Once, We Built for Beauty
By Catesby Leigh, Brandon Bosworth, Naomi Riley
ONCE, WE BUILT FOR BEAUTY
By Catesby Leigh
The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration
By Henry Hope Reed
Principal Photography by Anne Day
W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $50
I should acknowledge at the outset that I owe my vocation to Henry Hope Reed. Not just because Reed, starting in the 1950s, laid the groundwork for the current resurgence of traditional civic art and architecture with books such as The Golden City. I am one of many fortunate souls who has benefited from his encouragement and support over the years.
Reed’s new, lavishly illustrated book on the U.S. Capitol is his culminating work, simply because no other American building better epitomizes the ideals he has advocated throughout his career—architectural design in the great tradition, generous decoration by means of sculpture and mural painting, and, last but not least, enlightened patronage.
The classical image of Washington that resonates so deeply in the public consciousness is largely attributable to the city’s namesake. George Washington was the patron who not only chose the French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant as the planner of the Federal City, but also selected the design for the original Capitol produced by the remarkable amateur architect William Thornton.
The development of the Capitol, which Reed traces in the first part of his book, extended over a century. It got underway with Thornton’s design of 1793, and was punctuated by the completion of the original building in 1829. This was a handsome edifice with a low dome of copper and wood. The expansion, which involved new Senate and House wings and the stupendous cast-iron dome we encounter today, started with Thomas Ustick Walter’s appointment as architect of the Capitol in 1851 and continued until the graceful three-level terrace on the West front, designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, was completed 40 years later. (Reed only briefly discusses, in his preface, the awful scheme for a three-level, 580,000-square-foot subterranean expansion on the Capitol’s east side, the Capitol Visitor Center, scheduled for completion in the fall of 2006.)
Foremost among the artists who deocorated the Captiol was the painter Constantino Brumidi, born and trained in Rome. He took his cues from Raphael above all, especially the Renaissance master’s celebrated Vatican murals. Hired by the brilliant Army engineer who supervised the expansion, Captain Montgomery Meigs, Brumidi worked on the Capitol for a quarter century before falling off a scaffold in the Rotunda in 1879. He was 74. Though he broke his fall by catching the rung of a ladder, he never recovered from the shock and died four months later.
Capitol visitors can take the measure of his virtuosity in the Brumidi Corridors, on the first floor of the Capitol’s Senate wing—covered with portraits, insignia, and landscapes strung along leafy arabesques brimming with birds, winged babies, and fruit baskets—and in the even more lushly decorated Senate Reception Room upstairs. Brumidi’s majestic Apotheosis of Washington, crowning the Rotunda, covers no fewer than 4,664 square feet. The technical challenges included the 20-foot concavity of the canopy on which this mural was painted—in the most demanding of media, fresco (in which paint must be rapidly applied to wet plaster). Because the center of the canopy is 180 feet above the ground, human figures in the Apotheosis are as much as 15 feet tall.
The second part of the book offers a tour of the building, with detailed description of the exterior and of the most artistically significant rooms. Reed concludes with useful appendices including an illustrated glossary of design terms, interior and exterior photographs of the Capitol with design elements identified, and biographies of people involved with the architecture and decoration of the building, though a number of biographical entries are missing.
More important, Reed never really conveys the magnitude of Walter’s achievement with the cast iron dome, painted white to resemble marble and completed in 1863. This is the Capitol’s most important feature, because the building’s significance as a work of civic art lies principally in its role as a national symbol and a city landmark. The dome, more than anything, is what makes it excel in both categories. Walter achieved perhaps as perfect an equipoise between the elements of his dome as has been achieved anywhere. The dome soars.
Thanks to the vision of patrons like Washington and Meigs, and the brilliance of architects and decorators like Walter and Brumidi, the U.S. Capitol is America’s greatest building. No one can give us so comprehensive an account of its splendors as Henry Hope Reed.
Catesby Leigh is at work on Monumental America, forthcoming from Spence.
