 Good evening everyone. My name is Crane Porter. I'm an exhibit curator here at the National Archives and it's my pleasure to welcome you all to the William G. McGowan Theatre this evening here in Washington, DC for our program Monument Man, the Life and Art of Daniel Chester French. Whether you're here in DC or watching on YouTube, thank you for joining us. This evening's program is presented in partnership with the linking group of the District of Columbia. The nation's longest-serving organization devoted to studying the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and we thank them for their support this evening. Following tonight's discussion, we will have a book sale and signing of Monument Man with author Harold Holzer in the library, in the lobby outside of the theater. In the holdings of the National Archives, we have numerous records related to President Lincoln, including his original State of the Union addresses, as well as his presidential pardons, commissions, and endorsements. Of course, one of our true national treasures is the original Emancipation Proclamation, which will be on exhibit from April 14th through the 16th this year, along with the DC Emancipation Act. Please visit archives.gov for more information about those displays as well as any related activities. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce John O'Brien, President of the linking group of the District of Columbia. John is a retired hospital executive who now pursues his interest in President Lincoln's connections with individuals who lived and worked in neighborhoods near the White House. He also gives lectures and leads tours. Please join me in welcoming John O'Brien. Thank you, Corinne. The linking group is pleased to once again be a co-sponsor of another high quality Lincoln event with the National Archives. For those familiar faces that I see, you know the reputation that the archives has for the quality of what goes on here, and we are just delighted to be able to work with them on it. The mission of the linking group is to learn and to educate about the life and dedication of Abraham Lincoln to his philosophy of equality and liberty under the law. In his attitude, this be done with malice toward none and charity for all. We do this through programs and educational programs events, such as the Lincoln study group, which meets at the Ford's Theatre Conference Center one Saturday a month to discuss a book and related issues to that. We also, for the March meeting, our regular meeting will be in conjunction with the Abraham Lincoln Institute, which is also being held at the Ford's Theatre. That's an all day seminar. It's free, but it does require advanced registration. If you go online to the Ford's Theatre site, you can participate with us. We will be announcing this year the creation of a scholarship dedicated to the memory of our late past president, John Illiff, who was a dedicated educator, and we view the scholarship as an important way of extending our mission to professional educators who participate with Ford's Theatre. Our regular monthly meetings are on the third Tuesday of every month. You can find out more about what we do and how we do it at LincolnGroup.org. Again, sit back, enjoy the program. We're delighted to be with you this evening and look forward to Harold and Edith's presentation. Corrine? Thank you, John. Now it is my pleasure to welcome our speakers to the stage. Please join me in welcoming Harold Holzer, author of Monument Man and Edna Green Medford, Interim Dean and Professor of History at Howard University. Welcome to the stage. Good evening, everyone. What we're going to do is I'm going to ask Harold lots of questions that he knows the answers to because Harold has been doing incredible work in this area for many, many years. He's also going to share some slides with us. I think it's going to be a lovely evening. So sit back and relax. And Harold, this is your first question. So why Daniel Chester French? What was it about this one sculpture that captured your imagination? I wish I could say in all honesty that it was my idea to do this book. I was very lucky. In this case, the National Trust for Historic Preservation approached me. Just to step back, I've been going to the Berkshires for a weekend or a week in the summer for 40 years with my wife and with our kids and now with our grandson. And we always go to Chesterwood, the summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French. We were going there before it was opened as a National Trust site or just about when it became open. And we always loved it. And then I started doing Lincoln programs for them as a benefit for Chesterwood and ultimately the director said would you like to do the first biography that has ever been written by a non-family member? And I just thought it was an irresistible opportunity. So that's the back story. But the Lincoln Memorial is, to me, the greatest public monument not only in Washington but in the country. So it was a pleasure and an honor to look more deeply into it. What I found interesting about the book, among many things, was that it's really two books in one. So one is the biography of a great man, the life of a great man. The other is the story or stories of his great art. What did you find to be the most difficult to recapture or to reconstruct? Without question, the hardest thing was to animate him because he was a reticent, Yankee, closed-mouthed, non-communicative guy. His sense of humor at one point was compared to Calvin Coolidge's. And that was considered a compliment in 1922. But his letters are about business. His jokes are, you know, that kind of sharp-edged one-line comments. He's caustic. He's mercenary, you know, in a way that professional artists are with all due respect to our professional artists who are here. The great Wendy Allen is here who is the best Lincoln artist in the country from Gettysburg. I don't mean mercenary as a derogatory. I mean, he talks about clients and opportunities and commissions