On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  As soon as Moore heard of Mrs. Keyes’s plans for the Lee mansion, he strongly objected to making the place a memorial to the Confederate general. Lee already had countless shrines, Moore argued, so why create another? Instead, he urged the quartermaster to emphasize the mansion’s architectural heritage, as one of the first Greek Revival homes in the United States, from the days of George Washington Parke Custis. Restoring the interior to the florid Victorian style of the Lees would clash with the clean, cool neo-Greek exterior, Moore believed. He even tried to divorce the family’s name from the house—calling it not the Lee Mansion, as most people did, but the Arlington Mansion. “It is eminently proper that the name Arlington Mansion should be applied to the house,” he told the quartermaster, “and that it should be refitted both as to the house itself and the grounds immediately surrounding it, as a home representative of the first fifty years of the Republic”—and not, he implied, as the home of the Lees.14

  In the end, Moore lost his skirmish with the Confederate ghost. Congress passed Cramton’s bill extolling the general’s “exalted character, noble life, and eminent services” and established the residence as his memorial. The bill, which pointedly referred to the house as the Lee Mansion, authorized the secretary of war to restore the place “to the condition in which it existed immediately prior to the Civil War, and to procure, if possible, articles of furniture and equipment which were then in the mansion and in use by the … Lee family.”15

  President Calvin Coolidge signed the legislation in March 1925. Because budgets were tight in the postwar era, it took another four years for Congress to appropriate one hundred thousand dollars for renovations.16 As soon as the money came through, the quartermaster plunged into the project, dispatching workers to restore mantels and fireplaces, repair sagging floors, replace old hardware and rotten framework, and rebuild crumbling walls within the house. Chandeliers and chimneys were put into working condition; electrical wiring was modernized; General Lee’s heating system was torn out and converted to a modern one, placed outside the mansion to reduce the risk of fire. Maj. L. M. Leisenring, an army architect overseeing research for the project, combed through archives and interviewed former slaves to gather authentic information about the mansion and grounds.17

  An invaluable source for this living history was James Parks, the slave who had been born at Arlington, had grown up there, and had continued working on the estate long after the Civil War. He helped Leisenring locate the conservatory where the Custises and Lees had raised camellias; pinpointed the rooms where G. W. C. Custis had set up his office; recalled how Custis had played his fiddle for dances down by the river; and meticulously described the layout of the stables and slave quarters, which allowed them to be reconstructed with historical accuracy. He provided details about the summer kitchen, the smokehouse, the old vegetable garden, and the covered well from which he and generations of slaves had drawn water for their masters.18 When project managers found a drawing of the mansion from 1853, they noticed that it depicted balustrades around the upper wings, an architectural element long since missing from the house. Quizzed about it, Parks vividly remembered how, in her more nimble days, Mrs. Lee would climb out of an upstairs window to stroll around the roof on the mansion’s north wing: “Miss Mary used to come out from dat window up dere and walk around on dat roof, and she suregwine to fall and break her neck if dey ain’t no fence up dere to stop her,” said Parks, his language recorded in the dialect formulaic for those times.19

  Trusting his testimony, restorers replaced the copings just as he described them. He had established himself as a reliable witness, never prone to exaggerate or to jumble the facts.20 “He was very careful in answering questions to answer them in accordance with his memory and not to fake any of the information,” Leisenring reported. “If he didn’t remember … he candidly said so, or explained why he was not familiar with the matter … I asked him many questions regarding the … summer kitchen building. He described it quite minutely and although some of the entrances which he said were there had been filled in, and the stone or brick work stuccoed over, I tore off some of the stucco to verify the location of the doors … and found the wooden lintels … He had an unusually good memory of things connected with the place of bygone years.”21

  The restoration was just getting under way when James Parks died in August 1929. He was said to be eighty-six years old, and in the phrase of the Washington Evening Star, which gave him a page-one obituary, he was the “last of the home folks” from “those far-off days of stately minuets and crinoline and old lace.”22 Affectionately known in his later years as “Old Uncle Jim,” Parks had grown up among the Lee children, seen them disappear with the war, walked among Union forces camped on the hills, and witnessed the rise and fall of Freedman’s Village. He had dug the first graves for military burials at Arlington and watched the white tombstones proliferate with each new war. He had married at Arlington, fathered twenty-two children there, and sent five of his sons to serve in World War I, from which all returned safely. He vividly remembered President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation but credited G. W. P. Custis with his freedom, because that is what Custis had stipulated in his will. Parks had known the mansion when it was new, witnessed its decline, and, here at the last, contributed to its revival, which must have been a satisfying way to close the circle on an eventful life.23

  His friends at the War Department arranged a memorable farewell for Parks, whose last wish was to be buried at Arlington. He was assigned a prominent grave close by the Fort Myer Gate. More than sixty friends and family members turned out for the ceremony. On a steamy August day, they gathered around his grave as an Army chaplain read the burial service, soldiers snapped off a three-rifle salute, and James Parks returned to his home soil in fine military style. A few months later, a commemorative tablet appeared on his grave, placed there by the American Legion in tribute to the courtly man who had been so much a part of Arlington. “In appreciation of his faithful service the Secretary of War granted special permission to bury his mortal remains in this National Cemetery,” the tablet read. “Requiescat In Pace.”24

