The United States Capitol Building is one of the most recognizable edifices in the world. Sitting atop a small knoll grandly known as Capitol Hill, it is part of every photo of the skyline of the nation’s capital city. The interior of the building is as grand as the exterior, featuring murals, sculptures, and other priceless works of art.
What goes on inside the building is equally important; it is the home of the United States Congress – the Senate and the House of Representatives. Ever since the capital of the United States moved to Washington in 1800, every piece of legislation has moved through this building. Until 1935, every Supreme Court case was argued and decided in this building.
I am beyond furious that todays GOP seems equally intent in destroying both the building and the work that goes on inside. They apparently believe that an attack on the building is just fine (including theft, vandalism, and destruction of the interior), and they have ceased to take seriously the business of governing. This week has provided everyone with yet another example of this, as they performatively impeached Alejandro Mayorcas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and have spectacularly failed to carry through with legislation to respond to the continuing violence in Ukraine and the growing violence in the Middle East.
Chris Hayes’ reaction Wednesday night got it exactly right: "All of this made me think of a parent watching when a young child grabs your phone and then pretends to be on a work call, doing their six-year-old impersonation of a meeting."
I want to tell you what this building means to me. I have spent significant time on Capitol Hill, and I treasure this building and what it stands for. I despise the GOP for not understanding this.
My first memory of being in the Capitol was on November 24,l 1963 – two days after President John F. Kennedy was shot and skilled in Dallas. His body was brought back to Washington, and a variety of funeral events were quickly scheduled for the next several days. I was a junior in high school at the time, and I was with some friends in church Sunday morning when we learned that his body would be taken by a funeral cortege to the Capitol on Sunday afternoon, where he would lie in state until Monday morning when he would be taken to Arlington Cemetery. My friends and I decided we wanted to participate in this, and I don’t recall my parents raising any objections.
We got down into DC (it was only about ten miles from the church I attended in Falls Church, Virginia) and we began to wander around and try to figure out where we should go. We were on Pennsylvania Avenue (between the White House and the Capitol) when someone in the crowd shouted that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot by Jack Ruby in Dallas. The only news source was that man’s transistor radio.
We made our way up to Capitol Hill and finally found the line – which stretched down east Capitol Street in the direction of RFK Stadium.
We joined the line to go through the Capitol Rotunda at about 5 pm that afternoon, as I recall. We hadn’t eaten since early afternoon (and wouldn’t be able to eat until early the next morning). I remember being freezing and starving while we stood in line. I also remember being in line with someone who had flown up from Puerto Rico to pay her respects, along with a family from Indiana who had driven over 500 miles to be there.
We got through the Rotunda somewhere around 2:30 in the morning. We then went to find our car (my friend John had driven five of us down there) and I got home around 4:00 am. Again, I have no recollection of my parents being upset or angry about the fact that I had been out so long without any way of communicating with them. No cell phones, etc, in 1963.
When Tim and I met in 1965, we discovered we had both been in DC that weekend. He also lived in the Virginia suburbs, in Arlington, and he had also gone into town with his friends. They were there on Monday to watch the funeral procession from the White House to Arlington National Cemetery.
I was at the Capitol again a little over a year later, when Lydon Johnson was inaugurated in January of 1965. He was sworn in on the East Front of the capitol (the building doesn’t have a back; it has an east front and a west front). When Reagan was elected in 1980, his advisors recommended that the ceremony be moved to the West Front, to take advantage of the vista down the National Mall to the Washington Monument. This has been the location of every inauguration since then.
My next close encounters with the Capitol Building were in the late 1970s, when I was finishing up my Ph.D. in Political Science at Catholic University in Northeast Washington. I did a lot of my dissertation research at the Library of Congress (just across the street from the Capitol) and usually traveled to and from the Library by bus. The bus stop was on Independence Avenue beside the Capitol, so I walked past the building virtually every day for a year or so. While I was working on my dissertation, I got a temporary teaching job at National Cathedral School (an elite private girls’ school associated with the Washington National Cathedral in Northwest DC), and I generally rode the bus to and from the school to teach in the afternoon. Again, I caught the bus in front of the Capitol Building. The bus stop was on First Street, which separates the Capitol Building from the Library of Congress.