and competitions. And, you know, he had a reticent private life, although an unusual one. In the end, he said whenever he was asked for interviews or comments or letters about his art and what inspired him, he would say it's all in the sculptures. He had nothing to add, and that can be a problem and a challenge. So it was easier to see him through his art than it was through his papers. Let's talk a little bit about the personality of the man. A reticent might be a mild term to use for him when you're talking about certain aspects of his life. I was struck by the relationship he had with his father. Here's a man who in the mid to late 19, well, really late 19th century, he's pursuing art at a time when parents, professional parents, as you've said, would have expected their children and their sons would have gone on to follow in their footsteps. And here's a man who pursued something that was very different from what his father was. His father was a fairly well-known jurist, but this man had a different calling. His father supported it at that time and did more than that. Actually was one of his biggest supporters and sort of intervened on many instances to get him positions that he might not have been willing to pursue himself. So where does that come from? That's got to be rather unusual for that time. So Henry Flag French, as you say, was a New Hampshire-born Massachusetts judge. He was a college president briefly, unsuccessfully. He was a little too progressive for his trustees. I guess it's where UMass Amherst is now. That was his school. It was a small school. And he expected his sons to go to college and become lawyers. One son became the founding director of the Art Institute of Chicago. So he was an art administrator. And Dan was, you know, he was not interested in academics. He was interested in bird watching and in sculpting. And his father still did make him go to MIT for a while. I've seen his transcript. He was not made for MIT. And MIT was not made for him. What his father did that I think was extraordinary. Well, by this time they were in Concord, Massachusetts. And Concord is such an intellectually alive town. Emerson lives there. The Alcots live there. And, you know, it's a town that's brimming over with creativity. And French goes to May Alcott, not Louisa May Alcott, but the sister Amy and little women, who is a drawing teacher. And he sends Dan to her and he says basically, can he really do this? I mean, is this going to work? And he sculpts for her and she becomes his teacher. And he keeps that first sculpting tool for the rest of his life. So his father gives him a test, MIT, not so good, May Alcott. And then after that, he encourages him to take classes with William Rimmer and others. But you point out the rest of the support system. So Henry Flag French becomes a political appointee in the Treasury Department under President Grant and survives for, you know, for a good 10 years in government service. And when Dan comes back from a sojourn in Italy already with a big success behind him, he has nothing to do, no prospects. And his father gets him commissions to do post office buildings, you know, the big statues on top of buildings in Boston and Philadelphia, which the Treasury Department builds. I didn't know that they were responsible for the building. And that's how he supports himself. So his father is, now whether that's appropriate or not, we can debate. But his father is very open about it. And he definitely, until Dan at about the age of 29 or 30, is secure enough to go off on his own without his father's patronage and intervention. His father means everything to him and to his career. He sort of stick around until he's about 37 years old. I mean, he's with his parents for a long, long time, it seems. Well, he does establish an independent life back in Concord. But he lives in the family home. And his brother comes in and out. His sister and the sister's husband come in and out. And in the summer his father and stepmother come back. So, yeah, he's around. He's in the family unit and he builds his own studio about 200 feet from his house. So he doesn't stray too far. Only later does he rent studio space in Boston and really start moving in a more independent direction. Very dependent on his father, for sure. He does come across in your book as being a bit of a ladies' man. But a ladies' man who's kind of not willing to commit. He has this very... I mean, he's 37 years old when he gets married. He has this long-term relationship apparently at least a few years with Thomas Ball's daughter, Lizzie. But he kind of dumps her at the docks when he returns from Europe. So they're traveling together with her family and then he arrives. His father is there waiting for him and it doesn't seem like he even says goodbye to her. I should have written it that way. That's really... That's what I got out of it. So running it from a guy's perspective, well, it's over. You know, they had a very strange relationship. She was the great beauty of Florence, the expat American beauty in Italy. And he developed a crush on her and wrote to his family about her. I don't know if she really reciprocated it. That's the thing. I think she had lots of suitors and she married a sculptor, which annoyed French tremendously, made him very jealous. So he was flirtatious but not terribly committed. He had a great head of hair. I was so happy that he lost his hair. I just think, you know, it's poetic justice. And then when he finally gets married, he marries his first cousin. Which he was concerned about and did research about to find out what impact such a relationship might have on their children. And they resisted getting together and he did not commit while his father was alive. He thought perhaps his father was not able to handle it. His stepmother was fine and they really stayed away from each other even though she summered at the Concord house as well. And she was, you know, seven or eight years younger than him and an occasional model for him. So this