From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

A couple of years ago I gave a public lecture on Lincoln’s last days in 1865.  Following the discussion period, as I was leaving the auditorium, a woman approached me to ask one more question.  She hadn’t broached the subject earlier, she said, because it was so distant from my topic.  “Did Lincoln,” she wondered, “really get syphilis when he was a young man?”

I was fascinated that this issue was on her mind, and asked her where she’d first heard about it.  “In one of my medical school textbooks,” she replied.  She couldn’t remember if the textbook treated the syphilis story as a fact, or as a speculation.

I told her that the subject had been widely discussed in the 1980s, when Gore Vidal featured it in his Lincoln: A Novel (1984).  Major historians weighed in at the time to say that the evidence for Lincoln’s having contracted syphilis was inconclusive at best.

After Vidal’s death in summer 2012, I went back to his novel and his shorter writings on Lincoln to try to figure out why he’d dwelt so doggedly on the syphilis idea.  It soon became clear that he’d seized upon it as the first salvo in a campaign to destroy Lincoln’s image as a “saint,” to reduce him to the moral status of a very ordinary man of his times.

The word “syphilis” still conjured up menacing associations in the 1980s, as it had in the 19^th century.  Even the possibility that he had carried the disease — which in its long latency period might have infected Mary Lincoln, and, through her, their children — could help tarnish his reputation as a hero of uncommon virtue.  Vidal played up the devastating implications for Lincoln’s family members as much as he did the original “devilish passion.”

Did Lincoln have the ….? Herndon and Vidal thought so. Artwork by Douglas Volk, 1928.

The “Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore” approach to Lincoln, said Vidal, had blocked a true grasp of his significance.  Blighting the saint would open people’s eyes: the mythic selfless emancipator was actually an aggressive empire-builder.

The politically nimble Lincoln had done much more, said Vidal, than “save” the Union from being split in two.  He had deepened the hold of the union, making the nation, not the states, the sovereign power for all Americans.  Decades after his death, with the holy Lincoln as its chief icon, the imperial American state got to have its cake and eat it too, dominating much of the international order while posing as the one power that acted “with malice toward none and charity for all” other nations.

But where did Vidal get the syphilis story in the first place?  It came from Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon, who wrote privately in 1891, “Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis…  About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease.”

Herndon claimed to have heard those words from Lincoln’s own lips, but he didn’t specify when he’d heard it.  “Old and infirm,” by his own admission, when he wrote the 1891 letter — he died two months later — Herndon sometimes got mixed up about what he’d heard directly from his former partner, what he’d heard from others, and what he’d inferred all by himself.  (In 1889, Herndon said Lincoln had told him that he’d left his “heart” buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave; in 1866, Herndon claimed “a friend” had told him that; some evidence suggests he came up with it himself.  See my blog post of Nov. 30, 2011.)

That doesn’t mean Herndon was confused in this instance, but the reliability of the syphilis tale has been widely questioned.  In his book We Are Lincoln Men (2003), David Herbert Donald concluded that a recollection written down “more than fifty years after Lincoln’s alleged escapade and more than twenty years after his death” could only stand if supported by “confirmatory evidence.”

Herndon may have anticipated the doubts that would greet his story.  “Lincoln told me this,” he wrote to Weik, “and in a moment of folly I made a note of it in my mind…”  In other words, it would have been better for all concerned if he’d simply forgotten about it.  But he’d done what came naturally to him: remembered exactly what he’d been told, and remembered it for all time.  Now he could only kick himself for being such an unyielding servant of the truth.

With Lincoln’s syphilis engraved in his memory as a fact, Herndon had tried to keep it a secret.  But now, approaching his end, he felt compelled to divulge it.  He feared that someone, after his death, might discover the fact and wrongly take it as proof that Abraham had been unfaithful to Mary.  Herndon was absolutely certain that Lincoln had been “true as steel to his wife.”  He’d contracted his case of syphilis six or seven years before his marriage.

The irony of the syphilis tale is that Herndon’s goal — protecting the memory of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s marital purity — came at the cost of swearing to Lincoln’s pre-marital impurity.  Thankfully, he managed to keep quiet about all this until almost a decade after Mary Lincoln’s death in 1882.  Having suffered after 1866 from Herndon’s wild speculation about her husband’s heart — that after Ann Rutledge’s death in 1835 he had never truly loved another woman — she was spared having to reckon with Herndon’s report about Lincoln’s infected body.

With the current spotlight on Lincoln actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones — all three of them up for Oscars on Sunday night, Feb. 24th — it’s easy to overlook the (now) 88-year-old Hal Holbrook, who plays Preston Blair, Sr., in the film.  When Steven Spielberg signed the actor for this small part, he was honoring the hardy impersonator of Mark Twain and the 1976 winner of an Emmy Award for his lead role in the NBC mini-series “Sandburg’s Lincoln.”

By the time producer David Wolper cast him as Lincoln, Holbrook had already been famous for two decades.  His tours as the curmudgeonly Twain had begun in the early 1950s, and by evoking his character on stage, Holbrook became an American institution.

But he fretted about being typecast for life as the warmly cynical sage in his signature white coat.  In the 1960s he sought out other parts, and earned a turn as Lincoln in the 1963 off-Broadway revival of Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”

Raymond Massey, the 1940 ‘Lincoln’

During that run, Ed Sullivan showcased him on CBS for Lincoln’s birthday.  More than 10 million people tuned in as he performed the central Lincoln “speech” from the play, a monologue made memorable by Raymond Massey in the original theater production and in the 1940 film.

The real Lincoln never delivered this speech.  It’s a medley drawn from several Lincoln pieces, with a few fictional twists to adapt it to the Depression and the fight against fascism in the 1930s.  Here is a seven-minute clip of Massey’s film speech:

Reciting the speech on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1963 gave Holbrook instant credibility as a Lincoln interpreter, and it may have put him on David Wolper’s radar screen.  A decade later, Wolper signed him to play “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” and the six 50-minute installments aired at irregular intervals from late 1974 to early 1976.  (The show became available on DVD about two years ago.)