SONS OF ULSTER
By Brandon Bosworth
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
By James Webb
Broadway, 369 pages, $25.95
The subtitle of James Webb’s Born Fighting—How the Scots-Irish Shaped America—implies a much narrower scope than the book embodies. Instead of merely explaining their impact on American life, Webb takes the reader on a journey through the entire history of the Scots-Irish people.
This history begins in the century before the birth of Christ, when Roman armies swept through Europe, defeating the native Celtic tribes. Those Celts, who refused to bow down to foreign rule, either died fighting or were driven north and west, eventually finding themselves in the harsh territory of what is now modern Scotland. When the Romans attempted to conquer all of Britain, they were met with fierce resistance by the Scottish Celts. Unable to tame the unruly highlanders, the Romans in 122 A.D. built a 73-mile barrier known as Hadrian’s Wall to protect the sons of Rome from the savages to the north.
In bisecting Britain, Webb notes, this wall created the conditions for development of two distinct cultures on the island. To the south, England would experience the civilizing influences of the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans. To the north, Scotland would remain essentially Celtic. “England became highly structured, top-down, and feudal while Scotland remained atomized, bottom-up, and in many respects tribal.” The Scots thus developed a rabid individualism and distrust of authority and centralization that they would carry with them wherever they traveled.
And travel they would. One of the most important migrations of the Scottish people was to Ireland. The English had been battling Catholic rebels in Northern Ireland, and hoped to alter the character of the region by establishing a Protestant plantation. The ever-adventurous Scots began to migrate in large numbers to the Ulster region of Ireland. According to Webb, in 1602 fewer than 2 percent of the population of Ireland was of English or Scottish descent. Within a century, that number had climbed to 27 percent, and almost all resided in Ulster.
These “Ulster Scots” developed an identity distinct from their fellows who remained in Scotland, and it was they who would become the Scots-Irish. Like that of their Celtic ancestors, this identity was often shaped by conflict. The Presbyterian Scots and their Catholic Irish neighbors were often violently at odds, planting the seeds of sectarian strife that continues to the modern day. The Ulster Scots also had a hard time getting along with the Anglican English in the area, who considered themselves “conformist” Protestants, versus the “non conformist” Christianity of the Scots. In 1703, Britain’s Queen Anne would establish the Test Act, which aimed to bring the Ulster Presbyterians in line with mainstream Anglicanism. “Non conformist” Protestants were, as Webb observes, forbidden “from teaching school, holding positions in the government, or serving as officers in the militia.” The Ulster Scots began to seek a better future in the colonies of America.
The Scots-Irish were ideal candidates to tame the rough continent of the New World. With their long history of individualism and anti-authoritarianism, these new immigrants to America had little use for the snobbish “Englishness” of the New England colonies, preferring instead to make their own way by heading south along the Appalachians. They settled in large numbers in Pennsylvania, but many continued on into the Carolinas and the rest of what would become the American South.
It is the Scots-Irish who are largely responsible for establishing the character of Dixie. Their stubbornness and refusal to submit to outside authorities would plant the seeds of both the American Revolution and the War Between the States. In both instances, the Scots-Irish saw themselves as casting off a yoke of foreign oppression, be it from London or Washington. This tradition would extend into Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century. To this day, Southern descendants of the Scots-Irish embrace their history, while contending with contemptuous attitudes directed at them from coastal and Northern elites.
As Webb stresses throughout his book, the Scots-Irish of America, with their heritage of wanderlust and natural combativeness, found an obvious outlet for their passions by enlisting in the U.S. armed services. A majority of Marine Corps commandants since World War I have been of Scots-Irish ancestry. Webb notes that these proud people don’t merely serve their country, they die for it as well. The heavily Scots-Irish populace of West Virginia ranked either first, second, or third in military casualties in every American war of the twentieth century.
