Lincoln Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial is a U.S. national memorial honoring Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, located on the western end of the National Mall of Washington, D.C. The memorial is built in a neoclassical style in the form of a classical temple. The memorial's architect was Henry Bacon. In 1920, Daniel Chester French designed the large interior Abraham Lincoln statue, which was carved in marble by the Piccirilli brothers. Jules Guérin painted the interior murals, and the epitaph above the statue was written by Royal Cortissoz. Dedicated on May 30, 1922, it is one of several memorials built to honor an American president. It has been a major tourist attraction since its opening, and over the years, has occasionally been used as a symbolic center focused on race relations and civil rights.
Doric style columns line the temple exterior, and the inscriptions inside include two well-known speeches by Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and his second inaugural address. The memorial has been the site of many famous speeches, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on August 28, 1963, during the rally at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Like other monuments on the National Mall, including the nearby Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and World War II Memorial, the national memorial is administered by the National Park Service under its National Mall and Memorial Parks group. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since October 15, 1966, and was ranked seventh on the American Institute of Architects' 2007 list of America's Favorite Architecture. The memorial is open to the public 24 hours a day, and more than seven million people visit it annually.
History
Construction and dedication
The first public memorial to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., was a statue by Lot Flannery erected in front of the District of Columbia City Hall in 1868, three years after Lincoln's assassination in Ford's Theatre. Demands for a fitting national memorial had been voiced since the time of Lincoln's death. In 1867, Congress passed the first of many bills incorporating a commission to erect a monument for the sixteenth president. An American sculptor, Clark Mills, was chosen to design the monument. His plans reflected the nationalistic spirit of the time and called for a structure adorned with six equestrian and 31 pedestrian statues of colossal proportions, crowned by a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Subscriptions for the project were insufficient.The matter lay dormant until the start of the 20th century, when, under the leadership of Senator Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois, six separate bills were introduced in Congress for the incorporation of a new memorial commission. The first five bills, proposed in the years 1901, 1902, and 1908, met with defeat because of opposition from Speaker Joe Cannon. The sixth bill, introduced on December 13, 1910, passed. The Lincoln Memorial Commission met for the first time the following year and President William H. Taft was chosen as the commission's president. Progress continued steadily, and in 1913 Congress approved the commission's choice of design and location.
There were questions regarding the commission's plan. Many thought architect Henry Bacon's Greek temple design was far too ostentatious for a man of Lincoln's humble character. Instead, they proposed a simple log cabin shrine. The site too did not go unopposed. The recently reclaimed land in West Potomac Park was seen by many as either too swampy or too inaccessible. Other sites, such as Washington Union Station, were put forth, but the commission stood firm in its recommendation, feeling that the Potomac Park location, situated on the axis connecting the Washington Monument and Capitol, overlooking the Potomac River and surrounded by open land, was ideal. Furthermore, the Potomac Park site was already designated in the McMillan Plan of 1901 to be the location of a future monument comparable to that of the Washington Monument.
File:Taft Harding Robert Lincoln 1922.jpg|thumb|Chief Justice William Howard Taft, President Warren G. Harding, and Lincoln's eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, at the memorial's dedication on May 30, 1922
With Congressional approval and a $300,000 allocation, the project got underway. On February 12, 1914, contractor M. F. Comer of Toledo, Ohio; resident member of the memorial's commission, former Senator Joseph C. S. Blackburn of Kentucky; and the memorial's designer, Henry Bacon, conducted a groundbreaking ceremony by turning over a few spadefuls of earth. The following month is when actual construction began. Work progressed steadily according to schedule. Some changes were made to the plan. The statue of Lincoln, originally designed to be tall, was enlarged to to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the huge chamber. As late as 1920, the decision was made to substitute an open portal for the bronze and glass grille which was to have guarded the entrance. Despite these changes, the Memorial was finished on schedule. Commission president William H. Taft – who was then Chief Justice of the United States – dedicated the Memorial on May 30, 1922, and presented it to President Warren G. Harding, who accepted it on behalf of the American people. Lincoln's only surviving son, 78-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln, was in attendance. Prominent African Americans were invited to the event and discovered upon arrival they were assigned a segregated section guarded by U.S. Marines, a policy implemented by director of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, Lieutenant Colonel Clarence O. Sherrill.
