The Lincoln Conspirator

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A Memorial's History

The Lincoln Memorial nearly sank in the swamp of politics. Here, a look at the history of its construction.

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With the Democrats set to take control in March, Brown got Sen. Shelby Cullom of Illinois to introduce a bill to establish a commission to create a memorial. The 81-year-old senator had been a family friend of Lincoln's. He had warned Lincoln about rumors that he was in physical danger, but Lincoln said he would have to take his chances, Cullom later wrote in his memoir. Three weeks later, Cullom accompanied the president's body back to Springfield, Ill., for burial. His bill to create a memorial finally became law in February 1911, one month before the new Congress convened.

BUT THIS WAS ONLY PHASE ONE OF THE BATTLE. As a member of the new Lincoln Memorial Commission, Cannon still aimed to block the Potomac Park location. He secretly persuaded a majority of his fellow commission members to vote for a new location at Arlington National Cemetery, the former home of Robert E. Lee and where Union soldiers were buried. Commission of Fine Arts member Frank Millet, who would soon die onboard the Titanic, happened to overhear talk about Cannon's plan the night before the memorial commission meeting. There was no time to warn Taft, who chaired the commission. So Millet had his friend Texas Congressman James Slayden convince one of the panel's Southern members that Arlington was unsuitable.

When the memorial commission met the following morning in the White House executive office, Cannon argued against the Potomac Park site, calling it a swamp and saying that "the memorial would shake itself down with ague and loneliness." He then made a stirring plea to put the memorial to Lincoln alongside his fallen troops in Arlington. House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri sat quietly. When it was his turn to speak, he stretched his long legs under the table and said, "I, for one, will never consent to the erection of the Lincoln Memorial in any part of the South. We should not imitate the custom of the ancient Romans by placing a memorial of the conqueror in the territory of the conquered," repeating just what the Texas congressman had said to him.

Taft quickly realized that Cannon's new scheme had been quashed. "Well, Uncle Joe, I guess you and I will have to give up Arlington!" said the president, a genial man who hid his dislike for Cannon.

The question of the memorial's location was still unsettled at the end of the meeting. Cannon kept pushing for other locations. When the Fine Arts Commission recommended McKim's former assistant, Henry Bacon, as the architect, Cannon opposed him, too. He persuaded the memorial commission to have Bacon and architect John Russell Pope compete for the job. While Bacon drew up plans for Potomac Park, Pope made plans for Cannon's new favored sites: the Soldiers' Home in Northwest Washington, where Lincoln had his summer cottage, and Meridian Hill on 16th Street, north of the White House. Models of the architects' plans for three locations were placed on exhibit at the new National Museum (now the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History). Cannon wasn't the only one trying to undermine the commission's recent recommendation. Proponents of the Lincoln Memorial highway launched a national campaign to get Congress to approve the road to Gettysburg instead. The commission wasn't allowed to consider anything outside of Washington, but Taft met with them anyway.

Speaker Clark joined the growing number of highway supporters, telling the Washington Star that "Lincoln was a practical man; a great man, with practical ideas. If we are to expend that much money, we should expend it where it will do some good, and the most good that can be done is by building a great highway from Washington to Gettysburg."

There were no decent roads to Washington or to most towns. Rural America's dirt roads were the worst in the developed world. Fifteen years after the first automobile appeared in the nation's capital in 1897, few people owned cars because of the cost. The $1,200 average price of a car in 1912 is equivalent to about $26,000 today. But their numbers were growing, and the country's miserable roads became a political issue. John Stewart, president of the International League for Highway Improvement, was quoted in a 1912 New York Times article as estimating that the cost to build adequate roads throughout the country would be at least $25 billion.

The memorial commission finally approved Bacon's modernized version of an ancient Greek temple on the Mall in December 1912. Cannon had lost his reelection bid the previous month in the Democratic sweep that would bring Woodrow Wilson into the White House three months later.

The Senate quickly adopted the panel's recommendation of a Greek-style temple, but it still faced an uphill battle in the House. Rep. William Borland, the Missouri congressman who led the highway effort, predicted an easy win for the road. He believed cars would become more popular, though he didn't drive one himself. Many congressmen found the prospect of obtaining federal dollars for road projects in their own districts tempting. Road supporters, backed by the auto industry, were well-organized. They flooded Congress with telegrams and petitions. Architect Glenn Brown's campaign in favor of a Greek temple was no match. Everyone knew that a House victory for the Lincoln highway would create a stalemate and indefinitely postpone the creation of any memorial because the Senate wouldn't agree to the road.

Brown organized a meeting of local memorial supporters just before the vote. Sen. Elihu Root of New York launched a searing attack at the meeting that made front-page headlines. He'd learned that a group of speculators in Washington had obtained options on the land where the Lincoln highway would run. "A cabal is at work to defeat this Lincoln Memorial plan," he charged, in order to build a road as part of a scheme to boost property values in the area, according to newspaper accounts.

Tensions were high when the memorial resolution was debated the following week. House members wore carnations in their lapels in memory of Lincoln. Brown sat in the gallery alongside Bacon.

Highway advocates attacked the memorial plan as foreign and not representative of Lincoln, according to the Congressional Record. "There is nothing in this Greek temple . . . that even suggests . . . the character . . . of Abraham Lincoln," said Rep. Isaac Sherwood of Ohio. "It is time we had some American art and . . . American ideas in this national capital."