Lincoln's secret: Below the memorial, graffiti may show racy screen star

Washington Post

17-02-2025

The woman's profile is drawn on concrete deep in the undercroft of the Lincoln Memorial. She has dark lipstick, dark eyebrows and dark eye makeup. A cigarette hangs from her mouth. Beside her face, written in flowery script, is the word 'Vamp.'
The sketch, possibly done in carpenter's pencil, is among the century-old workers' graffiti left on the pillars of what is the basement of the Memorial, 45 feet below the sculpture of the 16th president on the Mall in Washington.
Now, as part of that underground area is transformed into a new visitor center, the National Park Service theorizes the drawing may depict a scandalous figure from another era in American history: the racy silent-film star Theda Bara.
'I think there's a compelling (if circumstantial) case to be made' that the drawing represents Bara, a spokesman for the National Mall and Memorial Parks, Mike Litterst, said in an email.
Bara became a movie sensation after starring as a powerful, seductive woman in silent films starting around 1914. She popularized the image of the 'vamp,' the enticing female predator who leads good men astray.
She appeared in films including 'The Devil's Daughter,' 'Sin' and 'The Vixen.'
One newspaper called her 'the siren of the silent screen.'
In 1915, the New York Tribune's drama critic Heywood Broun wrote: 'No good ever came from such eyes.'
Her line, 'Kiss me, my fool!' uttered in a text block to a spurned lover, became a silent-film classic.
Some moviegoers, unable to separate the role from the actor, attacked her for her alleged wickedness. Some newspapers condemned her. But people thronged theaters to see her movies, according to news reports at the time.
'Audiences came to see her as the arch-symbol of forbidden sex,' author Roy Liebman wrote in his 2023 book, 'Theda Bara, Her Career, Life and Legend.'
She was 'the heedless vampire who destroyed lives just because she could,' Liebman wrote.
Would Abraham Lincoln, who loved the theater, have approved?
'He enjoyed all sorts of theatrical entertainment,' historian David Herbert Donald wrote in his 1995 Lincoln biography. He loved Shakespeare's plays, especially the murderous tale of Macbeth.
'Nothing equals Macbeth,' Lincoln wrote, according to Donald. 'It is wonderful.'
'The great tragedies, with their stories of linked ambition and guilt, especially appealed to him,' the historian wrote.
Lincoln also liked lower-brow works and comedies. The night he was assassinated he was attending the comedy 'Our American Cousin,' which starred the British actress Laura Keene, a powerful female figure in the theater of her day.
Theda Bara was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati in 1885.
She made 42 films, according to film historian Robert S. Birchard. She graced the covers of magazines. She had her own newspaper column. People named their daughters after her, and her death in 1955 was front-page news in some newspapers.
'In 1915 (the same year they were finishing pouring the foundational pillars in the undercroft) she had her breakthrough role in a film called 'A Fool There Was' in which she played a character called 'The Vampire,'' Litterst wrote.
She portrayed a woman who lures a prosperous attorney away from his family and leads him to ruin. The film's title comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem, 'The Vampire,' about unrequited love.
The name, shortened to Vamp, 'is the origin of the term we use today to refer to a seductive woman who exploits men,' Litterst wrote. 'Next to the image of this woman … is written the word Vamp in very stylish lettering.'
'It doesn't jump out at you at first, but that's clearly what's written there,' he wrote.
And though the Park Service can't date precisely when the profile was sketched on the column, Litterst speculates that 'A Fool There Was' may have provided the inspiration.
'Again, all circumstantial, but I'd make the case that some lovesick laborer working on the Lincoln Memorial goes to the movies and sees 'The Vamp,' then in a quiet moment in the undercroft the next day draws a picture of her and labels it accordingly,' he wrote.
Litterst said he heard the theory several years ago from a former Park Service volunteer and brought it up after a recent tour of the undercroft that highlighted the progress of the visitor center construction.
There are also drawings of, among other things, the cartoon characters Mutt and Jeff, and a figure that looks somewhat like President Woodrow Wilson, who was in office during the construction of the memorial.
Work on the memorial began in 1914. The structure was built on dozens of concrete columns that raise the memorial about 45 feet above ground level, creating the undercroft beneath it.
The memorial was dedicated in 1922.
The Park Service believes the sketches were made by the men who built the memorial.
The artists are unknown, although someone using elaborate script wrote the name 'Bosco Johnny' on one of the pillars.
For many years, the National Park Service allowed special tours of the undercroft to see the stalactites that had formed under the memorial's steps, Stephen Potter, retired regional archaeologist for the service's national capital region, said in a recent telephone interview.
But park rangers leading the tours began to notice that some of the artifacts left behind by the original workers were disappearing. 'People were five-finger discounting this stuff,' he said.
Potter said he was asked in 1984 to do a survey of the undercroft and document, map and photograph what was there 'so that we could then collect all that and remove it so it wouldn't go missing.'
On Sept. 7, 1984, Potter and Robert Sonderman, then a Park Service archaeologist, descended to the undercroft, where, using huge utility lights, they catalogued the things that had been left behind.
The Park Service eventually recovered 33 artifacts, including old leather work boots, a rubber overshoe, liquor bottles, a cap, a milk bottle and pieces of a rake.
They also photographed the graffiti — though neither man said he was aware of the Theda Bara theory.
'Because I'm a frustrated cartoonist … I couldn't help but start noticing all this graffiti,' Potter said. 'Particularly some that was extremely well executed.'
He said the drawings appeared to have been done with carpenters' pencils — 'the kind that are flat, that you then have to take a pen knife and you sharpen.'
'That was what they used because everybody had them in the slot of their bib overalls,' he said.
The best of the caricatures, Potter believes, were done by 'Bosco Johnny.' It's not clear if that was a worker.
'The stuff he did was artwork,' Potter said. 'The best of the caricatures are all done with his flourish,' and he probably drew the 'Theda Bara' picture.
He said the drawings were probably done before the undercroft was enclosed by the structure of the memorial above it.
Litterst said the memorial's new undercroft visitor center won't include the area where the graffiti is, but copies of some of the images will probably be displayed in the new space.
The multimillion-dollar center will include a museum, store and exhibit section, as well as glass walls to provide views of the cathedral-like interior of the undercroft, and an immersive theater presentation, the Park Service said.
The project is scheduled to be completed by July of next year.