Edward Rothstein: The New Lincoln Museum ... History Simplified

Edward Rothstein, in the NYT (4-19-05):

... The museum literature points out that its goal"is not to fully explain all of the issues that confronted Lincoln but to inspire in the visitor a deep sense of personal connection and empathy with the man."

And indeed, there is something almost eerily lifelike about many of the museum's figures, which were created using photographs and computer modeling, to simulate the characters' appearances at different ages. It is difficult not to sense the trauma in the Mary Todd Lincoln figure, sitting isolated in a chair by a window after their son's death in the White House, the raindrops casting shadows on her face like tears. And one doesn't think of Lincoln in the same way after seeing photographs of his increasingly worn face displayed in year-by-year succession during the Civil War. There is also an astonishing use of technology in a four-minute history of the Civil War, as an animated map shows the shifting borders, battles and casualties.

The problem is that some of the museum is history, and some of it is not. Some of it is"experience," and some of it is true. At a time when an Academy Award-winning documentary,"Mighty Times: The Children's March," puts invented historical scenes into its narration without warning or notice, this museum does something similar. The words of the insults hurled at Lincoln and the arguments by his opponents are almost all paraphrased or invented.

The soundtrack of the assassination of Lincoln omits John Wilkes Booth's declaration from the stage after the murder -"Sic semper tyrannis," Virginia's motto, meaning"thus always to tyrants" - because there was concern about whether it would be understood.

The same simplification takes place in the dramatized rhetoric and arguments of Lincoln's critics. But how then do we begin to appreciate the glorious rhetoric and pungent argument of Lincoln himself? How do we understand Lincoln's ideas about slavery, or why the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederacy and not the four slave-holding border states that remained in the Union?

And of course, the recent scholarly discussions about Lincoln, some of which were touched on in a two-day conference that ended Monday at the next-door library, are not reflected here at all: debates about his sexuality, about the shifting nature of his religious beliefs, about his view of civil liberties. Here, Lincoln remains an icon: the Suffering Servant of the Union, a martyr for the cause of equality. Complications are shunted aside for a series of psychodramas. Various exhibition rooms have suggestive psychological titles:"Hall of Sorrows,""Whispering Gallery,""Illusion Corridor."

Dominating the entrance hall, for example, is a scale model of the White House portico; and within is seen not Lincoln at work, but Mary being fitted for a ball dress, surrounded by dresses worn by her social critics and rivals, the explanatory panel suggesting that for her, as for her husband,"the White House was a war zone." That may also be why figures of Booth, Frederick Douglass and Civil War generals loiter outside the portico. They embody the husband's battles.

The personal is the political: that seems to be the motto of this life"experience." And the political becomes personal, represented not by argument but by shouted insults and condensed formulas, as if the sound bites of 2005 really resembled the political debates of the early 1860's.

None of this, of course, undermines the entertainment offered, and it will be surprising if Springfield does not realize its ambitions: the museum promises fun, delivered with at least some insight along the way.

But there is still something serious being undermined. The blurring of history for the sake of entertainment may not be something new. After all, the village of New Salem, about a 20-minute drive from Springfield, was where Lincoln tended store and began his political career, but the town didn't survive. So in the 1920's and 30's, it was"reconstructed"; it is an invented historical village.

But the new museum, because of technological power alone, risks making invention seem like fact. It also enshrines a notion that the best way to know anything about politics and history is to understand personality, and even then only in a simplified fashion. Maybe it will lead to curiosity and further inquiry; maybe not. But it is telling that by the end of the presentation"Ghosts of the Library," the historian ends up turning into a ghost himself, and disappears into thin air.