Springfield, Illinois
IN THE WINDOW of the Osco Drugstore, on the south side of the Old Courthouse Square here–three doors down from where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, 20 yards from where he delivered the “House Divided” speech, eight blocks from where he boarded the train to Washington at the dawn of the Civil War and bid farewell to his hometown forever–Kelsie Wilson of Virden High School has hung a portrait of Lincoln made out of toast. It’s the product of a painstaking process involving polyurethane, white bread, aluminum foil, and a blowtorch. The likeness is uncanny, if slightly charred.
Kelsie’s portrait deserves mention because it might otherwise be lost to the ages, given all the commotion surrounding Springfield last week. After nearly 20 years of planning, fundraising, and political back-and-forthing, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum officially opened with four days of festivities and citywide hoopla. President Bush flew in to give his blessing, along with a speech whose great eloquence and subtlety were soon swallowed up in the general excitement. The world may little note nor long remember what Bush said here, but it can never forget what’s been done here.
Built at a cost of more than $100 million, the Lincoln museum represents the latest and most elaborate effort of American history buffs to reinvigorate popular interest in the country’s past and make it accessible to an indifferent population. That’s not the sole motivation, of course. Historical scholarship will benefit, since the library adjoining the museum at last gives a home to the state of Illinois’s dazzling collection of Lincoln documents and artifacts. And there’s an economic angle, too. The residents of Springfield, whose recent hard times show through the acres of empty storefronts downtown, will now enjoy a new employer, a splendid tourist attraction, and a massive transfer of wealth from their taxpaying fellow countrymen, who paid for almost everything. Other towns and villages throughout central Illinois hope Springfield’s benefits will trickle down, giving them something to count on besides ethanol.
But it’s the museum’s play for widespread populist appeal that’s drawn the most attention, and which promises to have the longest-lasting effect. The museum holds more than 40,000 square feet of exhibit space, making it far larger than any other presidential library and nearly the equal of the largest history museums. Unlike those museums, however, the Lincoln museum embodies a revolutionary principle; it stands indeed as a kind of indictment of those other museums. A promotional video, released before the museum’s opening, puts it well: “Ordinary museums,” says the narrator, “take wonderful objects from the living past and imprison them in row upon row of glass boxes.” Here we see grainy pictures of bored museum-goers slouching through galleries. “Typical museum galleries are bland, empty rooms that house these objects rather than enhance our appreciation of them.” Suddenly on the video there’s a swooooosh! like the kind they use on Fox News to keep their viewers awake, followed by a wash of uplifting, energetic music: “That’s why the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum had to be something completely different! Here we are reinventing the very concept of the presidential library.”
It’s a grand claim but an accurate one, too, and the video shows you how: The screen fills with a happy montage of actors and filmmakers, studio musicians and puppeteers and costumers, and you realize you’ve been taken from the world of traditional museums, where the intent is to inform and elevate, into the realm of show business, where the goal is entertainment above all. Reading and watching its promotional materials, you can be forgiven for assuming the Lincoln museum is dedicated to the now inescapable proposition that every venue and institution in America, from ballparks to doctor’s offices to movies, should be pitched to the intelligence of an easily distracted 13-year-old boy.
As it turns out, the museum’s effect is not so strident. It’s in a low-slung building of Egyptian marble the color of ochre, taking up a full city block. Greeting you in the large sky-lit atrium are life-size silicone dummies of Lincoln and his family. Just beyond them, other historical figures loiter on a near-scale reproduction of the White House portico: Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, and, in an eerie memento mori, John Wilkes Booth, looking sinister. The figures are only slightly cartoonish, and they don’t move, thank God, unlike those herky-jerky animatrons in Disney World’s Hall of Presidents. From the atrium you turn to the left or to the right to embark on one of two “Journeys.” Journey One takes you through a log cabin into a series of galleries depicting Lincoln’s early life; Journey Two, which you enter through the White House portico, shows the Civil War years.
