LAND OF LINCOLN
TO ENTER THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL is to enter another world. The passage begins on the east side of the building. Behind you stretches the reflecting pool, its glassy, rectangular surface reaching toward the Washington Monument, which towers above the grass and trees in the heart of the nation's city. Farther in the eastern distance rises the Capitol dome. Ahead of you, to the west, ascend broad flights of stairs, the kind that carry citizens into the halls of government or justice—or into heaven. At the top—cool, white, columned, and massive—looms the temple, an American Parthenon. Something timeless and true and powerful dwells there, and it gestures to you, inviting you to cross the boundary that separates your time and place from another realm. The air is hot, heavy, and hazy, typical for a summer day in the District of Columbia, and crowds of sweaty tourists seem to be everywhere. But none of that matters, for you are about to glimpse something unearthly, eternal, infinite.1
The initial approach is low and gentle, and you easily climb a series of steps and intervening terraces. Crossing the road that encircles the structure, you climb several more sets of steps and traverse still more terraces. About halfway up, as you near the last and steepest flights, you experience a strange sensation. Each step, repeated again and again, protracts the distance, prolongs the time, and makes you feel small. The effect is even more pronounced if you make the passage at night. Slowly, your disembodied, shrinking self rises toward the luminescent temple floating in the darkness.
At the top stand the enormous fluted columns. Touching one, you sense the solidity and great age of the republic. Looking back, you see an urban park, but you might as well be on a mountaintop, surveying a green and misty valley. You pause for a moment as the enormous compacted weight of the past pushes down on the present. Then you step between the columns—through the portal—and into the temple.
There, huge, silent, and surrounded by shadows, a marble Lincoln presides over a land beyond time. His craggy, uneven face—“so awful ugly it becomes beautiful,” the poet Walt Whitman said—is at once stern, weary, tender, and sad.2 You try to meet his gaze, but you cannot quite make the connection, for his eyes see past you—or through you—to something in the distance, something large and everlasting and more important than you.
“IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION,” read the words engraved on the wall, “THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.” To the north, behind a row of columns, is a chamber in which appears Lincoln's second inaugural address and its iconic phrase “WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE … WITH CHARITY FOR ALL.” High above the words, so high that you almost miss the scene, a woman with giant wings—an angel or a goddess—seems to be reconciling two groups of white people. Representatives of each group, a man on one side and a woman on the other, reach out and join hands, as if in marriage. The winged woman places her hands on theirs, blessing their bond. To the south, between another set of columns, is a chamber devoted to the Gettysburg Address and its most deeply felt principle, that the United States is “A NEW NATION CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY AND DEDICATED TO THE PROPOSITION THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.” Above the lines carved in marble, the winged woman, reaching in triumph to the heavens, appears to sanctify the emancipation of black people.
Back in the temple's main room, you stand before Lincoln again. It is impossible to be detached, neutral, unmoved. You are in the presence of greatness, of inevitable forces, unspeakable and omnipotent, and suddenly they lift you from yourself and carry you to a reality somewhere beyond your own. For a fleeting moment you are aware of an ultimate purpose and meaning, a higher truth, in the marble.
The wave, however, passes as quickly as it came. Your body, your physical self, now reminds you that you are more of this world than of some other. The heat and humidity are oppressive. You are tired, thirsty, hungry, a little dizzy, and your feet are beginning to ache. The other tourists—their chatter and bustle and relentless picture taking—are starting to annoy you.
Outside, sitting on the steps, you survey the trees, grass, water, and people, and your mind runs free. You think of the dedication and speeches chiseled on the walls. Why did someone choose those words and not others? You picture the newly freed men and women in the mural, their shackles broken. What are they going to do now? Why are they not at the wedding with the white folks? You notice the crystalline grain and varied colors of the marble beneath you, its chips, cracks, and seams, and in the seams, greenish dirt. You look back at the great classical columns and notice their weathered, irregular surfaces. Someone mined, cut, carved, polished, and assembled the marble. Where was the quarry? Who did the work? How and why, you wonder, did this monument come to be? You now realize that you have left behind the sublime otherworld in which the temple hovers. You are back on the ground, in this place, a capital city awash in humid air, perspiration, and imperfection. You are back on this Earth.
