The American Spirit Read online

  Harry Truman later said to her, “Mrs. Smith, your declaration of conscience was one of the finest things that has happened here in Washington in all my years in the Senate and the White House.”

  As should be appreciated, too, there is here, and rightfully, an enduring pride that comes with serving one’s country, of navigating with skill and to good effect within this political institution. Congresswoman Barbara Jordan once put it proudly, “I am neither a black politician nor a woman politician. Just a politician, a professional politician.”

  My old friend Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, while standing outside the Capitol on 9/11, said to himself, “Lord, let us get back in there . . . we had to say to the American people that we were here, including our loyal and brave staff.”

  Barbara Jordan

  Think of those who have passed through these very doors. Think of the turning points in our history that have taken place here—here where we are gathered in Statuary Hall, the old House of Representatives.

  It was here that James Monroe, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Millard Fillmore were all inaugurated president . . . here that a foreign citizen addressed Congress for the first time—the Marquis de Lafayette.

  This is historic ground if ever there was. Congress passed the Land Grant College Act here, established the Smithsonian Institution, voted for war on Mexico, a decision strongly opposed by many, including a congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. Here, by acts of Congress, eight states became part of the Union—Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, and California—states that in area nearly doubled the size of the country.

  Acoustics in the hall were erratic, mainly terrible. From certain locations on the floor one could hear what was being said—even whispered—on the far side of the room. At the same time it was next to impossible to hear what was being said from the podium.

  There are old tales of ghostly footsteps echoing here at night. According to one story, a Capitol policeman entered the hall on a New Year’s Eve to find all the statues dancing.

  One of the most moving moments in our country’s story took place just over there. A brass plate on the floor marks the spot.

  In 1831, at age sixty-three—considered quite old at the time—a newly elected member of the House, John Quincy Adams, took his seat. Thirty years earlier, in 1800, his father, President John Adams, had addressed Congress when it convened for the first time in the still unfinished Capitol. John Quincy had been an ambassador several times, a senator, secretary of state, and president. Now he had returned to the same setting where he had been inaugurated president to serve as a mere freshman congressman. It was something no president had ever done and, as he wrote in his diary, no election or appointment had ever conferred on him such pleasure—including the presidency.

  He was short, portly, a bit drab in dress, not at all impressive in appearance, but he soon left little doubt as to where he stood on issues. He was determined, incorruptible. He was also one of the few members of the House whose voice could be plainly heard from the podium, acoustical problems notwithstanding. “Mr. Adams,” wrote Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, “belongs to no local district, no political party, but to the nation and to the people.”

  He loved the House of Representatives, loved the theater of all its proceedings, rarely missing even an hour when the House was in session. He worked fervently to establish the Smithsonian, opposed the war with Mexico with unfailing tenacity, and spoke with an eloquence scarcely equaled then or since—“Old Man Eloquent,” he was called. He was the most ardent and faithful antislavery member of the House of Representatives.

  John Quincy Adams

  Tenacity of purpose burned in him to the very end. February 21, 1848, was the day John Quincy Adams collapsed here at his desk. He died two days later. He had died “in harness,” as said then.

  On February 26, he lay in state here, the room packed with an immense crowd including all members of both houses, the Supreme Court, and President Andrew Jackson. “We have never witnessed a more august spectacle,” wrote one Washington newspaper. “In point of character, as a man and as a politician, none of the public men at Washington,” said the New York Herald, “are approachable to what Mr. Adams was.”

  Two all-important lessons of history stand clearly expressed in this our national Capitol. The first is that little of consequence is ever accomplished alone. High achievement is nearly always a joint effort, as has been shown again and again in these halls when the leaders of different parties, representatives from differing constituencies and differing points of view, have been able, for the good of the country, to put those differences aside and work together.

  I witnessed this firsthand in 1978, during the Senate debate over the Panama Canal Treaty, a measure strongly favored by the Carter administration. My book on the canal, The Path Between the Seas, the result of six years of writing and research, had been published only the year before, and convinced as I was that the treaty was much the wisest course for our country and for Panama, I volunteered as an independent advocate for the treaty and was on hand here on the Hill through several months. At times I had the pleasure of hearing my book quoted on the Senate floor, and by those taking opposite positions. But, so it often is with history. It can serve to validate all kinds of opinions.

