February 16, 2009 PRESIDENTS' DAY
Dear Coalition Friends:
In honor of George Washington's birthday celebrated today, admission to his home at Mount Vernon is FREE, as noted below.
Also see below Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott's review of two exhibitions on Abraham Lincoln at the Library of Congress and National Gallery of Art.
Mount Vernon
February 16, Monday FREE Day
Presidents Day Washington DC events
Celebrate the national observance of George Washington’s birthday by visiting his home and burial site FREE-of-charge on this day. The traditional wreathlaying ceremony at Washington's Tomb takes place at 10:00 a.m., followed by patriotic music and military performances by the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, featuring the 3rd U.S. Infantry, the Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps, and the Commander-in-Chief’s Guard on the Bowling Green. America’s Smallest Hometown Parade lines up at 1:30 p.m. with its fife and drum corps, 18th-century music, and farm animals. “General Washington” is on the grounds to greet visitors and receive birthday wishes.
THE WASHINGTON POST
By Philip Kennicott
Thursday, February 12, 2009; C01
If Abraham Lincoln belonged to a more remote historical era, there would no doubt be conspiracy theorists like those who bedevil Shakespeare scholarship, claiming there was no way Abe Lincoln was really Abe Lincoln. Surely no one from the backwoods could write so well, master the art of politics and persuasion, marshal armies to victory and leave such a permanent imprint on American life.
But in a wonderful and slightly creepy way, Lincoln's physicality is ever with us, in daguerreotypes, life and death masks, bloodstained clothing and myriad talismanic reminders of the 19th-century fascination with the body. And yet, as two very different new exhibitions devoted to Lincoln demonstrate, the physicality of Lincoln is, in many ways, a distraction. Because the real Abraham Lincoln was fashioned from words, and the Lincoln we live with now -- the monumental, oversize, heroic Lincoln -- was forged from the equally intangible stuff of myth.
The two shows -- "With Malice Toward None," a Library of Congress exhibition organized to mark the 16th president's birth bicentennial, and "Designing the Lincoln Memorial: Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon," now open at the National Gallery -- couldn't be more different. The former, which includes almost all the major Lincoln documents, is essential viewing even for people who've already hit the wall with too many Lincoln celebrations. The latter, tucked into a section of hallway at the National Gallery, is a tiny exhibition devoted to two very large objects: the original design model for the Lincoln Memorial by architect Henry Bacon, and the large plaster cast of the seated Lincoln (by sculptor Daniel Chester French) used to model the statue that now dominates the memorial. But the two shows work well together. One is a powerful lesson in Lincoln's self-creation through the mastery of language and rhetoric, while the other offers tangible evidence of his posthumous re-creation as the chief eminence in the American pantheon.
It's refreshing to walk through the Library of Congress exhibition and feel no particular compulsion to get close to Lincoln on a personal level. This is not a exhibition about emotions, or the flesh-and-blood Lincoln, or Lincoln the Family Man. It is an exhibition about words.
That doesn't diminish the visceral power of many of the objects on display. On the page of a copybook from his boyhood are his first extant written words, traced in a careful hand: "Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen, he will be good but god knows When." It is a silly verse, and quite likely not of his invention. It is also very faintly written, on the lower left corner of a page on which someone has worked through a math problem. As the critic Adam Gopnik writes in a companion volume to the exhibition, "His hand and pen were the axis of his experience," and to see them emerge, ever so delicately on faded paper, is to see the first inklings of a mind taking form, a mind that constantly aspired for moral clarity even as it was steeped in earthy humor.
A copy of Lincoln's first grammar book has similar power, an unprepossessing volume that moves us in part because it explains nothing, just as a scientific tract on the vibration of strings explains nothing about the fugues of Bach.
Next to these sacred objects -- powerful for communion, but limited in teaching power -- are examples of Lincoln's mature rhetoric in the process of being worked through. The exhibition includes what is believed to be the oldest copy of the Gettysburg Address, begun and finished on different types of paper. It also includes the Emancipation Proclamation, the first and second inaugural addresses, the farewell speech delivered before leaving Springfield, Ill., to assume the presidency, and letters to his changing cast of feckless generals.
Documents can be frustrating viewing for anyone who isn't a scholar, but the copy of the first inaugural address is interesting even to laymen. It is printed, with handwritten emendations. The changes reflect, among other things, the recommendations of Lincoln's secretary of state, William Seward, who had also been a competitor for the Republican nomination. Seward suggested a more conciliatory tone, and offered a paragraph that included the famous "mystic chords" analogy.
"I close," begins Seward's conclusion. Lincoln changed that to, "I am loth to close." It is a small, but powerful alteration, suggesting Lincoln's desire to extend this last, desperate moment of national conciliation.
There are curious surprises and arcana, as well. The "blind memorandum" was written in August 1864, when it appeared possible that Lincoln would lose reelection. It was drafted secretly, folded and then signed by his Cabinet members, without knowledge of its contents. In the end, it wasn't necessary, and his promise to cooperate with the new president-elect was moot.
Among the curiosities is a newspaper, from Vicksburg, Miss., printed on wallpaper, the only paper available during the extremity of the Union siege. It records the news of the day, including many deaths of Vicksburg residents; but its final paragraph was written by Union soldiers, after the city fell. "Two days bring about great changes," they wrote, mockingly. "The banner of the Union floats over Vicksburg."
The Library of Congress exhibition is certainly the most impressive in the current round of Lincoln displays mounted so far, at least in Washington. The National Gallery's Lincoln Memorial show is more a respectful nod to the bicentennial event. Bacon's model of the Lincoln Memorial is a massive but crudely made wooden thing, meant to show the profile and proportions more than the details. Whoever wrote the names of the 36 states (at the time of the Civil War) on the frieze didn't even bother to space the letters evenly. "Ohio" strains to take up space, while "Massachusetts" shrinks progressively from the M to the final S.
French's plaster cast, one-third the size of the statue that now reigns over the Mall, is more revealing, a chance to look Lincoln in the eye, rather than staring at the sole of his boot. An American flag is draped over Lincoln's seat, in a manner that people who get exercised about proper respect for Old Glory would probably lam ent. A photograph next to the cast shows an even earlier, and yet smaller model, with Lincoln sitting in something like an early American chair.
French had a remarkable amount of physical evidence for Lincoln's form, but the power of the statue lies in its departures from pure fact. Although there is a famous model of Lincoln's hand, clutching a piece of a broomstick (on display both at the Library of Congress exhibition and the new Lincoln exhibition at the Smithsonian) French substituted his own hands for Lincoln's, perhaps because he could model them more intimately. They are the most expressive part of Lincoln's form. And the chair French settled on, a throne fronted by bundles of fasces -- a sign of consular (and usually patrician) authority in the old Roman republic -- is remarkably regal for a democratically elected man who disdained overt signs of pomp.
Lincoln is too big for the throne, and that might be the final genius of French's re-imagining of the man. It subverts the royal associations of the throne, suggesting that great men who rise by election are even greater than men who come to power by succession. Democracy, French seems to say, is more authoritative than authoritarian government.
With Malice Toward None, Monday-Saturday 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., through May 9 at the Library of Congress (second floor, Thomas Jefferson Building), 10 First St. SE. (Exhibit debuts to the public tonight from 5 until 9; regular hours begin Friday.)
Designing the Lincoln Memorial: Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., through February 2010 at the National Gallery of Art (West Building, main floor), Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW.
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