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By Root 873 0

of flowers—just a modest tombstone marking the resting place of the former president, his wife Frances, and their daughter Ruth. Textbook images of Grover Cleveland when he had served as the reformist mayor of Buffalo, New York, of when he took on the corruption of Tammany Hall, of how he handled the Pullman strike and the financial panic of 1893, flooded my brain in vain denial of the hard fact that this gigantic figure was no more than a pile of bones under the cold November ground of central New Jersey and had been for eighty years. Later, I came across something theologian Jonathan Edwards—who is also buried in Princeton Cemetery—wrote back in 1746 in his book Procrastination, “The bodies of those that made such a noise and tumult when alive, when dead, lie as quietly among the graves of their neighbors as any others.”

Another long-ago quote rang true during my visit to Princeton Cemetery, where I also sought out the grave of one of the great anti-heroes in American history: onetime Vice President Aaron Burr, who is best remembered for killing former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 pistol duel. But as I stood at his gravesite instead of feeling animosity toward Burr, I was engulfed by an unexpected wave of compassion. I understood what Washington Irving had meant in 1820 when he wrote in The Sketch Book: “Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him.”

Cemeteries are some of the least appreciated, even most mocked, public spaces in America. Thus, when Brian Lamb first told me of his plan to write a book on presidential gravesites, I knew he would be in for a round of ridicule. After all, in 1948 supremely snide British writer Evelyn Waugh devoted an entire novel, The Loved One, to lampooning California’s famous Forest Lawn, barely disguised as Whispering Glades Memorial Park.

Waugh’s acetose satire of American cemeteries was published just a few years after his countryman Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which also made sport of the promise of immortality that cemeteries like Forest Lawn were selling. Waugh and Huxley derided the “memorial park” as a harmful illusion designed to mask the reality of death, thus denying its purpose in society. In his 1947 Life magazine article “Death in Hollywood,” Waugh averred that death should remind “a highly civilized people that beauty [is] skin deep and pomp mortal.” He would not have thought much, it seems, of President John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery. Rather, Waugh argued that at the Forest Lawns of America the body is not allowed to decay: instead, “it lives on, more chic in death than ever before, in its indestructible Class A steel-and-concrete shelf; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy.”

One suspects that neither my Majic Bus visit to Lincoln’s grave nor Brian Lamb’s Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? are the sort of enterprises of which Waugh and Huxley would have approved, sniffing as they would at the study of presidents’ deaths as an exercise in morbid triviality. But they were a couple of Anglocentric snobs feeding off California’s golden riches even while mocking the American way of doing everything, including death. Had they ever deigned to visit Ohio, how they would have snickered at the imposing Harding Tomb in Marion or the gargantuan McKinley Mausoleum in Canton—such ridiculous and meaningless sites. But what those blinded by cynicism fail to understand is that the purpose of a visit to, say, James Madison’s grave at Virginia’s Montpelier Station is not the mawkish worship of a founding father. No, a pilgrimage to a president’s grave is instead a way to pay quiet tribute to all of our glorious past, to thank the militiamen who lost their lives at Bunker Hill, to honor the oratory of Patrick Henry, to salute the valor of the men who died at Iwo Jima and Midway and a hundred other flyspeck islands in the Pacific.