Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture: Abraham Lincoln and the Political Culture of New Deal America

In the 1930s and ’40s, Abraham Lincoln seemed to be everywhere. Having long figured as a predictable staple in Republican Party propaganda, Lincoln now became an object of intense political contention, fought over by New Deal Democrats, Republican stalwarts, black civil rights workers, and left-wing activists. Once relegated to vague political pronouncements, Lincoln now took center stage in volatile discussions about economic collapse, race and civil rights, and global conflict. Even more, Lincoln achieved a cultural resonance in these years, as Americans became well-versed in the stories of his childhood hardships and youthful ambitions, especially when those stories came from the pen of Carl Sandburg or took shape on movie screens across the country. Indeed, not since Reconstruction had Lincoln’s legacy been so sharply contested or had Lincoln assumed such a prominent place on the public stage. Out of these contests, starting in the early 1930s and extending through the beginning years of World War II, the sixteenth president underwent a series of remarkable transformations: no longer a bland symbol of reconciliation, he emerged as a figure more firmly associated with federal power and racial justice only to change again into a singular representative of Americans’ rebuke to global dictatorship. In this regard, Lincoln was more than a simple mirror of cultural and political trends. Rather, he occupied a fiercely contested space and, for some Americans, offered an imaginative repository—a kind of cultural testing ground—for exploring more hopeful responses to the social and economic crises of the 1930s.¹

“Getting right with Lincoln” was, of course, already a well-established political tradition, as historian David Donald has suggested. Donald’s essay argued that by the 1930s all political persuasions had to demonstrate their firm adherence to all things Lincoln. While this included mainstream parties and political movements, in the Depression era, there were signs that some politicians and activists now wanted to get left with Lincoln, too. Democrats increasingly challenged Republican claims to the sixteenth president as they worked to associate Lincoln with New Deal efforts. Indeed, for every Republican who summoned Lincoln as the “great defender of freedom,” there was at least one Democrat honoring him as the new dealer of the 1850s and ’60s. Howard Koch’s The Lonely Man, a play presented by the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project placed Lincoln at the forefront of contemporary workers’ struggles, imagining him as a reincarnated college professor who visits a Kentucky campus and expresses sympathy for striking coal miners. Moving further left, U.S. communists made Lincoln an object of veneration and Americans who wanted to fight fascists in Spain joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The left-wing Mexican muralist Diego Rivera proposed pairing Lincoln with Lenin in his shortlived fresco at Rockefeller Center.²

Yet Lincoln’s popularity in these years went far beyond leftist political boundaries. In 1939 the Los Angeles Times called Lincoln “one of the greatest peacemakers of all time” while the Boston Globe celebrated him, perhaps only slightly more modestly, as “the greatest American humorist.” Lincoln also acquired a new standing in American popular culture, appearing as the star attraction in novels and radio programs and theater performances. Perhaps the capstone to Lincoln’s new celebrity status came with his emergence as a Hollywood icon. In 1930 he took top billing in an early biopic by legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith and starred in the two better-known films from the end of the decade: John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln and John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois. In the 1935 film The Littlest Rebel, Lincoln teamed with the most financially successful movie star of the 1930s, Shirley Temple. The two shared an apple and then Lincoln freed Shirley’s father, falsely accused as a Confederate spy, from prison.³

The pairing of Shirley and Abe did not simply make for good box office returns; it spoke, too, to the powerful emotional weight each one had assumed in 1930s America. If, as John Kasson has suggested, Shirley Temple and Franklin Delano Roosevelt radiated a kind of resolve...