Another Day at a Monument to Democracy

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/us/politics/another-day-at-a-monument-to-democracy.html

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WASHINGTON — The glorious Lincoln Memorial was closed on Inauguration Day, leaving its white marble inhabitant to inspire from a distance. The monument had served as a backdrop for an inaugural concert the night before, and now, in the late morning, construction workers were methodically removing the silvery bars of scaffolding that imprisoned it.

Even so, its sole resident could still be seen behind the Doric columns, his gaze trained on the far-off domed Capitol, where a peaceful transfer of power was about to take place. And people still came to be in his presence, some to remind themselves that a country riven by dissent can come together. It has before.

No matter that the sky was as gray as the Potomac, or that the cold air felt like a wet sweater. Here they were, from the North and South, East and West, in red Trump hats and blue Hillary T-shirts, jubilant, distressed, feeling a part and apart. They stood in admiration of Lincoln, as workers tore down and cleaned up, including a man collecting debris with a hand-held picker, his dog tag laced securely into one of his military-issue boots.

Ed Rich, he said his name was, while taking a Camel break. Forty-four years old. A mortgage broker from Annapolis, trying to ride out a slow period. So it’s $12 an hour working for the inauguration, putting up fencing, laying down flooring, snapping up cigarette butts with a metal picker.

“I voted for him,” Mr. Rich said of Donald J. Trump, at this point still the president-elect. “I think he could make a mess of it, but it could be cleaned up easily. People seem to forget there’s a House and a Senate.”

Mr. Rich tossed his spent cigarette into the box of garbage he was carrying and returned to collecting butts and paper bits, his words nowhere near as eloquent as those of Lincoln, carved into the memorial’s walls, yet in the same vein: the belief — often tested, including on this day — in the country’s democratic system of governance.

Generations have come to the Lincoln Memorial to reassure themselves — or to remind the rest of the nation — of this foundational belief. The African-American contralto, Marian Anderson, sang here in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from another Washington venue; she began with “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., of course, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech here in 1963, after Mahalia Jackson called out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin.”

Even Richard M. Nixon, during a dark moment of his presidency (and that is saying something), came here on a very early May morning in 1970, valet in tow; he wound up in profoundly strange conversations with some Vietnam War protesters, his disjointed message: Don’t give up on this country.

In their footsteps came others on this inaugural morning.

Jerry Naradzay, 56, a physician from Henderson, N.C., cycled up to the monument with his 13-year-old son, Sammy, the father’s broad smile explained by his red “Make America Great Again” cap.

He noted that the memorial’s stone had come from both the North and the South to convey unity after division. He then said he had goose bumps just thinking of more than two centuries of peaceful transfers of power.

Nodding toward the memorial, Dr. Naradzay said, “This monument represents how the country is bigger than one man.”

Standing nearby in full agreement were four Hillary Clinton supporters from Wisconsin’s North Country. They had made plans for this Washington visit in expectation of a different result, but decided to come anyway, in part to participate in the women’s march on Saturday.

So: How did they feel?

“Hollow,” said Jackie Moore, 33, a member of the Ashland City Council. Several awkward seconds of silence followed.

When conversation resumed, another Ashland council member, David Mettille, 32, and his partner, Teege Mettille, 36, recounted how their blue Hillary shirts had spurred some heckling, but they didn’t mind. It was their way of saying: We’re still here.

“We will remember this,” David Mettille said. “We will remember how painful today is, so that four years from now — we work to win.”

Then Teege Mettille noted that they had about a half-hour left of President Obama, and off the visitors from Ashland went.

It was true: Time was winding down, or winding up. From the swearing-in ceremony in the distance, beyond the reflecting pool’s greenish waters, came the echoes of ministers beseeching God for guidance, the raised voices of the Missouri State University Chorale, the somber tones of imminent transition.

All the while, others came to be in Lincoln’s presence.

A retired civil engineer from Virginia who said he had voted for Mr. Trump because a relative is a heroin addict, and because the Mexican border is a sieve. A couple from Utah who voted for Mr. Trump because their community depends on natural gas and oil. Mothers and their adult daughters from Texas and New Mexico, so dismayed that Mr. Trump would soon be their president that they kept their backs to the inauguration.

Soon the Mormon Tabernacle Choir could be heard singing “America the Beautiful.” Then came the distinctive voice of the new president, his assertions of a restored American greatness in all things floating through the gray noon and up the four score and seven steps leading from the reflecting pool to the memorial.

No longer president-elect, he was now President Trump.

While the pageantry unfolded, Mr. Rich, the debris collector, kept working. A former Marine, he said he spent six months in Iraq with a mortuary affairs unit, collecting bodies and body parts from the front.

Sometimes there wasn’t enough for certain identification, he said, “so you’d write, ‘Believed to be.’”

He said he was making plans to succeed again in the mortgage business, in a country whose balanced-power form of government he trusts. But for now Mr. Rich had what he called his mission, which was to keep the plaza beneath Lincoln’s gaze clean.