Ghost in the Machine
Civil War & Reconstruction
Djettison Django?
Continuing his recent renaissance as a cultural critic, Kareem explains why the otherwise entertaining Django shouldn’t be an Oscar contender. I agree with the take-films-seriously sentiment, but, at least as far as Oscar goes, that ship sailed decades ago (and he’s too charitable to the excellent-but-also-flawed Lincoln.)
Also making the round today, Christoph Waltz and the SNL gang’s Djesus Uncrossed. A funny idea almost redeemed by Waltz, but as with so much SNL fare the execution is less clever than it should be.
Fact-checking Lincoln.
Historian Eric Foner, who knows of what he speaks, fact-checks Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln. I enjoyed the film quite a bit, and would recommend it to all comers, particularly Daniel Day Lewis’s typically amazing performance. That being said, I thought the excessive emphasis on the virtues of compromise in this story was fundamentally wrongheaded.
For one, the death of slavery would never have reached the House floor were it not for several decades of uncompromising agitation by abolitionists. “On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” As many of y’all know, that’s William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, giving one of the most definitive statements against compromising with an evil like slavery. Point being, compromise didn’t end slavery in America — an abject refusal to compromise did.
For another, as Foner notes, Lincoln had the votes in the next Congress — so there was no real need to compromise in this situation in any case. And besides, is it really a heroic moment for Thaddeus Stevens to be downplaying his commitment on the House floor to basic human equality? Surely, misleading the public about one’s true beliefs in congressional debate is not something we should be applauding. Nor does Washington, now or then, need any more erstwhile reformers who think the right thing to do when confronted with a stand on fundamental principle is to obfuscate and capitulate.
Of course, this nation was founded on compromise — some of them quite repellent, like the Three-Fifths — and the United States wouldn’t exist without it. And at other times, intransigence on principle has lost battles that compromise would clearly have won, such as the stubbornness of Woodrow Wilson dooming the League of Nations to defeat in 1919 and 1920, But the problem with this — mostly contemporary — emphasis on compromise is that it leads the filmmakers to a flawed understanding of the history of this period.
However much research Tony Kushner did on Lincoln here — and the film is indeed very well-written — it’s unfortunately quite clear that he doesn’t know jack about what came after the War. Here’s what he said to NPR on the subject:
“I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of war was a very, very smart thing. And it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered. The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote ‘noble cause,’ and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.’”
This, I’m sorry to say, is nonsense. Here, Kushner is blithely reciting a century-old popular myth, perpetuated by the Dunning School and D.W. Griffith, that isn’t just anachronistic and wrong. It’s been widely discredited, by some of the very same authors the film cites as sources.
The noble cause and the Klan did not arise because the North was mean to the former Confederate states. They arose because many in the South refused to accord African-Americans the basic civil liberties for which the war had ultimately been fought. To “forgive and reconcile with the South” would mean acceding to the disfranchisement and general abuse that many whites desired to levy upon African-Americans in the former Confederacy. Indeed, when Kushner’s desired move to “forgive and reconcile with the South” came with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, it was followed relatively soon thereafter by the emergence of Jim Crow. In short, Kushner’s argument here is pure wishful thinking, and it has been exposed as bunk by the last 40-some-odd years of Civil War and Reconstruction histories.
TL;DR: Lincoln is an entertaining and worthwhile film, but, then as now, compromise can be overrated. (Kushner quote via Tropics of Meta.) Update: More from Foner.
Sixteen.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln gets a poster. Hard to believe this project is finally almost in the can.
Back in the River City.
“Lincoln’s visit to Richmond produced the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war. With an escort of only ten sailors, the president walked the streets while Porter [Admiral David D. Porter, actually one of my ancestors] peered nervously at every window for would-be assassins.” 146 years after a visit from the sixteenth president, and several weeks after Daniel Day Lewis was spotted as casual Lincoln in a Richmond restaurant, the actor is photographed in full Lincoln garb by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Uncanny.