The moment when the magic vanishes is powerful because it subverts the temple's unearthly objectives. The temple seeks to magnify transcendent truths by minimizing the importance of the physical body. Its selective presentation of words and pictures attempts to legitimate a racial order that leaves black citizens out of the national reunion. Perhaps above all, by means of its size, beauty, and placement, the building tries to disguise the crass material circumstances of its creation. Yet it cannot completely succeed in any of these purposes. Its symbolic power notwithstanding, it cannot entirely silence a visitor's weary, emotionally spent body. Despite the elegance of its murals and the force of its words, it cannot obscure the reality of black people's experiences. And no matter how magnificent, its marble still weathers, cracks, and crumbles. Rather than culminating in a moment of mystical transcendence, your passage through the temple ends in an unsettling realization that something else—something corporeal, terrestrial, and tangible—is going on here.3
That awareness is an essential precondition to a crucially important insight: although the Lincoln Memorial is a monument to a god, it cannot rise, godlike, above its creators, materials, and environment. Even as it expresses the highest of ideals, it objectifies earthbound circumstances. All those circumstances, even conflicts over racial policies and practices, have been, and still are, grounded in a fundament so massive and ubiquitous that people often overlook the multiform ways in which it has shaped, limited, and empowered their lives. That fundament is nature—a nature that takes many forms but includes marble and other minerals; water, trees, grass, algae, and air; and even the body's flesh, blood, and bone. More than anything else, the Lincoln Memorial encapsulates Americans' struggle to capture, use, and find meaning in the matter and energy that swirl around and through them. Like the nation that created it, the Lincoln Memorial is a monument to nature and to the efforts of citizens to shape nature in the image of their ideals.
Between 1914 and 1922, the United States Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers, planners, architects, artists, contractors, and other citizens literally made the Lincoln Memorial from pieces of the national landscape.4 The transformation began with the construction site and proceeded to the marble that finally capped it. Enormous quantities of earthen fill turned a plot of marshy Potomac River bottomland into solid ground, although not solid enough for the memorial. To provide a stable foundation for ton upon ton of stone, the M. F. Comer Company drove 122 hollow steel cylinders some sixty feet to bedrock, dug out the earth inside them, and refilled them with steel-reinforced concrete. On these sturdy piers, the George A. Fuller Company erected the marble superstructure. Most of the stone came from a quarry situated at an elevation of nearly ten thousand feet in the central Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Milled into architectural components at a nearby village, the brilliant white marble, Colorado Yule, arrived at the construction site on railroad cars.5 From this downward process—shafts sunk to bedrock and marble rolled from the mountains—the Lincoln Memorial rose toward the sky.
The construction, however, was hardly a simple, instrumental process of transforming nature into a building. It was not just a matter of choosing the best site and the best materials and then shaping them into a stunning piece of architecture. Central to the manipulation of nature—inextricable from it—was a politics of nature. Members of Congress and planners squabbled over the location of the memorial, and the primary designer, Henry Bacon, resisted the meddling of other prominent architects. Most important, the selection of Colorado stone snubbed other marble-producing states, particularly Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Indeed, the politics of marble replicated the sectional politics that had resulted in the Civil War and Lincoln's rise to greatness. Proponents of Colorado Yule pointed to the stone's exceptional brightness; critics claimed it was too expensive and inferior in quality. The Bureau of Standards tested the competing marbles but found only that Colorado Yule absorbed more water and might have a greater propensity to stain. Eventually, Bacon and government officials accepted smaller amounts of stone from the other states, including some in the South—pink Tennessee marble for the interior floor and wall base, for example, and white marble quarried in Georgia for the statue of the man most responsible for the Confederacy's defeat.6
Nature itself sometimes obstructed the efforts of the memorial's designers and builders. The building site and materials resisted manipulation. To save money, the approach steps and the upper terrace retaining wall were constructed on spread-slab foundations that rested not on piers rising from bedrock but on soft soil. Eventually the foundations began to sink, damaging the steps, the retaining wall, and the concrete deck underlying the terrace. Contractors removed the foundations, steps, wall, and deck, dug shafts down to bedrock, and then built a massive substructure to support the enormous weight of new architectural components. Organic nature was not fully cooperative, either. To enhance the memorial's timeless look, its site plan called for mature trees and shrubs, species such as yew, boxwood, holly, and magnolia. Yet a search in and around the capital turned up only enough aged specimens to cover the ground on one side of the structure.7
The effort and energy necessary to manipulate stone, soil, and plants into art required the labor of people, a human nature that consisted of the minds and bodies of workmen. High in the Colorado Rockies, laborers braved rock falls, bad weather, avalanches, and runaway railroad cars to cut marble blocks from a mountain and then shape them into neoclassical building components. At the construction site, other laborers excavated soil in preparation for the mighty piers that would hold the edifice. The men hand-dug the shafts for the foundation of the steps and terrace, wrote the architectural historian Christopher Thomas, “a job the discomfort of which in Washington's hot, humid summer can be imagined.”8 By such means, human work blended with earthen materials to produce a monument imbued with a powerful, unearthly symbolism that could not admit of sweat and dirt.
