Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (review)

This book is a welcome sequel to the author's Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (2000), which provided thorough coverage of the period from 1865 until 1915. This one devotes exhaustively researched chapters to the 1920s and Great Depression (a period considered by the author to have been the "apex" of Lincoln's reputation); World War II; the Cold War, racial conflict, and contested images of Lincoln; the Civil Rights Movement and its complex impact on our perceptions of Lincoln; and what Schwartz calls "Fading Prestige, Benign Ridicule" that brings the story into the "post-heroic era."

It is unfortunate that this book went into production in 2007 because crucial to the author's central theme is the argument that there has been a steady decline of Lincoln's "prestige" in American culture during the past two or three generations. Much of his evidence for the second half of the twentieth century is compelling, but Schwartz had no way of knowing that Barack Obama would make Lincoln such an iconic figure in his presidency, from using the Lincoln Bible for his own inauguration, and replacing a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office with Lincoln's, not to mention all of the analysts making endless connections and comparisons between the two presidents. Doris Goodwin's Team of Rivals (and other works) have done much to restore admiration for Lincoln's savvy as a politician and wisdom as a statesman.

Be that as it may, readers should forgive the opening thesis statement because the book substantively adds a great deal to our understanding of Lincoln, social change, and American culture. Schwartz is the first to use public opinion polling data from 1950 through 2001 to get at what ordinary Americans thought and how they rated Lincoln in relation to Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. This is important because previous studies of Lincoln in American memory have primarily relied upon published texts (biographies, plays, poems, and tracts) rather than the views of Everyman.

The book is packed with arresting information and revisionism: turn of the century southerners were less hostile to Lincoln than we assumed because they sought national reconciliation; Republicans have managed to associate Lincoln with conservative views that he never espoused, such as making him an anti-statist libertarian; during the 1950s and '60s conservatives misquoted him in support of segregation; academics and others ascribed to Lincoln views about race that he did not hold (1960s-1980s); and "his imagined commitment to civil rights" now gets highlighted because of our own multicultural concern for social justice (142).

Schwartz contends that Lincoln's prestige has declined since 1960 despite the ceaseless publication of so many laudatory books about him—arguing that what matters is not how much we know about the man but how we feel about what we know, an elusive point to demonstrate, even with polling data. Schwartz is persuasive, however, that by the 1960s Americans could no longer agree on what Lincoln stood for above all: preserving the Union or freeing the slaves. Lincoln's "real" views on race became especially contested, with many (notably blacks) becoming increasingly critical based upon modern criteria of "equality." Ultimately, Schwartz makes a sound case that during the generations he covers the nation moved from "reverence" (meaning a kind of adulation) for Father Abraham to "respect" for the Great Emancipator.