Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (review)

In this the first of two books, Barry Schwartz charts the vicissitudes of the national memory of Abraham Lincoln from his death until the end of World War I. In the sequel, Schwartz promises to complete this history to the present. The substantive conclusion of this well crafted book is that Lincoln’s reputation as national savior was not forged until the Progressive era. The history of Lincoln’s surging reputation in the early twentieth century, Schwartz argues, challenges the dominant theoretical perspective in the sociology of collective memory.

The politics of memory, as he labels this perspective, mixes instrumentalist and constructionist approaches to the processes of collective remembering. Schwartz finds fault with this perspective because it disassociates collective memory and history. The politics of memory sees collective remembering as a social construction that serves to conceal domination and encourage hegemony. Researchers in this tradition typically mobilize history to demystify collective memory — thus assuming that the two are antithetical. As a corrective, Schwartz argues for a perspective that sees a reciprocal relationship between history and commemoration in the forging of collective memories. History, as Schwartz sees it, limits and enables the work of commemoration.

Schwartz views collective memories as “valuating” the past to make the present meaningful. By “lifting” morally significant pieces from the past, Schwartz argues, collective memories extend meaning to the present. As such, collective memories operate much as other cultural systems do. To defend this claim, Schwartz draws heavily from the cultural theories of Durkheim, Goffman, and Geertz. To his credit the resulting theory of collective memory is nuanced and balanced. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as elegant as the dominant perspective it aims to replace, but maybe this is how it should be.

In a systematic empirical argument rich in historical description, Schwartz convincingly argues that in the closing decades of the nineteenth century the public opinion of Lincoln was mixed. The wounds of the Civil War were deep. Many Americans loved Lincoln, others hated him. And yet something quite singular had happened to Lincoln’s reputation upon his death. Lincoln’s assassination and the dramatic funeral that followed signaled that he would be forever remembered by many as a martyr for the Union and a symbol of the new state. It would take decades, however, for this to become a national sentiment. Not until the Progressive era did Lincoln assume first place in the pantheon of American idols. As a new, more muscular American state emerged in the early twentieth century, so did the national adoration of Abraham Lincoln.

That said, the myth of Lincoln was pressed into service for a bewildering array of social projects, not all of which were state sanctioned. In the early twentieth century, socialists, progressives, women’s rights activists, immigrant groups, African Americans, even Southerners found something to identify with in the memory of Lincoln. The objective limits placed by history on Lincoln’s memory were plastic indeed. But that so many different people and progressive causes found in the memory of Lincoln something meaningful also supports Schwartz’s counterpoint to the politics of memory: no single interest controlled his memory nor controlled others through it. And though the meteoric rise of Lincoln’s reputation in the early twentieth century was closely tied to the surging power of national government, Schwartz argues that this rise would not have occurred had it not coincided with the death of the generation that lived through the Civil War.

Schwartz’s analysis could still go further in exploring the interdependence between history and collective memory. Schwartz explains how inconsistencies and complexities in Lincoln’s record and character made it possible for different people to lift different things from his past, but the history of Lincoln’s own words plays no part in this analysis. It may be that Schwartz does not give these words much weight. Schwartz does say that Lincoln was no “cultural Sleeping Beauty” ready to be awakened when “conditions were right...