The Lincoln Plawg

Friday, October 25, 2002 02:01 p.m.

Who got Marian Anderson to the Lincoln Memorial?

As Will Rogers didn't quite say, historical anecdotes are like cocktails....

Having touched on the Marian Anderson/Lincoln Memorial story, I find it gets some play in the previously-mentioned William Manchester book [1] - in which I truly have no rights!

In 1939, Anderson was a well-known artiste both on disc and in the concert-hall (more so in Europe than in the US, for obvious reasons).

Or, not so obvious. Manchester highlights the role of one individual I had not heard of:

...when a peppy, redheaded newspaperwoman named Mary Johnson heard of plans for an Anderson concert in Constitution Hall, she played a hunch. Constitution Hall, Miss Johnson knew, belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Calling upon the DAR president, Mrs Henry M Robert Jr, she asked her where the Daughters' position was in all this. Right in the driver's seat, Mrs Roberts snapped.....

You have to figure Ginger Rogers or Jean Arthur in the role of the 'peppy' Miss Johnson, in close-up as the thought crosses her mind that the DAR don't have the faintest idea who Marian Anderson is. And hold the shot as her face registers the thought of the jolly jape of interviewing the august matron in charge, and putting her wise. (Though doing so as a passenger in her car was madness, surely....)

An encounter somewhat reminiscent, perhaps, of the the scene in Blazing Saddles when the townsfolk first meet their new, not entirely lily-white, sheriff.

(The alternative explanation is that the DAR had contracted out the management of the Hall, and were not informed of who was performing. More likely, perhaps - but not as funny.)

On the one hand, it certainly wasn't what one might can a sisterly act; though whether race or mischief was the motivating factor is not clear. On the other, without the cancellation by the DAR, there never would have been the Lincoln Memorial concert - the first time it was used for such a purpose, so far as I'm aware, since its 'opening' in 1922 [2] - nor, perhaps, would the 1963 March on Washington have climaxed there. One less twentieth century icon.

In 1939, Washington, of course, was a town fit for Southern gentlemen - the Jim Crow laws happily invigorated by that hero of the Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson, who in 1913 had a DAR experience of his own when he found Negroes in Federal offices in DC working with white folks in a non-janitorial capacity.

(The unsung role of Mary Johnson in this story is rather paralleled by that of Chase and Sandborn coffee in the 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds fright. The trouble started when the WotW audience was swollen by listeners to a show featuring Charlie McCarthy (Edgar Bergen's puppet - don't ask!) who switched over when the C&S hard sell started - and therefore missed the forest of signposts that it was just a play.)

The Glory and the Dream p245
The story of the Lincoln Memorial is filled with delicious ironies: for example, it was dedicated by one of of the worst presidents, Warren Harding; an address was given by Robert Moton of the Tuskegee Institute on Lincoln as the great emancipator - to a segregated audience!
And, notably, whilst a wall is dedicated to an extract from the Second Inaugural, there is no room for the (every bit as telling) First.