Honest Abe’s Dark Side

Is there any president we know as well as Abraham Lincoln? Honest Abe, the rail-splitter, the largely self-educated man (his formal education ended before the second grade) whose prose rings with common sense and an eloquence learned from Shakespeare and the King James Bible? Whose life has inspired more biographies than that of any other American? What more could we know?The History Channel takes a shot in the cheesy new series “Lincoln,” which premieres today. Advertised as a kind of expose of the 16th president’s emotional life, the series argues, like Joshua Wolf Shenk’s recent “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” that Lincoln’s greatness was driven by depression.The image of Lincoln as a man of sorrows is not new. His sadness was apparent even to Walt Whitman, who frequently passed him in Washington’s streets. Certainly, every serious Lincoln memoirist and biographer since former law partner William Herndon and presidential private secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay have told us that Father Abraham was, to use Aaron Copland’s line from “Lincoln Portrait,” “a quiet and a melancholy man.”Like nearly everything else the program bills as a major revelation, this is simply long known fact. But the program seems to celebrate Lincoln’s depression, even to argue that his greatness stemmed from it, as if pandering to an audience of overmedicated West Siders addicted to psychoanalysis. Common sense tells us his genius had nothing to do with his depression. Illness might have tested his character. It did not make him a great man.The talking heads tell us again and again that Lincoln was depressed, as though someone off camera had cautioned them to be sure and mention it in every sound bite.This emphasis is flawed, as is the prurient focus on Lincoln’s sexual life. That Lincoln may have gone whoring as a young man – he would be neither the first nor last president to have paid for sex in the heat of youth, or even middle age – would shock only a dirty minded fundamentalist.The suggestion that Lincoln was “sexually confused” stems from a few things, most already well known.Lincoln had a gift for emotional intimacy with men: He made friends and kept them. He lived with his best friend, Joshua Speed, for several years, and their letters candidly express deep affection and enjoyment of each other’s company. But little in them bears a sexual interpretation. More laughable, perhaps, is the way the film dwells on Lincoln’s frequently sharing beds with other men, a custom shared by most 19th-century American men who had to travel.Nearly any visiting European journalist wrote articles or memoirs reciting the appalling discomforts of the practice,which had everything to do with having a place to sleep and nothing to do with sex. One of the film’s commentators dwells at some length on second-hand hearsay that Lincoln had been seen in bed with a Pennsylvania militia captain stationed at the Washington Soldiers’ Home, which the president frequently visited to escape the heat of a Washington summer.None of this is shocking or even particularly interesting, save as it reflects on 21stcentury audiences. As one commentator suggests, where we think of sex first, Lincoln’s contemporaries thought of it last.And what’s with the well-fed lad in the print shirt pretending to be the young Lincoln, who constantly mops his brow while planing wood for his mother’s coffin, or the burly fellow pretending to be Lincoln’s abusive father? Indeed, many of the actors hired to impersonate historical figures in “Lincoln” are noticeably overweight – yet another 21st-century quality imposed on 19th-century America.“Lincoln” illustrates a growing flaw in modern made-for-television documentaries, a form that once explored a subject through artifacts – documents and contemporary images. Time was when the notion of re-enacting or illustrating events in a historical narrative would have been laughable, unthinkable. That changed in the early 1990s when A&E, originally the Arts & Entertainment Network, began shifting its focus from leisure to historical subject matter.In those early days the channel, with insufficient product for broadcast, ran almost constant footage of World War II newsreels – some waggish television commentator at the time described A&E’s programming as “All Hitler, All the Time.” Still hurting for broadcast material, A &E and its spinoff, the History Channel, began making a new kind of documentary, using actors and hobbyist re-enactors to illustrate points that earlier documentary audiences had been expected to understand through the use of words.It must have been cheap and easy, using out-of-work actors and enthusiasts. Now, in a kind of Gresham’s Law of filmmaking, this has become accepted, even common prac tice. Documentary filmmakers assume they have to illustrate everything. In “Lincoln,” we see the same scenes over and over, the same shots of violently green computer-enhanced grass along the byways of 19th-century Illinois, and endless outof-focus sequences, nausea-inducing, and presumably meant to let us know we’re seeing history.It’s only when “Lincoln” falls back on traditional documentary tools that the film becomes effective, even breathtaking – largely because Lincoln himself is fascinating. A sequence of Lincoln photographs, beginning with the young, ambitious congressman (his eyes glowing with the calculating ambition of a Lyndon Johnson), ends with him consumed by the war, his face graven with strain and weariness.These images speak for themselves.And a succession of Matthew Brady battlefield photographs, subtitled with the names of battles and the number of casualties – Chancellorsville, 30,099; Gettysburg, 51,112 – dramatize the carnage as no narrator can.Yet two commentators stand out for their sanity and common sense. Harold Holzer, the gentle, modest man who wrote numerous speeches enhancing Mario Cuomo’s natural eloquence before turning to the scholarly study of the 16th president, speaks with profound knowledge, lightly and humorously carried.It’s Gore Vidal, however, who steals the show.Vidal’s ill-concealed and frustrated passion for politics – his grandfather, a United States senator who frequently took his grandson to the Senate floor,his father a prominent New Dealer – has often shaped and colored his works. Often, his politics have seemed nearly paranoid. Yet his commentaries in “Lincoln” are statesmanlike – mellow, goodhumored, and ultimately moving.Ultimately, Edward Herrmann’s beautifully underplayed delivery of Lincoln’s letters and speeches, particularly moving during the Gettysburg Address (refreshingly spoken without rhetorical flourishes), shows up the intellectual poverty of the padded script and much of the commentary. Lincoln, though 140 years dead, writes a better script than most of the allegedly living writers connected with this production.

Honest Abe’s Dark Side

Honest Abe’s Dark Side

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