The Things I’ve Seen…
In the US History is Surprisingly Short department, an eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination appears on TV (for a February 9th, 1956 episode of I’ve Got a Secret, to be exact.)
Mr. Lincoln’s Army.
Finally setting off on his long-rumored Lincoln biopic — with Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field as Abe and Mary Todd respectively — Steven Spielberg fleshes out his cast in impressive fashion. Joining Mr. Lincoln, among others, are Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Todd Lincoln), James Spader, John Hawkes, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, Hal Holbrook, and Tim Blake Nelson. A team of rivals, and no mistake.
Confederates at Gitmo.
“The military trial of civilians is an atrocity!” Why, yes, yes it is. And, if you didn’t think so already, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, an occasionally flat but still edutaining courtroom drama, aims to sway you to that point of view by coming strong with the history — in this case, the 1865 trial of Mary Surratt for her alleged role in the murder of President Lincoln.
The good news is The Conspirator is nowhere near as preachy and inert as Redford’s last attempt at liberal muck-raking, Lions for Lambs. (I’ll confess I don’t have much patience for didactic message movies that bray at me to embrace opinions i already hold — See also Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone.) Nonetheless, this film still occasionally suffers from the same mix of well-meaning blandness and dramatic torpor that characterizes almost all of Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s similar 19th century courtroom exercise: The values being reified are all laudable, to be sure, but the story as told is strangely lifeless (and I say that as someone who probably enjoys the genre of movies-to-be-shown-in-high-school-history-when-the-teacher-is-out more than most.)
Fortunately, the movie grew on me after awhile. Its depiction of broader Washington DC often feels stagy, and some of the acting support here doesn’t help matters. (As Surratt’s daughter Anna, Evan Rachel Wood overdoes it in her every scene, and the very 21st-century Justin Long is just miscast here as a Union veteran.) But as the lens of the story narrows down to the nitty-gritty of the court case in its middle hour, The Conspirator finds a surer footing. At its best moments, Redford’s film feels like an episode of Law and Order: Civil War Unit, one whose resonances — military tribunals, indefinite detentions, victor’s justice, and whatnot — still feel “ripped from the headlines.”
After establishing that our protagonist here, Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy, with an impressive American accent — he should help out his countryman Ewan) is a Union war veteran wounded in his nation’s service, The Conspirator begins with the terrible crime that will concern us. On the night of April 14, 1865, only five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, several men attempt to kill President Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward, with mixed results. Seward manages to survive some nasty stab wounds, Johnson’s killer loses his nerve…but, as we all know, the flamboyant actor-turned-assassin John Wilkes Booth manages to kill the 16th President of the United States in cold blood. It is a horrible act of treason, the first assassination America has ever seen, and, make no mistake, everyone involved will pay.
And so, under the direction of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline, only slightly less Cheneyesque than Richard Dreyfuss in W) the conspirators (minus Booth, who is shot during capture) are rounded up and put on, for all intent and purposes, show trial — one headed by military men and quite clearly designed to come back with guilty verdicts. (FWIW, this film mostly elides over the Manhunt part of the story.) Nonetheless, according to that quaint old Constitution, even such dastardly criminals as these deserve defense counsel, and ultimately the young Union lawyer we met at the outset is roped into defending Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) by his mentor, Maryland senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson).
Captain Aiken takes to his new position reluctantly, especially since he feels pretty certain that Surratt — the proprietress of the boarding house where the conspirators plotted — is guilty as all Hell. But as he learns more of Surratt and her pious Christian, Ur-mother ways, he starts to wonder if maybe she’s just taking the fall for her son John (Johnny Simmons of Jennifer’s Body), who is still on the lam. And, as he grows ever more sick of the obvious railroading happening at trial under the direction of Judge David Hunter (Colm Meaney) and prosecutor Joseph Holt (Danny Huston, doing his officiously sinister bureaucrat thing), Aiken becomes a convert to his duties, even as proper Washington society begins to shun him for seeming to take on the Confederate cause. Sometimes a man has to make a stand, etc. etc.
