Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial is the site of a pivotal collision between national ideals and the persecution confronting the Roth family. During their Washington tour, the monument’s solemn grandeur first deepens Herman Roth’s reverence for Abraham Lincoln, then makes the antisemitism directed at his family feel like an expulsion from the very civic inheritance the memorial honors. For his son Philip, the visit becomes an enduring image of patriotic beauty shadowed by exclusion.

Setting and Meaning

Verlin M. Taylor guides the family from the parking area up the broad marble steps and between the columns into the memorial chamber. There, an illuminated statue of Abraham Lincoln sits elevated above the visitors. Philip sees Lincoln’s face as joining the face of God with the face of the nation: the monument makes public greatness seem immense, almost beyond ordinary judgment. Its scale and solemnity leave the family, adult and children alike, exposed to an atmosphere that magnifies whatever happens inside it.

That grandeur first prompts grief. Herman recalls that Lincoln was assassinated and insists on the tragedy of what happened to a great president. Bess tries to keep him from pursuing the subject, while Taylor offers to take the family the next day to Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House, places associated with Lincoln’s shooting and death. The exchange gives the visit a historical sequence: the memorial honors the president, while the proposed stops would lead the family to the sites of his killing and final hours.

Antisemitism at the Memorial

The national reverence surrounding the statue does not protect the Roths from hostility. Nearby, an elderly visitor praises Charles A. Lindbergh; after a stranger has looked over the family, he mocks Herman and identifies him with an antisemitic insult. The woman then voices her own hostility. The episode is brief, but its location matters: the attack takes place within a monument to a president whose public memory is associated in the scene with equality and emancipation.

Herman responds by directing attention to the memorial’s tablet and its equality principle. He argues that such open hostility would not have been tolerated during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, and connects the present atmosphere to Charles A. Lindbergh’s alliance with Adolf Hitler. His anger is political as well as personal: the insult, in his view, is not an isolated breach of manners but evidence that the country’s leadership has made prejudice newly speakable. Bess, already distressed, pleads for the family to leave the argument alone. Taylor guides them into a smaller hall, where a mural depicts an angel freeing a slave, but Herman is too consumed by the incident to take comfort in the image.

The family eventually returns to the steps and gathers beneath the open sky. Across the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument stands in the distance; trees frame a panorama Philip experiences as a vision of patriotic abundance. Yet he also remembers the family as huddled together and expelled. The contrast is central to the scene: the landscape appears to offer an ideal of national welcome, while the family’s encounter has made them feel unwelcome inside its most revered civic space.

From Memorial to Political Argument

The Lincoln Memorial’s meaning follows the family beyond the visit. When Herman later protests that another party has taken the Roths’ hotel reservation, he invokes the equality principle displayed at the memorial. The policeman answers that the principle does not make all reservations equal, and bystanders laugh. Herman’s appeal has moved from the monument to an everyday dispute, but the underlying question is unchanged: whether a celebrated national ideal governs the treatment of actual Jewish citizens. The scene gives the memorial a practical afterlife as a standard against which exclusion can be named.

The family’s experience also resonates later, as Jewish households are displaced under the government’s relocation policy. After neighbors have left, the Roths sit in a pharmacy over ice-cream sundaes, exhausted and uncertain about what will come next. Bess recognizes that Lindbergh’s rule has made their Jewish identity newly consequential; Herman rejects the suggestion that their American belonging can be negotiated away. The memorial scene has already established the terms of that disagreement: the ideal of equality is visible and publicly honored, yet the family cannot rely on its protection merely by pointing to it.

Narrative Significance

Philip’s account makes the Lincoln Memorial a place where childhood awe and political recognition arrive together. The boy first encounters the chamber through its scale and Lincoln’s monumental image; he then sees the family exposed to contempt in the same space. The scene does not treat the monument as empty or meaningless. Rather, its ideals sharpen the contradiction between the country’s commemorated principles and the behavior tolerated under Lindbergh.

That contradiction gives the memorial continuing force in the family’s story. Herman returns to its equality principle when he challenges discrimination, while Philip’s memory holds together the beautiful panorama and the family’s sense of expulsion. The monument thus signifies neither simple reassurance nor simple hypocrisy: it preserves an ideal that the Roths can invoke, even as their experience shows how little invocation alone can secure. In the novel’s alternate history, the Lincoln Memorial becomes a measure of the distance between public memory and lived belonging.