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The State. President Hoover accepted an invitation to the services. There was plenty of precedent. President McKinley dedicated in 1898 the Cathedral's large Peace Cross, symbolizing the end of the Spanish-American War. President Roosevelt helped lay the foundation stone in 1907. The service Woodrow Wilson attended on the Sunday following the Armistice in 1918 was considered the nation's religious observance of that event. After the opening of the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armaments in November 1921, President Harding led all its 34 delegates to a special Cathedral service through the Bethlehem Chapel doorway over which is carved "The Way of Peace." On Mount Saint Alban in 1928 Calvin Coolidge addressed an open air meeting of the 49th General Convention of the Episcopal Church.
"Temple of Peace" In the sermon he prepared for the dedication, Bishop Freeman wrote: "Nothing could be more fitting in a time so critical, fraught with such momentous events, than this service. . . . The very fact that this Temple is but partially completed seems to suggest that the vast work of rehabilitating a disordered and disorderly world, presents to us an opportunity and a challenge of incalculable value. . . . Without these walls, a troubled and distracted world is seeking again the ways of Peace and orderly living. Within these walls fresh affirmation is given of the ways and means by which alone that Peace can be secured. . . . Here, we are seeking to understand through symbol, praise and sacrament, the paths that shall lead us ultimately to those serener heights where we shall know and comprehend God's larger plan for the peace and happiness of His children. . . . In no place other than here in the capital of the nation has such a Temple of Peace a more appropriate setting. ..."
Foundations were laid (1907) during the episcopate of the late Rt. Rev. Henry Yates Satterlee, first Bishop of Washington, cousin to Herbert Livingston Satterlee who is John P. Morgan's brother-in-law and a prominent money-raiser for the Cathedral. For many years the Cathedral existed only underground. Since 1912 there have been daily services in Bethlehem Chapel which is one of three, in sturdy Norman architecture, burrowed among piers which will some day bear the weight of the 262-ft. central tower. These chapels began early to receive great dust. Woodrow Wilson was a Presbyterian but his widow had him interred in the Episcopal pile. George Dewey, Henry Vaughan (Cathedral architect), Bishop Satterlee and his successor the late Bishop Alfred Harding are in the chapels, in handsome sarcophagi. Last person to be buried there was Counselor Melville Elijah Stone of the Associated Press. The delicate matter of arranging interments is in the hands of the Cathedral Executive Committee, who are empowered to accept no more than one person a year. For his interest in arranging such matters, Bishop Freeman has been called, with the sometimes startling jocularity of high churchmen, "The Body-Snatcher."