OPINION:
To call Washington a “swamp” is usually a tired political cliche. But when we talk about the National Mall, it is also the literal, muddy truth.
When planners began constructing the Lincoln Memorial in the early 1910s, they realized that their grand marble tribute to the Great Emancipator was destined to sink into the Potomac mud. Their solution? Sink 120 massive concrete pillars 50 feet into the ground to hit bedrock.
In doing so, they inadvertently created one of Washington’s best-kept architectural secrets: a sprawling, subterranean cavern known as the undercroft. For more than a century, this 50,000-square-foot concrete expanse — almost twice the footprint of the memorial above it — has been open only once a year to a select few.
But that changes now. Opening this month (June 25, to be exact), a brand-new, 15,000-square-foot immersive museum is finally shedding light on the literal and figurative foundations of America’s most famous monument.
Stepping into the undercroft is less like visiting a traditional museum than it is like entering the vaulted basement of a medieval cathedral. It is raw, industrial and surprisingly damp.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently noted the presence of actual stalactites hanging from the ceiling. “They’re still dripping. And of course, as the rainwater comes through cracks in the granite, it seeps down here, picks up calcium,” he said.
It is a stark, fascinating contrast to the pristine, polished marble of Daniel Chester French’s gargantuan Abraham Lincoln sitting quietly upstairs. Transforming this dripping concrete basement into a state-of-the-art facility — complete with floor-to-ceiling glass walls, immersive theaters and original copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment — was no small feat. It took a cool $69 million, utilizing a public-private partnership.
Billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein fronted a quarter of the necessary funds to pull this project out of the dark.
“I thought it would be a good idea just to have more of an educational role for the Lincoln Memorial,” Mr. Rubenstein told CBS News. For him, the museum is about civic duty as much as it is about architectural preservation. “You can’t really be a great country if you don’t really honor your history and understand your history.”
Crucially, the new museum seeks to humanize the man on the marble throne. Lincoln’s legacy has been chiseled into a flawless mythology over the past century, but the reality was far messier.
“He had a very complicated life,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “He had a lot of tragedy in his life. A lot of his children died before they were very old. [He] had a very complicated marriage as well. But in the end, he rose up to the occasion and became, I think, our greatest president.”
But the Lincoln Memorial hasn’t belonged solely to Lincoln for a very long time. Almost since the day it opened, the monument has served as America’s premier stage for civil rights, a backdrop for our most pivotal national reckonings.
Howard University historian Edna Greene Medford beautifully captured this evolution. “I think it’s still about freedom, hope, and today it’s about inclusion,” she told CBS.
The museum’s interactive exhibits lean heavily into this legacy. They highlight Easter Sunday in 1939, when the brilliant contralto Marian Anderson, barred from performing at indoor venues by the city’s Whites-only policies, sang on the memorial’s steps to a crowd of 75,000.
The museum also immortalizes the 1963 March on Washington, during which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Lincoln’s shadow and declared, “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”
Mr. Burgum was candid about how this administration views the memorial’s narrative role.
“There’s a place to have current cultural debates. And then, there’s a place to just tell and celebrate our history. We’re not a nation without flaws, but we are a nation that was based on continuous improvement. And we may have ’over-rotated’ towards a point of some kind of massive self-criticism because maybe it was expedient, politically, in the short term. It’s important, when we’re using federal dollars, that we tell the story that celebrates this country.”
Whether you view history as a story of triumphant progress or a complicated struggle that is still unfolding, the undercroft offers something truly valuable. By allowing the public to see beneath the floorboards of our national mythology, we get to appreciate the sheer weight, hard work and dripping, calcium-stained imperfections that uphold the American ideal.
It turns out, the best way to understand the monument — and perhaps the country itself — is to finally look at what’s keeping it from sinking into the swamp.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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