"A colonnade of 36 Doric columns, representing the number of States in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, surrounds the memorial chamber." The building stands in splendid isolation in a landscaped circle at the west end of the National Mall. Maybe that gives it that air of permanence.Īccording to the NPS, "It consists of a main level on a high raised basement with a recessed attic story above. The memorial is of Neoclassical design and based on the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. I wonder what personal emotions and thoughts they might have had looking at the brand-new structure so long in the making. Harding and Robert Todd Lincoln, Lincoln's only surviving son, according to the NPS. Robert Moton, president of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, who addressed a mostly segregated crowd Supreme Court Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft President Warren G. But only in 1911, when Congress formed a new Lincoln Memorial Commission, did things really get moving.Ī groundbreaking took place in 1914, on land decried by some critics as a swamp.įinally, the memorial opened on May 30, 1922. Just two years after his death, Congress passed the first of many bills to create a memorial, according to the National Park Service. Lincoln was a controversial figure, especially in the defeated South. Remember this moment." The nation in 1922 And I told myself, "Remember this moment. A bright moon lit up the mall with the Washington Monument and US Capitol in the background. I paused on the way out to sit on the steps of the memorial, all alone but feeling the arms of my country around me and almost giddy with a hope bolstered by youthful optimism. But there sat President Lincoln, carrying burdens few would ever understand during America's greatest crisis, pointing the way forward. It was easy to feel worried about the future - mine, the nation's and the world's. And assassination was in the air again - Anwar Sadat of Egypt had been killed just weeks earlier, and President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II survived attempts on their lives in the spring. The threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a constant underlying anxiety. The United States was in a deep recession. We were facing our own troubles in the fall of 1981. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. But it was the inscriptions that emotionally overwhelmed me - especially the ending lines of the Second Inaugural Address on the north chamber wall. Or felt.įlooded in light at night, I was moved by the beauty. Being in near solitude with no distractions enhanced it all. Our hotel wasn't far away, and I sneaked away from the group to see it. But the memory of my first visit to the Lincoln Memorial itself remains as clear as the cold, moonlit night I made it on.
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