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The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History
Allen C. Guelzo
| Perhaps it is accidental that the premier journal of American history has had so little to say about the premier figure in American history, Abraham Lincoln. Or perhaps it was Lincoln's misfortune that the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA, the forerunner of the Organization of American Historians, or OAH) was not formed until 1907 and that the Mississippi Valley Historical Review (MVHR, the forerunner of the Journal of American History, or JAH) did not begin quarterly publication until 1914, when the sun of Lincoln's historical reputation had already reached its apogee and had nowhere to go but downward. For five decades after his assassination, Lincoln's position as the second greatest American (after George Washington) had arched upward, until by 1909, the centennial of his birth, Lincoln had eclipsed even Washington as the central icon of American democracy. In just one decade, 1910–1919, seventeen new Lincoln statues were dedicated, one more than all the Lincoln statues installed in the half century after the attack in Ford's Theatre. And in that heyday of Progressivism, the most important Lincoln biography, Ida M. Tarbell's The Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900), was not only the product of one of Progressive journalism's most famous voices, but unveiled a Lincoln whom Progressives could embrace as their own. Which they did: "The Progressive platform of to-day is but an amplication ... of Lincoln's," announced Theodore Roosevelt.1 |
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But from the 1920s onward, the outsize historical image of Lincoln began to wane, almost in tandem with the waning of Progressivism. In 1914, although Lincoln's sole surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln, was still alive and active and Henry Bacon had only sketched out his first plans for what became the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, the historical glow of Lincoln was already dimming among American historians. By 1936 James G. Randall was moved to ask, almost plaintively, "Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?" Enthusiasm for the theme was also passing in popular culture. The last two movie biographies of Lincoln—Henry Fonda's Young Mr. Lincoln and Raymond Massey's Abe Lincoln in Illinois—appeared in 1939 and 1940, respectively. (Among Lincoln's recent on-camera appearances have been roles in a short-lived UPN television sitcom, in the 1989 movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and in a TV ad, in the company of a beaver.) After the first volumes of Carl Sandburg's folkish Abraham Lincoln in 1926 and Albert J. Beveridge's Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858 in 1928, the only memorable Lincoln biographies to appear over the next sixty years were Randall's neo-Progressive Lincoln the President in 1945–1955, Benjamin P. Thomas's Abraham Lincoln in 1952, and Stephen B. Oates's With Malice toward None in 1977.2 |
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