A vast eggshell of iron and glass

by David Benjamin

“I shall always identify Washington with that huge… towering bulge of pure white… [that] vast eggshell, built of iron and glass… a beauty and genuine success.”

— Walt Whitman

MADISON, Wis. — This week, on the feast of the Epiphany, we learned perhaps why Walt Whitman described the Capitol Dome as an “eggshell,” when the minions of an aspiring autocrat cracked open and scrambled America’s most honored and tormented building.

The defiling of the Capitol on a holy day is a telling coincidence. When he envisioned the building, architect Thomas Walter sought to emulate great European churches like St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London. In tones of veiled reverence, commentators ranging from David Brooks to French president Emmanuel Macron have called the Capitol “the temple of American democracy.”

These remarks evoke, for me, a scene early in Frank Capra’s film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. An overgrown boy scout named Jefferson Smith has been appointed to fill a Senate seat vacated by his predecessor’s death. Arriving in Union Station, he looks up Pennsylvania Avenue and beholds the Dome. “Look, look! There it is!” he exclaims. He freezes in altar-boy awe, ignoring his handlers and deaf to the hubbub around him.

Later, when he reappears in his Senate office, Jeff Smith (James Stewart), explains to his assistant, Saunders (Jean Arthur), what came over him. “Gosh, I’ve never been called absent-minded before. But there it was all of a sudden, staring right at me through one of the doors.”

“There what was?” asks Saunders.

“The Capitol Dome. As big as life, sparkling away under the old sun out there. I just started to go toward it,” says Jeff Smith. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so thrilled in my whole life. And that Lincoln Memorial! Gee whiz! And Mr. Lincoln. There he is. He’s just looking straight at you as you come up the steps, just sitting there like he was waiting for someone to come along.”

When Mr. Smith Goes to Washington came out in 1939, Jeff Smith’s attitude of worshipful wonder must have seemed as American as apple pie. Since Thomas Jefferson invoked “our Creator” in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, American democracy has been a sort of civic faith. As the authors of the Constitution were consciously divorcing their budding republic from any vestige of state religion, they sought to foster in citizens the sort of zeal felt by churchgoers. One of Frank Capra’s thundering themes in Mr. Smith is the hero’s naive passion for his nation’s secular cathedrals, its political saints and martyrs.

Before Jeff’s introduction to the gruff and savvy Saunders, he floats through a montage that segues from Capitol Hill to the Supreme Court to the Washington Memorial. Significantly, the tour ends — gee whiz! — at the Lincoln Memorial.

There, looking over Jeff’s shoulder, we read the peroration of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

In this brief, brilliant speech, Lincoln — like Jefferson and all his forebears — invoked God as a source of secular ideals. Throughout history, politicians good and bad have leaned on the Lord for validation (or cover). In the American discourse, God is the benign steward watching over his most favored land, blessing our union, fathering democracy and urging us to live by the Golden Rule.

Abraham Lincoln’s challenge was to preserve this delicate balance during an insurrection, when God, according to both sides, was on “our side.” The nation’s temple was despised and imperiled by rebellion. Even its defenders weren’t entirely loyal. The Capitol’s new Dome, under construction, was under threat from deficit hawks. Lincoln family friend Julia Taft described the wartime Capitol as “an armed fort. About the entrance and between the pillars were barricades of iron plates, intended for the dome, held in place by barrels of sand and cement. All the statuary in the rotunda had been boxed and the pictures covered by rough boards, while the halls within were full of soldiers, drilling.”

Unfortunately, America made no such precautions when Donald Trump was declaring his lost election “rigged” and casting Capitol Hill colleagues as enemies of his people. The day when a mere glimpse of the Dome could thrill a patriot’s heart had sunk into a fog of Trumpian spite and QAnon hysteria. Mustered by an orange-faced lame duck, red-capped white visigoths raided the Capitol, looted its offices, trampled its sanctums and carried off the eucharist. They showed Jefferson Smith’s beloved building  — and its history, its ideals, its secular sanctity — no more respect than a mob of frat boys storming a sorority house on a panty raid. 

Appropriately, like sorority girls giggling and scattering, the alleged protectors of the republic waved them through and posed for selfies.  

Okay, let’s forget that shot and return to Capra’s Lincoln Memorial. Jeff gazes up at the Gettysburg Address, etched on marble panels. A little boy, holding his grandfather’s hand, is reading aloud Lincoln’s most storied speech. The child’s recitation draws another listener, a Black man old enough to be the son of slaves. In this Norman Rockwell tableau, Capra concentrated Jeff Smith’s ideals, the little boy’s hopes and dreams and the wisdom of his grandfather. Pointedly, Capra balanced this image with Lincoln’s — and the nation’s — greatest heartache: the phantom of justice and equality promised but undelivered to the poor man of color who, in a moment, will walk down the steps into an American South still ruled by Jim Crow and not yet finished with the pastime of lynching folks like him.

Capra lends this scene the solemnity of a High Mass. But he ends the service before it can turn mawkish and cuts to Jeff Smith’s plunge into the cold sober world of practical politics. Capra was a master at rubbing Americans’ naiveté up against our cynicism and making us laugh at our contradictions. 

I’m wondering if, on Insurrection Day (Wednesday, January 6), perhaps our personality finally split. Millions of us seem to have chosen to place our faith not in the nation or an ideal but in a self-appointed messiah. Megachurch leaders have preached that Donald Trump was chosen by God to rule as Lord. Among the banners brandished in the ransacking of the Capitol, several read “Jesus.” Another said “Pelosi Is Satan.” Trump has been called “savior” by followers. A Congressman called Trump’s impeachment “the trial of Jesus.”

Jeff Smith is Capra’s mortal Jesus. His trial at the end is a filibuster that leaves him scourged and heartbroken. Beneath that sacred Dome, Jeff is forsaken by his fellow Senators, deprived of his voice and shattered by lies. 

But wait. This is a Capra flick. So, no crucifixion! Whew. At the last minute, Jeff is saved when Sen. Joseph Paine (Claude Rains) has an epiphany of faith. Stricken by guilt, he remembers the youthful beliefs that brought him to his hallowed seat beneath the Capitol Dome. Joe Paine throws himself on the altar, confesses his sins, and justifies the civic devotion of his disciple. 

Pondering this week’s tragedy, I find myself wishing for one more scene at the end of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Jeff is at the train depot, on his way home. He looks back toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The sun again is glinting off the unsullied ivory Dome, reminding him of the purity and promise it represents and of the civic reverence that he feared he had lost. The temple of American democracy, rising above all the indignities inflicted upon it by the venal and violent fools who trample its floors, fills Jefferson Smith’s heart and restores our faith.