoline and exhaust permeated the early-morning air.
“Please, can you just move to the other side?” one of the workers asked the runners. “Just need a minute to clean.”
The members of the November Project — fitness devotees who meet at the memorial every Wednesday not to check out the president’s somber visage but to climb what they call “Lincoln logs” — made way for the cleaning crew.
The workers descended the steps in a line, their leaf blowers sending a plastic water bottle flying onto the lawn below. When they reached the landing, they turned around and returned to the top.
A puff of dust flew into a scrum of teenage girls from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School taking selfies between the columns. They’d arrived at dawn wearing pleated green skirts, white sneakers and T-shirts from the colleges they’d be attending in the fall: Tulane. Syracuse. Wake Forest.
“I don’t see N.C. State,” observed Roy Williams Jr., a horsemounted officer with the U.S. Park Police.
Now the girls, the runners and the cleaners were joined by Marines out on a jog and an NBC journalist conducting an interview with a congressional candidate beneath the shade of an elm.
Behind them, through the wide marble columns that hadn’t yet warmed in the afternoon heat, the roar of the leaf blowers was quieter.
Timothy Boyd, 52, stood below Lincoln’s massive legs and hoisted a 40-foot long pole topped by a soft bristle brush into the air. It resembled a giant toilet bowl cleaner.
Lincoln would be getting a steam bath the next day — but first, the preservationist needed to do something about the dust and bird poop. Boyd ran the brush down the slope of Lincoln’s nose and along the curve of his forehead.
By then, the president’s brief moment in the morning light had nearly passed. The sun was rising, the crowds were growing. A new day was underway.
A house divided
The lectern had been set up by National Park Service rangers so school kids from the Washington region could deliver historical speeches. But as soon as Sephora Grey spotted it, the 24-year-old Georgetown Law Center graduate, clad in her black-and-purple cap and gown, commandeered it for a photo op.
Grey, who mentors younger students and has a podcast where she interviews successful African American women in law, can envision herself “giving speeches to hundreds of thousands of people, like many before have done here.”
At 11 a.m., a ranger clicked on the microphone.
Then Emory Springs, 12, a sixth-grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., approached.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” she declared, her voice rolling down the steps to the Reflecting Pool. “I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.”
It was Lincoln’s powerful “House Divided” speech, delivered in 1858 during his unsuccessful bid for the Senate. His opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, wanted to stick with the status quo, each state choosing its slaveholding status. Lincoln prophesied boldly — and correctly — this was no longer possible.
“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” Emory continued. “I do not expect the house to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided.”
She was polished in a royal blue blazer and long neat braids. And she was already ambitious, with plans to go to UCLA and become a psychiatrist to “help people with mental struggles.” But she was also nervous, not just because she had to go first, but also because she was delivering a Lincoln speech at the Lincoln Memorial.
“I kind of felt like he was watching over me when I was presenting,” she said later, “because he was right behind me.”
The fun rangers
First things first: You are not to touch Mr. Lincoln.
Admire or equivocate, behold in reverie or with suspicion. Sit on the steps, if you must, and follow his marble gaze toward the troubled heart of American democracy. But don’t touch, don’t pat, don’t rub his feet for luck — and most certainly don’t do what a visitor now proposed to Park Service ranger David Smithey.
“I want to sit in his lap,” she said.
“You do not want to go to the D.C. jail,” Smithey, 50, replied with a tight smile.
Lauren Devore, his co-worker, stared at him from beneath the broad brim of her hat.
“You speaking from experience?” she asked.
This is life for park rangers on the Mall. In the argot of the Park Service, they are interpretive rangers — or, as they like to put it, the fun rangers, not the gun rangers.
They would rather be explaining the historical minutiae of Ford’s Theatre or the World War II Memorial than deterring would-be Lincoln Memorial alpinists. During the noon hour, they were in their element, handing out maps and junior ranger badges beneath a green tent below the memorial. There was even a miniature statue of the seated Lincoln, for anyone particularly obsessed with touching his likeness.
For the memorial’s centennial, the rangers were trying to tell people about some of the civil rights history attached to the site. Smithey was particularly animated in discussing Anderson, the Black contralto who performed to an audience of 75,000 at the memorial in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall.
“Are these free?” one man asked, holding up a laminated card with Anderson’s photo on it. “Oh, no,” Smithey said. Devore, 34, hailed a crowd of Old Glory Honor Flight veterans as they swept past the tent toward the memorial. Among them was Jim Bricco, 75, from Wisconsin.
“I’ve been here before,” Bricco said. “In 1968.”