The series suffered from frequently wooden plots, static staging, and bland dialogue, but Holbrook’s physical appearance helped keep many viewers engaged.  He didn’t look exactly like Lincoln, but that made him all the more intriguing.

Thanks to veteran make-up artist Charles Schram’s painstaking work — Holbrook sat motionless for three hours every morning as Schram applied seven rubber “appliances” to his face — Holbrook looked something like Lincoln.   He looked enough like Lincoln to make a viewer wonder where exactly the likeness lay, and whether more of it might turn up in the next scene.

Drawing on his Mark Twain persona, Holbrook gave Lincoln a folksy, chatterbox personality that spiced up the undistinguished writing.  This garrulous president was never at a loss for words.  The scripts highlighted the downhome storyteller, the wheeler-dealer politician, the patient husband and father, and the resolute warrior who suffered the loss of every dead soldier.  Left out of this mix were the quiet, contemplative, self-concealing man, and the writer of great passages on freedom and equality.

In the social and political tinderbox of the early-to-mid 1970s, with the American population split over Vietnam and race relations, “Sandburg’s Lincoln” avoided the subject of race, and barely mentioned the word “slavery.”  It left aside the president’s famous words about equality and freedom.  In a one-minute excerpt from the First Inaugural, Lincoln pleaded for national unity — knowing full well that obtaining it would require a minor miracle, the return of “the better angels of our nature.”

Carl Sandburg died in 1967.  Had he lived to see “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” he’d have been shocked by its wholesale disregard of emancipation.  The episode entitled “Unwilling Warrior,” which aired in September 1975, actually showed Lincoln arriving in Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1865, for his three-quarter-mile walk to the newly captured Confederate White House.  Writing emancipation out of this historic moment required a diligent effort.

Describing the scene in Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Sandburg celebrated the dense crowds of “black folk, some silent and awe-struck, others turning somersaults and yelling with joy as though their voices and bodies could never tell what they wanted to tell… . As they reached hands toward him in greeting and salute,” Lincoln welcomed them to their first day of de facto freedom.

Holbrook’s Lincoln walks through deserted streets on his way to the Confederate White House.  He doesn’t notice two black men cowering in a doorway, for they are too afraid to show themselves.  Lincoln’s mind is focused on the imminent end of the fighting.  Once ensconced in Jefferson Davis’s chair, and refreshed with a drink of water, he sighs gratefully, “it’s over.”

Sandburg would have winced at the series’ excising of emancipation from the moment of reunion.  But he would have loved the main thread of “Sandburg’s Lincoln”: Hal Holbrook’s depiction of the savvy Midwestern politician who conquered the East and never forgot his roots in the West.

Part of the power of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln comes from screenwriter Tony Kushner’s skill at navigating the line between history and fiction.  He followed the example of James Agee, the novelist and film critic who wrote five half-hour teleplays on Lincoln for the CBS program “Omnibus” in 1952-1953.  Agee laid down the principle of “reasonable conjecture” to guide the dramatist in creating a gripping story that brought Lincoln alive on the screen.

Agee defined “reasonable conjecture” as speculation based on facts, but not fenced in by them.  Getting at the deepest truths about Lincoln required both dramatic license and dramatic discipline: familiarizing yourself with the available facts before rearranging them and supplementing them to make the story work.  Invented scenes and dialogue were justified if they contravened no known facts and tried to capture the life of Lincoln as he’d lived it.

In 1955, “Omnibus” aired “Mr. Lincoln,” a one-hour abridgement of Agee’s five films. (The hour is available on DVD from The Archive of American Television.)  The first scene shows the principle of “reasonable conjecture” in action.  It’s April 10, 1865, and we find ourselves inside the sun-drenched Washington, D.C., studio of photographer Alexander Gardner.  The film camera is focused on its ancestor, Gardner’s studio camera perched atop its tripod.

We see actor Royal Dano from the back as Gardner prepares his shot, joking about how the Appomattox surrender has made Lincoln do something for the first time: smile for a photographer.  Gradually the “Omnibus” camera zooms in on the studio camera, passing by Lincoln’s shoulder as Gardner instructs him to turn his head slightly to the right.  Gardner removes the lens cap, and we see what he sees: the ever so slight grin of contentment that the real Lincoln did allow Gardner to capture in the “cracked plate” photo of February 5, 1865.

This dialogue between Lincoln and Gardner is a fiction, but a fiction designed to expose a truth: the scores of photos we have of Lincoln miscommunicate his character.  They make him severe and solemn.  Long exposure times ruled out capturing his affability, not to speak of his hilarity.

By lingering on Gardner’s camera, and first showing Lincoln’s face as seen through the lens, Agee’s film addresses a second truth.  Photographs have decisively shaped our awareness of him.  Those of us born in Agee’s era (he died in 1955) almost certainly encountered Lincoln first through iconic images of wisdom, resilience, and patience, not through stories about his everyday human experiences.

It still takes a lot of convincing for many of us to believe that he ever missed the boat, gave up, lost his temper, or behaved as anything less than a perspicacious saint.  (Could he possibly have slapped his son Robert across the face, as Kushner’s script has it?  Never!  Could he have sunk into a depression so deep that he thought he had caused Ann Rutledge’s death, as Agee’s film has it?  Impossible!)

Spielberg’s Lincoln follows the lead of Agee’s “Mr. Lincoln” by introducing the star of the show from behind, and then moving the camera slowly past his shoulder before cutting to a front view of Lincoln sitting before us.  Daniel Day-Lewis is oddly situated, alone on a platform (perhaps a reviewing stand) as a few dozen soldiers mingle nearby before pushing off.