is a complicated romantic and personal life. But they did marry. They postponed their wedding. They had a June wedding, I think, scheduled for Washington. She's from Washington. And at this point his father is still situated. I'm sorry, he's not situated here. But her family is here. And he has produced a model for a statue of Thomas Gallaudet for Gallaudet College. And Augustus St. Gaudens comes to look at it. And St. Gaudens was the more famous sculptor at this point. But they weren't that far apart in age. So they had a strange relationship too. They were competitors, friends, and St. Gaudens was always the senior guy. The more famous. The one who did Lincoln first. And St. Gaudens apparently said something to him about the Gallaudet. Something on the order of, the legs are too short. So he was really upset. And he told Mary, Mary French, that they couldn't get married in June because he had to fix the sculpture. So she waited and she said we got married in the hottest city in the world, in the hottest month in the world. July in Washington. But it was for work. And she realized that was her lot in life. She was going to be, it was not a bad life, but she was going to be traveling and supporting him. He also, she had no creative input into that marriage. He built, he bought a house for her in New York. He decorated it himself. He chose all the wallpaper, all the drapes, all the furniture. Did the same thing when they built a home in Massachusetts. You know, she, she was sort of the child bride in the old, late 19th century sense of things for better or for worse. But he was the boss of the creative side of the family. Now, about his work, it seemed that he was a little anxious with most of his work. You know, that the idea that at the time that his most important work at that point was about to be dedicated, he decides to pack up and go to Europe. Because he's a little concerned about how people are going to respond to it. My patrons, he had patrons that he was worried about. My patrons at the National Trust don't agree with me completely that he didn't, he was anxious about this first work. The first work is the Minuteman, the famous Minuteman in Concord, Massachusetts, which is really the other great iconic work that he did before the Lincoln Memorial. It's been the brand of everything from this great little collection at Chesterwood of labels and advertising materials relating to the Minuteman. Before Jell-O, the first Minut custard had a Minuteman on it. The NRA has a Minuteman logo, the National Guard, Savings Bonds. So it was really a tremendously influential image of American preparedness and instant reaction. He was uncertain about it because he had never done a statue when he got the job. He got the job, his father was influential in Concord. Emerson wanted him to do it. All of the big wigs, the all-cots supported his getting the commission. There was no competition. But again, he had never done a statue and the stories of his doing it are almost comical. You know, to make a mold, you have to turn the plaster upside down and as they're pouring the plaster, the head falls off and he has to hold it up while the plaster is coming down. So it could have been, and his father is holding one end and he's holding the other. It could have been a disaster. And I think he was worried that it would fail. So he took the opportunity to go to Europe. He did not go to Paris, which many of his generation were doing. There was a whole new kind of sculpture and painting. You know, it's the moment of the Impressionists. And he does not stop in Paris for long. And he goes on to Florence because he's interested in the classical tradition. And then the opening day of The Minute Man is the 100th anniversary of the fight at the Concord Bridge in 1875. Now, I know you can't just get on an Alitalia jet and come back and then go back again. But it was a big deal. Ulysses S. Grant managed to come, president of the United States. Ambrose Burnside led his veterans. But Daniel Chester French did not go. And I think he was petrified of what the reaction would be. And it was a sensation. Immediately lauded. But he wasn't there for the ceremony. And he wasn't there for the parties. His father stood in for him at everything. Very proudly. How did he view himself in comparison with other sculptors of his era? Well, of people his own age, like Martin Milmore, whose memorial he lived to do because Milmore died young, he was convinced of his superiority. He was less secure when it came to St. Gauntes. St. Gauntes was a phenomenon. And getting great commissions. And occasionally St. Gauntes would say, you can come along with me and we'll do a death mask together. But I think as long as St. Gauntes lived, French was insecure about his position. St. Gauntes died young and of cancer. And by this time, Daniel Chester French has become a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which should have been enough to convince him of his importance. And he very magnanimously organizes the first American sculpture exhibition at the Met devoted to St. Gauntes. And then he sort of becomes almost a sculpture curator at the Met doing exhibitions, acquisitions, fundraising. And he's very generous about St. Gauntes and helps ensure his reputation. The Met owns hundreds of St. Gauntes models and medals and statuettes and large pieces because French wanted them at the Met. So after St. Gauntes' death, I would say from 1900 to 1930, French is, you know, from the age of 50 to 80, he believes he's the greatest American sculptor. He's certainly racking in the money. You know, he gets $75,000 for the Lincoln Memorial, which is a lot of dough in the year, even in the roaring 20s. And would you say he was the greatest American sculptor? Yeah, I think so. I love St. Gauntes. I had a very nice letter from a critic who is writing about the book. And he said that until he read it, he believed St. Gauntes was in his own class and French was at the top of the second tier. But now he believes that French