Capitol Remains Symbol, Stage of American Drama

They started building the United States Capitol nearly 192 years ago, and they’re still tinkering with it. It is full of art, some valuable and some awful. It has been bombed and gutted by fire. Chunks of wall have fallen off.

For all these indignities, the Capitol remains magnificently dignified, even as its West Front undergoes a long-overdue, $49-million face lift behind construction cranes and scaffolding.

The building is an architectural triumph of masonry, sandstone, cast iron and marble, but it has a deeper dimension. It is both symbol and stage, the embodiment of a nation’s spirit and the arena where a people’s hopes, sorrows and strivings are played out.

“The Capitol has a terrific presence, standing up there very proudly, looking as important as it really is, dominating the city from one of the greatest sites in the world,” said Don Canby, editor of Architecture magazine.

“It is a slightly eclectic but generally very successful neoclassical style, with just enough quirks to make it lovable. They threw away the rule book on occasion, but it works.”

Architectural historian Frederick D. Nichols of the University of Virginia sees minor flaws--the dome overhangs the portico a bit, for example--but says that “on the whole, it’s a great building.”

“It’s very hard to talk about the Capitol purely as architecture,” said Lois Craig, associate dean of architecture and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The Capitol carries so much history, so many hopes and expectations that the building, over time, has assumed a symbolism that is undeniable and unassailable,” she said.

“Like other great public buildings--the White House, the Houses of Parliament, even the Kremlin--it is an entanglement of events and place. It’s architecture plus.”

The Capitol is a classical example of the Palladian style of architecture, central structure crowned by a dome and flanked by wings, that stems from ancient Greece and Rome.

Subsequent modifications, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, gave the Capitol an American accent, the simplicity of the Federal style, with a late 19th Century overlay of Victorian-style interiors.

The massive dome, employing a cast iron technology used for the first time in St. Isaac’s Cathedral at St. Petersburg, borrows stylistic elements from St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Santa Maria dei Fiori in Florence, the Pantheon in Rome and the Church of the Invalids in Paris.

It took the talent of not one but four architects, most of them strong-willed and eccentric, to build the Capitol over 90 years, each altering the work of his predecessor to satisfy whim, ego and artistic pride.

The winning design for “the Congress House” was submitted in 1793 by William Thornton of the Virgin Islands. He was a young physician, portrait painter, inventor and self-taught architect. Sixteen other sketches were dismissed as unsatisfactory. (One loser featured an enormous weathercock perched atop a dome with wings flapping.)

The site, described by Pierre Charles L’Enfant as “a pedestal waiting for a monument,” was a barren, rocky plot near the brow of Jenkins’ Hill, where Powhatan Indians once lived. There Thornton built the north wing of his Capitol, using sandstone from a Virginia quarry.

Congress moved down from Philadelphia for its first joint session in the columned Senate chamber on Nov. 22, 1800. The modest building was immediately overcrowded--it was shared by the 32-member Senate, the 105-man House, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and the District of Columbia courts.

The House moved out first in 1801, into a one-story, oval brick building nicknamed “the Oven” for its unbearable heat, on the foundations of Thornton’s south wing. The Supreme Court’s quarters in the north wing were so cold and drafty that the justices frequently met across the street in a tavern.

Thornton’s successor was Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English-born architect appointed by Thomas Jefferson, who completed the House wing in 1807 from Thornton’s design and poured his genius into the interiors of the two wings, then connected by a wooden ramp. After British troops set fire to the Capitol in August, 1814, Latrobe rebuilt “a most magnificent ruin” while Congress met in a brick building on the site of the present Supreme Court building.

Latrobe quit in 1817. His successor, the coolly diplomatic Charles Bulfinch of Boston, finished the Senate and House chambers for occupancy in 1819 and built the connecting center section of the Capitol topped by a saucer-shaped wooden dome sheathed in copper. It all was finished in 1829.

Twin Extensions Built

It was left to Thomas U. Walter of Philadelphia to build the twin extensions that house the present Senate and House chambers and erect the spectacular, 9-million-pound dome visible today. When the head of the 7 1/2-ton bronze “Statue of Freedom” was bolted into place atop the dome at noon, Dec. 2, 1863, Capitol Hill’s field battery boomed a 35-gun salute, one for each state. The guns of a dozen Union forts guarding the city during the Civil War roared back in response.

Many of those who work there today--both old-timers and newcomers--are struck by the majesty of the building.

“There’s a certain feeling you have nowhere else when you look up at the Capitol in the morning, driving up New Jersey Avenue,” says Eileen Foley, who has worked in the House doorkeeper’s office for the last 10 years.

“There’s such beauty all around you--the high ceilings, the thick walls, arches and cornices, the herringbone pattern in the brick flooring that slave labor probably laid,” she says.

