Lincoln's Body: A Cultural History by Richard Wightman Fox

Author:Richard Wightman Fox [Fox, Richard Wightman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

AFTER THE GROUNDBREAKING on Lincoln’s birthday in 1914, it took over eight years to complete the Lincoln Memorial. The details of the statue emerged slowly, as Daniel French built larger and larger plaster models. He began with a three-foot-high version in 1916 and reached ten feet in early 1917. By that time, he and Bacon realized that the final statue needed to be twice the originally proposed ten to twelve feet in order to avoid looking minuscule beneath a sixty-foot ceiling.

French signed a new contract to raise the statue to nineteen feet, not counting its base, doubling the government’s expenditure from $45,000 to $88,000. For some reason it took two years for the Washington Post to report the statue’s increased size and price. Perhaps the Post was leery about publicizing the cost overrun in the middle of World War I. Even in 1919, with the war over, the paper found it necessary to defend the further expense by invoking “artistic purposes.” “Naturally,” said the Post, a statue of such gigantic size should cost more. “To give some idea of its enormousness it is said that the legs are six feet long.”7

Of course, all of the measurements were now majestic. Lincoln’s face measured three and a half feet high by two and a half feet wide. His thumbs were a foot long. The total height of the statue, including its eleven-foot seven-inch pedestal and plinth, came to thirty feet seven inches. The whole installation reached halfway to the ceiling. Lincoln would now dominate the space of the main hall, rather than being dwarfed by it.

As a steady stream of visitors has discovered since the Memorial opened in 1922, Lincoln sits calmly and intently in his massive chair of state, his strong hands poised atop the Roman-style fasces (bundled rods) that mark this place as the seat of power. The vertical rods carved into the front legs of the chair match the muscular fingers of his hands, and the four long fingers of each hand echo the four Ionic columns to either side of him, dividing the main hall from the side chambers.

Daniel French caught Lincoln in a living moment of physical exertion, just as Saint-Gaudens had done in Chicago. Here Lincoln’s right foot extends over the edge of the chair’s base, as if it’s shuffling forward. His right hand clutches the armrest, his index finger lifting off the edge, while the left hand clenches into a fist. Lincoln’s torso has seemingly settled back into his eternal seat, apparently at rest as his eyes gaze placidly toward the distant Capitol. But the busy hands and angular legs give away his mental vigilance. This throne-like chair is boxing him in, restraining him as much as supporting him.

“What I wanted to convey,” French wrote privately three weeks before the Memorial’s dedication, “was the mental and physical strength of the great President and his confidence in his ability to carry the thing through to a successful finish.” If he, the sculptor, had succeeded, it was

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