January 2011

In 1970 I became choral director at the high school in Sandusky, Ohio. Beards were popular then, and I thought I would start one over Christmas break. As it filled in, people said they saw a Lincolnesque profile there.

That’s when it occurred to me that I might be able to do a presentation on Lincoln, something like Hal Holbrook’s one-man show Mark Twain Tonight . So I began doing research, my first steps on an excursion that has brought my wife, Joanne, and me to make our home in Gettysburg. I think I’ve played Lincoln eightyfive hundred times over the past twenty-one years.

Recently we purchased a cemetery lot and headstone within seventy-five yards of the spot where the President made his “few appropriate remarks” in November 1863. How is that for fulfilling the promise of a “final resting place”?

I thought that I became acquainted with Lincoln when he asked his audience in Peoria in 1854, Would it be right to free the slaves and make them “politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” If he was revolted by the idea of political and social equality of blacks and whites. I was revolted by his stand.

As a boy growing up in Mississippi, I never had much interest in Abraham Lincoln, and it was not until graduate school at the University of Illinois, when I became the research assistant of Professor J. G. Randall, the great Lincoln scholar, that the subject really attracted me.

At that time Professor Randall was working on his account of the Fort Sumter crisis (which later appeared in his Lincoln the President ). Sitting beside him in his study four hours every day, I came to see how his mind worked and learned that history was not just a stringing together of names, dates, and anecdotes; it was more like a working out of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, where every one of thousands of pieces had to fit.

The process began to fascinate me, and it has done so ever since.

I was born on Lincoln Avenue (in Colorado City, which was later annexed to Colorado Springs) and, while in high school, was once called upon to recite the Gettysburg Address, but never became seriously interested in Abraham Lincoln until 1953, when I was forty years old and teaching at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Recently retired from the university, J. G. Randall, the foremost Lincoln authority, died that year with the fourth and final volume of his magisterial Lincoln the President unfinished. He left a note asking me to complete it for him, which I did, and thus became a convert to Lincoln scholarship.

I became acquainted with Lincoln the way everyone else does—in school. But I didn’t have a particular interest until my older sister, Marie, who is much smarter than I, thought I should know Lincoln better. She bought me the nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln .

At the time I had no money of my own. We didn’t even have an encyclopedia in the house until we had our third child. The Collected Works to me was a treasure. And I actually read it—all of it. I still have it—the History Book Club edition, gray binding with blue trim—in my study at home, along with sixty or seventy other Lincoln books I keep close at hand.

It is rare on first meeting that someone completely overtakes one’s heart, and so it has been for me with Abraham Lincoln. He has gradually and imperceptibly accrued in me like the layers of a pearl: laid down over time, in a mysteriously hidden process, owing as much to friction and irritation as to inspiration. He is quite simply the most important man I’ve ever gotten to know. He has helped me know myself more clearly and helped define my own in-scrutable love of country.

When the Russian tanks finished pounding my family’s apartment building, a grand piano lay on top of the rubble; a music teacher had lived on the third floor. The image has grown into an icon in my mind and will never leave. Budapest, November 1956. The revolution had been defeated, and my father said that the country would stay Communist for the rest of my life. “Leave. You have no future here. Go to an English-speaking country.” I was sixteen years old.

I was born in Hungary during the Second World War and born again in South Dakota, a free man. There I put myself through a small college, doing such executive jobs as washing dishes to working in the fields. Along the way I discovered Lincoln. He helped teach me English—and much more. I wrote my first term paper as a sophomore on his economic views. Years later it became my first book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream .

Although Lincoln’s birthday has disappeared from our calendar of national holidays (swallowed up into the convenient but somehow unsatisfying Presidents’ Day), there is no dampening of enthusiasm among America’s “Lincoln people.” During this, his 190th anniversary year, the Lincoln field is enjoying a renaissance. New books and film projects abound, and Lincoln people remain as impassioned as before and more diverse than ever. Politicians, historians, actors, businesspeople, and collectors continue to mine his speeches and letters, debate the meaning of his presidency, argue for the right to walk in his large footsteps, affix beards to impersonate him for films, television, and pageants, and pursue artifacts associated with his life, despite the stratospheric prices such items now command. Exactly what possesses these admirers?

In nations, increasing power seems to bring with it an expanded sense of moral obligation. Until the nineteenth century, for example, famines were considered natural disasters, catastrophes that regimes could palliate but not wholly avert. The Irish potato blight changed that moral calculus. For the first time in history, people had suffered what seemed to be an avoidable famine. While the potato crop would have failed no matter what the British government did, by the 184Os the richest and most sophisticated state in the world had the technical ability to quickly move massive amounts of food across oceans and distribute it to the starving Irish. In the eyes of subsequent generations, the British state, having failed to use this new power, was guilty of an atrocity, and this judgment does not seem obviously wrong; our moral imagination necessarily expands with the increase in our powers.

It was Winston Churchill’s judgment that the Holocaust “was probably the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” The Holocaust, of course, was part of a colossal struggle in which fifty-three million people were killed, where nations were decimated, where democracy’s survival was in the balance. In his campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe, Hitler and his Nazi followers murdered six million men, women, and children for no other reason than that they were Jewish. This crime is of such profound proportions that it can never be fully understood; it must continue to be analyzed from every aspect as to how and why it happened, and its memory must unite all of us.