belongs, at least in the same discussion as St. Gauntes. St. Gauntes might have gotten the commission to do the Lincoln Memorial had he lived. There was actually a move, and I'll show you the slide at some point tonight, when they were building the Lincoln Memorial, you know, it was being financed by the Congress, so they were looking to save money. And it was the costing of fortune and the ground was sinking and the floor was cracking and it was a runaway, budgetarily it was a runaway enterprise. And someone had the idea, why don't we just get a copy of St. Gauntes Chicago Abraham Lincoln The Man, also known as Standing Lincoln. It could save a fortune. And it almost happened. St. Gauntes widow began campaigning for it. And fortunately for French the architect who was doing the building was his long time and frequent collaborator, a young architect named Henry Bacon, with whom he had worked at first in Chicago at the World's Fair of 1893. And Bacon and he conspired to put a stop to it. And then French got the commission. And you make a success of it. You're going to be the greatest American sculptor if you do it right. And I think he did everything, everything about that statue is perfect. Except the back, the story of how it came into existence. And then the little issue of lighting and that kind of thing becomes problematic. Could you share a little bit about his other work? I mean, we know about the Lincoln Memorial, the seated Lincoln Memorial. But what about some of the other works that he did before he got to that point? He did one other really good Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska. They commissioned him to do a standing Lincoln for the state capital. He did a fine job. And you know, the head is tilted down. It's really the way he saw Lincoln. And hands clasped before him. Great story about it. And by the way, when it was dedicated in about 1911, William Jennings Bryan gave the dedicatory address. And he said, is there anyone in this audience who saw Abraham Lincoln? And about a hundred hands shot up. You know, it's 45 years. And I guess it's possible. I saw Linda Johnson once, so, you know, goes back in a big place. But I saw him. When they were previewing the model that he did in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was under a drape. And an elderly lady came up to French who was there with his daughter and said, you know, I saw Abraham Lincoln. He said, oh, that's wonderful. I wish I'd spoken to you before. He said all the right things. And she said yes. And she said I saw him speak. And every time he was ready to speak, he would clasp his hands in front of him and bow his head. And then he would lift up his head and speak. And they undraped. And she said, you saw him too? I was 15 when he died. I know, but he somehow intuited it. So I think that was a great Lincoln work. But here in Washington, it's not in great shape last I saw, but the Admiral Dupont Circle, you know, the Dupont Soul Memorial to Admiral Dupont is by Daniel Chester French. And it has representations of wind and storms to represent a life at sea. It's a beautiful work. The Gallaudet statue at the school is Daniel Chester French. There is a not so successful but interesting piece that's sort of behind the White House grounds called winged victory. It's a world winged, yeah, the arch of victory. It's a winged figure. And it's a World War I memorial commissioned by the big red, the big red one as they call this heroic unit of World War I. And the general who commissioned it didn't like the fact that it was a naked female figure. He thought it was not respectful. And by this point, as like Daniel Chester French said, take it or leave it. But there are, you know, wonderful works all over the country. He did a general grant in Philadelphia. He did a hooker equestrian for Boston. Those who have been to the Guimet Museum in Paris, the Asian Art Museum, may know that there's a George Washington equestrian right outside that museum just by coincidence. It wasn't an Asian Art Museum then. And the Place de Ana and that's his only work overseas. The four continents in front of the Custom House in New York, Richard Morris Hunt Memorial in New York, a fabulous sculpture of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a statue adaptation in Concord, Massachusetts. I'm going to miss something. Thomas Starr King, what is it? Oh, yes, thank you. He had a whole career in college presidents. John Harvard at Harvard University, the Alma Mater at Columbia University, Brooklyn and Queens for the Manhattan Bridge, he had a lot of, he worked until he was 80 and he did a lot of great pieces. Why don't we take a look at some of the slides? Okay. So there he is with the model, but so I just wanted to show you what the Lincoln Memorial might have looked like. Clark Mills, who did a life mask of Lincoln a couple of months before he died, proposed this statue and you see where it was to be located. And a Lincoln enthroned with equestrians beneath and identifiable war heroes. Congress never really got the money together. Vinnie Rehm's sculpture is here in Washington, you know, in the U.S. Capitol. Thomas Ball, controversial then, controversial now, either lifting up or meeting a kneeling slave. French studied under Thomas Ball in Florence, so he would have seen this model and known of that work. And this is, of course, the St. Godin's in Chicago from 1887, unveiled by Abraham Lincoln's grandson. He can't do much better than that. Here's the minute man and here's Daniel Chester French when he goes off to Florence and adopts a kind of Bohemian toad there. And this is the Nebraska, the Lincoln Nebraska. And this is a French appointed, when he's appointed by William Howard Taft to head the First National Commission of Fine Arts, whose job is to complete the National Mall and hire the sculptors. The only problem is he doesn't want to leave when he gets the job for the Lincoln Memorial. He doesn't seem to recognize there's a conflict, but he does eventually leave. I think