More than 50 years in the making, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is a century old

The Lincoln Memorial is one of Washington DC’s major tourist attractions. It is open 24/7 and attracts seven million visitors annually.

It was here in June 1947 that President Truman became the first US president to address the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and Dr Martin Luther King delivered his famous ‘I have a dream speech’ in August 1963.

Beginning with a reference to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves free in 1863, King said ‘one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free’.

The most quoted line of the speech is undoubtedly: ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!’

The end of May this year marks the centenary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.

A crowd of 50,000 attended the ceremony, while as many as two million listened across the country via radio. Speakers included President Warren G Harding, former president and chief justice of the United States William Howard Taft (who also served as chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, which had overseen the design and construction of the memorial), and Dr Robert Russa Moton, principal of the Tuskegee Institute and the son of former slaves from Virginia.

Dr Moton’s remarks promoting equality among the races were addressed to a segregated audience, a rather shocking demonstration that America still had a long journey to travel.

African-Americans invited to the dedication were directed to a roped-off enclosure. A US Marine is alleged to have told one man, ‘N***ers over here.’

As early as 1867 the US Congress passed a bill to establish a commission to erect a memorial to Abraham Lincoln.

However, the suggested designs did not meet with approval and by the beginning of the 20th century no progress had been made to advance the project. Five more bills went down to defeat in Congress before another bill was passed in 1910.

Construction began on February 12 (the date of Lincoln’s birthday) 1914 – almost 50 years after Lincoln’s assassination. Construction was interrupted by the Great War with the result the monument was not completed until 1922.

The memorial draws its inspiration from Parthenon in Athens and contains a large sculpture of the 16th president seated in contemplation. The seated figure of Lincoln measures 19 feet from head to foot. If Lincoln were depicted standing, he would be 28 feet tall.

There are also inscriptions from two of Lincoln’s most famous speeches: the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address.

The memorial is rich in symbolism. The 36 columns represent the states of the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death. The 48 stone festoons above the columns represent the 48 states in 1922. Inside, each inscription is surmounted by a 60-by-12-foot mural portraying principles seen as evident in Lincoln’s life: Freedom, Liberty, Morality, Justice, and the Law on the south wall; Unity, Fraternity, and Charity on the north. Cypress trees, representing Eternity, are in the murals’ backgrounds.

One of those who attended the ceremony was Robert Todd Lincoln, the eldest and only surviving son of the 16th president. Like his father, a lawyer by profession and a Republican in politics, he had served as secretary of war in the administrations of James Garfield and Chester Arthur and as US ambassador to the UK in Benjamin Harrison’s administration. He was often spoken of as a future presidential candidate but he never actually mounted a bid for the presidency.

Remarkably, Robert had either been present or in close proximity to the assassination of the first three American presidents to meet that fate. Although he did not go to Ford’s Theatre the night his father was shot, he attended his father’s death bed.

In 1881 he was at Washington train station when President Garfield was shot by Charles J Guiteau, a disappointed and delusional office-seeker.

In 1901 he was just outside the building where President McKinley was fatally wounded by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo.

Robert developed a superstitious belief that he was a bad omen for presidents and made a point of declining presidential invitations, pointing out that ‘there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present’.

He made an exception for the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial and happily nothing untoward occurred.

Robert is at the centre of yet another remarkable story. In either late 1863 or early 1864 Edwin Booth, brother of his father’s future assassin, saved Robert from serious injury or death on a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Robert provided an account of this episode in a letter to the editor of ‘The Century Magazine’ 1909: ‘The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn.

‘In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.’

At the time Booth did not know that the man he had assisted was the president’s son but the incident was said to have been of some comfort to Edwin Booth following his brother’s assassination of President Lincoln.