  Workers brought the Lee mansion slowly back to life. Leisenring explained that the restoration, largely completed by 1934, was meant to give visitors the impression that the family “had gone out for the afternoon and would soon return.”25 This notion was reinforced when the superintendent and gardener moved out of the mansion in 1932 to new offices in the plantation’s refurbished stables, a miniature version of the main house with its central hall and symmetrical wings. Removing cemeterial functions from the mansion underscored the building’s historical standing and furthered its new role as a memorial to the Lees.26

  Undaunted by his failure to make the house an architectural specimen of the Custis period, Charles Moore of the Fine Arts Commission turned his attention to Arlington’s landscape design, where his influence was more readily felt. Here, emphasizing the mansion’s colonial setting, its classical lines, and its superb views down the river, Moore urged the quartermaster to dig up colorful flower beds near the mansion and replace them with grass and boxwoods more in keeping with the cemetery’s sober purpose and the early Republican style. He also asked that heavy iron vases in front of the house be “taken out and lost” and recommended colonial-style walkways of brick or gravel to replace paved ones around the house. He railed against a pavilion known as the Temple of Fame, a tin-roofed eyesore the late General Meigs had built with columns salvaged from the Patent Office fire of 1877. After years of resistance, the Army razed the Temple of Fame and Moore’s landscape plans gradually took hold at Arlington, where his suggestions reduced clutter, soothed the palette of hillside plantings, and called attention to the house’s dignified architectural lines. In the end, Moore’s contribution greatly enhanced views of—and from—the heights of Arlington.

  Civilians who crossed the river to visit graves or check on progress at the Lee mansion soon found their way to the new Memorial Amphithe
ater and the Tomb of the Unknown, where no sentries were present to enforce decorum. By 1923 enterprising photographers had set up shop and were charging for pictures. The cameramen irreverently posed subjects around the tomb and even encouraged young ladies to sit on the sarcophagus for portraits. This was just one of the indignities visited upon America’s hero of the Great War. Men approached his shrine with their hats on; others stubbed out cigarettes on the marble plaza; some enjoyed picnicking on the nearby hills; others strolled around laughing and talking excitedly, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings.27

  It was not long before complaints began flowing to the Army brass in Washington. “We do not honor our Unknown as well as those in France do,” Maj. R. H. Fletcher wrote the adjutant general in 1922, recalling the Europeans who had inspired America to honor its nameless warrior in the first place. “If our people do not understand,” Mabel Brown wrote to General Pershing from Norfolk, Virginia, “could not the tomb be protected against them?”28

  The answer—from Pershing, from Quartermaster General William H. Hart, and from Secretary of War John W. Weeks—was no. Aggravated by tight postwar budgets and force reductions, Weeks informed a member of the American War Mothers organization that there was no structure for billeting sentries at the tomb and therefore no way to post guards there; it apparently never occurred to him that such barracks might be built or that men from Fort Myer might be encouraged to walk a few hundred yards downhill to Arlington for sentry duty. “It is realized that the placing of an armed sentry at this tomb … would lend dignity to the Shrine,” Weeks wrote in December 1922, “but in view of the fact above noted, it is regretted that it is not considered advisable to issue instructions to this effect at this time.”29 In a less roundabout explanation, a deputy from Pershing’s office dismissed complaints about the Army’s stewardship at the tomb, which was placed so far off the tourist track that it did not merit a full-time guard, in the opinion of Brig. Gen. H. H. Bandholtz.

  “As is well known,” Bandholtz told the adjutant general, “the average visitor to Washington, or the average citizen of the city, can reach the distantly located tomb only with great difficulty, and it is not and never will be visited by the thousands of visitors as is done in England, France, and Italy.”30 Posting a sentry at the tomb, he argued, would “not lend dignity to the shrine, and would … work a real hardship on the soldier required to do sentry duty there, and in time this feeling of irritation, transmitted from sentry to sentry, would unquestionably detract from the respect and veneration in which the shrine is now held … Furthermore, the average American visitor … would probably not even notice the fact that a sentry was stationed nearby.”31

  Despite the opposition of Bandholtz and like-minded officers, the War Department eventually took steps to protect the tomb, largely because the place had become a magnet for visitors who found conditions wanting at Arlington and complained about it. After the Washington Post called attention to rowdy crowds and litter around the tomb, the Army erected a picket fence, rousted commercial photographers from the area, and posted a civilian guard there later in 1923. The watchman had “strict orders to keep visitors from the top of the Tomb, and picnickers are not allowed in the vicinity,” Quartermaster William Hart reported. But he warned that hired guards could do nothing to prevent visitors from wearing their hats or smoking at the tomb.32 This changed in 1926, when veterans’ groups shamed the War Department into posting armed soldiers to “prevent any desecration or disrespect” at the tomb. A few years later, the sentries, originally assigned to patrol during daylight hours when the cemetery was open, were put on duty around the clock, a practice that has continued without interruption since 1937. With this, what had begun as a reluctant duty became one of the proudest traditions of the service.33

