The Lincoln Memorial and Its Architect, Henry Bacon (1866-1924)

The dissertation is a biography of the architect Henry Bacon and a detailed account of his best known building, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1911-22). His training as a Classical designer included exposure to Greek archaeology (through his brother, Francis H. Bacon), extensive travel in Europe and the Aegean, and long service for McKim, Mead & White, then the leading Academic Classical architectural firm in America. After a brief partnership (1897-1903) with James Brite, Bacon practiced on his own until his death. The biography (Part 1) includes a discussion of his personal, professional, and artistic attitudes, and a survey of his work, emphasizing designs for the settings of monuments and memorials, usually undertaken in collaboration with sculptors (French, Bitter, Saint-Gaudens, and others). Part 2 explores the background to the building of the Lincoln Memorial. One chapter considers Abraham Lincoln's symbolic significance for Americans from 1860 to ca 1920, and a second traces the attempts to honor him on a grand scale in Washington between 1865 and 1911, centering on the McMillan (Senate Park Commission) plan of 1901-2, which featured a Lincoln Memorial prominently. Alternate sites and programs to memorialize him, and the movements behind them, are described, especially the plan for a "Lincoln Memorial Road", which arose about 1908. The design, building, and critical reception of Bacon's Lincoln Memorial are treated in Part 3. The evolution of his design is traced from his first sketches in August 1911, through the design competition with John Russell Pope, to the acceptance of Bacon's design by Congress in early 1913. The final chapter comprises a description of the finished memorial, its landscaping, construction, and decoration (including the statue, address-tablets, and murals), and a survey of its early critical reception, with allusions to the memorial's "after-life" as a patriotic shrine and a symbol of democratic justice.