While I was doing this work at the Library of Congress, I picked up another temporary gig, doing some research for Republican Congressman Robin Beard of Tennessee. I don’t remember exactly how this came about, but I had become acquainted with one of his legislative aides – a man named Tom McNamara – and he convinced the congressman to offer me a short-term contract to conduct some opinion polling for his office. He was interested in public opinion about military service in his district, and I was doing research more broadly about public attitudes toward the military for my dissertation, so the two topics seemed to mesh.
The study I did wasn’t memorable, but I do remember one interesting story. Tom and I occasionally needed to get in touch with each other, and that was hard because I was working in a place – the Library of Congress – where no one could reach me on the phone. We devised a system so that I would know if Tom needed to talk to me about anything. This was just a few years after Watergate, and we all knew the story about how the person identified as ‘Deep Throat’ – later identified as Mark Felt – let Bob Woodward know he needed to talk to him: he would move a plant on his balcony, Woodward would see it, and he would contact Felt in a prearranged manner.
So Tom and I did the same thing. He had a Tennessee state flag in his office window, which faced First Street. The DC Metro (the subway system) was open to the public by then, and my habit was to ride the Metro to the Pentagon where I would catch a bus to go home. I had to walk down First Street, past Tom’s office, to get to the Metro station. We only used this means of communication once; I was walking down First Street, looked up at the window, saw the flag on the opposite side of the window ledge, and just walked up the stairs and down the hall to Tom’s office. He burst out laughing when he saw me walk in – he had only moved the flag 30 minutes or so earlier, and he had no expectation that it would work.
One side note – another person who worked on this project was an army officer based in the Pentagon, Rick Gabriel. Newspaper reports identified him as one of the passengers who died in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
My next opportunity to hang out in the Capitol came in 1980, as I was hired to work for the Senate Finance Committee. The chairman of the committee at the time was Bob Dole, and it was interesting to see how a powerful member of the Senate conducted business at that time. Reagan had just been elected President, the GOP had taken control of the Senate for the first time in decades, and they were all feeling their oats. I only worked in this office for a year, but I spent most of my time running (well, walking purposefully) around the Capitol Hill complex. Again, in those days the only way to get a message (or a document, or lunch) from one place to another was to physically make the trek. I was very very very low on the totem pole, so I was the designated trekker much of the time. The job was crazy busy (I answered phones and typed, mostly) and the hours were crazy long, but it was a very good (and informative) year. When I started teaching high school government a few years later, the knowledge I gained from this short year on the Hill was very useful.
The next time I encountered Capitol Hill was in the summer of 1993 when I worked for a couple of months as an intern in the office of Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia. I had been teaching government for a few years by that time, and my anecdotes about Congress were stale. I needed new stories. So I called the Senator’s office and talked a bit with his staff person who was in charge of interns. She thought it was amusing that I wanted to be an intern at the ripe old age of 46 or so (most of the interns were in college), so she offered me a spot. I even got paid -- $4 an hour, as I recall. Just about enough to pay for the subway, lunch, and appropriate clothing. None of the other interns got paid.
While I was teaching government in Prince William County (between 1989 and 1998) I took my high school students on a field trip to the Capitol Building every year. Often, when teachers take their students to Washington, they try to see everything – the Capitol, the Washington Monument, a museum or two – and it is often a very scattershot and frantic affair. I took a different approach. I divided my students into groups of 10 (with one adult chaperone per group) and sent the groups off on a scavenger hunt where they had to find all kinds of things in the Capitol complex – the offices of their Congressman and Senator, a few specific pieces of art, the subway, the Senate and House Chambers, one specific coffee shop, and so forth. This had two benefits.