Webb’s history lesson is enlivened with tales from his own Scots-Irish heritage. Like any good Southerner’s, his family tree includes memorable characters. There was his grandfather, who faced the wrath of an Arkansas banker for stating that it was un-Christian to charge blacks higher interest rates than whites. Or his Uncle Tommy, who could supposedly throw a knockout punch with a swing of just 12 inches. And there are Webb’s own autobiographical references to his first rifle and his first whiskey.
In their journey from Central Europe to the British Isles to America’s South, the people we know as the Scots-Irish have maintained their spirit, their independence, and a good deal of their culture. What they have not ever really commanded is the respect of the elite classes, or acknowledgment for what they have contributed to our history.
Webb’s book should rectify that.
Tennessee-born TAE associate editor Brandon Bosworth hails from the Scottish McQueen clan.
SHAMROCKS AGAINST SHEETS
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan
By Todd Tucker
Loyola Press, 261 pages, $24.95
Notre Dame University occupies a unique place in the American Catholic mind. It was founded at a time when many questioned whether there was such a thing as an American Catholic—that is, whether the masses of Catholic immigrants would ever become real Americans.
In Notre Dame vs. the Klan, Notre Dame alum Todd Tucker examines Catholic Americanism at a particularly important historical moment—the early part of the last century, when Catholics themselves were divided over how much to assimilate. Many opposed U.S. involvement in World War I because they didn’t want to help the British—the source of Catholic oppression in Ireland. Church leaders favored new Catholic hospitals, schools, and orphanages because they felt the influence of American culture would distort their faith.
These attitudes seemed to feed the anti-Catholic sentiment already growing in the country. Like any ethnic or religious group whose ranks include many poor, unemployed, and sometimes violent men, Irish Catholics were increasingly seen as a threat. The leaders of the Ku Klux Klan saw this anti-Catholic sentiment as an opportunity to expand their influence. The Klan began to promote the idea that it was the enforcer of Prohibition and the defender of industry against labor unions (which it associated with communism). Its first target turned out to be Irish Catholics—those drunken factory workers causing all the problems.
Since Northerners had just recently fought a civil war against tribunes of white supremacy, there was no way they would join the Klan unless it was marketed as something other than antiblack. D. C. Stephenson turned out to be just the man to create a different image. More concerned with making money than killing anyone, Stephenson, the youngest son of a sharecropper from Houston, rose to the highest ranks in the Klan and grew wealthy by selling $10 memberships to Protestants all over the Midwest. Stephenson had a violent streak, particularly toward women, but his main interest was gaining power through legitimate political and economic means. At one point, a third of the residents of Indiana were members of his group, and the Klan claimed as members a majority of the state’s legislature, as well as the governor.
The American Unity League tried to warn Catholics about the Klan, but the League was considered alarmist by many, including the administration, faculty, and students of Notre Dame. Notre Dame was gaining academic respectability, and turning into a football powerhouse. A broader accommodation was also taking place. After the U.S. entered WWI, most Catholics served their country in the trenches of Europe with the same dedication as the other young Americans.
In the early 1920s, the Klan began holding parades through the centers of Midwestern cities with large Catholic concentrations. It was almost inevitable that they would come to South Bend, a capital of American Catholicism. Seeing the burning crosses in their own town finally made the young men of Notre Dame stand up and take notice. Many attended a Klan meeting where they heard the leader explain that “Catholics can be good people, but we do not believe they can be good Americans….Catholics have a sworn loyalty to a foreign power: the pope and the Vatican. Catholics are a foreign power within our borders and can never be 100 percent American.”
On May 17, 1924, the Notre Dame students struck back. Few injuries and no fatalities resulted from the ensuing clashes. The Notre Dame president asked his charges to turn the other cheek, and most heeded his call. Notre Dame vs. The Klan unfortunately becomes rather anticlimactic at this point. But a precedent was set: A group of red-blooded American Catholic boys taught the white robed ones a bit of a lesson.
Naomi Riley is author of God on the Quad.