Subsequent history
The Memorial has become a symbolically sacred venue, especially for the Civil Rights Movement. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the African-American contralto Marian Anderson to perform before an integrated audience at the organization's Constitution Hall. At the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold L. Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, arranged for a performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday of that year, to a live audience of 75,000 and a nationwide radio audience. On June 29, 1947, Harry Truman became the first president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The speech took place at the Lincoln Memorial during the NAACP convention and was carried nationally on radio. In that speech, Truman laid out the need to end discrimination, which would be advanced by the first comprehensive, presidentially proposed civil rights legislation.On August 28, 1963, the memorial grounds were the site of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which proved to be a high point of the American Civil Rights Movement. It is estimated that approximately 250,000 people came to the event, where they heard Martin Luther King Jr., deliver his historic "I Have a Dream" speech before the memorial honoring the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years earlier. King's speech, with its language of patriotism and its evocation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, was meant to match the symbolism of the Lincoln Memorial as a monument to national unity. Labor leader Walter Reuther, an organizer of the march, persuaded the other organizers to move the march to the Lincoln Memorial from the Capitol Building. Reuther believed the location would be less threatening to Congress and that the occasion would be especially appropriate underneath the gaze of Abraham Lincoln's statue. The D.C. police also appreciated the location because it was surrounded on three sides by water, so that any incident could be easily contained.
The Memorial was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966.
At the memorial on May 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon had a middle-of-the-night impromptu, brief meeting with protesters who, just days after the Kent State shootings, were preparing to march against the Vietnam War.
On August 28, 1983, crowds gathered again to mark the 20th Anniversary Mobilization for Jobs, Peace and Freedom, to reflect on progress in gaining civil rights for African Americans and to commit to correcting continuing injustices. King's speech is such a part of the Lincoln Memorial story, that the spot on which King stood, on the landing eighteen steps below Lincoln's statue, was engraved in 2003 in recognition of the 40th anniversary of the event.
Exterior
The exterior of the Memorial echoes a classic Greek temple and features Yule marble quarried from Colorado. The structure measures and is tall. It is surrounded by a peristyle of 36 fluted Doric columns, one for each of the 36 states in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, and two columns in-antis at the entrance behind the colonnade. The columns stand tall with a base diameter of. Each column is built from 12 drums including the capital. The columns, like the exterior walls and facades, are inclined slightly toward the building's interior. This is to compensate for perspective distortions which would otherwise make the memorial appear to bulge out at the top when compared with the bottom, a common feature of Ancient Greek architecture.Above the colonnade, inscribed on the frieze, are the names of the 36 states in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death and the dates in which they entered the Union. Their names are separated by double wreath medallions in bas-relief. The cornice is composed of a carved scroll regularly interspersed with projecting lions' heads and ornamented with palmetto cresting along the upper edge. Above this on the attic frieze are inscribed the names of the 48 states present at the time of the Memorial's dedication. A bit higher is a garland joined by ribbons and palm leaves, supported by the wings of eagles. All ornamentation on the friezes and cornices was done by Ernest C. Bairstow.
The Memorial is anchored in a concrete foundation, in depth, constructed by M. F. Comer and Company and the National Foundation and Engineering Company, and is encompassed by a rectangular granite retaining wall measuring in height.
Leading up to the shrine on the east side are the main steps. Beginning at the edge of the Reflecting Pool, the steps rise to the Lincoln Memorial Circle roadway surrounding the edifice, then to the main portal, intermittently spaced with a series of platforms. Flanking the steps as they approach the entrance are two buttresses each crowned with an tall tripod carved from pink Tennessee marble by the Piccirilli Brothers. There are a total of 87 steps.