In one other way the Lincoln Memorial objectified a struggle over the form, function, and meaning of nature. At the heart of American civilization lay competing assumptions about humankind. Were all people members of the same human family, with the same (natural) propensities, capacities, and potentials? Or were groups of people, identified by their racial characteristics, inherently (that is, naturally) different from one another? The Lincoln Memorial embodied the tension between the two positions. For the most part, the building acknowledged a universal human nature (“ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL”) and a unified democracy (“IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION”). Yet the structure also alluded to division and difference. Jules Guérin's murals contradicted the memorial's universalism and wholeness. Reunion (which might have been titled Reunion of a Race) left blacks out of the national marriage and confined them, in a kind of aesthetic segregation, to Emancipation of a Race. The fracture was more than just symbolic, for the construction force that erected the memorial likely was divided by race and ethnicity, with different groups assigned to particular tasks.
The tension between universal and particular human natures even appeared in the first rituals held at the memorial. At the dedication ceremony in 1922, African American dignitaries sat in a roped-off area apart from other participants, witnesses, and spectators. Robert Russa Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute and the only black speaker at the event, was seated with his white peers, but he addressed the issue of segregation nonetheless. Standing at the top of the steps, he asserted that emancipation was Lincoln's greatest achievement and that it “vindicated the honor of a Nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Most white Americans ignored Moton and continued to harden the color line across the capital. Racial segregation rested on specious assumptions about the nature of black people—abstract prejudices that had no basis in material reality—yet segregation was a material practice literally grounded in the national landscape. It denied black citizens equal access to the spaces, environments, and resources that offered them the means to a better life. African Americans like Moton, refusing to accept either the assumptions or the practice, continued to assert their equality, often from the Lincoln Memorial's steps. Clustered in front of the portal, their marble patron sitting behind them, they proclaimed their full citizenship in the land of Lincoln.9
Surprises, not just transcendent truths, inhere in the temples of American history. The very marble that enables a visitor to intuit an ultimate purpose also manifests the complicated, contested experience of a messy biophysical world. And the environmental surprise within the Lincoln Memorial is but one example of similar surprises latent in the entire American past.10 Within every famous icon, turning point, movement, or moment is a story of people struggling with the earthy, organic substances that are integral to the human predicament. Focusing on stone, soil, sweat, and other forms of nature makes familiar historical accounts seem strange. That sense of strangeness enables the visitor to see the past with fresh eyes and, in the process, to recover the forgotten and overlooked ground on which so much history has unfolded.
My path to the marble temple began in the classroom, where I teach a course on the role and place of nature in American history. Years ago, two young women in the class challenged my choice of subject matter. They appreciated the historical study of diseases, soil, animals, drought, forests, conservation, national parks, irrigation, and industrial pollution, but they wondered if the course was what it purported to be. If it was about American history, they asked, then why weren't we covering the usual American history topics? Why weren't we studying the nature of the American Revolution, for example, or the nature of the Civil War? In retrospect, I see their insightful questions as the beginning of my quest to find the nature embedded in the iconic moments of American history—to begin the steps that led me to the Lincoln Memorial.
My immediate response to the two students was equivocal. A focus on environmental themes, I said, offers an alternative version of the past in which conventional topics matter less. Wars, presidents, elections, economic upheavals, and social movements recede in importance as biological transformations, shifts in climate, and the social and environmental consequences of humankind's manipulation of land and life become more salient. But I had to admit that if the premise of environmental history is correct—that nature is central to the human experience—then the field ought to have something to say about the Revolution, the Civil War, and any other event.