you, Washingtonians, will be interested in this. The Lincoln Memorial site was a matter of a lot of controversy. We all take it for granted that it's where it is in the mall. There was more controversy about where to put it than who should sculpt it and who should design it. One of the suggestions was Union Station. I love this shot because it's obviously not much around it as it's being built. Another suggestion is that it'd be where the shady statue of Grant is at the foot of Capitol Hill. The soldier's home was chosen as an alternative. The Naval Observatory on E Street, I thought it was appropriate to have a distant shot for an observatory as if it was taken from another observatory. I'm not even sure I've ever been to Meridian Hill Park. Not too far from Howard. It has a statue of James Buchanan, so it's not exactly appropriate. This is the area that was under consideration as well, West Potomac Park. It was a swamp at that point. This is Uncle Joe Cannon, the Nancy Pelosi of his day. The fierce speaker of the house. He had seen Lincoln in the flesh. He said, I will never let a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, be built in that goddamn swamp. He threatened to use his weight to locate it at Arlington in the Confederacy. There were lots of other choices being bandied about. Halfway between here and Gettysburg, Wendy would have liked that a shorter trip. Halfway in the contiguous center of the United States, wherever the actual center of the United States is. This is Henry Bacon, the young man who designed the memorial and who was beholden to French and hired French. Of course, he immediately, he did not compete. Really, he was assigned it. And the Greek temple, Parthenon-like temple, was his idea. And then it begins. What about the Mills Project? There are other projects before this one, so could you tell us a little bit about that earlier project that didn't quite make it? The problem with all of the early projects is that no one could agree on the design. No one really could agree on the site. And then once Democratic Congresses began coming in, they wouldn't appropriate the money for a statue to Lincoln. The Democrats are by and large blocks built by Southern Democrats. And they did not want a national memorial to Abraham Lincoln. And not until there was a Republican House and Senate in the Roosevelt era, Teddy Roosevelt, was there actually an appropriation to do this. And it's only like $100,000 for everything. And it still was very tough to get through. So they were dealing with this for almost 40 years before anyone could decide and could finance it. And then when they did it oddly enough, after all of that drama, after all of that indecision, Henry Bacon is the one and only guy who's chosen as architect. And Bacon makes sure his senior friend, Daniel Chester French, gets the commission. This is the most coveted commission in American sculpture up to that point. There are people who want to do it. I found a letter from our friend Vinny Rean, who was by then older, married, but still sculpting. And she said, I'd like to be considered. I don't know what that letter is in the archives, by the way. A little shout out to the archives, which has a fantastic collection relative to the National Commission. This photo is from the archives, by the way. That's up there now of the construction. Guts and burglar was hoping to do it. And he had already crafted a head that ultimately he used for Mount Rushmore. But there really wasn't much discussion of it. Once they got the money, it was Bacon and French. And so how much did it cost to build it? It's hard to find an exact accounting. Yeah, I wonder why. So $50,000 was the cost of the sculpture. But in the middle of the project, French came down to look at this building. I'll show you just a couple of more iterations as it grows before you. Again, these are all from the archives. So when the atrium is done, well, French goes down to look at it and says, A, I'm not going to do bronze, one of the choices because the pink marble in here is just beautiful. It calls out for white marble for contrast. But B, I've been contracted to do a 12-foot sculpture and it's going to be lost in this building. And he decided he had to do a 19-foot sculpture, which would have added about 35% to the sculpture budget. Another $25,000 or $30,000, which was a lot. And they said no. So French designed a head that was in proportion to a 19-foot sculpture. He brought it down to D.C. He had it hoisted in the atrium by ropes to the position it would be in. And then he called in Robert Lincoln and others to look at it. And they all said, well, this is perfect. It can't be anything other than this. And that's how he got the supplemental appropriation. I don't know what the building cost, frankly. It's hard to find the accounting, but it did encounter a lot of problems. They built it on marshland. And you and I have been in the undercroft, the basement area, which is taller than the memorial is above ground. It is huge and it's got gigantic pillars. And the bottom of it is sort of just mud. Exactly. Very uneven. And it began to sink as soon as the weight was built on top. The first steps cracked, the atrium cracked. So it settled. And that, again, cost extra money. And then I am an advisor now to a project that David Rubenstein is sponsoring to create a public space in this undercroft. So at some point it will happen. And there will be a visitor center, a bookstore, restrooms, which visitors will appreciate. And it will be a public space that will be very popular. Because a lot of workers left graffiti down there. Some of it suitable for families. Some not so. And it has just a strange aroma. It's dank down there. But if it's 90 degrees outside, it's cool downstairs. If it's freezing upstairs, it's warm downstairs. It's like a cave. It's an extraordinary place. It will be wonderful. Let's talk a little bit about the dedication. Can I get up to that in the slides? Quickly, this is just some of the research that French