I don’t know much about the Mary Surratt trial other than what Wiki has to offer, so I can’t tell you if Redford and screenwriter James Solomon have done justice to the specifics of the story — It seems to have a versimilitude about it, at any rate. But one place where I thought The Conspirator faltered is in establishing the Big Picture. True, the film begins grimly with Lincoln’s assassination — hard to fault it there, I suppose. But particularly once the courtroom scenes take hold, it doesn’t do a very good job of putting everything in emotional context — that all of this is happening mere days and weeks right after the close of America’s bloodiest war. (Nor, for that matter, is slavery mentioned.) And so, while the Law and Order aspects of the story are often compelling in their own right, the trial also feels flat, and strangely disconnected from all the events that put it in motion.
Which is too bad, really. Since, if anything, that Civil War backdrop adds depth to the viewpoint Redford seemed to be trying to uphold. There we were after four years of bloody war, 600,000 dead and the president assassinated, and Aiken is still taking a stand for the constitutional rights of Mary Surratt — even though an innocent verdict might well put the sides at each other’s throats again. (Contrast this with the cowardly behavior our past two administrations have shown with regard to tribunals, detentions, Gitmo, etc, even though, neither on 9/11 or since, has Al Qaeda ever represented the kind of existential threat to our republic that we faced in 1865.)
Speaking of the Civil War angle: In a way, I admire the shrewdness of this film: It tries to pitch a civil liberties morality play in such a way that the people who will feel most aggrieved about the injustices being shown, civil libertarians notwithstanding, are the folks among us with residual sympathy for the Confederacy — not normally a left-leaning or libertarian bunch. But, let’s get real: They’re not going to see this film, or, if they do, see it as anything other than lefty propaganda. Like Inside Job or Casino Jack and the United States of Money, The Conspirator is for the most part just preaching to the choir. One of the best things you can say about it is that, for the middle hour at least, you may not mind humming along.
150 Years Ago, a Union Broke.
“The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen…you will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.” — Robert Toombs.
All dreaded it, all sought to avert it…Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And so, 150 years ago this week, the war came.
There’s Something about Mary.
“A military trial of civilians is an atrocity…” Now isn’t that quaint? Union war hero James McAvoy finds himself reluctantly defending Robin Wright (a.k.a. Mary Surratt), a possible accessory to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, in the trailer for Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, also with Kevin Kline, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel, Evan Rachel Wood, Colm Meaney, Danny Huston, and Tom Wilkinson. Here’s hoping the historical setting here can ease the didacticism that marred Lions for Lambs.
The Tell-Tale Five.
“The National Archives gave the document prominent display, putting it on tour along with other important Lincoln documents. But for several years, archivist Thomas Plante had been troubled by the document. The ’5′ appeared to be darker than the rest of the document and was perhaps covering another number.“
A decade after attempting to secure fifteen minutes of fame, amateur historian Thomas Lowry is caught tampering with original Lincoln documents: He made it seem Lincoln’s last official act was pardoning a Union deserter named Patrick Murphy, actually pardoned in 1864. “Lowry’s purported discovery was hailed by historians when he came forward in 1998. At the time, a Civil War expert with the Archives said Lowry had made ‘a unique and substantial contribution to Lincoln research and to the study of the Civil War.’”
Abe Drinks Your Milkshake.
“Daniel Day-Lewis would have always been counted as one of the greatest of actors, were he from the silent era, the golden age of film or even some time in cinema’s distant future. I am grateful and inspired that our paths will finally cross with ‘Lincoln.’“
On the seven score and seventh anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, Steven Spielberg announces he has acquired a new Lincoln in Daniel Day-Lewis, replacing the long-attached Liam Neeson. My, that’s good casting.
Liam: No Lincoln.
