Comments on: On Lincoln and Accuracy

By: David in Toledo

David in Toledo — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:54:36 +0000

Every event in history involves multiple causation: the many factors, influences, persons who contribute to bringing about the particular moment. Historians love multiple causation.

A movie has time, if it is any good, to dramatize only a portion of this multiplicity. A movie’s brevity can be seen in a screenplay’s length: closer to a story than to a novel.

If you want the full story of the coming of the 13th Amendment, hire Ken Burns and prepare to enjoy a narrative with many voices and many parts.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:56:55 +0000

I’m wondering what you make of Kate Masur’s critique from The Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html which is generous to the filmmakers and far more thorough than the one-off Foner quote and pre-dates it by almost a week. I don’t think Masur’s critique falls into the unwieldy category, but not having seen the movie, I can’t speak to it’s validity. In some ways, she is asking Kushner to do more fudging of actual history in order to get more interpretive oomph.

By: Jerry Hamrick

Jerry Hamrick — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:54:00 +0000

I see a third film that focuses on Lincoln as an engineer. He said that he could not remember a time when he did not think that slavery was wrong. That is pretty clear. From the beginning of his conscious awareness of the fact that slavery was wrong, he wanted to end it. Thereafter Lincoln, the engineer, tried to devise ways to solve an immense social problem. His solutions changed over time, but his belief that slavery was wrong never changed. His ideas for solving the problem, it seems to me, were shaped by the political landscape: which ideas would work at this time, and which ideas could he possibly launch with a chance of success. So, he floated this idea and that idea, and none ever took hold. Until one day, he found a fitting set of legal circumstances and the power that enabled him to take advantage of those circumstances so that he could finally free the slaves.

I think Lincoln and Harry Truman were alike. Truman knew that the war with Japan had to be ended as soon as possible and he suddenly found that he had the power to do it. He dropped the bomb.

LBJ learned, truly learned, the evil of prejudice when as a young man he taught in Cotulla, Texas, and, as he said after he became president, “now that I have the power, I mean to use it.”

Lincoln, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, when they got the power they used it to do what they understood needed to be done. If they had gotten the power sooner they would have used it sooner.

Many people came to Lincoln and beseeched him to do something about slavery, but they offered no workable solution. He evaluated every idea in the context of the circumstances, and when the circumstances were right, he acted. All those who came to him were, I’ll wager, defining the obvious. But whether they came to him or not, I think he ended slavery as soon as he could, and in so doing, he fulfilled a lifelong wish. He was an engineer who worked on an important problem over many years, and finally solved it. He must have felt, well, he must have felt…