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.

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.”

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.

In April, Steven Spielberg announced Sally Field as his choice to play the president’s wife in Lincoln, the feature film coming in 2012 to a theater near you.   The director said he’d always wanted her for the part.  Why?  Because the two-time Oscar recipient could capture “all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”

There’s no telling how much screen time Sally Field will actually get in the picture, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  Goodwin’s story centers on Lincoln, his 1860 Republican presidential competitors (Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward), and his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.  But selecting Field to star opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, an “Abraham” with two Oscars of his own, suggests that Spielberg may intend more than a passing glance at Mary. 

Given Field’s stature in American popular culture, even a few scenes in such a high-profile venture will affect the image of Mrs. Lincoln for a long time to come.  Let’s hope that the screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, and Spielberg’s direction, will bring out the full “complexity” of Mary’s “fragility.” 

For all her temperamental swings and failures of judgment, this perpetually insecure soul — emotionally shredded, like her husband, by the death of their 11-year-old son Willie in early 1862, and badgered by Washington critics as a pathetic Western parvenu, if not also a closet secessionist — managed somehow to keep her husband’s health and the Union’s welfare hovering near the front of her mind. 

Too often her ups and downs are reduced to individual craziness, the product of her Todd family’s history of mental distress, aggravated by personal setbacks beginning when she was six with the loss of her mother.  A discombobulated Mary is easily positioned, after Willie’s death, as a spiritualist crank and a continuing burden on her long-suffering spouse.

Lincoln’s forbearance in the face of her tongue-lashings and manic shopping binges bolsters his image as a selfless saint, safely detached from her disorders.  But anyone who has ever been in a decades-long relationship will suspect this picture is one-sided.

Her splenetic displays, and his high-minded silence or forlorn withdrawal, were likely built into the relationship they’d created with one another.  The sparks were part of the substance.

The essential corrective to the portrayal of Mary as an out-of-control, self-aggrandizing deviant — the perfect foil for a charitable servant of the people — is to insist on her intimate ties with Abraham over 22 years of marriage.  In Springfield those ties included political as well as domestic intercourse.  In Washington, she gradually lost her political role, but her civic enthusiasm, and her ardor for her husband’s success and well-being, never waned. 

There’s no reason to think their “scenes,” as Mary labeled one of their White House spats, prevented them from enjoying, and needing, one another’s company.  There’s every reason to believe their angry standoffs were followed, at least some of the time, by eager reconciliation.  Their complexity as a couple helped shape her fragility as an individual.

Any depiction that takes Mrs. Lincoln as the nutty nuisance, the bothersome drag on the forgiving Mr. Lincoln, distorts their quarter-century of impassioned partnership.  So does any portrayal that misses Mary’s ongoing public engagement after Abraham stopped soliciting (or even listening to) her political judgments.

Goodwin’s engrossing Team of Rivals devotes only a few pages to Mary, but it gives Kushner and Spielberg all the evidence they’ll need to show that this long marriage kept being renewed by mutual fervor for politics and public service.

Mary and Abraham had both fallen for Henry Clay’s Whig politics long before they fell for each other.  They fell for each other in part because of their shared political vision.  Once in the national capital, she sought out new ways to exercise her political passions.  After Willie’s death, she poured herself all the more intensively into one of them: hospital work.  

As historian Michael Burlingame points out in his biography Abraham Lincoln:  A Life (vol. II, p. 495), “she won [occasional newspaper] praise for ‘the generous devotion with which she has tenderly cared for the sick and wounded soldiers.’”  Praise came from her husband too, writes Burlingame: “Lincoln gave her $1,000 out of his own pocket to buy Christmas turkeys for the hospitalized troops and helped her distribute them.”

One result of Mary’s inattention to publicity: no contemporary illustration of her hospital work exists. This 1861 scene of volunteers and visitors was probably less ghastly than what she usually saw.

Catherine Clinton (Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, p. 196) observes that Mary “visited the hospitals two or three times a week,” undeterred by what one newspaper called “the fear of contagion and the outcries of pestilence.”

In Team of Rivals (p. 457), Goodwin notes that Mary brought the men “baskets of fruit, food, and fresh flowers . . . to mask the pervasive stench of disinfectant and decay.”  She sat down beside them to write letters to their families.  One young man learned who she was only after the letter bearing her signature had been delivered. 

Urged by Lincoln secretary William Stoddard to curry general favor for her labors, Mary stuck with relative anonymity, having found, as Goodwin writes, “something more gratifying than public acknowledgment (p. 459).”  She got the reward of registering firsthand the soldiers’ devotion to her husband and their fidelity to the Union cause.

In Lincoln, Spielberg and Kushner have the rare chance to give us the Mary who made her husband proud alongside the Mary who made him fret.  The Lincolns collaborated in family building and public service.  She shored him up even as she weighed him down.  He let her find new purpose even as he left her aside, to embark on a presidential calling all his own.

A film centered on civilian leaders in wartime cannot attempt a full treatment of the Lincoln marriage.  But it can let Sally Field signal a fully human Mary, courageous as well as distraught.