“I’m not actually playing Lincoln now. I was attached to it for a while, but it’s now I’m past my sell-by date.” Along the lines of Guillermo del Toro leaving The Hobbit, Liam Neeson announces he’s now off Stephen Spielberg’s long-rumored Lincoln biopic, mainly because it’s taken too long to get off the ground. (Neeson was first rumored for the role in 2005.) Well, that’s too bad. But, if it takes another decade or so to move, Adrien Brody should fit in nicely.
“Law & Order: Civil War Unit.”
“Redford says he didn’t want to simply re-create Lincoln’s assassination and deals with that mainly as setup. ‘All the President’s Men was very similar, because you had this big historical event taking place, but what people didn’t know was what these two reporters did, digging in under the radar. You didn’t need to show Nixon a lot,’ he says.“
USA Today checks in on the set of Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, about the trial of Mary Surratt, with Robin Wright Penn, James McAvoy, Toby Kebbell, and Alexis Bledel. (This is not to be confused with the long-gestating film adaptation of Manhunt or Steven Spielberg’s seemingly cursed attempt at a Lincoln biopic.)
Thrill of the Chase…Letter.
Score one for eBay: After three-score years lost to the winds, a long-missing Lincoln letter is returned to the National Archives by the Arizona collector who ended up with it. “Federal officials, who have not ruled out its possible theft from a government collection, discovered it two years ago during routine monitoring of online auctions.“
His Soul’s Marching On?
“‘It’s a great, great project,’ Brolin told us. ‘The script was already out there; I read the script, I loved it. It would be a very tough character for me to play. We’re going to do some tests once I’m done with this, but it’s a great script and story. Somebody who I know, because of Howard Zinn’s thing, and I know the character really well.’” After Jonah Hex and the next Woody Allen film, will Josh Brolin be frontlining a new John Brown biopic? That’s the word I’m hearing from my abolition-minded colleagues at Coming Soon.Net. Let’s just say the authorities at Harpers Ferry had best be wary.
A Dark Hour for Lincoln.
“A source close to Spielberg says the director is busy with his next film, Tintin, and is not wringing his hands over Paramount’s decision. But another source associated with the project, asked about the process, said, ‘I think it’s called water-boarding.‘” Will Steven Spielberg’s long-gestating Lincoln biopic (with Liam Neeson and Sally Field as the president and first lady respectively) become a victim of the downfall of Dreamworks? “This past weekend, he’s been waiting for executives at Paramount–the studio he ditched last year–to decide whether to make the film and hire him to direct it.“
Well, the dubious merits of Amistad notwithstanding, I can think of a couple dozen other movie projects I’d like to see the plug pulled on before this one.
Abe Lincoln and the Land of the Sundered Republic.
Lincoln laughs last? It seems that due to rewrite issues with the rumored Abbie Hoffman film, Steven Spielberg has put his Lincoln biopic back on the front-burner, to be shot right after Tintin (a la Jurassic Park/Schindler’s List and War of the Worlds/Munich.) Other than Liam Neeson and Sally Field as President and Mrs. Lincoln respectively, no other casting has been announced.
Yoo must be joking. | SSDAG.
“Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion,” said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.” (Nor, apparently, does the Fourth Amendment apply.) An unsettling memorandum by Dubya stooge John Yoo which advocates both dictatorial rule and the legality of torture is released to the public, five years later. “‘The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president’s wartime authority,’ Jaffer said. ‘The memo was meant to allow torture, and that’s exactly what it did.‘”
More than anything, I’m reminded of Lincoln’s remarks to the Indiana fourteenth: “‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing over slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.’“
And, just in case anyone was under the impression that this sort of thing only happened in the dark days of 2003, witness Attorney General Mukasey last week getting publicly verklempt and making up 9/11 tales as he goes along, all to help preserve the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps. At this point, Chuck Schumer has a lot to answer for.
The Constitution Made Whole.