One, a group of ten students could go place where a group of 100 wouldn’t be admitted. My groups would report back to me at the end of the day and have some amazing tales to tell. Once, a group started talking with a Congressman who provided his personal escort onto the floor of the House, where the general public is not usually allowed. Other groups got into the Senate gallery to hear a debate, while others rode the subway with Ted Kennedy. You get the idea.
Second, I didn’t assign any group to me. In fact, I listed myself as an item on the scavenger list that they had to find. I usually parked myself for the day on a pleasant bench or under a shady tree and entertained a series of visits from my groups of students as they passed information along when they met each other in the halls.
My final experience in the Capitol Building itself was in 1997 or so, right before we decided to move to Williamsburg. I worked (volunteered) as a guide in the Capitol Building on Saturdays. After my initial training (I did my training on a snowy February Saturday), I was scheduled to work. I don’t recall whether I worked every Saturday – somehow I don’t think so, but I don’t really remember.
There were four volunteer guides on each shift. We were stationary guides – we stood in one place for about 30 minutes and talked to people as they walked through our area, and then rotated to the next station. Our stations were at the entry to the building on the Capitol’s East Side, in the Old Senate Chamber (used by the Senate until 1859), and in the Old Supreme Court Chamber (used by the Supreme Court until 1935). The fourth guide on the shift rotated to the break room, where we hung out with the Capitol police officers.
These were simpler times at the Capitol. A visitor center was built underground on the east side of the Capitol, but before that tourists walked right into the building and, after going through a security checkpoint, had little guidance about what to do next. The guide stationed at the entry provided guidance about how to navigate the building and suggested possible places to visit.
When I was planning to teach an Osher class on Westward Expansion in American History a few years ago, I happened upon some art in the Capitol Building that I had not known about. I was surprised by this finding; even though it had been years since I was in the Capitol, I thought I knew the building pretty well.
I knew about the three Brumidi Corridors in the Senate wing of the Capitol, designed by Constantin Brumidi in the 1850s and completed by Brumidi and other artists over the succeeding decades; some of the art in these corridors was on my scavenger hunt list for my high school students. But I didn’t know about the three Cox Corridors in the House wing.
The Cox Corridors were authorized by Congress in 1971, and Capitol Architect Alloyn Cox was asked to submit a proposal for the work. The first two corridors were completed between 1973 and 1982; Cox died shortly after the completion of this work. In 1993-94, EverGreene Painting Studies executed the final corridor, depicting the nation’s Westward Expansion. So I don’t feel so bad for not knowing about the Cox Corridors; they weren’t there during the times when I was most often in the Capitol Building.
These murals in the Cox Corridors extend across the vaulted ceilings; here are a few pictures of what you’ll see if you lie on your back on the floor and look up.
If you want to take some time, here’s a one-minute unnarrated video that walks you through these corridors. Watch this to get an idea of what the Capitol interior looks like when it’s not being befouled by idiots.
If you watch this – or if you’ve ever had the opportunity to spend much time in the Capitol Building – you will be as outraged as I am about how the GOP has demeaned both the building and the work done in the building. Remember, the insurrectionists carried a Confederate flag and defecated on the marble floors while they were in this building. I despise them for that. If you are of a mind to defend their behavior, don’t bother.
I haven’t been to the Capitol since 9/11, and I certainly haven’t been there since January 6, 2021. From what I can determine online, visitors are still permitted to walk independently through the building after going through slightly more rigorous security at the Visitors Center.
Writing about the Capitol Building makes me want to visit again. I think I will try to go up there sometime this summer. I just checked out Amtrak between Williamsburg and Washington’s Union Station (about four blocks from the Capitol). A train leaves Williamsburg at 6 am and gets to DC at about 9:20. To come home, I can catch a train at about 3:30 and will get home by 7:45 pm. The cost is $23 each way. I think I’ll do this. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Today’s GOP is not the same as our father’s…
I won’t tell anyone you have worked for Republicans!