turned to photographs of Lincoln life mask. You see he put nails in it to do measurements. That's how these guys work. Lincoln's hands, French's own hands. This is his first model. See the feet are a little different, a little larger. And then you see the model that he produced for carving. And this is the head that I talked about. It's now preserved in the New York Historical Society with a label that doesn't tell the full story. I beg them to explain it. Just a shout out to these guys. Immigrants from Italy. The Pichirilli brothers. They had a gigantic studio right near where Yankee Stadium is in the Bronx. They were French's marble cutters of choice. And they carved the Lincoln Memorial from his specifications. So, you know, Daniel Chester French was not Michelangelo. He didn't sit with a block of marble and do the chipping away. At this point in the history of art and the creation of art, he did a clay model. He supervised its translation into plaster. He enlarged it successively. And when he felt he had a suitable model that these kinds of guys could do, he would bring the model up to the Bronx as he did and they took over. And he would visit once a week and polish things and tell them what they were doing right and wrong. So why don't they get some of the credit for the creation? They will in the new, in the undercrawl. Because French was the celebrity. You know, you're right. They whited the marble cutters in Georgia who were basically enslaved people. They were prisoners on work. They are going to get credit too in Washington. And I think they have in another area of the city of the district. And here they are working on the head. Okay, now we're going to get to the dedication. Here's the dedication day. Here's Dan French on the left and Henry Bacon on the right. Installing the statue on the site. Little by little. They're both standing in front of it now. French who's now in his 70s would climb up those two ladders to polish stuff off on the final piece. And here's Memorial Day 1922. The crowd begins to arrive. Robert Lincoln comes. And now we get to the ceremony. And so what's interesting about the beginning of your book is that you start with the dedication. And you start with the fact that this sculpture, this memorial actually that's supposed to symbolize inclusiveness actually expresses exclusiveness or a segregation of the races at the actual dedication. Why don't you describe that for us. One of the things that is overlooked now is that this statue, this memorial is dedicated to sectional reconciliation, not racial reconciliation. That meaning was only derived 15 years after its dedication. So that's the first given. This is supposed to be, you know, it's tilted to face the south, all this stuff. So when I did the book, I read a wonderful study and I read newspaper accounts of the dedication both in the white press and the African-American press. The crisis, the New York age and other newspapers. And there are two different stories. One is of a great event with 75,000 people, one of the great days in American history. But the black press tells a different story because members of the African-American community came early to this event feeling a great kinship to Abraham Lincoln and got what they hoped would be great seats for the event. Well, after a couple of hours in the seats, they were rousted out of the seats by mounted police, many of them Southern born, many of them using the n-word and other epithets to get them out and move to the back right about where the reflecting pool is on backless benches. Some members of the community stayed, others did not, including a man whose name I've forgotten, but he was the first African-American Rhodes scholar. Elaine Locke. Professor at Howard University. He said, I'm not staying. And he walked out. I think this is, okay, this is the other part of the story. So that's one part of the ugliness of this day. And that's, you know, why I started it that way. I think a flawed dedication on this scale should be the lead. So I started with the ceremony and the two different ways of looking at it. The two blind, you know, the white press is blind to the outrage here. So this is Robert Russell Moten. He is the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington's successor. And I guess a safe choice for white America to choose, a conservative African-American leader, as was Washington, to quote represent his race at the dedication. And unlike the white speakers of the day, he was required to submit his text in advance to the planners, to the Lincoln Commission and to the Harding White House, Warren Harding White House. Well, in his text, he wrote rather boldly for him, I thought, until there is true equal opportunity in this country, then we cannot say that the Lincoln's work is finished. His unfinished work is still unfinished, and this sculpture is a hollow mockery. So the Harding people said to him, well, you can't say this. And he said, well, you know, that's what I'm saying. And they said, well, you can either cut it or you can retire from the proceedings. So he decided it was more important to be part of the ceremony and he deleted all the censored passages from his speech. So members of the African-American community and the public at large did not know this. But that was, the speech was not published in full until, I think, the Moten papers were released. And Edna and I were there when, for the 75th anniversary of the actual event, when we were members of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, we invited the current president of the principle of Tuskegee Institute to read the full speech belatedly, very belatedly. So it was a very counterintuitive, brutal dedication. And we don't realize that this was what the Lincoln Memorial was until the late 1930s. But again, it was a symbol of, and the white speakers that day, Taft, Harding, Edwin Markham, the poet, were all talked about the restored relations between North and South. Oh, I think I left out one detail of the story because