I regret that I do not remember the names of those two young women, but I recall clearly their intelligence and sincerity, and I have been grateful ever since for the questions they pressed on me, which have guided me to better-informed and more thoughtful and complete answers. If I could turn back the clock, here is what I would say to them.
To recover the nature of familiar historical subjects is to come to terms with nature in its fullest sense and with its centrality to the human experience. It is to realize that nature is infinitely large and varied, and as the story of the Lincoln Memorial demonstrates, it has engaged human life in multiple ways, on multiple registers. It is to realize that environmental history broadens the frame of scholarly inquiry and gives people a fresh view of the eternal problem of agency versus determinism, as humanity's freedom to think and act inevitably encounters the limits that nature imposes. It is, finally, to realize that American history, in every way imaginable—from mountains to monuments—is the story of a nation and its nature.11
What is nature? Most basically, it is the matter, energy, and forces that constitute the universe and compose all life. It is the marble that crystallizes in the Earth's crust over millions of years, the atmospheric processes that help turn blocks of stone into particles of sand, and the rivers that carry sediments to the sea. It is gravity and sunlight and the electrons that vibrate around the nuclei of atoms. It is the photosynthesizing tissues of trees and other plants and the metabolizing bodies of the creatures that eat them. Nature includes human beings, too, from the carbon and other elements that compose flesh, blood, and bone to the bacteria that assist digestion, the electrical impulses that enliven muscles and enable thought, and the sweat that drips from a weary body on a muggy summer day. Nature is the omnipresent substance of reality, the calloused hands of laborers no less than the materials—marble and all others—with which they alter the world.12
Whatever form nature takes, people have arranged their societies, economies, and governments to turn it into food, clothing, warmth, shelter, weapons, art, architecture, and many other things. The complexity of means by which people have sought to realize these ends—and the biophysical and social consequences of their actions—constitutes an enormous part of environmental history. In the United States, the settlement of land, the production of food, the mining and refining of minerals, the harvesting and processing of timber, and other activities generated immense wealth. Much of that wealth enabled the development of modern business corporations, sophisticated technological systems such as railroads, and complex divisions of labor. In the form of tax revenues and proceeds from public land sales, that wealth also funded the bureaucratic organization and physical infrastructure of the federal government. During the early twentieth century, the legislative and executive branches created a special commission that worked with the War Department and one of its subdivisions, the Army Corps of Engineers, to erect a marble monument commemorating the sixteenth president. To accomplish the task, the commission and the Corps of Engineers employed architects, artists, engineers, craftsmen, and construction companies and their workers. In this manner, the United States gathered wealth and materials from the Earth and shaped them into a building that monumentalized the nation and, by its very beauty, masked the circumstances of its creation.13
If nature has been intrinsic to social relationships, economics, and government, then it also has been intrinsic to the ideas of the people who create those systems. The capacity of the mind to envision, calculate, and dream is virtually infinite. In their heads, people imagine things that transcend their physical circumstances. They contemplate future and past, perfect forms and supernatural powers, and a reality on the other side of death. Yet their capacity to imagine things beyond nature is rooted in nature, in an organ called the brain, and in the physical body and its experience of its environment.14 And of all the ideas that cross people's minds, perhaps none is as important as that of nature itself. A providential hand, some Americans believed, guided a sequence of events that culminated in the formal recognition of a universal human nature and the inalienable rights that it conferred—the rights to life, liberty, and happiness. Artists, architects, and engineers later erected a monument to a champion of those universal natural rights, even as their design gestured to the competing notion that nature differentiated people by race. But no matter the message, the monument had to conform to what the architects and engineers knew about the behavior of matter, energy, and forces; the building had to stand. Ideas thus may be abstract, but they are more than just abstractions—they are functions of a natural human capacity and products of people's interactions with the physical environments in which they live.15
The difference between what people think and what nature allows them to do is the difference between agency and determinism. People are agents of their histories; they are willful, purposeful, discerning beings who choose among many potential actions. Yet their capacity to act is not boundless; they shape events only within a range of what is possible. The ultimate limit on that range of possibilities, and thus the final determinant of human history, is nature.16 The citizens who built the marble temple used natural materials to counteract the constraints that nature imposed on them. The greatest of those natural constraints—greater even than gravity or the forces of erosion—was their own mortality. Indeed, the marble temple expressed a profound desire to realize a kind of immortality, to touch an eternal layer of meaning and truth above and beyond the inevitable deaths of people and the republics they create. Yet the temple, which seemed to float above the fray, remained an earthbound structure, altered by the material interests that divided people no less than by the geophysical processes that fracture rock and reduce it to bits. A noble attempt at transcendence could not escape nature's limits.
