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In the Rotunda, you can see everything.
It tells you the whole story
of American history and how we’ve struggled for years to define it,
to describe it, and to show the world what it means.
The thread that ties all the people together,
who I think you can identify by name,
in the Capitol and especially in the Rotunda,
is the notion of expanding rights--
--expanding civil rights, expanding freedoms . . .
Other countries have ideologies, but it’s America’s fate to be an ideology.
He’s [George Washington] sitting there,
ascending into the heavens. He’s surrounded by the 13 colonies.
Just on either side of him are two figures,
and you can see that one of them is holding
something that looks like an axe, inside a bundle of sticks.
Those are fasces.
It’s an ancient Roman symbol of power and authority of government.
Each little shaft
is very delicate, and you can break it pretty easily,
but you put a whole lot of them together, and they’re very strong.
And, that reflects, of course, not only the ancient
Roman idea that the Roman people together are strong,
but also the idea in America that,
together, we create a great nation.
Some of the other stuff there that doesn’t today seem terribly American to us
are all the folks around the edge. Those are all Greek and Roman gods.
So, they’re trying to sort of evoke that long heritage--
--much older than this not-very-old nation, at the time this was made--
--with these Greek and Roman gods.
But, the funny thing is, if you look, they’re kind of mixed in . . .
with Americans.