Lush orchestral music follows you as you walk from room to room, alternately chipper or somber as the era requires, sometimes joined by disembodied voices. In some galleries, the walls tilt, as they do in Disney’s Haunted Mansion. The attention to detail seems endless: The leaves of a plexiglass tree overhanging the cabin’s chimney show singe marks. There are thunderclaps and rain storms, twittering birds and booming cannon. This isn’t just a museum, say museum spokesmen. It is “an immersive experience–a blend of showmanship and scholarship,” as the museum’s director, Richard Norton Smith, puts it. Few 13-year-olds, even the most narcoleptic, will grow drowsy.
Historians and history buffs are supposed to be stuffy people. It is a mark of the desperate straits they find themselves in–with interest in history fading, and historical ignorance growing–that scarcely any of them have stepped forward to criticize the museum’s approach as lightweight or “dumbed-down.” There have been critics: two, by my count, which is just close enough to a real controversy for the New York Times to announce that a real controversy exists, as it did in a story last fall, “Fitting or Not, a Lincoln Tribute Moves Forward.” In it, the editor of the collected papers of Ulysses S. Grant, John Y. Simon, declared his opposition to “the Disney touch in the Lincoln Museum. . . . When you have priceless documents and important letters, let’s showcase them instead of the rubber Lincolns.” The museum, he said, would be better called “Six Flags over Lincoln.”
The sting of Simon’s criticism was balmed by the fact that he hadn’t yet actually seen the museum he was criticizing. A more damaging review was offered a few days before last week’s grand opening by Blair Kamin, the Chicago Tribune‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. “The museum,” Kamin wrote, “is an architectural flop that turns Lincoln’s life into the storyline for a mawkish indoor theme park.”
Kamin’s review was so harsh, and its prominent appearance in the state’s most important media outlet so potentially devastating, that the local newspaper, the State Journal-Register, even ran an article about it, reprinting several of its ugly paragraphs as a kind of warning of what to expect from the cosmopolitans up north. Locals were quick to respond with letters to the editor. “Who is Blair Kamin?” wrote one. “What is the Pulitzer Prize? Sounds like ‘expert’ stuff.” Headlines over the other letters made the same point: “Disappointed to see Kamin review in SJ-R”; “Museum will impress visitors”; “High School senior very impressed.” Even the local alternative weekly, reliably left-wing and generally skeptical of boosterism, was ticked off.
“I kept waiting to feel the kind of disdain that Kamin expressed,” wrote a columnist for Illinois Times, who had toured the museum, “and that feeling never came. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to be offended by rubber mannequins if they’re teaching me something I didn’t already know.”
Museum officials hope the museum itself stands as the best rebuttal to huffy critics. Its scholarly bona fides are hard to discredit. Though an incurable showman, Smith is also the author of excellent biographies of George Washington, Thomas Dewey, and Robert McCormick; the museum’s major-domo is Tom Schwartz, Illinois state historian and probably the country’s most astute Lincoln scholar. He assembled a panel of Lincoln experts to oversee exhibits as they were designed and to ensure that no standards of accuracy or taste were breached. Their efforts are best seen in the thousands of words of wall text offered to visitors as they move from gallery to gallery, gawking at the special effects. Traditional museum elements aren’t ignored entirely. Even amid the recreations and life-sized simulations, there’s a reassuring emphasis on stuff: dazzling artifacts like Lincoln’s stovepipe hat and shaving mirror; the gloves Mary Todd Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater, now bloodstained; a Gettysburg Address written out in Lincoln’s own hand.
Other history museums are closely watching to see whether the Lincoln museum’s experiment in “immersive experiences” has the desired results in rising attendance and revived public interest. “The whole point of the museum is to make Lincoln matter,” Smith says. Who wouldn’t sympathize with such a noble pursuit? If there’s a lesson here, and a cause for worry, it is that the never-ending quest to secure the wandering attentions of the American public will require ever greater extravagances–that history in the public mind will become more and more a matter of the dazzling, the anomalous, the unexpected, the unusual. If that’s the case, the only good news is that Kelsie Wilson of Virden High School, with her talent for toast and the torch, will never be out of work.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