“Not one lawyer in 100 can identify Ohio congressman John Bingham as the main drafter of the 14th Amendment. Yet Bingham is a fascinating historical figure: he served in Congress in the 1850s as the country was torn apart and in the 1860s as it was stitched back together. He was a federal judge and the nation’s minister to Japan. As a prosecutor, he convicted John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators, and as a member of Congress he gave closing arguments in President Andrew Johnson impeachment trial. All that, plus he drafted Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which is perhaps the single most important paragraph of our Constitution.” Over at TNR, Doug Kendall pleas with Obama and others to remember the Reconstruction amendments.
Land of Lincoln.
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” From deep within the Library of Congress, new photos emerge of Lincoln’s second inauguration.
We are Lincoln MEN 2B?
By way of Dangerous Meta, a cardiologist argues in a new, soon-to-be-published e-book that Abraham Lincoln might be the earliest known case of a rare genetic disorder. “Sotos believes Lincoln had a genetic syndrome called MEN 2B. He thinks the diagnosis not only accounts for Lincoln’s great height, which has been the subject of most medical speculation over the years, but also for many of the president’s other reported ailments and behaviors.“
Wife of Abraham.
Liam Neeson has his Mary Todd: Sally Field joins Spielberg’s forthcoming Lincoln biopic as Abe’s First Lady.
An Abe, Honest.
“‘Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee’s army,’ Lincoln wrote, ‘the rebellion will be over.” Trevor Plante, a researcher for the Discovery Channel, discovers a lost handwritten note penned by Lincoln after Gettysburg in the National Archives. Meade did not complete his work, of course — like McClellan before him, he remained overcautious with the Army of the Potomac, prompting Lincoln’s wrath in an unsent letter dated a week after the discovered note: “My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.”
Old Dominion.
“This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution.” In related news, the Virginia General Assembly unanimously expresses “profound regret” for Virginia’s hand in slavery, becoming the first state to do so. “The measure also expressed regret for ‘the exploitation of Native Americans.’“
Don Young’s Lincoln Lies.
“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” In vaguely-related news, conservative congressman Rep. Don Young trots out an obviously-fake Lincoln quote to bash Dems on Iraq. [ThinkProgress has the video.] ”’Now that he’s been informed these are not the actual words of Lincoln, he will discontinue attributing the words to Lincoln. However, he continues to totally agree with the message of the statement,’ [spokeswoman] Kenny said.” (For the record, and despite his suspension of habeas corpus, President Lincoln was a lenient sort, and assuredly not a believer in the reforming potential of public hangings.)
Prayers for Tim.
Get well soon, Tim Johnson. Oof, talk about terrible news on several levels. One hopes the Senator will make a full and complete recovery after his AVM surgery, and we won’t have to think too deeply about the possibility of a Senate turnover. Fortunately, there seems to be a good deal of precedent for long absences from the chamber — my first thought (other than Nate Fisher and Narm!) was Charles Sumner’s three-year absence after the caning, but there are apparently many 20th century examples too.
After Munich.
In a wide-ranging interview with one of his fansites, Steven Spielberg talks Indy 4 and other projects in his possible short-term future, including his long-rumored Lincoln biopic (with Liam Neeson, and based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent Team of Rivals) and a new hard sci-fi project entitled Interstellar.
Crisis of the New Order.
“Observers describe Bush as ‘messianic’ in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, ‘The Almighty has His own purposes.’ Invoking also Lincoln’s remarks on the Mexican War, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. laments the rise of preemption, senses dark forebodings in Dubya’s saber-rattling with Iran, and concludes that “there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.”
Munichan Holiday.
Steven Spielberg announces he’s taking a hiatus in 2006, meaning that both his Lincoln biopic with Liam Neeson and Indy 4 (currently being polished by Spiderman scribe David Koepp) might take longer than expected to hit theaters.
The world has changed.
“The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you’re trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes — Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond — sail away. They can’t live in this world that they’ve created, because it’s so different from what they started out to defend. It’s a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn’t sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln’s America anymore.” By way of a friend in the program, Columbia’s Eric Foner picks his five most personally influential books, and guess what made the list…
First Batty, now Booth.