Lincoln bigger than life, if only on the billboard. (Photo by Richard Wightman Fox)

We expect Lincoln, perched on his wooden pedestal, to be the main speaker in this scene, but Kushner makes him the listener, as two young white soldiers and one black soldier recite portions of his year-old Gettysburg Address to him.  This exchange never happened.  But Kushner does double duty with it.  Lincoln is rattled by hearing his exact words spoken by the white soldiers.  He tries to make them stop, embarrassed by the memorized adulation.

Like Agee with the photograph, Kushner seems to be telling us viewers to let Lincoln come down from the pedestal we’ve placed him on.  We’re so busy venerating his image and his words that we’ve forgotten about the man.  It’s time to examine the actual emancipator.  As the black soldier finishes the recitation, speaking of “a new birth of freedom,” Lincoln is moved by his own words.  He hears the judgment in them.  He’s being challenged, not routinely praised.

Kushner shows he’ll also examine the man in relation to his wife.  The second Lincoln scene in his script mirrors the second scene in Agee’s.  They both put Mary and Abraham in a small, warmly lit White House room on an evening in 1865.  They’re relaxing together until conversation turns to an alarming dream Abraham has had.  Agee’s Lincoln recounts his (apocryphal) dead-president-in-the-White-House dream.  Kushner’s Lincoln tells the (factual) fast-moving-ship dream.  (See my post on “Lincoln’s Dreams, Authentic and Inauthentic,” Jan. 10, 2011, for the content of the dreams.)

Both authors invent a fictional tête-à-tête to disclose a basic truth about Abraham and Mary.  Each of them took dreams very seriously as hints of what might happen.  Kushner goes beyond the facts in tying the ship dream to the 13^th amendment (at least in Mary’s mind), but in doing so he brings out the common sensibility of two people usually thought of as opposites: crazy, impatient Mary, and rational, long-suffering Abraham.

Dreams helped Mary and Abraham establish their intimacy.  As she does in Kushner’s scene, Mary appears in real life to have taken on some of Abraham’s anxiety about his dreams.  Her readiness to absorb some of his worries let them feel close.  And that closeness gave him much-needed support as he got back to the daily grind of saving the union and advancing freedom for all.

Daniel Day-Lewis, the four-time Best-Actor Oscar nominee and two-time winner (for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood), has outdone himself in Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln.  Earlier big-studio Lincolns of the sound era — Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, and Raymond Massey — played Lincoln.  Day-Lewis manages somehow to embody him.

There’s never been a big-screen Lincoln remotely like this one: quick-witted and brooding, calculating and cheerful, logical and humorous, drawn to philosophical ruminating but ready to strike with resolve when he sees the chance, in early 1865, to abolish slavery once and for all by helping to push the resolution for a 13^th Amendment through the House of Representatives.

Day-Lewis will get his fifth Oscar nomination, and maybe his third Oscar.  Whether he picks up the Oscar or not, he has created a character as richly layered and warmly mysterious as the original Republican hero.

Director Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he didn’t so much direct his male lead as get out of his way.  But he provided Day-Lewis with two accomplished stars — Sally Field as Mary Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens — and both of them bring out Day-Lewis’s crafty best in the most riveting scenes of the film.

The single other person most responsible for Day-Lewis’s performance is screenwriter Tony Kushner, whose script lets this Lincoln debate, meditate, joke, and out-reason everyone else.  Lincoln is the work of a dramatist used to writing Pulitzer Prize-winning words, as he did two decades ago for Angels in America.

In this 1865 revision of an older print, Lincoln’s head (center) has replaced pro-slavery John C. Calhoun’s head in the tableau of authors and defenders of the U.S. Constitution. Might Daniel Day-Lewis now replace Henry Fonda or Hal Holbrook as the best ‘Lincoln’?

Hence the film feels a lot like a stage play, or a film from the 1930s or 1940s.  Indoor verbal jousting trumps “action” by being the action.  But that’s a perfect choice for capturing the historical Lincoln, the champion wordsmith who adored the theater himself.

Some viewers will find the barrage of verbiage excessive, and yearn for Spielberg’s signature visual movie making.  They’ll have to get by on the comic relief supplied by Lincoln’s storytelling, and on some beautiful silent moments the president shares with his young son Tad.

When I first heard about Spielberg’s plan for a Lincoln movie, I wondered if the film would highlight the emancipator as much as it did the savior of the union.  And I hoped it would not depict Lincoln as such a tender man of charity that his wife Mary would be reduced to the needling, tempestuous thorn in his ever-saintly side.

The stakes were high.  A filmmaker of Spielberg’s stature would shape popular attitudes and beliefs about Lincoln the husband and Lincoln the leader for decades to come.  (Spoiler alert: what follows reveals plot details on both subjects, the Lincoln marriage and Lincoln the emancipator.)

I needn’t have worried.  Spielberg and Kushner, Day-Lewis and Field, have come through with balanced treatments on both scores.  Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field re-create the presidential couple’s tangled relationship in all its human fragility.  Like every other couple, they converse genially about one thing and another.  They debate the meaning of Abraham’s ominous “ship dream.”  They plan a “shindig” (public reception).  And they experience a joint emotional outburst, with Mary vilifying her husband and Abraham shouting her into submission.

The fight ends without reconciliation.  But gradually they realize that their sorrow over 11-year-old Willie’s death in 1862 has taken too huge a toll on their marriage.  Riding in their open carriage on the afternoon of April 14, 1865, they agree to try, at long last, to give up being the servants of their grief.

Meanwhile, Lincoln the emancipator gets his most resounding film portrayal ever.  The president cajoles Congressmen night and day to line up affirmative votes for the abolition amendment.  The film could have left Lincoln there, savoring the end of slavery.  Instead, the script goes out of its way to record the liberator’s final move, months later, on the subject of black freedom: publicly endorsing the vote for some African-American men in his last speech on April 11.

It’s early evening on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln is bantering with friends in a White House sitting room about the April 11 speech.  They note the criticism of it by Thaddeus Stevens, who was seeking the vote for all, not some, black men.