  In the course of the debates I saw Republicans and Democrats alike change their point of view and I saw that both sides were trying to do what they felt to be the right thing. I witnessed no animosity, no enmity. In the end it was only when a number of Republicans, and Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee in particular, saw the treaty as the right course and made it a joint effort, that the treaty passed. And it has proven to have been the right decision over the past thirty-eight years.

  The second lesson to be found here is that history is about far more than politics and war only. So much that is most expressive of American life and aspirations and contributions to the human spirit is to be found in the arts—in architecture, paintings, sculpture, and engineering genius. We Americans are builders at heart and in what we build we often show ourselves at our best. You have only to look around at so much to be seen in this great building.

  In view of the current political climate, let me point out, too, how much of what we see throughout the building was the work of immigrants. William Thornton, a physician who won a design competition for the Capitol in 1792, was a native of Tortola in the British West Indies. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the first professional architect to take charge of the design of the building, including this hall, was born and educated in England. James Hoban, the architect who restored the White House after it was burned by the British during the War of 1812, and who also worked on the Capitol, was from Ireland. And Collen Williamson, the stone mason who oversaw the laying of the foundation of the Capitol, was a Scot.

  Benjamin Latrobe by Charles Willson Peale

  Then there was amazing Constantino Brumidi, the artist whose vibrant frescoes fill the uppermost reaches of the great Rotunda under the Capitol dome and whose decorative genius brightens the corridors and hallways of the Senate wing in such a manner as rarely to be seen. A tiny figure who stood only five feet five inches tall, he was exuberant in spirit and produced work here of such monumental scale as had never been seen in our country.

  There was also Carlo Franzoni, the sculptor who did the statue of Clio, the muse of history, over there, above the main door keeping note of the history taking place here.

  Brumidi and Franzoni, as you might imagine, were both from Italy, as were any number of workers, skilled masons, and stonecutters.

  It might also be added that our capital city, Washington, was itself the design of an immigrant, the French engineer Pierre L’Enfant, and that the two finest, most famous movies ever made about Congress, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Advise and Consent, were directed by immigrants, Frank Capra and Otto Preminger, respectively.

  Constantino Brumidi

  And y
es, there were the African American slaves who did much of the work on the Capitol—how many in all will never be known, but play a large part they did. Notable evidence of their labors are the pillars that stand all about us here. “Hired out” by their owners, they cut the marble in the quarries.

  Building and rebuilding the Capitol took more time and labor and patience than many might imagine. Things went wrong. There were angry differences of opinion over matters of all kinds. There were accidents, numerous injuries, and one dramatic, narrow escape.

  At work one day on his frescoes in the upper reaches of the great dome, Brumidi slipped from his scaffold and only just managed to catch hold of a rung of the ladder and for fifteen minutes hung for dear life with both hands some fifty-five feet above the marble floor until a Capitol policeman happened to glance up and rushed to the rescue. Brumidi by then was seventy-two and had been at work in the Capitol for twenty-six years.

  The great dome famously took form through the Civil War and remains as intended the colossal commanding focal point of our capital city. It is primarily the work of two exceptional Americans, architect Thomas U. Walter and structural engineer Montgomery C. Meigs, each a story. Walter started out as a bricklayer. Meigs, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, was all of thirty-six when he took on one of the most challenging engineering assignments ever and created what stands as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century engineering with inner and outer cast-iron shells weighing nearly nine million pounds.

  A great lover of the arts and an artist himself, Meigs also had much to do with the art that was to fill the building—including the part played by Brumidi and the choice of the American sculptor Thomas Crawford to create the nineteen-and-a-half-foot-high Statue of Freedom that would stand atop the dome.

  U.S. Capitol under construction

  The Statue of Freedom, U.S. Capitol

  Completed in 1868, the gleaming dome remains the focal point of our capital city and though there have been modifications and additions to the building in the years since, it remains essentially as it was then, a symbol of freedom, the structure bespeaking more than any other our history, our American journey, evoking and encouraging powerfully pride in our system and, yes, patriotism.

  And now we are in the midst of another election season, which like so many before will determine much to follow—more than we can possibly know.

  Over there above the door, on the side of Clio’s chariot, is the work of the Massachusetts clockmaker Simon Willard. It has been doing its job a long time, since 1837, one hundred and seventy-nine years ago. It ticks on, still keeping perfect time.