  Just as the first contingent of sentinels shouldered their Springfields and began patrolling the tomb, Congress came through with funds to construct a substantial new sarcophagus over the temporary one, which had been in place since Armistice Day ceremonies in 1922. The original monument’s plain style and unfinished condition—and the government’s long delay in completing it—provoked widespread criticism in newspapers across the nation, which prodded lawmakers to set aside fifty thousand dollars for completing the tomb in July 1926.34 Congress authorized the secretary of war to secure competitive designs. Seventy-four plans were submitted. From these the Fine Arts Commission and other experts awarded the winning design to Lorimer Rich as architect and Thomas Hudson Jones as sculptor in 1929. Their plan was simple to the point of severity. It used the old tomb as a base for a new sarcophagus, an oblong marble box more than thirteen feet long and eleven feet tall. The spare, classically inspired figures—representing Victory, Valor, and Peace—were to be carved on the eastern end of the tomb facing Washington; its western end, at the edge of the amphitheater terrace, was saved for the inscription “here rests in honored glory an “American” soldier known but to god.” Side panels were to be decorated with inverted laurel wreaths and Doric columns. None of these visions could be realized until the raw material—three massive blocks of white marble weighing a total of more than eighty tons in the raw—was ordered from the Yule Marble Quarry in Marble, Colorado, the same company that had provided stone for the Lincoln Memorial.35

  It took a year of trial and error before acceptable pieces of marble could be extracted from the quarry, located near a mountaintop at ten thousand feet. After three attempts, workers finally cut a suitable fifty-ton die block, the main component for the new tomb; it took three more tries to extract the eighteen-ton tomb base, while the third component, a fourteen-ton capstone, was freed from the mountain on the first try and pronounced perfect. Then the massive pieces were shipped by rail to Vermont, trimmed down, and finished smooth before the rail journey to Arlington, where the three separate elements had arrived by September 1931. There a timber A-frame was erected over the old tomb and the new base was hoisted into place and painstakingly lowered onto the amphitheater terrace—whereupon project managers from the quartermaster’s office discovered a flaw in the new marble. All work came to a halt for three months while a replacement stone was cut and the pattern was repeated, from Colorado to Vermont to Virginia. While this part of the project dragged on, workers at Arlington focused on another phase of the design, which called for opening views down to the river from the amphitheater terrace. There, where a retaining wall had been built into the side of a hill to form the plaza in 1922, crews demolished the wall, graded a slope to the river, and installed a long flight of marble steps cascading down into the cemetery. This opening provided sweeping vistas across the Potomac, where the newly completed Lincoln Memorial anchored the view from Arlington to the National Mall.36

  Work on the tomb resumed in December 1931, when the replacement marble base arrived from Vermont. The defective piece was lifted away, the new one fitted in its place, and the massive die block rolled into position over the old tomb. On the last day of 1931, the capstone was sealed over the marble box, ending more than six years of delay. After all the mishaps and waiting, it was at last time for Thomas Hudson Jones to begin carving the decorative figures into the die block, a commission he finished in a matter of weeks. The completed monument was opened to public view on April 9, 1932, with formal dedication ceremonies planned for Armistice Day.37

  By this time, the national cemetery and capital city had been linked by the long-anticipated Arlington Memorial Bridge, a 2,163-foot-long span distinguished by its graceful stone arches and gilded, muscular equestrian statues at either end: “Valor,” “The Arts of War,” “Sacrifice,” and “The Arts of Peace.” Designed by the respected architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White and opened in January 1932, the bridge finished Washington’s riparian landscape in one unified design, extending the National Mall to the Potomac River and linking Lee’s newly restored memorial with Lincoln’s gleaming marble temple.38

  The bridge erased some of the distance remaining between North and South, advancing t
he ongoing work of reunion. But even as this happened, a worsening Depression created new rifts among the survivors of the nation’s most recent war.

  Hard-pressed veterans of the Great War, disillusioned by the government’s delay in paying bonuses promised for their military service, converged on Washington with the spring of 1932 to demand redress. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), their numbers swelled to as many as twenty thousand by July. Rebuffed by Congress and by President Herbert Hoover, the men and their families milled around the Mall, begged citizens for money, haunted vacant government buildings, and set up dozens of camps around Capitol Hill. Some Washingtonians, accustomed to life in a segregated city, were shocked to see that the BEF, unlike the regular Army, was thoroughly integrated; black and white comrades camped together, messed together, and made their rounds of the capital with little regard for racial distinction. Some crossed the new bridge into Arlington, scrounged food from sympathetic soldiers at Fort Myer, and paid respects at the tomb of their unknown comrade. They may have found it ironic, if not perplexing, that the government was willing to lavish thousands of dollars on the dead from their war but withheld funds for living soldiers who came home from Europe to find their farms ruined, their jobs gone, and their prospects diminished.39