But House Speaker Schuyler Colfax commends the president for being the first chief executive in American history to endorse even limited black suffrage.  With that, a cheerful Lincoln sets off for Ford’s Theatre, telling his friends he has to depart, though he’d rather stay.

The film portrays such a vehement emancipator that one wishes Spielberg had let Lincoln out of the White House to celebrate the new era with the masses of African Americans who gave him and God the credit for freeing them.

Having shown Lincoln in Petersburg, Virginia, with General Grant on April 3, where the President reflects somberly on the military deaths he and Grant have caused, the film could easily have shown us Lincoln walking through Richmond the following day.  On that warm afternoon, with smoke still wafting over the city, thousands of slaves celebrated their first day of de facto freedom by walking alongside him, hailing the hero who had magically appeared in their midst.

Even a small glimpse of that scene could have revived our cultural memory of what used to be an iconic Lincoln event: the emancipator striding into the post-war world in the just-fallen capital of the Confederacy, shoulder to shoulder with the nation’s newly freed men and women.

The film does show Grant and Lee silently doffing their hats to one another after the surrender at Appomattox on April 9.  The Richmond moment could have set the stage for it: on April 4, as journalist Charles Coffin reported, Lincoln took off his hat and bowed silently to an elderly black man who had removed his own at the president’s approach.  Coffin summed up the majesty of that moment, calling the president’s bow “a death-shock to chivalry, and a mortal wound to caste.”

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, due out in November 2012, may prove Oscar-worthy, given its stellar cast of previous Academy-Award winners: Daniel-Day Lewis and Sally Field as Abraham and Mary; Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens.  But three earlier biographical Lincoln features offered excellent acting too, and they all fared poorly come Oscar time.

Despite Walter Huston’s fine performance, D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) received no nominations.  John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), starring Henry Fonda, could muster only a nomination for best Original Story, and it lost in that category to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The sole Lincoln best-actor nominee — Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) — lost out to Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story.

On one occasion, however, the Motion Picture Academy did give a best-picture award to a Lincoln film.  The Oscar for best two-reel (20-minute) short subject of 1955 went to an unpretentious little documentary called The Face of Lincoln.  You can watch the video below.

The Face of Lincoln was a labor of love for sculptor Merrell Gage of the University of Southern California’s Department of Fine Arts.  Born in Topeka in 1892, he began sculpting Lincoln in 1916.  The Seated Lincoln he completed that year was installed at the Kansas State House in 1918, and it conveyed the same fondness for the president that Gage exuded four decades later in the film.

In the statue, Lincoln is not presiding from on high; he’s seated on a low chair, bending toward the spectator in an informal, welcoming posture.  Many sculptors had tried to elicit Lincoln’s humanity.  Gage went after his warmth.  (You can see the statue here.)

Beginning in 1928, Gage took his clay and sculpting tools into public halls and let audiences watch as he created Lincoln’s head from scratch.  While working, he would relate stories of Lincoln’s life.  By the 1940s, despite his many other sculpted works, his one-hour Lincoln show had become his main claim to fame.  Naturally, when he approached retirement in the mid-1950s, USC’s Department of Cinema Studies decided to preserve his act on black-and-white film.

Cover of the booklet that went into the tin with every copy of the film that showed Gage at work.

In 1956, the Motion Picture Academy nominated The Face of Lincoln in two categories: best two-reel short, and best documentary short.  Though it lost in the documentary contest to Disney’s Men Against the Arctic, it beat out the two-reel competitors — one of them The Battle of Gettysburg, which featured the voice of “Lincoln” reading the Gettysburg Address.  It thus became the only Lincoln production ever to win a best-film Oscar.

The Face of Lincoln begins with Gage holding up sculptor Leonard Volk’s 1860 life mask of the 51-year-old Lincoln, running his fingers over it to show the difference between the left and right sides of his face.  For Gage, facial features revealed character and aptitude.

On the left side, Lincoln’s skin is stretched tight, exhibiting Lincoln’s power and decisiveness.  It gives Lincoln his “firm, true look,” indicative of his “legal ability.”  On the right side, a relaxed muscle makes the corner of his lip protrude slightly, suggesting gentleness, the look of the “humanitarian and philosopher.”

With these homespun findings out of the way, Gage gets to the true business at hand:  digging into the clay with his fingers, thumbs, and implements, conversing all the while about the flatboat trip to Louisiana in 1831, the Black Hawk war, and a dozen other iconic moments from Lincoln’s life story.  He spends almost two minutes on little Grace Bedell’s suggestion that the presidential nominee would look better with a beard.

The seductive storytelling can draw our attention away from what else is happening:  with his hands and voice, Gage is expressing his affection for Lincoln.  He’s speaking to him as much as speaking of him.  He’s modeling the face of Lincoln, but he’s also modeling an intimate bond with his hero.

Gage’s attachment to the president is touchingly visualized when Gage briefly mentions the Ann Rutledge story.  The camera pans slowly around the back of Lincoln’s head as we learn that he experienced “what we would call a nervous breakdown” after her sudden death in 1835.  The camera stops to let us join Lincoln in gazing at Gage.  The sculptor is describing the care Lincoln required from “his friends the Bowling Greens” after Ann’s burial.  Gage seems to be comforting his sorrowing friend too, by smoothing out his lapels.

When the Civil War arrives, Gage makes Lincoln’s face age rapidly.  He digs at the hollows of the cheeks and the wrinkles above the eyes.  Gage’s fingers are working hurriedly by the time he gets to Appomattox and Lincoln’s final week of life.  His voice slows down for the trip to Ford’s Theatre, even as his hands rush to complete the crow’s feet beside his eyes and the creases around his mouth.

“You know the rest of the story,” says Gage.  He swivels Lincoln’s head away from the camera as he adds, “you know how the assassin’s bullet forever turned his face from us.”

Millions of Americans saw The Face of Lincoln on television or in school in the mid-twentieth century, and, thanks to the United States Information Agency, millions of people around the world saw it too, with the soundtrack dubbed in their own languages.  It’s a rarely seen work today, but half a century ago audiences knew it embodied the reverential feelings that Lincoln routinely evoked.

