United States Capitol

The United States Capitol is both a physical landmark and a potent image of national history in the Roth family’s visit to Washington. First glimpsed by accident on a wrong turn, its great dome inspires awe and briefly embodies the family’s hope that American history and its institutions can protect them from Charles A. Lindbergh’s politics. Later, as the setting for an emergency congressional session during the president’s disappearance, the Capitol stands at the center of a national crisis in which that hope is sharply tested.

First Encounter in Washington

The family’s arrival at the Capitol is unplanned. In heavy traffic, while Bess Roth tries to read the road map and direct Herman Roth toward their hotel, the car takes a wrong turn. At the end of the street, on an incline, the children see what the narrator describes as the biggest white thing he has ever seen: the Capitol’s broad stairs rise to a colonnade beneath an elaborate, three-tiered dome. The building’s scale arrests the journey. Instead of reaching their hotel by the intended route, the family has driven, almost inadvertently, to what the narrative calls the heart of American history.

The sight matters because the family arrives in the capital carrying political fear as well as luggage. The narrator understands the Capitol not simply as a striking building but as American history in its most inspirational form, something the family is counting on to protect them against Lindbergh. The building’s civic symbolism becomes a kind of hoped-for safeguard: the national past, made visible in stone and architecture, seems to promise continuity against a frightening political present. That hope is not presented as certainty. The family has reached a landmark; whether its ideals can protect them remains unsettled.

The Capitol also belongs to the narrator’s private world of collecting. Before the trip, he persuades his mother to let him bring his stamp album, including his sixteen president stamps from the 1938 series, which runs by denomination from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. On an album page, the Capitol Buildings appear alongside Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. This small, portable representation of national landmarks anticipates the imposing building the family encounters in person. The album allows the child to carry familiar images of the country with him; the actual Capitol makes those images suddenly immense.

A Landmark Among Washington’s Institutions

The first view is followed by a guided encounter with the city’s public buildings. During the morning, Mr. Taylor shows the family the Capitol and Congress, then the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. His detailed knowledge—of domes, lobbies, marble origins, and the subjects commemorated in murals and paintings—makes the visit an education in the physical and historical particulars of national government. Herman praises him as a small-town boy from Indiana who ought to appear on Information Please. The tour gives the Capitol a place within a larger civic landscape: it is one of several institutions through which the family encounters the capital, rather than an isolated monument.

The family’s reaction to the city is not uniformly confident. As their police escort takes them past federal buildings, Sandy points toward the White House. Bess begins to cry, apologizes to the children, and says that it is no longer like living in a normal country. The contrast is important: the Capitol has inspired awe, but the surrounding journey also exposes the fear that has brought the family to Washington. National symbols can evoke pride and reassurance without dissolving the danger the characters perceive. The landmark’s meaning therefore rests in a tension between the grandeur of the country’s public history and the family’s anxiety about its present direction.

From Historical Promise to Political Emergency

The Capitol’s later appearance turns that tension into a political test. On October 9, 1942, after headlines ask where Lindbergh is, martial law has been imposed across the continental United States and its territories and possessions. Acting President Wheeler travels under military guard to the Capitol and addresses an emergency closed-door session of Congress. He announces that the FBI has information establishing that the president has been kidnapped and is being held somewhere in North America by unknown parties. He assures Congress that steps are being taken to secure Lindbergh’s release and bring those responsible to justice.

The announcement places the Capitol within a machinery of emergency rule. Borders with Canada and Mexico are sealed, airports and seaports shut, and military forces, the National Guard, the FBI, and local police are assigned roles in maintaining order. The building that first appeared to the family as an inspirational emblem of American history is now the site where an acting president communicates extraordinary measures to the legislature. The change does not erase the earlier meaning; it makes the gap between promise and circumstance harder to ignore. The Capitol remains associated with national government, but its appearance in a closed emergency session links that government to fear, restricted movement, and the uncertain fate of the president.

Narrative Significance

The Capitol’s two appearances create a deliberate contrast between sight and political action. On the family’s arrival, its dome and stairs are apprehended almost as an image: a wrong turn brings them face to face with a monumental version of the history they hope will defend them. In October, the narrative returns to the same national center through a report of what happens inside it, replacing visual wonder with official announcement and emergency procedure. The shift enlarges the story’s scale, connecting the Roths’ private apprehensions to a crisis affecting the entire country.

The building also links the novel’s intimate and public histories. The child’s album reduces national landmarks to pictures he can carry; the Capitol in Washington overwhelms that small scale, while the later congressional session makes the national political order newly vulnerable. Its significance is not that the building itself guarantees protection, but that it gives concrete form to the hope and uncertainty attached to American institutions. First the family looks to the Capitol as a possible shelter in history; later, the crisis unfolding there reveals how precarious that shelter may be.