The Capitol: What I Know and What I’ve Learned

As a tour guide and historian in Washington, DC, I visit the United States Capitol building on a fairly regular basis. In the pre-pandemic world, I am inside the Capitol a minimum of twice a week, probably 40 weeks a year, which is more often than some elected officials who work there. This means that I have the privilege of knowing the Capitol pretty well.  I know, for example, the weight of the Dome (just shy of 9 million pounds), about the Brumidi Corridors on the Senate side, and what both the House and Senate chambers look like, in and out of session. I know the awed look that tourists get when they see the Rotunda, with the stunning fresco of Washington on the inside of the Dome. I even know what the Speaker’s Office looks like, and that Speaker Pelosi keeps three gavels in plain sight, each bigger than the last.

To be honest, the Rotunda has never been my favorite part of the Capitol; I much prefer Statuary Hall, with its 35 statues peering down majestically at everyone in the room. Some of the statues are famous—Rosa Parks, for instance—and some are less well known: Norman Borlaug, recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, and Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first Vice President. Normally, at any given time inside Statuary Hall one can find the two constants in political Washington: multimple tour groups moving through the room and multiple Members of Congress lurking at the edges of the room. The tour groups don’t usually notice the Members, but the Congressmembers know to stay well away from the tourists. Statuary Hall, it turns out, makes a particularly compelling backdrop on television and so the Members of Congress are usually waiting impatiently for their next TV spot.

I know other things, too, such as where there is dried blood on the back staircase to the House Gallery. The blood remains embedded in the marble from an 1870s dispute between a disgraced Congressman and the reporter who disgraced him; violence, it turns out, has never been far from the heated rhetoric of Congress.

There are things I did not know, however, things it would never have occurred to me to wonder.  I did not know how easily the walls of Congress could be breached, jumped over with seeming ease by an angry group of insurrectionists.  I did not know what it would look like to see a place I know so well covered in a riotous, unruly mass of humanity, breaking windows and smashing doors. I did not know what it would look like to see flags waved inside the Capitol not to a state or our country, but to one man and one ideology.  I had no idea what it would feel like to see pictures of violent terrorists storming around those Brumidi Corridors, their mouths curled around words of hate.

I have never seen Members of Congress threatened in real time; normally they seem so impenetrable in their citadel. I did not know that they could look so terrified, threatened in the very place where they, and the democracy they serve, should be most safe. It was unfathomable to me to see lines of people trying to break into the Senate and House Chambers to disrupt their functioning, rapelling down from the balcony, clutching zip ties and wearing tactical gear. It took a moment to realize that it was real, this was really happening.

In Statuary Hall, one of my favorite places in the Capitol, there were pictures of the seething mob marching through, as if on parade—which in a sense they were. As the statue of Rosa Parks looked on serenely from her perch, the tumultuous crowd went streaming through the Hall. Many of the invaders were clearly angry, their faces a rictus of entitlement, loathing. Several of the terrorists, though, were calm, even gleeful, their countenance seemingly at odds with the rest of their bodies. This in particular is galling to me, the terrorists who treated this invasion as a tantamount to a vacation, a lark. How does one enter the Capitol by force and smile about it? How can someone stomp all over democracy with apparent enjoyment? What kind of person treats the active rebellion of white supremacy inside the Capitol with amusement?

White Supremacy is, in point of fact, a very old story in the United States Capitol building, and Jan 6 was by no means its first manifestation within those hallowed halls. The Capitol was built by enslaved persons, their presence regarded as so unremarkable during the building process that it is not clear how many there were. January 6 was also not the first time the Confederacy and its symbols tarnished the halls of the Capitol.  True, the Confederate flag (which is not actually the Confederate flag, but we’ll save that discussion for a later time) has never disgraced the halls of Congress, but there are statues to Confederate officials and slaveowners in the Capitol.  In fact, there are more statues to slaveowners than there are to women adorning the walls of the Capitol, and since these statues are sent by individual states, this says a lot about the priorities of remembering history around the country. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, has a statue sent by his home state of Georgia which still stands, and up until December 2020 Robert E Lee did as well. Even Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, has a statue sent by his home state of Mississippi, and there can be no greater marker of America’s failure to acknowledge its past than this.

Protests are nothing new to the Capitol, nothing new to Washington; if I had a nickle for every time I have had to maneuver a tour group around demonstrators, I could quit the game right now. Protests happen all over DC; at the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol and beyond. As someone who makes their living giving outdoor tours, I find the frequency of protests is annoying, but as a citizen of this democracy I take an odd comfort in these frequent interruptions.  I have watched many a foreign guest try to puzzle through the spectacle of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to peacefully assemble, and I have registered their astonishment that such things are legal and encouraged. The feeling of pride that comes with that is one of the singular joys of my job, even if I don’t agree with the protestors. It is our right as Americans to be angry with our government and to let them know.

January 6 was not a protest. It may have started out that way, although I doubt it, but once the mob breached the Capitol and entered by force, it became something else altogether.  January 6 was terrorism. Words matter, particularly in this circumstance, so it is important to be very clear about what happened: a white supremacist mob entered the United States Capitol by force, intent on assaulting Members of Congress and disrupting the normal course of our democracy. If this happened in another country we would call it an attempted coup d’etat, and wring our hands with smug superiority in the calling. It was a violation, and we feel violated.

Now that this has happened, there seem to be no limits on what I do not know. Where do we go from here, as a country and as a democracy? How can we begin the healing process, how do we bring those responsible to justice, what does justice even look like for something this egregious? How does the city I live in and love become whole after this? In the immediate term, what does this mean for the inauguration on the 20^th, and the proper continued functioning of Congress? I have few answers, but I do think that any approach to healing needs to include proper contextualization, and for that we will need several well qualified historians, and a commitment to civics education and public engagement.