It’s been over 70 years since Hollywood produced a biographical feature film on Lincoln.  It’s been over 80 years since Hollywood released a biographical feature touching on Lincoln’s presidency.  That movie was Abraham Lincoln (1930), and its director was the renowned D.W. Griffith, who had made the Civil War and Reconstruction saga Birth of a Nation 15 years earlier.  (Okay, last spring’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter counts as a Hollywood feature, and it certainly is based on one real slice of Lincoln’s life: his facility with an ax.)

Walter Huston (1930) was “the big buck of this lick” and a man’s man in the last Hollywood biopic about Lincoln’s presidency. Almost 4 score and 7 years later, what kind of man will Daniel Day-Lewis’s president be?

Two months from now, soon after the presidential election, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln will come to a theater near you.  With the accomplished Daniel Day-Lewis playing the president, this movie will mark Lincoln’s Hollywood comeback.  RKO’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) — starring Raymond Massey in the performance he’d perfected over a long Broadway run — was the last biopic feature to appear.  And that classic film took Lincoln’s life only as far as his departure for Washington on a chilly winter morning in 1861.

Spielberg’s Lincoln won’t try to cover Lincoln’s whole life either.  Griffith’s 1930 film showed that that is a nearly impossible task.  Too much gets left out, and too many scenes turn out sketchy at best.  Spielberg has announced that his Lincoln, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), will address only “the last few months” of Lincoln’s life.

Kushner’s script, says Spielberg, will treat the end of the military action but also probe Lincoln’s role in the January 1865 passage of a House of Representatives resolution for  a 13^th amendment that could abolish slavery.  It appears we’re about to get a cinematic Lincoln we haven’t seen before.  This Lincoln cares as much about emancipation as he does about reunion.  After 1862 he cares about them equally, since he believes freeing all the slaves he can makes reunion possible, and since banning all future slavery is a necessary step in fulfilling the nation’s democratic destiny.

Contrast this Lincoln with D.W. Griffith’s Lincoln.  His films dwelt on Lincoln’s desire to reunify the nation, minimizing his interest in emancipation.  Above all else, Griffith’s Lincoln wished for peace between the sections.  In the silent Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (played by Griffith crewmember Joseph Henabery) appears at the start of the film as a reluctant warrior: sitting alone at his desk, he dabs his eyes with a handkerchief after signing the first order for volunteers in 1861.  By the time of Appomattox in 1865, Lincoln has become the South’s “best friend” (as the Confederate Dr. Cameron calls him), a Christ-like conciliator eager to restore white rule to the former Confederacy.

When the scheming Radical Republican Congressman Austin Stoneman, patterned after Thaddeus Stevens, storms into Lincoln’s office, preaching vengeance on the secessionists, the president tells him (as the dialogue card reads), “I shall deal with them as though they had never been away.”  He slowly rises from his chair, stretches up to tower over the Congressman, and peers down at him to dismiss his presumption.

In the 1930 film, Walter Huston’s President Lincoln cares passionately about two things above all: unifying the country and pardoning a young deserter.  The merciful Lincoln is matched by the charitable Robert E. Lee: at war’s end, a tired but elegantly attired Lee pardons a Confederate soldier charged with refusing to fight.  Setting up this parallel between Lincoln and Lee as gentle, forgiving souls nails down Griffith’s notion that the greatest leaders of 1865, North and South alike, wanted only to rebuild a tranquil Union.

Griffith goes out of his way to assure us that his peace-loving Lincoln is also a hyper-masculine man of the people.  “I’m the big buck of this lick,” bellows the burly Huston after besting Jack Armstrong in the famous New Salem wrestling match.  He embarks on a playful, romantic love with Ann Rutledge, and later on a convivial friendship with General Grant.  His ease with Rutledge and Grant proves he’s a man’s man — one who’ll have no trouble tolerating Mary Lincoln’s henpecking while preserving his sense of humor and his alpha-male sense of command.

If Spielberg’s film gets all the way to Lincoln’s final week of life, I hope it dramatizes Lincoln’s “reconstruction” speech of April 11, 1865, when he went on record in support of voting rights for black veterans and other qualified black men.  John Wilkes Booth was in the audience that evening, standing on the north side of the White House.  According to one of his associates, speaking after the assassination, Booth saw red when he heard the endorsement of black suffrage fall from Lincoln’s lips.  He promised that the president would never deliver another speech.

As Eric Foner points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), the president’s suffrage comment on April 11 doesn’t prove he would have done more than his successor Andrew Johnson to extend the voting rights of freedmen.  But it does give us reason to hope that, had he lived, he would have found ways to work with Congressional Republicans in easing African Americans’ passage toward full citizenship, while protecting them against violence and intimidation.

Last February, on a blue and balmy Southern California morning, I drove to Disneyland to take in the famous spectacle “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.”  The final third of it features an almost lifelike audio-animatronic president speaking some eloquent lines, drawn from several of his speeches, on the subject of liberty.

Surprisingly, on a tourist-heavy day with thousands of customers already in the park, only 25 people turned out for the noon performance. They barely dotted the “Opera House” auditorium that can seat over 500 patrons.

I went back for the 2:00 p.m. show, when tens of thousands of perspiring people were clogging Disneyland’s sidewalks and attractions.  This time only 35 people were enjoying the air-conditioned comfort, and Lincoln wisdom, at the Opera House.

Disney’s Lincoln originated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where it was showcased at the Illinois Pavilion.  The assassination and funeral of President Kennedy in 1963 had sparked a flurry of interest in Lincoln, and Fair officials went all out to bring Disney’s prototype to Queens.  They gave the company a $250,000 “loan” that amounted to a Lincoln appearance fee.  The state of Illinois chipped in with an additional $100,000 for Disney.