Has Same Emotions

Ben West, superintendent of the House Press Gallery, has worked in the Capitol for 43 years. “It holds the same awe and majesty that I felt my very first day on the job,” he said. “I get that same feeling of excitement every time I look up at the lighted dome when I leave work at night.”

The building has inspired different emotions in a few political or ideological dissidents, who bombed it twice in recent years. The first blast occurred March 1, 1971, during the unrest over the Vietnam War. The device exploded in a restroom next to a barber shop on the first floor of the Senate wing, causing $200,000 worth of damage but no injuries.

Another explosion came Nov. 7, 1983, on the second floor of the Capitol outside a conference room about 30 feet from the Senate chamber. No one was hurt in the nighttime blast. A group protesting the invasion of Grenada and the presence of Marines in Lebanon took responsibility. No arrests were made in either bombing.

Former Iowa Rep. Fred Schwengel is so enamored of the Capitol that when he was defeated in 1972, he remained in Washington as a founder and president of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. Among the purposes of the privately financed organization is to acquire and restore works of art and important historical documents for the Capitol.

‘Most Important . . . in World’

“The Capitol is the most important building in the world. More has happened in the shadow of the dome of this building . . . to bring the biblical promise of a more abundant life to the people and share it with the rest of the world than any other place on earth,” Schwengel said.

The story of the Capitol, as told by its art, is a tale of mishaps and murder, of the sublime and the comical.

The plaster model for the “Freedom” statue nearly sank to the bottom of the Atlantic during its voyage from Italy in the hold of a leaky barkentine.

Dark blotches on the marble steps of a ceremonial House staircase are believed to be bloodstains from a Kentucky congressman, William Preston Taulbee, who was fatally shot by a reporter for the Louisville Times in 1890.

Italian fresco master Constantino Brumidi, who spent the last quarter-century of his life beautifying the Capitol of his adopted country, nearly fell to his death in 1879 while painting the heroic, eight-foot-high frieze that circles the wall of the rotunda.

The artist, then 74, never returned to the scaffolding.

At the eye of the rotunda, 180 feet above the floor, is Brumidi’s crowning achievement, a grand fresco entitled “Apotheosis of Washington” glorifying the first President. Brumidi, furiously brushing plaster before it dried, completed the allegorical painting, which measures 4,664 square feet, in just 11 months.

2 Sunken Bathtubs

Far below, nearly forgotten behind some air conditioning equipment in the Senate basement, are a pair of deep, sunken bathtubs, fashioned from Carrara marble with brass fittings and contoured headrests. They were imported from Italy and installed in the mid-1800s for the pleasure of senators, many living in nearby hotels and boarding houses that lacked such amenities.

Altogether, more than 500 artworks crowd the Capitol, from Brumidi’s hallway murals to busts of long-forgotten vice presidents, from gilded clocks and immense canvases to a towering pair of ornamental bronze doors propped up against a wall--intended for an extension of the West Front that may never be built.

Among the most prized works are a Rembrandt Peale portrait of Washington, the so-called “porthole portrait” mounted high above the dais of the restored Old Senate Chamber; four historical scenes by John Trumbull that are mounted in the rotunda, landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Western scenes by Seth Eastman.

The arrival of the most fantastic assortment of statues was signaled when Congress decided to do something about Latrobe’s original House chamber, which had turned into a dusty, shabby haven for prostitutes, office seekers and peddlers of root beer and oranges after the House moved to its present location in 1857.

Becomes ‘Weighty’ Problem

Congress declared the chamber a Statuary Hall and invited each state to submit two statues of its most notable citizens. Soon the weight of contributions raised fears that the chamber’s floor might collapse, so the statues were dispersed throughout the Capitol.

Today likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Ethan Allen, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan and Will Rogers are alongside those of such lesser-knowns as Joseph Ware of South Dakota, founder of Yankton College, and “Shoup” of Idaho, a bald, rotund gentleman with thumb tucked self-importantly in his marble vest.

A man identified only as “Glick” represents Kansas. “Had they waited, they could have had Eisenhower,” says one observer.

The stern-faced likenesses of suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott rise waist-high from an unfinished block of marble, prompting the nickname “Three Ladies in a Bathtub.” They reside in the Crypt, the vaulted, ground-floor chamber under the rotunda that was reserved for a Napoleon-style tomb for Washington, who was buried instead at his Mount Vernon home.

Three nonwhites are among the worthies represented in marble or bronze--two Chippewa Indian warriors and Polynesian King Kamehameha I, who united the Hawaiian Islands. The first statue of a black person, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is to be installed in the Capitol next year.

Today, nearly two centuries after George Washington laid the cornerstone for Thornton’s original north wing, the task of completing the Capitol continues.