The last few times the nation has been called upon to throw major parties for the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the results have been something less than admirable. The Lincoln Centennial in 1909 is mostly remembered now for a bloody race riot in Lincoln’s own home town of Springfield, Illinois, and a new version of the penny, with Lincoln’s profile on the obverse. The Lincoln Sesquicentennial in 1959 was marked by a special address to Congress by poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, and a new version of the Lincoln penny.  Perhaps the best thing which can be said about the Lincoln Bicentennial in 2009 is that, once more, we got a new version of the Lincoln penny.

President Lincoln

Maybe this should not come as a surprise. Lincoln’s historical reputation hit its highest point in the 1910s and ‘20s, and has been slipping gradually in stature ever since; among African-Americans, who once idolized him as a second Moses, Lincoln’s standing as the Great Emancipator has nose-dived since the 1960s, to the point where Lincoln is now routinely discounted as a scheming white supremacist who only wanted to use black people for his own political ends. Part of this is surely produced by the general decline in civic literacy in American schooling, where it’s enough a struggle just to identify who Lincoln was, entirely apart from the larger task of explaining what he did; and the decline of Lincoln’s fortunes among blacks is surely linked to a healthy unwillingness to see themselves as merely the step-children of benevolent white folks. Neither of these represent irreversible developments — provided that the Lincoln Bicentennial could be deployed in what it is now fashionable to call a ‘teachable moment.’ But the ‘teachable moment’ has come and gone, and little if anything of the Lincoln Bicentennial seems to have served the purpose of reminding Americans of either who Lincoln was or what he did.

The bulk of the blame has to fall squarely on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, which was created (and funded) by Congress in 2000 to act as the forum for the celebrations of Lincoln’s birth in 2009. Almost from the start, the Commission became a political football, with Michael Bishop, the Bush Administration’s pick as executive director, at loggerheads with the Commission’s co-chair, Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin, and the Commission’s two most prominent Democratic appointees, Harold Holzer and Chicago Congressman Jesse Jackson, jnr. Once control of Congress shifted into Democratic hands in 2006, Bishop was out as executive director, and in his place came Eileen Mackevich, who had no particular connection to anything Lincolnian apart from having run the Chicago Humanities Festival. Lincoln had once declined an invitation to join a Chicago law firm, complaining that the place would kill him. The Commission, now with the skilled technicians from the Land of Blagojevich securely at the controls, proceeded to confirm Lincoln’s apprehensions, post facto.

It was books, rather than “town halls” and exhibitions, which ended up carrying the day for Lincoln’s bicentennial. Lincoln has always been a profitable subject for book publishers over the years (along with diet books, cook books, the Kennedys, and Hitler), and the bicentennial year would surely be no exception. Although we were warned by the Boston Globe in the fall of 2008 that “at least 50 titles about Lincoln are due out between next month and 2010,” there is, after it all, no difficulty in picking out the giant among the pygmies, and that is Michael Burlingame’s two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life, over 2000 pages long and built over the span of two decades on the most exacting research. If Burlingame’s Lincoln does not win the Pultizer, the National Book Award, and the Lincoln Prize, there is no justice. Crowding behind Burlingame are Thomas Krannawitter’s Vindicating Lincoln, Barry Schwartz’s Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America, Stephen Berry’s House of Abraham (on Lincoln and the Todd family), Charles Lachman’s The Last Lincolns and the inevitable Harold Holzer’s Lincoln, President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860-1861. Much-ballyhooed but almost empty of anything significant are Ronald White’s A. Lincoln: A Biography and George McGovern’s Abraham Lincoln. And far down at the bottom are the contributors to Eric Foner’s stillborn Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, which struggles to drape Lincoln in the toga of Progressive deification.

Curiously, no one attempted a Lincoln movie, although rumors continued to bob-up all through 2009 about a Steven Spielberg ‘Lincoln,’ with screenplay by Tony Kushner and starring Liam Neeson as Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. There were, however, no shortage of documentaries produced, from PBS, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. Almost predictably, PBS’s “Looking for Lincoln” was another long soak in racial bathos, with Henry Louis Gates ‘looking’ for someone who could persuade him that Lincoln was not really a white supremacist. But PBS also produced a corking-good documentary on “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,” based on James Swanson’s Manhunt, while the History Channel took on the unlikely subject of the 1876 scheme to rob Lincoln’s tomb, “Stealing Lincoln’s Body.” At least one major theater production has emerged from the bicentennial, James Still’s The Heavens Are Hung in Black, a three-act play commissioned for the re-opening of Ford’s Theater in Washington after an 18-month refit. And Norman Corwin’s 1959 play on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, The Rivalry, was dusted-off for a new audio-CD production by the LA Film Works, featuring Paul Giamatti as Stephen Douglas and David Straithern as Lincoln.

Lincoln in music had a much better time during the bicentennial. Over and above the by-now ritualized performances of Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942), the Naxos label issued ‘The Lincoln Portrait Project,’ a CD which began with the Copland piece, but reached out to include both new and old works written around the Lincoln theme – Morton Gould’s Lincoln Legend (first performed in 1942 by Toscanini), Charles Ives’ setting of Edwin Markham’s lugubrious poem, “Lincoln the Man of the People,” and two works by Paul Turok (Variations on an American Song, based on the 1860 campaign tune ‘Lincoln and Liberty, Too’) and Ernest Bacon (a twelve-movement suite, Ford’s Theatre). Orchestra programs around the country tacked the Copland Lincoln Portrait onto their programs, although frequently undoing the dramatic potential of the music by hiring in the role of solo narrator a celebrity who couldn’t have told Lincoln from a half-note. The Chicago Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony programmed the Copland with James Earl Jones as the narrator, the Boston Pops got by with a local TV personality, and the Philadelphia Orchestra passed all understanding in giving the narrator’s ticket to Alec Baldwin. Curiously, there remained an impressive backlog of ‘Lincoln music’ which was never touched by either performance or recording during 2009 — Daniel Gregory Mason’s Lincoln Symphony (1936), Roy Harris’s Symphony no. 10 “Abraham Lincoln” (1965) and Herbert Elwell’s Lincoln – Requiem Aeternam (1946). Unhappily, music directors rarely feel the urge to consult historians when drawing up the next season’s program.

The Lincoln Bicentennial has not lacked for quantity, which may be some consolation. He is still very much a lively target of interest for scholarly books, although the moguls of the book trade are very likely to want to give the Lincoln subject a rest after so many books during the bicentennial. And if it gave us nothing more than Burlingame’s Lincoln, we would still have cause for gratitude. But it is disappointing that the public side of the Lincoln commemorations was so lackluster – worse than lackluster, so unfocussed and so liable to trim its course to the demands of the political bien-pensants. There were moments, particularly under the aegis of the ALBC, when it was not clear whether Lincoln was being celebrated or indicted. And there is certainly no sign that the bustle of Lincolnian activities promoted by the ALBC made much of a dent in slowly-rising indifference to Lincoln which has been in-process for the last four-score-and-ten. That, unhappily, is an important failure, because the more we lose a grasp on Lincoln, the more we will tend to drift away as a nation from the Lincolnian ideals of self-transformation, of economic mobility, and of the ennobling power of free labor and commerce. Those were the qualities which Lincoln believed made America the “last, best hope of earth.” Let’s hope that the Lincoln Bicentennial does not turn out to have been the last, best hope for Lincoln.

Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies, Gettysburg College

Allen Guelzo is also the author of Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2009), Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).

Man of Ideas

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, Allan Guelzo

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