Initially, according to the New York Times, Fair audiences found the Lincoln facsimile unconvincing.  The “32 channel magnetic tape” sending electronic impulses to “activate pneumatic and hydraulic valves” produced cumbersome movements of the head, arms, and torso.

During the Fair’s winter recess in early 1965, Disney engineers reworked the mechanism, and attendance more than doubled in the spring and summer: only six percent of fairgoers watched the show in 1964; in 1965 the figure surpassed 12 percent.  Spectators now exclaimed to pavilion personnel that this Lincoln must be “a man impersonating a machine.”

The Illinois Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1964, seen on a postcard. Note the Lincoln face and words on its wall at left. From here Disney’s man-machine Lincoln went to Anaheim’s Disneyland Opera House; and so on to the whole world.

In the summer of 1965, to mark Disneyland’s 10^th anniversary, “Great Moments” also opened in Main Street’s new Opera House.  Today, after decades of minor changes and temporary shutdowns, the show goes on with the more supple “autonomatronic” president installed for Lincoln’s bicentenary in 2009.

On my visit, a Disneyland employee named Bob (he preferred not to give his last name) was working the show.  He has been watching over Lincoln off and on since 1979.  He and others in the old guard have successfully argued for keeping Lincoln going when some in the company wished to pull the plug.

Bob advised me to sit front and center to catch the small movements in Lincoln’s face (and his audible exhalation).  As the Los Angeles Times reported when the new Lincoln was unveiled, the engineers “figured out how to capture the musculature of the face using 16 micro-miniaturized motors pushing and pulling [the] silicone skin.”

This Lincoln figure still doesn’t quite look, or sound, like the actual man.  He’s too broad-shouldered, and his voice is a rich baritone rather than a high-pitched tenor.  His arms can make sweeping gestures, but they can’t bend up to grab his lapels.  That said, Disney’s “imagineers” have come eerily close to bringing Lincoln to life.

This crafted president delivers a commanding physical presence with the slow swivel of his head, the stretch of his chest, and the delicate play of his fingers.  His eyes seem to seek you out in the audience.  The “Complete Show” upload includes a close-up of his eyes that is not to be missed.

It’s a shame that in 2009 Disney didn’t take the time to upgrade the show’s introductory history lesson while it was improving Lincoln’s bodily movements.  Centering on Lincoln’s life and leadership, the nine-minute look at American history up to the Civil War combines narration (much of it in Lincoln’s words) with a slide show of colorful paintings and stirring music, including a haunting 90-second duet of “Two Brothers on Their Way, One Wore Blue and One Wore Gray.”

The opening images depict the arrival by ship of two groups of Europeans — the 17th-century Pilgrims and the 19th-century immigrants  – but omit the arrival by ship of the African slaves.  As historians have shown for over a generation, there is no way to grasp the flow of American history in general, or the greatness of Lincoln in particular, without putting slavery and its aftermath at the heart of the story.

Disney’s Lincoln tells us in passing that God “hates injustice and slavery.”  But the real Mr. Lincoln went far beyond hating slavery in the abstract.  He came to realize that reunion depended on emancipation, and that emancipation ultimately meant extending citizenship rights to some of the freedmen.  Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in praising him for placing political equality on the American agenda once and for all.

Since 1865 Americans have tried in a thousand ways to keep Lincoln’s memory alive, and Disney’s groundbreaking effort does so by revivifying his body.  Probably no other figure in American history could have prompted such a sustained investment in technological wizardry.  Americans have admired many politicians’ speeches and leadership, but for generations they have found Abraham Lincoln uniquely endearing in his moral character and his physical person.

In early June, websites and newspapers around the world reported an exciting “new find” in Lincoln studies. In May, a researcher working for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project had been sifting through boxes of 19^th century records at the National Archives in Washington. Suddenly she found herself holding a manuscript marked (in black ink), “Chas A Leale, Report on death of President Lincoln.” Just above that title, a cataloguer had written (in red ink) the date “1865.”

Historians had been trying to find this document for nearly a century and a half. It was Dr. Leale’s original account of what he’d done and witnessed on the evening of April 14, and morning of April 15, in 1865.

The 23-year-old Leale had been the first physician to come to Lincoln’s aid as he sat unconscious and mortally wounded in his box at Ford’s Theatre. Leale’s quick decision to lay Lincoln down on the floor of the box — relieving the pressure on his brain — may have been responsible for extending Lincoln’s life until early Saturday morning.

That stretch of nine hours from Booth’s gunshot at about 10:30 p.m. to the president’s death at 7:22 a.m. gave high government officials the chance to gather around the deathbed and absorb the calamity together. Northerners as a group took comfort from the familiar deathbed ritual, described for them in great detail in their Sunday and Monday newspapers and soon reproduced visually in countless commercial lithographs.

An inaccurately drawn, hand-colored print of 1865 suggests why Dr. Leale's memory of Booth's blade grew over time.

Two years later, in 1867, Dr. Leale wrote an account of Lincoln’s death for a congressional committee, and in that document (today located in the Benjamin Butler Papers at the Library of Congress) he said he was drawing on an unpublished manuscript that he’d written “a few hours after leaving [Lincoln’s] death bed.”

The “new find” of June 2012 gives us our first look at what Leale wrote on April 15, 1865 — not the actual pages, but the undated copy of them marked “1865” by the National Archives cataloguer. You can read this copy at http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/New_Documents.htm

It turns out the “new find” doesn’t disclose anything new, but that’s an important bit of knowledge in its own right. We now know there’s no bombshell waiting to be divulged in Leale’s long-misplaced report. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to compare Leale’s 1865 and 1867 documents. It shows us how his memory of the assassination was evolving, and it points us to moments during the last hours of Lincoln’s life that aren’t usually highlighted in treatments of the assassination.

Here I can mention three such moments: Lincoln’s entry into the dress circle at Ford’s Theatre; John Wilkes Booth’s brandishing of his dagger; and the prayer (or was it prayers?) intoned by the Reverend Phineas Gurley at the time of Lincoln’s death.

