Lincoln Memorial’s 100th reminds us of our unmet aspirations

On that May 1922 dedication day, (Warren G. Harding) said the 16th president “knew he had freed a race of bondmen and had given the world the costly proof of the perpetuity of the American union.”

If April is the cruelest month — as T.S. Eliot and thousands of amateur dinner-table philosophers have attested — then May may be the most poignant month.

And so, as the fifth month roars to a close amid rising temperatures, blooming wildflowers and great summer expectations, let us consider several late-month anniversaries that speak to us at this difficult moment in the American passage. They involve, as so much of our history does, our tortuous, tortured and tardy racial reckoning.

May will forever be remembered as the month in which George Floyd was mercilessly, senselessly and needlessly killed in Minneapolis, triggering a nationwide reexamination of our views on race.

This month also includes the birthdays of Jim Thorpe (the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal, a standout baseball and football player and film star) and Malcolm X (a controversial civil rights leader and prominent member of the Nation of Islam). Both left huge footprints in the pathways of American life. It also is the birth month of John F. Kennedy, for most of his life a reluctant foot soldier in the struggle for racial justice, but inhis last six months a strong voice for the cause he described as being “as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the AmericanConstitution.”

Kennedy came to his conclusion about racial justice (“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue”) only after a long-forgotten May moment, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1963 Memorial Day speech at Gettysburg, where, in marking the 100th anniversary of the landmark battle there, he said, “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.”

That speech jolted Kennedy, prompting him to deliver his reprise of his vice president’s call to arms, saying, “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons,are not fully free.”

Now we approach another 100-year anniversary, and the tensions that surround American presidents and their approach to race are rippling through the country again. Monday is the centenary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, and the anniversary is important because it illuminates the assumptions of that time and the tensions of our own time.

Two American presidents were present to commemorate the life of a third American president. Both were Republicans. Both were white.

One was Warren G. Harding, who had been in office for only 13 months and had, in October 1921, told a large crowd in Birmingham, Ala., that racial discrimination was “the problem of democracy everywhere, if we mean the things we say about democracy as the ideal political state,” adding, to the discomfort of the audience and the outrage of Birmingham’s ruling grandees, “Whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality.”

On that May 1922 dedication day, he said the 16th president “knew he had freed a race of bondmen and had given the world the costly proof of the perpetuity of the American union.”

Also on the dais was William Howard Taft, who after being president was appointed chief justice. He spoke of Lincoln’s instinct for “justice, truth, patience, mercy and love of his kind, simplicity, course, sacrifice and confidence in God.”

There were other speakers, all of them also white except for Robert Russa Moton, grandson of a slave. Here the educator who succeeded

Booker T. Washington as the principal of the Tuskegee Institute clashed with Taft, one of the most prominent figures in the first quarter of the 20th century.

A dozen days before the dedication of the memorial, Taft asked to see Moton’s remarks. This was a fateful, and disgraceful, moment of conflict, a collision between the commemoration of the freedom won in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and the freedom of expression enshrined in the First Amendment. Taft objected to several elements of the Moton text and insisted that this passage be excised:

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

Also cut was this evocative passage:

“With equal truth, it can be said today: No more can the nation endure half privileged and half repressed; half educated and half uneducated; half protected and half unprotected; half prosperous and half in poverty; half in health and half in sickness; half content and half in discontent; yes, half free and half yetin bondage.”

Moton, a late addition to the proceedings — someone recognized that an event celebrating Lincoln could not be conducted without at least one Black speaker — was not invited to sit with the white speakers. Indeed, the Black people in the audience were shunted to a roped-off area, prompting the Chicago Defender, the prominent Black newspaper, to remark, “The venomous snake of segregation reared its head at the dedication.”

Nonetheless, Moton argued in his remarks that “greatness for Abraham Lincoln lies in this, that amid doubt and distrust, against the counsel of chosen advisers, in the hour of the nation’s utter peril, he put his trust in God and spoke the word that gave freedom to a race.”

Today the legacy of Lincoln, like that of the Founders and Andrew Jackson, is being re-examined. He remains known for his Emancipation Proclamation, but other elements of his life — his opposition to interracial marriage, his advocacy of shipping Black people to Africa, his hostility to racial equality and skepticism of the abolitionism movement — are receiving new prominence.

In dedicating the Union cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln employed various forms of “dedicate” six times in a speech of only 272 words. At the centenary of the dedication of his own memorial, we might dedicate ourselves to the notion that, as he put it in a speech that transformed the Civil War from a battle for preservation of the Union into a crusade for the abolition of slavery, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”