  My feeling is Clio, too, is attending to her role now no less than ever, taking note of the history we are and will be making.

  On we go.

  Acknowledgments

  Again I am gratefully indebted to those of my family, friends, and working associates who helped make this book possible: my daughter Dorie Lawson, who over the years made all the arrangements for the speeches I’ve given and who assembled and sorted them and helped select those that seemed most applicable to the present moment in our country; then there was the part played in this same process by my son Geoffrey, Melissa Marchetti, and my gifted research assistant of long standing, Mike Hill; my editor, Bob Bender, whose close reading and suggestions have been, once again, of great help; my literary agent, Morton Janklow, particularly for his immediate enthusiasm for the idea; to all of my family including those grandchildren to whom the book is dedicated, and, above all, as always, to my editor-in-chief, my wife, Rosalee.

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  About the Author

  DAVID McCULLOUGH has been acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history.” His most recent book, the widely praised The Wright Brothers, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Mr. McCullough’s other books include The Greater Journey, 1776, John Adams, Truman, Brave Companions, Mornings on Horseback, The Path Between the Seas, The Great Bridge, and The Johnstown Flood. His books have been published in nineteen languages and none has ever been out of print.

  In addition to his two National Book Awards and two Pulitzer Prizes, David McCullough has twice won the Francis Parkman Prize. He has been honored with the National Book Foundation Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Gold Medal for Biography, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received fifty-four honorary degrees.

  He has been an editor, teacher, lecturer, and familiar presence on public television—as host of Smithsonian World and The American Experience, and narrator of numerous documentaries including Ken Burns’s The Civil War. He is also one of the few private citizens to speak before a joint session of Congress.

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  ALSO BY DAVID McCULLOUGH

  The Wright Brothers

  The Greater Journey

  1776

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  Truman

  Brave Companions

  Mornings on Horseback

  The Path Between the Seas

  The Great Bridge

  The Johnstown Flood

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  Photo Credits

  Page 2: U.S. Senate Historical Office

  Page 4: National Gallery of Art

  Page 7: Library of Congress

  Page 13: Courtesy of Architect of the Capitol/U.S. Capitol Historical Society

  Page 18: University of Pittsburgh

  Page 26: © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello

  Page 30: Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

  Page 35: Courtesy of Union College

  Page 36: Courtesy of Union College

  Page 44: “John Dickinson by Charles Willson Peale, from life, 1782–1783,” courtesy of Independence National Historical Park

  Page 45: “Benjamin Rush by Charles Willson Peale, after Thomas Sully, 1818,” courtesy of Independence National Historical Park

  Page 56: National Gallery of Art

  Page 66: Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library

  Page 70: The Ronald Reagan Library

  Page 71: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum

  Page 74: Bradley Smith, Courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library & Museum

  Page 81: White House Collection/White House Historical Association

  Page 84: Courtesy of The Carpenters’ Company, Philadelphia, PA

  Page 88: National Gallery of Art

  Page 96: Courtesy of Ohio University

  Page 110: Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery

  Page 122: Portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette by Samuel F. B. Morse, 1826, oil on canvas. Photograph by Glenn Castellano, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York

  Page 126: AFP/Getty Images

  Page 131: Library of Congress

  Page 133: Library of Congress

  Page 137: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior

  Page 144: Library of Congress

  Page 146: Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images<
br />
  Page 150: Tom Fox, © 2013, The Dallas Morning News

  Page 154: Photo 12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

  Page 156: Tom Williams/National Archives/Getty Images

  Page 160: LBJ Library, photo by Frank Wolfe

  Page 163: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY

  Page 166: Private Collection, Peter Newark Pictures/Bridgeman Images

  Page 167: Library of Congress

  Page 169: Courtesy of Architect of the Capitol

  Page 170: Bruce Guthrie, photo credit

  Front endleaf: Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society

  Back endleaf: Library of Congress

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  “Simon Willard’s Clock” originally appeared in Brave Companions by David McCullough in 1992 (Simon & Schuster).

  “Power and the Presidency: What’s Essential Is Invisible” originally appeared in Power and the Presidency edited by Robert A. Wilson in 1999 (PublicAffairs).

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