In 1865, Dr. Leale wrote that he watched from his seat in the dress circle as the president’s party walked by on their way to the box. The audience was cheering heartily, and the president and Mrs. Lincoln “reciprocated” the warm welcome with “a smile and bow” (p. 2).

But this happy Lincoln was replaced in Leale’s 1867 report by a despondent one: “the President as he proceeded to the box looked expressively mournful and sad.” Leale had either suppressed the news of Lincoln’s sorrowful mien in his 1865 account, or remembered the dejected look on his face only after writing that report.

In 1865, Dr. Leale was intently focused on the long knife wielded by the “man of low stature and black hair and eyes” who had leaped to the stage from the president’s box. He noticed the “drawn dagger” Booth was “flourishing in his hand” before he jumped (p. 3) and again as he ran across the stage (p. 4). By 1867, Leale had embellished his memory of the menacing knife. Now Booth had “raised his shining dagger in the air, which reflected the light as though it had been a diamond.”

The dagger was so impressive to Leale that when he rushed to Lincoln’s box about 10:30 p.m. — after “distinctly” hearing “the report of a pistol” crack through the theatre (p. 3) — he first checked the president for a stab wound, not a gunshot wound.

Perhaps the actual stab wound that was staring him in the face — the one inflicted by Booth on Maj. Henry Rathbone, a member of Lincoln’s party — influenced his judgment. But maybe Leale was initially unwilling to countenance the idea that Lincoln had been shot, hoping against hope that he’d only been slashed.

In 1865, Dr. Leale described the scene beside the bed after Lincoln died. The grieving officials and family friends “bowed down” for a prayer delivered by the Lincoln family’s minister Phineas Gurley (p. 20). In 1867, Leale remembered, they all knelt down together for two prayers, one before the president died and the other after his last breath.

With his avid interest in Gurley’s words, we might expect Leale to have heard, and recorded, Edwin Stanton’s phrase “now he belongs to the ages” — if Stanton had in fact said it. Leale made no mention of it in 1865 or 1867. It’s one of the nice ironies of Lincoln’s deathbed vigil that the main thing many Americans remember about it today —  Stanton intoning his moving phrase over Lincoln’s body — was quite likely a much later addition to Lincoln lore. There’s no record of it in 19th-century sources before 1890. If only Dr. Leale had mentioned it in his 1865 report. That would have been a bombshell.

Take a look at this close-up of the obverse (heads side) of the Lincoln penny.  Apart from minor tweaking, this side hasn’t changed in over a century, a sign of Abraham Lincoln’s deep hold as an American hero.

A penny, a statement, a work of art.

Try to imagine this is the first time you’ve seen Lincoln’s face on the penny.  Try to imagine it’s the first time you’ve seen any American leader on any circulating U.S. coin.

That was the situation in the summer of 1909, when citizens got their first look at Lincoln on the new penny.  Previously, almost every U.S. coin in circulation had shown a symbol of “Liberty” on the obverse — an idealized female figure (originally the “goddess of liberty”).  An actual person had never been depicted. U.S. coins were supposed to signal the ideal that animated the body politic, not to herald the greatness of an individual.

The “Indian-head” penny, minted between 1859 and 1909, hadn’t shown an actual Indian, but a white female figure wearing a feather headdress — with “Liberty” spelled out on the headband.  As one magazine explained in 1859, “the obverse presents an ideal head of AMERICA.  The drooping plumes of the North American Indian give it the character of North America.  The head is intended as an illustration of ‘Liberty.’”

At the moment of most intense Lincoln enthusiasm — his 100th birthday in February 1909 — the government announced its initial plans for a new Lincoln coin.  Yet many people were reluctant to part with their long-familiar penny.

Some believed that even their most beloved Chief Magistrate should be kept off the metal currency.  Putting Lincoln or anyone else on a stamp, or on paper money, was fine, they felt.  The solidity and permanence of coinage, however, suggested caution.

The New Orleans Picayune feared setting a precedent that would haunt future generations.  Presidents in power might use coinage to help turn themselves into quasi-monarchs, provoking “the transmogrification of the Republic into an empire.”

The New York Times reminded readers that when the U.S. Senate passed a bill in 1792 to put George Washington on the one-dollar coin, the House rejected the idea as “a feature of monarchy.”  Since the “American Indian typifies the love of liberty and the possession of it,” the Times campaigned to block the new coin — at the very same time that the paper was avidly promoting the Lincoln centennial events and praising his greatness.

“The idea of further honoring the memory of LINCOLN in this way,” said the Times, “is absurd.  That most modest and humble of our Presidents would never have consented to change a long-established custom by putting his own profile on the cent… The Indian must remain.”

The Times soon realized that resistance to the Lincoln penny was futile.  The Theodore Roosevelt administration didn’t need congressional approval to make the change, since the Indian-head cent had been circulating for more than 25 years.

By summer, the 12 sub-treasuries in American cities were getting frenzied orders from banks anticipating heavy customer interest in the new coin.  All the commotion showed the Times, as it satirically noted, “the Lincoln penny is to start a war of extermination on the one bearing the bust of the red man.”  Indian-head pennies would still circulate, but the Mint would no longer make them.  In short order, people would be hiding them in drawers.

On August 2, thousands of men and boys lined up at the sub-treasuries to get the maximum allotment of 25 pennies per person.  In Washington, D. C., 3,000 customers made it up to the disbursement window on the first day.  Instantly a speculative market took over the streets, with newsboys selling pennies for up to a nickel each.  By this point, nearly everyone seems to have loved the Lincoln coin.

One Lincoln disciple, 31-year-old Carl Sandburg, countered the Times claim that Lincoln himself would have disapproved.  The “great, good man,” said Sandburg, would probably be “perfectly willing” for his face to adorn the penny.  True, as symbol-in-chief for “the people,” Lincoln might object to being put on a fancier gold or silver coin.  But he’d likely smile at seeing himself on “the cheapest and most common coin in the country.”