Beware the finger of death, Confederate conspirators. Former fugitive, scoundrel, and president Harrison Ford is slated to track down Lincoln’s assassin in the forthcoming film Manhunt. Ford will play Everett Conger, the retired cavalry officer who helped catch John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett farm, near Port Royal, Virginia, twelve days after Lincoln’s shooting.
Foote-notes.
“The academy never wholly embraced Foote (who, for his part, never considered himself a professional historian or a military expert). Some historians complained that Foote didn’t pay enough attention to the political and economic factors behind the war. Others were offended that he’d dare to write history without footnotes. Looking back, was it merely a case of Northern empiricism scorning Southern charm?” New Yorker editor Field Maloney assesses the historical contribution of — and controversy over — the late Shelby Foote.
McMonticello.
“‘I think there is more significant history in this corridor than in any comparable space in America,’ Moe said. ‘There’s been a lot of encroachment already, particularly in the form of residential development. If this continues, the character of this region will be changed forever.’” Richard Moe of the National Trust for Historic Preservation adds the expansive Tri-State region between Gettysburg and Monticello to its list of most endangered historical sites.
Rehearsal for Reconstruction.
“The pattern of the South’s Reconstruction, more than the pattern of Japan’s, has anticipated occupations elsewhere — above all in Iraq, where some supporters of the old regime participate in a campaign of terror even as a long-oppressed and newly enfranchised group struggles to claim power. What are the lessons of our own self-reconstruction?” By way of The Late Adopter (who, darn it, beat me to the great “Fables of the Reconstruction” post-title), historian and Promise of the New South author Edward Ayers discusses the applicability of Reconstruction to current events.
One More Crusade.
Moving a long-awaited project closer out of development hell, George Lucas approves the new Indy IV script. If Harrison Ford also approves, Indy IV could get a 2006 start, after Spielberg finishes both Vengeance, his Munich Olympics film with Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, and his Liam Neeson Lincoln biopic, based on a forthcoming book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Abe Lincoln and the World of Tomorrow.
“Bob Rogers, BRC’s founder and chairman…draws two circles, labeled ‘scholarship’ and ‘showmanship,’ on a sheet of yellow paper. The circles overlap, but only slightly. That tiny slice of shared space, he says, is where the museum needs to be.” By way of Dangerous Meta, the Washington Post examines the mild controversy surrounding high-tech exhibits at the Abe Lincoln library. If BRC is consulting a sizable number of outside historians on the scholarship, as they seem to be doing, then what’s the problem? Gimmicks like Tim Russert introducing 1860 campaign ads are a bit facile, sure, but if they help get more laypeople intrigued in Lincoln’s life and times (and don’t unduly misrepresent the history), I’m all for it. Besides, my feeling is, if historians don’t get behind such efforts, they’re going to happen anyway, and with much less historical rigor to them.
Kinsey on Lincoln.
Schindler, Rob Roy, Darkman, Qui-Gon, Kinsey…why not Honest Abe? Liam Neeson is apparently in talks to play Lincoln in a Spielberg-directed biopic, to be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s forthcoming book, The Uniter. Ok, that’s not bad…but hopefully this project turns out better than Amistad.
Also in loosely related Lincoln-by-way-of-Kinsey news, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir casts a troubled eye at C.A. Tripp’s Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. As he ably points out (as does George Chauncey in the excellent Gay New York), “the difficulty with assessing Lincoln’s private life (or that of anyone else who lived before the 20th century) is that the nature of private life has changed dramatically from his time to ours, and the distance between us distorts the view…Whether [Lincoln and Joshua Speed's, with whom Lincoln shared a bed] relationship had a sexual component or not, it belongs to a vanished world of intimate male friendships of a kind almost unrecognizable to us.” In other words, sexual orientation is an historically dynamic idea. Homosociality does not necessarily imply homosexuality, and one cannot simply read 19th century sources and infer a 20th century mindset. You have to delve a little deeper. Update: Columbia’s David Greenberg also weighs in for Slate.
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