Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln

Today marks the 206th anniversary of the birth of President Abraham Lincoln, one those of providential events in America history, and it should be noted. The nation once celebrated the date with a national holiday, but the Great Emancipator was eventually downgraded to sharing a day with George Washington, the Father of Our Country, with the imprecise name of Presidents’ Day suggesting they might also share the honor with some of the lesser figures who have occupied the office, and the lack of attention paid is not only a show of national ingratitude but also indicative a dangerous lack of historical perspective.

Lincoln got some favorable publicity a couple of years ago when Steven Spielberg released a sympathetic bio-pic, which received mostly favorable reviews from conservative critics despite a screenplay by the liberal writer Tony Kushner, and a semi-scholarly history of his administration became a best-seller back when Barack Obama was first running for office and being touted as the new and improved version of Lincoln, but even all the hype attendant to a Spielberg release or an Obama campaign cannot elevate Lincoln to his deserved prominence. A friend swore to us that he had spoken with some young people at the local university about the Lincoln movie when it came out and was told that they liked most of us but were unpleasantly surprised at the end when the titular character was assassinated. Despite the daily reminders of his face on five dollar bills and pennies, and despite his name on cars and tunnels and logs and countless road signs, we suspect that by now most Americans are only slightly more familiar with the story of Lincoln.

There was another recent movie about Lincoln as a zombie hunter, but that probably didn’t fill in many gaps in the public knowledge, and the schools don’t seem to be doing much better. We suspect they’re probably too busy telling their empty-headed charges about Emma Goldman, Malcolm X, Christine Jorgensen, and similarly significant historical figures who are more useful to the narrative of an America exceptional only for its racism and sexism and homophobia muddling along toward the liberal future only because of protest movements and higher taxes and bureaucratic control. To the extent that Lincoln is taught, the lessons are likely to come from Richard Hofstadter’s widely published essay “Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth,” which found the Emancipation Proclamation insignificant and preferred to focus on the speeches Lincoln made to deal with the racist realities he confronted in mid-19th Century America and how they fell short of the standards of late-20th Century liberalism. Such Lincoln-bashing has become something of an academic cottage industry, and is also common in the entertainment industry. When not axing zombies Lincoln can also be found in a trendy art-house flick from a few years back called “Confederate States of America,” which imagines an alternative history in which the Confederacy won the Civil War, and takes the boringly uncontroversial view that things would have gone badly, but with an unmistakable sense of moral superiority it portrays Lincoln, whose visionary leadership was singularly responsible for preventing that historical calamity, as a racist, a rube, a tyrant, and a coward. To our dismay, we have found this is a fashionable opinion.

One must somehow dismiss Lincoln, of course, to sustain that broader narrative about America being unexceptional except in its sinfulness. That narrative must be sustained, of course, to justify America’s retreat from the world and its apologetic unwillingness to bring any of its values to bear on the rest of the world. When the current occupant of the White House tells a prayer breakfast gathering that America should not “get on a high horse” when Islamist terrorists behead or crucify or burn alive their captives because a Christian America once had slavery, it is inconvenient to recall the far more eloquent and explicitly theological words that Lincoln used in his Second Inaugural address to explain a bloody war that ultimately abolished slavery. Because Lincoln cannot be denied credit for preserving the Union of these States, those who decry that outcome because it has failed to meet early 21st Century standards of liberalism must denigrate the accomplishment.

None of these critics are nearly so wise as Walt Whitman, America’s greatest poet, nor did they have the experience of the full horror of Lincoln’s war that Whitman endured as an ambulance driver in the bloodiest battles of that conflict, and neither do they have Whitman’s true vision of America’s once and perhaps future greatness. We’ll let Walt have the final words on this anniversary of Lincoln’s birth:

“This dust was once the Man,

Gentle, plain, just and resolute — under whose cautious hand,

Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,

Was saved the Union of these States.”

— Bud Norman

The Great #%@& Emancipator

That Abe Lincoln fellow was one foul-mouthed son of a gun. This is one of the surprising historical tidbits to be found in the new motion picture “Lincoln,” Steven Spielberg’s much-ballyhooed biopic about the late president.

Or so we’re told by The Hollywood Reporter, at any rate. We haven’t actually seen the movie, partly because we’re among the tiny minority of Americans who are not enamored of Spielberg’s work and partly because Netflix isn’t yet able to mail it to our front porch, but the report seems plausible enough. It seems to be a rare flick these days that doesn’t have plentiful cussing, and there’s no reason that a supposedly serious tribute to one of the few remaining revered figures in American history should be an exception to that rule.

The Hollywood Reporter’s reporter found some disagreement among Lincoln biographers about the historical accuracy of the language in the movie. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the hottest Lincoln scholar ever since her “Team of Rivals” hit the best-seller list a few years ago, said she had no problem with it and that she even encouraged the screenwriter to include one of the president’s favorite ribald jokes. James McPherson, whose Lincoln scholarship includes a well-reviewed book about the president’s “Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,” said it was unlikely that The Great Emancipator was prone to such frequent outbursts of profanity.

Such disputes cannot be definitively settled, of course, because until recent times writers rarely resorted to impolite words. People have always cussed, and it’s likely that a backwoods rail-splitter such as Lincoln would occasionally let loose with some saltiness, but his contemporaries would not have recorded it for prosperity. Our guess is that someone in Lincoln’s more rigidly moral times would have made note of it if he had made a habit of cursing in respectable circles, and we also note that Lincoln was a man of such legendary eloquence that he probably saved his cursing for only the most appropriate moments, but one never knows for sure.

There’s also no certainty that whatever cussing Lincoln did was comparable to what’s in the movie. Just as the rest of the English language has evolved over the past many years, for better and worse, cussing has also likely changed. The etymology of curse words is difficult to trace because of the lack of written citations, but we suppose that someone of Lincoln’s rural background was more prone to scatological rather than sexual language.

Although we have no objection to cussing in the movies whenever it is necessary for verisimilitude, such as in the fine “Patton” biopic of the famously salty general, it hardly seems necessary in a movie about Lincoln. The intention was probably to make Lincoln seem more human to modern audiences, but surely there were ways to do so that would haven’t provoked historical debates or kept younger children away from the movie. Spielberg has generally kept clean in previous movies, which may be one reason for his extraordinary popular success, and it’s hard to figure why he would deviate from that habit for a Lincoln flick.

Critics have been mixed about “Lincoln,” and the ones we trust most have panned it, but apparently the movie doesn’t try to portray the first Republican president as a 21st Century lefty of the spread-the-wealth variety. That’s a welcome relief, given that Hollywood routinely does sanitizes even the likes of Queen Victoria in biopics and that liberals have been trying to claim Lincoln as one of their since at least the days when the Lincoln Brigade went off to fight for the commies in the Spanish Civil War. If “Lincoln” had turned out to be another bit of Tinseltown agitprop, we’d have been cussing up a storm.

— Bud Norman