it's probably too horrible to recall, but I should. The spaces that the African-American, the early arrival African-American visitors had occupied were then taken by Confederate veterans wearing their uniforms. So it's pretty brutal. Absolutely. But that was America at that time. 1922. Absolutely. And it's interesting because Harding, I don't know, this is a segue, but Harding had a sort of a mixed record on race. And his wife, who's otherwise best known as a suspect in his early death, was actually interested in civil rights. It's unusual in the 20s. But again, the Republican Party was more interested in opportunity for African-Americans in the early 20s than the Democrats. And you do have that change over by the 1930s when African-Americans do abandon the Republican Party and move to the Democratic Party because of the kinds of things that the Republican Party is doing at the time. Exactly. And Roosevelt's very forceful push for the African-American vote. Yes, absolutely. But also Taft, who is the chairman of this, the emcee, he had continued TR's sort of cautious outreach to the African-American community. Wilson overturned the integration of the federal bureaucracy that Taft had sustained. So it's just a bizarre event and just unspeakable and inexplicable in many ways. But the memorial changes in a few years by the late 1930s. An event occurs that really does give that memorial a different kind of feel, especially to people of color. I think I have the picture. Well, that's just it. There it is. And I feel so privileged that I work these days in Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's home in New York City. The house that they occupied until they left for Washington for the inauguration. So in 1939, as I'm sure many of you know, Marion Anderson was scheduled to sing at Constitution Hall at the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution up near the White House. And the D.A.R. said, that's not happening. This is 1939. We don't have African-Americans in the D.A.R. Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt interceded. And she called Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, and they arranged for Marion Anderson to sing not for 700 people, but to sing for 75,000 people. Who came to the Lincoln Memorial, it was Eleanor's idea, sing at the Lincoln Memorial on a rainy Easter Sunday in 1939. And millions more heard her on the radio singing My Country Tis of Thee and Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen and Other. It was a brief concert. It's on YouTube. If you want to hear a voice beyond belief, that concert is scratchily immortalized on YouTube. So overnight, the memorial becomes a totally different place. The statue bears a totally different meaning. Instead of celebrating reunification under the terms of the 19-teens and 20s, it becomes the backdrop for national aspiration. And then I think it also helped by, I have to give a little credit to Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra, because that same year Mr. Smith goes to Washington, comes out. And where does this idealistic senator go for inspiration? He goes to the Lincoln Memorial where a child reads the words of the Gettysburg address that are inscribed there and where reaction shots show children, old people, and an African-American man. Listening. And Capra was told not to include a person of color in the scene because then the film would not be distributable in the south. This is 1939, but he did it anyway. And that reaction shot also helps change the image of the Lincoln Memorial. And of course, lots of people are introduced to the power of that memorial as a consequence of the march on Washington and 60s. I mean, these events are, of course, here's one event that I found out about after I wrote the book. But in 1947, Harry Truman, descendant of Confederate veterans, spoke at the final meeting of the NAACP in the final day of the NAACP conference in Washington. This is 1947. And the speech is at the Lincoln Memorial. And I don't know if you see her back there, but her head is turned away. In the front row on the right is Eleanor Roosevelt watching him. And a few months after this speech, Truman did something that even Roosevelt didn't do, which is integrate the American military. And he gave a really good speech that day. If you read the text, it's a speech about tolerance and about equal opportunity. And of course, this is the famous day of the march on Washington. And you may see some familiar faces here. A Philip Randolph in the center, Roy Wilkins on the right. And that young man in the center, that handsome young man in the center is the great John Lewis. See him right here? And of course, this is the day that Dr. King brought yet another layer of meaning and aspiration. He spoke directly about the Emancipation Proclamation and the memorial in his speech as we stand in the shadow of this memorial where 100 years ago, et cetera. So I found so many interesting visitors. Fidel Castro came to visit the Lincoln Memorial. Does anybody remember the day that Richard Nixon decided to go meet war protesters at the Lincoln Memorial? This is not a Photoshop picture. That is, Nixon meeting a hippie. And then it's the backdrop for, you know, it's sort of now a tradition that the president-elect on his last night as president-elect goes to the Lincoln Memorial for some sort of ceremony. So you see it's become a tradition. No, that has nothing to do with Trump. I have that later. This is Maldon's famous cartoon of, again, it's the Lincoln Memorial evolving into a symbol of national moment and national feeling. This is November 23, 1963. This is the Lincoln Memorial in representational mourning for all of us at the death of John Kennedy. And I found at least 10 fist bump cartoons from Election Day 2008, the Lincoln Memorial meeting Barack Obama. And I have been asked, is there a Lincoln Memorial cartoon about Election Day 2016? And there is. I think it's just a surprise. So that's most of my pictures. This is French's last visit to the memorial in about 1930. Great. Well, we're going to give you a chance to ask some questions. So please come to the microphones on each side. Yes. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm a college student here in the Washington, D.C. area. And I've been interested in history and Abraham Lincoln for several years. One thing that I was wondering is, do you know if Daniel Chester French's parents and family were involved in anti-slavery activities? I would say they were living in an abolitionist town. They were anti-slavery. They were involved. The judge was involved in a couple of defenses of, quote, runaways in their time. But again, it was kind of an insulated ethereal community. But you know, they were in a community with Emerson. They knew garrison. So those were their pals. And they were, if not activists in the movement, they were friends of movement leaders. But like, I would think like many abolitionists, they might have believed in freedom for African-Americans, but did not necessarily believe, or did not necessarily see African-Americans in the same light that they would. They're friends next door. Right. Because I'm reminded of the passage in your book where you're talking about French's wife, Mary, who, when she's talking about what it was like living in Washington in the post-Civil War era, she referred to African-Americans as darkies. Right. And said some rather disparaging things about them. Right. So Mary, the wife was a Washingtonian, which meant that she was living in, you know, sort of the Southern society. Right. Dan was New Englander through and through. Again, not to say he knew people of color. Like many abolitionists, the theoretical belief in freedom and opportunity was there, but they didn't know people of color. Right. The people of color that Dan knew in later years were people who worked for him. And, you know, the separate but equal culture was probably what he would have been most comfortable with. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. In the early part of your presentation, you were showing pictures of concept drawings or studies for what the monument was going to look like, and you mentioned that it took on the appearance of the Parthenon. Was there a reason why he went in ancient Greek references and something so large where several of the studies you showed were more, well, some cases or innate, but they were smaller in footprint? So I think Bacon chose the Greek style. A, because he believed it was appropriate to symbolize democracy in its purest aspirational form. And I think because he also thought that that style, that Parthenon-like style, with columns and an open entrance would welcome the appearance of a god inside, as there had been a god inside the original Parthenon. And in this case it would be American deity Abraham Lincoln. And I think they had a very harmonious conception of what the result would be, the Greek influence, but also, you know, little nods to American history, 36 of those giant pillars around the memorial that would represent the 36 states of the Reunited States in 1865. The names of all the states, the murals, the words of the Gettysburg address. So there was a certain harmony, but I think it begins with the, you know, Greek democracy in its purest and original form. The Park Service usually points out that the eyes of Lincoln and the eyes of Grant are actually the same height, so they look directly into each other's eyes. Was that a French thing or the Grant sculpture dude thing? Or a National Park Service thing. And also when you say $75,000, that's not what he was paid. That's the cost of the sculpture or what? In all of French's commissions, he kept really good record books, but I think they're a little bit like the financial statements that candidates issue. It's very hard to figure out what he's, yes, he is paying his contractors. So out of his $75,000, he pays the pictureillies. He pays his staff, his molders, his plaster people, and how much of that he gets to keep, he keeps as much as he can. So it's hard to find what his net was. Now, oh, I think it's a complete coincidence that his eyes match the Shreddy Grant, which is a really great sculpture. And, you know, it was dedicated around the same time as the Lincoln Memorial, but with much less fanfare. I think it's a coincidence and it's almost like the urban legend. And I'm amazed that nobody's asked this yet. I hope it's not your question. Oh, it is? Okay. You ask. I was going to ask a question about another body part of the statue, the sculpture being the hands. There are a lot of stories. What is the true story? Okay. So I'm sorry, I inhibited, I ruined the question. So apparently, Lincoln's hands, as they sit, if you look at his fingers a certain way, it spells out A-L in sign language. And the question remains, or lingers, did Daniel Chester French do that intentionally? Being the sculptor of Gallaudet, would he have been doing sort of an homage to himself and to his one-time patron, the Gallaudet family? I don't see any evidence of it at all. It's too much based on the actual plaster cast of Lincoln's own hands that are the reference point for every sculptor who ever did a statue of Abraham Lincoln. And I take everyone at their word, being not a person who is familiar with sign language, that it miraculously spells A-L. But I don't think it's another one of those urban legends. So we have no additional questions? Well, let me just remind you on the title of the book. It's Monument Man, the Life and Art of Daniel Chester French on sale at your local bookstores and here at the National Archives. And Harold will be taking the time to sign your copies if you would like. So if we don't have any other questions, and Harold, you have no additional comments? I'm just happy that the book is actually being published next week. And it couldn't be more appropriate to preview it anywhere than here in Washington and with such a dear friend as you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you.