Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Lincoln and the study of memory is a burgeoning aspect of Lincolniana. Barry Schwartz, who wrote Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory in this field, now returns with Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America. The first book deals with the interesting trajectory (not always upward) of the Lincoln memory following Lincoln’s assassination to 1922—the year of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The newer offering continues with the Lincoln memory from 1922 to the apex in 1945 and then subsequent decline. In the preface, Schwartz promises another foray into Lincoln and memory (concerning the Gettysburg Address) in the future. He states: “academic and media professionals making the Gettysburg Address into an addendum of the Emancipation Proclamation and a prologue to twentieth-century civil rights legislation will be challenged” (pp. xii-xiii). This book is obviously going to be a different approach to the speech than what one can find in the works of Gary Wills or Gabor Boritt.
Because of the cliffhanger ending in 2000 with Schwartz’ Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, the book which turned into the post-heroic era Lincoln book I have before me was much anticipated. At least it was much anticipated until I saw the title and started reading (Nota Bene: reading this book was made more difficult due to: embarrassing typos throughout the book despite a long delay in publication; footnotes, in which Schwartz tries to almost write another book, being located at the back of the book instead of the bottom of the page where they belong [for shame University of Chicago Press, you used to know better]; and, no bibliography [flat out unacceptable]).
In Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era, Schwartz is at his best (as he was in the first Lincoln book) when he is digging up and utilizing a vast and varied amount of materials to talk about the Lincoln memory. Speeches, sermons, political cartoons, paintings, statues, posters and more all have a role to play in assessing what Lincoln meant to the people who viewed these symbols and the conditions which allowed the symbols to be made. Schwartz in this sense owes a debt to Merrill Peterson and his book Lincoln in American Memory which Schwartz rightly describes as “the most comprehensive chronicle of Lincoln texts and symbolism” (p. 116).
Peterson also presents a problem to be overcome for Schwartz, i.e., Peterson doesn’t deal with individuals and how they felt about Lincoln. Schwartz’ willingness to use any materials to get the job done brings him astray when he tries to find out what “ordinary Americans” think about Lincoln by focusing on opinion surveys. Schwartz’ use of newspaper propaganda produced during the World War II era helps make the case for Lincoln being effectively used to sell US participation in the war. By contrast, survey data showing that Lincoln has remained ranked first in Presidential greatness among respondents although Lincoln’s overall percentage has declined does not bring home the point that Lincoln’s prestige and that of all Presidents has declined. We should never lose sight of the fact that during his lifetime Lincoln was one of the most unpopular Presidents of all time. When Schwartz harps on the data showing that blacks of all ages are less favorable to Lincoln than whites, he never once attempts to delve into the black experience to see what the data might mean.
Instead, Schwartz comes off as a bit of a generational warrior who blames the ‘Uncommitted Generation,’ aka: ‘Generation X’, ‘Generation After’, and the ‘Generation with No Name’ for the irreversibility of the reverence of Lincoln to anything like the heyday of the early to mid 20th century. Four generations are covered by Schwartz in this book: “G.I. Generation” (1930-1945), “Rights and Justice Generation” (1945-mid 1960s), “Boomer” or “Rebellious Generation” (mid 1960s-1980s) and the aforementioned Gen X (1980s-today?). Obviously, if 1945 is the high point of the reverence of Lincoln, the three generations which come after that date are irreverent to varying degrees, with the ill-defined last generation taking the brunt of the blame. To return to the point about African Americans, Schwartz is completely unaware of the “Hip Hop Generation” (black Americans born 1965-1984). As Bakari Kitwana, who helped coined the phrase at The Source magazine, pointed out in his book, “Just as Black baby boomers were mostly defined by the civil rights and Black power movements, Black twenty-somethings were more than just Generation Xers in Black face” (p. xiii). M.K. Asante, Jr. has recently written about the “Post-Hip-Hop Generation” and the disowning of the Hip Hop Generation label as the commercialization of the art form stands for something which does not represent a growing number of young blacks. There is a great deal of meaning lying in such experiences which go a good deal further than surveys in figuring out why a picture of Lincoln or any other President is no longer hanging on the walls of most black families.
Does the rampant cynicism about the impossibilities of the American Dream myth which was sold to the baby boomers mean Americans value heroes less? Or, perhaps Americans just put less stock in bogus meaning narratives than they used to. None of the surveys employed by Schwartz or talk of the “acids of equality” can explain the appeal of the message of overcoming a “spiritual depression” from the Tyler Durden character in the novel Fight Club (later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton) to a generation starved for meaning, even if they don’t buy into the destructive impulse.
Lincoln remains ubiquitous in American society, but is he still a hero? Schwartz says that “Americans revered and emulated Abraham Lincoln as long as they could agree on what he stood for” (p. 201). But he also points to the paradox of Lincoln’s changing image in the post-heroic era, if Lincoln is seen to represent equality of all persons; then Lincoln’s own greatness is diminished so that others can take their place beside him (p. 218). This is no recent feat of multiculturalism or toleration of others’ cultures as Schwartz wants to suggest. For example, Schwartz himself presents this point with his description of a set of cartoons from the Polish-American press: “Immigrants and their children were eager to contribute to the war [World War II], but American symbols made sense to them only when joined to traditional symbols of their own” (p. 72). The cartoons in question were labeled in Polish and paired Lincoln with a Polish hero, Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko, who fought in the Continental Army in the American Revolution. For Polish immigrants Lincoln’s importance to liberty was not evident enough and had to be mediated through a Polish hero with some concrete connection to the United States and Lincoln (they share February 12 as a birthday and were both anti-slavery).
If Schwartz wants to claim that Lincoln still has plenty to say to us today, shouldn’t he work at demonstrating that fact to Generation X by mediating Lincoln in a way that he can seem heroic to a generation which has no direct experience of slavery, Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights movement, instead of berating the generation as vulgar? Ultimately, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era will probably be a disappointment to those who read and enjoyed Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory.
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