Lincoln Memorial
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The Lincoln Memorial, on the extended axis of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial built to honor President Abraham Lincoln.
The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple, and contains a large seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln. The memorial has been the site of many famous speeches, including Martin Luther King'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 the other monuments on the National Mall, including the nearby Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and National World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial is administered by the National Park Service under its National Mall and Memorial Parks group. The National Memorial was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. It is open to the public from 8 a.m. until midnight all year, except December 25.
Design and construction
The Lincoln Monument Association was incorporated by the United States Congress in March 1867 to build a memorial to Lincoln. Little progress was made until the site was chosen in 1901, in an area that was swampland. Congress formally authorized the memorial on February 9, 1911, and the first stone of the Lincoln Memorial was not put into place until Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1914. The monument was dedicated by Warren G. Harding on May 30, 1922, attended by the former President's only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln. It won for its architect, the prominent Beaux-Arts designer Henry Bacon, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, his profession's highest honor, presented at the Monument in 1923. The stone for the building is Indiana limestone and Colorado Yule marble, quarried at the town of Marble, Colorado. The sculpture itself is made of Georgian marble. Originally under the care of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks, it was transferred to the National Park Service on August 10, 1933.
Standing apart from the somewhat triumphal and Roman manner of most of Washington, the memorial takes the severe form of a Greek Doric temple. It is 'peripteral,' with 36 massive columns, each 33 feet (10 meters) high, entirely surrounding the cella of the building itself, which rises above the porticos. Five adults holding hands cannot quite embrace the columns. By a happy afterthought, the 36 columns required for the design were seen to represent the 36 states of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, and their names were inscribed in the entablature above each column. The names of the 48 states of the Union when the Memorial was completed are carved on the exterior attic walls, and a later plaque commemorates the admission of Alaska and Hawaii.
Interior
The focus of the memorial is Daniel Chester French's sculpture of Lincoln, seated. French studied many of Mathew Brady's photographs of Lincoln, and depicted the president as worn and pensive, gazing eastwards down the Reflecting Pool at the capital's starkest emblem of the Union, the Washington Monument. One hand is clenched, the other open. Beneath his hands, the Roman fasces, symbols of the authority of the Republic, are sculpted in relief on the seat. The statue stands 19 feet tall and 19 feet wide, and was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers of New York City in a studio in the Bronx from 28 blocks of white Georgia marble. The central cella is flanked by two others. In one, the Gettysburg Address is inscribed on its south wall, and in the other, Lincoln's second inaugural address is inscribed on its north wall. In the first column of Lincoln's second inaugural address, the word “Future” is misspelled, reading “Euture.” Above the text of these speeches are a series of murals by Jules Guerin showing an angel, representing truth, freeing a slave (on the south wall, above the Gettysburg Address), and the unity of the American North and South (above the Second Inaugural Address).
Events
In 1939, the singer Marian Anderson was refused permission to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington because of her skin color. At the suggestion of Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Harold L. Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, arranged for Anderson to perform from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a live audience of 70,000, and a nationwide radio audience. (It was a very successful performance.)
On August 28, 1963, the monument grounds were the site of one of the greatest political rallies in American history, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which proved to be a high point of the American Civil Rights Movement. Numerous speeches have been given in front of the building, including Martin Luther King's greatest, “I Have a Dream”. It is estimated that approximately 250,000 people came to witness this speech and that the crowd stretched back to the entrance of the present World War II Memorial. A marked tile on the memorial's steps shows where Dr. King stood.
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