To recover the nature of American history is to see the story of the Lincoln Memorial writ large. That story is about men and women who struggled, and often failed, to shape themselves and the land according to their faith. It is about a republic made possible by a large expanse of land and premised on the idea that nature and nature's God deposited in every person a capacity for reason, the exercise of which would lead to human betterment. It is about the rapid geographical expansion of the republic and the equally rapid conversion of its biological and geological resources into wealth. And it is about the consequences of those developments: civil war, the oppression of conquered and enslaved peoples, the erosion of soil and the destruction of animals and plants, the creation of terrifying new weapons, and the extension of unsustainable material needs beyond national borders. Although it is an ironic and often tragic story, examples of courage, decency, and profound moral conviction can be found in every chapter.17 Ultimately, it is a story of people who believed they must align their actions with a natural order intrinsic to their existence; who espoused the inherent—that is, natural—dignity and worth of every human being at the moment he or she came into the world; and who found hope and inspiration not only in machines and the regenerative power of violence but also in organic nature and the rebirth that was—and is—its final purpose.
My path to the Lincoln Memorial required a lengthy sojourn in the library of American history. Over the past century and more, scholars have created an enormous trove of books, articles, and primary documents with which to explain and interpret the nation's past. Some of these materials pertain directly to environmental history, but the bulk of them concern politics and government, armies and war, economics and society, and many other subjects.18 No one can master this great body of scholarship, but I read as much of it as I could, always keeping before me the basic question posed by my students: What did nature have to do with the major events of American history? While gathering information with which to answer that question, I became aware of how much nature had affected past Americans in virtually all situations, how much it meant to them, and how much they talked about it. I also discovered that some historians before me had written about the importance of nature to mainstream historical events.19 Yet I realized that over time, scholars and citizens had relegated—segregated, perhaps—the topic of nature to its now conventional haunts: farms, forests, parks, wildernesses, wolf pack territories, and other places “out there” where people had been fewest and their impress least, or sites that people had wasted, polluted, and destroyed.20 Whatever and wherever nature was, most people no longer recognized it in parchment documents, government buildings, soldiers' bellies, racial oppression, laborers' muscles, bombs, presidents, and marble temples. As I made my way through the library, I decided that my journey would be an act not only of reinterpretation but also of remembering. I wanted to find and restate something that time and circumstances had caused me and my fellow Americans to forget.21
In composing my answers, I chose not to write a single synthetic narrative covering all of American history. Such a form would not have allowed me to achieve the level of detail and vividness I desired. Instead, I concentrated my efforts on nine roughly chronological topics, from the colonial period to the twenty-first century, that commonly appear in textbooks. Most readers and citizens know something about them already, and together they suggest the larger trajectory of American history. I am under no illusion that I have gotten each topic exactly right, that I have covered every possible piece of them, or that my interpretations are flawless. Communities of scholars are devoted to each topic, and I make no pretense that my knowledge exceeds theirs. Although necessity required that I select a limited number of topics, my hope is that those who find my method intriguing or compelling will apply it to subjects I left out. I want to open conversation, not end it; I want to suggest possibilities in the past that my fellow historians and citizens might never have considered and that might seem, at first glance, unlikely. At the very least, I hope the stories I have told will help convince readers of something important: that a basic understanding of American history and its major events requires some familiarity with nature's role in them.22
The path to the Lincoln Memorial leads, at last, into the heart of American history. Rising from your seat on the steps, you climb to the portal and look out. What you see is the product of a long process in which the republic extracted resources from its landscape and rearranged them in a record of change over time. Everything before you contains an element of the natural, whether marble, trees, or grass, humid air or damp bodies, or the Smokey Bear hats and green uniforms of National Park Service rangers who have guided visitors through capital monuments for almost as long as they have through Yellowstone and Yosemite. In these ways and more, nature tells you something about the republic's birth and development, pain and sorrow, ideals and enduring promise. The marble temple on which you stand is not the culmination of a journey—it is the beginning of one. And so you descend the steps into a land of sunlight and shadow where nature and history meet and merge, and where a once-familiar past seems new. 