The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (review)

Historians interested in the place of the Civil War in American collective memory have focused great attention on monuments and memorials as public spaces in which the meaning of the conflict and its relationship to the nation's identity is stated and contested. Perhaps none has a more important place in American life than the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Designed between 1911 and 1912 by architect Henry Bacon and sculptor Daniel Chester French to symbolize the political unity and economic prosperity that Lincoln's war for Union made possible, the memorial's neoclassical grandeur has since provided a powerful setting for diverse groups of American to enact their own vision of American values. As Christopher Thomas notes in the final chapter of his new book on the monument, African American leaders from the singer Marian Anderson in 1939 to civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963 have claimed this symbolic location to construct much more inclusive and egalitarian understandings of Lincoln's legacy than the memorial's exclusively white, and largely elite, founders intended. While the Republican political leaders who supported the building of a memorial after 1900 hoped that it would come to stand for a transcendent and uncontroversial set of national ideas, Thomas argues that the famous temple to Lincoln has become a protean symbol in which vernacular meanings have competed fiercely with official ones.

While Thomas is interested in the larger meaning of the Lincoln memorial in American life, his book is mostly devoted to the cultural politics surrounding its creation. Emerging during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the idea of a Lincoln memorial represents, for Thomas, a progressive desire to use Lincoln's memory to valorize a reformist national politics that transcended narrow (including sectional) interests. Combining Republican politics with aesthetic conservatism, the Lincoln Memorial Commission supervised the creation of a memorial that celebrated Lincoln's humanity while using neoclassical architecture to elevate his legacy above the issues of sectionalism and race that still plagued the nation almost fifty years after his death. The memorial largely ignored the emancipationist elements of Lincoln's political career, and it quite consciously celebrated sectional reunion over emancipation as the most important outcome of the war. Thomas shows that the designers of the memorial worried more about the fact that their huge Lincoln statue had its back to Virginia, for instance, than that it failed to capture the significance of slavery's demise.

Thomas also persuasively argues that the memorial's timeless and inevitable appearance belies the enormous obstacles it faced at nearly every stage of development until its completion in 1922. Opposed fiercely by conservative Republican Speaker of the House Joe Cannon, the project did not receive formal approval from Congress until 1913. Even then it competed with other ideas to memorialize Lincoln that included an alternate site on Washington's Memorial Hill and the construction of a Lincoln memorial highway from the capital to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The former plan was supported by a determined constituency that united automakers, driving enthusiasts, and progressive reformers who associated road building with national progress. Thomas demonstrates that even after the approval of the Bacon design and National Mall location, conflicts over the use of material as well as wartime financial and material shortages complicated and delayed the completion of the monument.

While The Lincoln Memorial and American Life is a very fine study of the cultural politics surrounding the creation of one of the most important public monuments in the United States, it will not be the last word on the larger meaning of the memorial in American life. Only the last chapter of the book deals with the memorial's larger role in twentieth-century American culture, and this section reads more like an overview than a definitive study. At times, Thomas's focus on issues of design and construction, while expertly handled, leaves too little space for other forms of analysis. Given his emphasis on the role of...