Civil War historian Bruce Catton once said, “Whatever we are looking for, we come to Washington in millions to stand in silence and try to find it.” When I moved to Washington last June, I’m not sure I was looking for anything specific. I’d just spent my undergraduate years trying to ignore dorm study-lounges named after Angela Davis, English courses like “Rock Stars and American Culture,” and guest lectures on “The Sexual Politics of Meat.” I suppose I brought a vague longing to find old verities amid the city’s historic remnants and noble civic spaces.
I arrived with fresh eyes — I’d never seen Washington on a field trip or family vacation. On my first day of sightseeing, I strolled down to the Jefferson Memorial. A group of out-of-town teenagers had gotten there first. They had the slovenly appearance of teenagers, and they were shouting and strutting and making noises with their armpits. And they were utterly unmoved by the memorial — by Jefferson’s splendid words carved inside, or by his tremendous bronze likeness gazing across the Tidal Basin. They seemed impatient to get back to their Britney Spears CDs, and I slunk home in a state of Robert Bork-style gloom.
But the monuments and museums kept drawing me back. American history has a way of dispelling pessimism, as I began to see. On a broiling summer day, I slipped into the cool darkness of the National Archives. It was the Fourth of July weekend — an appropriate time, I felt, for my first look at the Declaration and other founding documents. I was fascinated by the signatures. Near John Hancock’s grandiose autograph on the Constitution was James Madison’s tiny, unassuming signature. It seemed to capture in ink the humility of the man who, more than any other, had shaped the creation and adoption of our basic law.
Next, in a temporary exhibit at the Archives, I saw a letter written by George Washington at Valley Forge. I was struck not by its content but, of all things, by the grace and elegance of Washington’s penmanship. It revealed not only how beautiful handwriting could be in the days before word processing, but also how steady his hand was — suggesting the resolve and judicious temperament a great leader commands, even when the situation is most bleak.
In October, in a glass case at the National Portrait Gallery, two life-masks of Abraham Lincoln held me entranced. One, made just before Lincoln became president, had the look of a man assuming a great burden with guarded confidence. The other, made in 1865, was full of lines and crevices that betrayed the toll taken by four years of war. Displayed between them were casts of Lincoln’s hands: enormous and strong, reminders of a time when future presidents came of age felling trees and slopping hogs, not dodging the draft and smoking pot.
Yet these pleasant discoveries hadn’t answered a question that had nagged me since my visit to the Jefferson Memorial: Were the virtues that sustained these men relics, too, preserved in glass cases and marble edifices, lifeless and unable to speak to us?
Recently, I visited Arlington Cemetery, and, standing in silence there, I found an answer. I’d walked past endless rows of bone-white headstones to the Tomb of the Unknowns, to see the changing of the guard. In the front row of spectators I saw Cub Scout Pack 150, in their disheveled Scout shirts and rumpled blue jeans, following the ceremony intently alongside their den mothers. After the guard-changing, a wreath given by the pack was to be placed at the tomb.
Two of the Scouts followed a tomb guard and a couple of elderly veterans out to place the wreath. As a bugler played “Taps,” one of the boys followed the guard’s lead and snapped into his three-fingered Cub Scout salute; he nudged his partner, and the second boy did the same. The other Scouts followed suit. After “Taps,” the guard and the veterans exited, and the two boys brought up the rear, shuffling to fall in step with the men in front.
It was a solemn ceremony, and the boys played their part well. I left Arlington reassured by that sight: the old men who had answered the call long ago, the tomb guards who stood ready to answer it today, and the Cub Scouts who seemed willing to answer it in the future. Even 9-year-olds can respond to duty, honor, and country. All that is required is the example of those who came before, and our willingness to remember.
LEE BOCKHORN
