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How To Design a Lincoln MuseumDo you feel what Lincoln felt?

By Andrew Ferguson
Posted Thursday, July 5, 2007, at 7:14 AM ET

Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's AmericaIn his new book, Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, Andrew Ferguson crisscrosses the nation on a quest to understand our ongoing obsession with our lanky 16th president. In the process, he interviewed Lincoln buffs and Lincoln impersonators, historians, collectors and business gurus, and dozens of others who have built their lives around the man. Tuesday, Ferguson explained how and why the state of Illinois hired Disney-style theme-park designers to develop the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the most ambitious (and expensive) attempt to bring Lincoln to the wider public since the opening of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. Today, he examines the resulting institution.

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"And here's the thing: It's completely 100 percent historically accurate. Oh, maybe we pushed it a little in terms of the dramatic moment. But the point is, today we tend to look back, we think Emancipation Proclamation, it's a no-brainer, right?

"This scene says: Huh-uh. No way. Not a slam-dunk. At all. Lincoln's North was just as racist as the South. Very powerful stuff. And you're going, 'Whoa. This is stuff my seventh-grade teacher never taught me.' "

Other changes were made to protect particular political sensitivities—in a kind of yuppie version of political correctness.

"Think," he said to me. "Did you see a gun anywhere in the museum? Not a picture of a gun, but a real gun? Huh-uh." And of course he was right. Even John Wilkes Booth, seen approaching Lincoln's box at Ford's Theatre, conceals his derringer behind his cape. Bob is anti-gun.

He is also, needless to say, anti-Confederate battle flag, and the stars and bars are nowhere to be seen; ditto the word nigger, he said. It's never used in the museum, despite its ubiquity at the time. "We could have used both, the n-word and the flag, but both are very volatile," he said. "We couldn't control what the reaction would be—and if you can't predict the audience reaction, well, you don't want to be in that situation. Bad emotional engineering."

He likewise stretched history to include more female figures in the exhibits, where they play a much more prominent role than they did in real life. "It was a constant battle to make this thing interesting to women," he said. "The Civil War was sort of a guys' time, you know? That's why we have an entire room devoted to dresses. That's why we show the White House kitchen. Every time we could, we brought in a lady."

"I'll give you one final example," he said. "Lincoln's law office."

The museum is heavily weighted toward depictions of Lincoln's family—on the assumption that this will be appealing to families of tourists. That's why they devoted an exhibit room to the Lincoln boys raising hell in their father's law office.

"We got the scene from [Lincoln's biographer William] Herndon, and we're true to his account—up to a point," Bob said. "What Herndon really says is, when he walked in the office once, he caught one of the boys pissing on the hot stove in the middle of the room. So I asked the people in Springfield, 'Hey, can we do this? It's true to history!' I begged 'em. I said, 'We can do it tastefully. We'll have the kid's back to the visitor, we get recirculating water going so you see the piss spraying out, we use colored water, we get a fogger so we see the steam rising from the hot stove, you hear the sssssss, we get an aromascape so you can smell it.' Jesus! How great would that be!"

He cackled again.

Would you have really done that? I said.

"Hell yes, I'd do it!" Bob said. "But they said no. They said"—he lowered his voice to a huffy tone—" 'Kids get enough toilet humor these days.' So I'm like, 'Fine. OK. You're the boss.'

"But God, it would have been beautiful. And 100 percent historically accurate."

*

Bob's design was intended to manipulate people, of course. That's what he'd been hired to do, and he did it better than anybody. But to what end? I was back to an old question. Among all our many presidents and historical figures, why care so much about Abraham Lincoln? What does he stand for? You could spend hours in the museum without finding an answer. "It's all emotional," Bob had said, as though giving me a hint. And there's no mistaking when you walk through the museum, you're meant to feel sympathy for Lincoln, even feel sorry for him. Pulled from room to room, you're asked to be touched by his humble beginnings (but many of our presidents were born poor). You feel terrible because his son dies an agonizing death (but many presidents watched helpless as their children died). We ache because he was reviled (most presidents were reviled by someone) and because he had an inexplicable marriage (Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton). In the end what you come up with is that he's interesting because a lot of people over the past 150 years have been interested in him. He's been hated and loved, pondered and studied, honored and mourned so intensely for so long that it doesn't seem to matter why. He's reached the zenith of American celebrity. He's famous for being famous.

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Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
This piece was excerpted from Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America, copyright 2007 by Andrew Ferguson c/o Writers Representatives LLC, and reprinted with permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It seems to me that Disneyfication is even more a grave disservice to Lincoln than it would be to other Great American Historical Figures (Washington, TR, Martin Luther King). This is because Lincoln's relevance to history, what made Lincoln Lincoln, is based on words--the power, beauty, and relevance of his oratory. Not that the others I mentioned didn't rely on words to some degree--especially MLK--but at least you can show visuals with some relevance--a battlefield, a march, a Birmingham Jail. Lincoln's family home, his law office, his White House desk, have nothing to do with what made him great; relying on visuals to tell his story makes him, as Mr. Ferguson says, nothing more than a celebrity.

--sjberke

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