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

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.

Episode 25, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”: We return from a brief hiatus to discuss with Dr. James Cornelius Steven Spielberg’s new movie about Abraham Lincoln entitled, “Lincoln”.

Warning: This podcast contains many spoilers of the movie. We would advise listening after you have seen the movie unless you want to have some sections of the movie spoiled.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.