Having fought the new penny in February 1909, the Times joined the applause in August.   With Lincoln’s “face relaxed” and showing “a benign expression,” the paper conceded, the immigrant medalist Victor David Brenner had delivered a “handsome” coin.  “The entire design is noteworthy for its simplicity of line.”

Brenner's design proved so popular that he issued small bronzes of it mounted on marble. He also designed a medal likening his immigrant background to Lincoln's log-cabin origins.

It was soon obvious that people liked this coin so much because it was so artfully designed.  Brenner had given the obverse a spacious layout, which allowed the word “Liberty” plenty of room to catch one’s attention in the open area to Lincoln’s left.

Brenner positioned the coin’s date lower than “Liberty,” leaving another wide-open space for Lincoln to gaze into.  And Brenner managed to invoke the president’s whole body.  This is not a “Lincoln-head” penny.  The shoulders and chest convey his authority and equanimity.

If the Lincoln penny ever succumbs to changing times — its utility in the marketplace is already being widely questioned, with some calling it “worthless” — the nation will have lost a beautiful and historic artifact designed for daily, hand-to-hand exchange.

To celebrate Lincoln’s hundredth birthday in 1909, the Times put on an essay contest for the children of the Greater New York Area.  Other urban papers, including the Philadelphia Ledger and the Cleveland Press, organized Lincoln competitions too, though none could rival the size of the Times event.

Drawing on a city population of 4.5 million, about 3 times that of Philadelphia and 9 times that of Cleveland, the Times attracted almost 10,000 qualifying submissions, many from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other towns in New York.  All of the handwritten papers — capped at 500 words — arrived with a teacher’s note certifying that the essay had been written “without outside help.”

“WINNERS OF THE LINCOLN COMPETITION MEDALS, CERTIFICATES, CASH PRIZES,” ran the 7-column headline on page 1 of the “Magazine Section” on February 23, 1909.  One thousand children had won silver Tiffany medals featuring the bust of Lincoln, and the top 100 were each to get a $5.00 gold piece.

The Magazine printed the top 10 essays, in facsimile form to show off the neatness and penmanship of the best writers.  Three of these, said the Times, came from the pens of 10-year-olds, one from a 12-year-old, and the rest from teenagers and one 20-year-old.  For the Times, the 10-year-olds (one of whom turned out to be only 9) proved irresistible.  Their innocent directness of expression seemed to mirror the mythic simplicity of Lincoln.

Alexandra Kliatshco, age 9 and just 3 years an American. Photo courtesy of Julie Stern, Cyrenius H. Booth Library, Newtown, CT.

How did the Times manage to attract nearly 10,000 essays?  By enlisting the eager support of the New York City school system, which added the Times contest to its already extensive Lincoln centennial program.

Teachers were encouraged to assign the 7-part biography of Lincoln published in the paper in early February.  (The biography was the work of Frederick Trevor Hill, author of the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer.)  They helped their pupils grasp what the Times meant by an “original” response to Hill’s account.  A summary would not suffice; students had to express their own sentiments about Lincoln’s slow climb to distinction.

Many teachers actively discussed the Times pieces with their pupils, focusing on Hill’s main point: “Lincoln was not a heaven born genius — merely a plain man who was honest, sincere, and upright.”  He learned growing up that strong “character” would get him through failure and disappointment.  Any young person in any era, the Times urged, could adopt Lincoln as a model.

The teachers promoted the contest, but the lure of a dazzling medal fired the children’s ambition.  Letters poured into the Times office from young hopefuls and their parents, explaining how badly they wanted to win.

One father thought he would help his 14-year-old daughter’s chances by sending in an additional poem she had written that urged equal time for George Washington:

It’s Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln

Just cause he’s a hundred years old,

O’ course he deserves every bit of his praise,

And maybe I am kind o’ bold

To say that there’s some one better,

An’ tho’ I’m only one

I’m goin’ ter stick up for the father

Of this country, George Washington.

The Times cautioned youngsters not to expect special treatment for extra material of this kind.  But the 14-year-old did get her medal.

In the aftermath, what did the Times think the competition had achieved?  “Thousands of eager, impressible, active young minds” had received a “conception of the great President, which will not easily be effaced,” it wrote.  The essays had “made Lincoln a vital reality to them,” to their families, and to countless readers.

In a city with almost 2 million foreign-born residents, the Lincoln contest had made him a subject of daily conversation for at least 100,000 people, said the Times.  Immigrants and native-born Americans, often occupying separate worlds, had taken another step towards a shared civic life.

Diminutive Alexandra Kliatshco, a Russian immigrant, and at age 9 the winner of a medal and a $5.00 gold piece, became the paper’s poster-child for equal opportunity in modern America.  Alexandra had arrived in America from Russia only 3 years before, knowing no English.  She had thrived at P.S. 177 in Manhattan, and she produced an elegant Lincoln piece.  Her father, a physician on Henry Street, told the Times that she had excelled at memorizing Russian poetry from the time she was 3 years old.

“I am a little foreign girl, and I have been here only a short time,” her essay began, “but when I read about Lincoln, I thought that I might grow up a great woman as Lincoln was a great man.”  And it ended: “We cannot forget the love he bore us and he died leaving the world better than it was.  I hope that I can be like Lincoln, unselfish, kind, thoughtful and modest.”

A 1998 profile in the Times noted that her prediction had proven accurate.  Alexandra Kliatshco Werner had graduated from Teachers College in 1922 and taught art for 40 years at Jane Addams Vocational School in the Bronx.  She loved impressionist paintings, classical music, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had tried her hand at poetry.

According to her daughter, interviewed for this post, she had not held on to her Lincoln medal, preferring to make a gift of it to her father, who died in 1928.

A regular contributor over the decades to the Times “Neediest Cases” fund, Mrs. Werner — the youngest top-ten winner in the centennial Lincoln competition of 1909 — died in 1997 at the age of 97.