Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [84]
Ever since first president George Washington died on December 14, 1799, the United States has looked to its leaders’ funerals as a means to unite the nation. Partisan bickering is put in check, flags are flown at half-staff, and solo trumpeters blow taps from the Jefferson Memorial to Mt. McKinley. The death of a president is a time of collective mourning and national pulse-taking, a yardstick moment to reflect how far we’ve come and how much remains to be done before America truly becomes Massachusetts colonist John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.”
As a quintessential American and a Hoosier who regularly strolls the grounds of Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, where twenty-third president Benjamin Harrison is buried, C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb understands how presidents’ graves serve as guideposts to our past and why a moment of quiet reflection in such places nourishes the soul and fuels the historical imagination. It’s a way to make a connection with the lives of the individuals who helped shape our nation.
Lamb’s attraction to presidential burial sites does not arise from some odd fascination with entombment; he is not the least thanatophilic and has as healthy a fear of death as anyone. His interest is instead that of a serious student of American history who simply has come to learn that both the lives and deaths of presidents play a part in our national drama. After all, the deaths of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK surely rank among the most memorable days in American history.
Detailing these events makes an intriguing read as well as a useful reference work in the form of a guidebook that encourages the traveler to put historical cemeteries on their itineraries. More recent presidents including Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon are buried on the grounds of their respective presidential libraries, so their graves are just the capstone on an afternoon of learning. There is an added value to Arlington National Cemetery as well; in addition to John F. Kennedy’s tomb with its eternal flame, visitors can also pause at the final resting places of such diverse patriots as Omar Bradley, Medgar Evers, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Marshall, William Howard Taft, and Earl Warren. And when we ponder all those endless rows of white crosses marking how many of our forebears lost their lives fighting for our freedom, we can’t help but be moved.
Enlightenment can be found at every presidential grave. It doesn’t matter what the various polls say about a past president’s rank by order of greatness, a consensus that usually puts Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts at the top, with the likes of Hoover, Harding, and Nixon at the bottom.
What makes Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? so refreshing is its avoidance of this poll-driven approach, instead giving all our past presidents equal billing in death; the chapter on Franklin Pierce is thus nearly as long as the one on Franklin Roosevelt. Of course, this egalitarianism will come as no surprise to C-SPAN viewers familiar with the network’s dispassionate, straight-down-the-middle style. In this book, refraining from favoritism allows C-SPAN to pay homage to the institution of the presidency and not just to the extraordinary individuals who have staffed it.
And the folks at C-SPAN are right: visiting any one of the presidents’ gravesites provides just as perfect an opportunity to meditate on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, on slavery and emancipation, on agrarianism and industrialism—on any event, large or small, that ever contributed to the forging of our nation. For great thoughts are inspired by contemplating the lives of great men, and every American president has been great in having the supreme courage to take on the job. As Theodore Roosevelt declared in an often quoted speech at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, “It is not the critic who