Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory

by Barry Schwartz

Book Overview

Abraham Lincoln has long dominated the pantheon of American presidents. From his lavish memorial in Washington and immortalization on Mount Rushmore, one might assume he was a national hero rather than a controversial president who came close to losing his 1864 bid for reelection. In Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Barry Schwartz aims at these contradictions in his study of Lincoln's reputation, from the president's death through the industrial revolution to his apotheosis during the Progressive Era and First World War.

Schwartz draws on a wide array of materials-painting and sculpture, popular magazines and school textbooks, newspapers and oratory-to examine the role that Lincoln's memory has played in American life. He explains, for example, how dramatic funeral rites elevated Lincoln's reputation even while funeral eulogists questioned his presidential actions, and how his reputation diminished and grew over the next four decades. Schwartz links transformations of Lincoln's image to changes in the society. Commemorating Lincoln helped Americans to think about their country's development from a rural republic to an industrial democracy and to articulate the way economic and political reform, military power, ethnic and race relations, and nationalism enhanced their conception of themselves as one people.

Lincoln's memory assumed a double aspect of "mirror" and "lamp," acting at once as a reflection of the nation's concerns and an illumination of its ideals, and Schwartz offers a fascinating view of these two functions as they were realized in the commemorative symbols of an ever-widening circle of ethnic, religious, political, and regional communities. The first part of a study that will continue through the present, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory is the story of how America has shaped its past selectively and imaginatively around images rooted in a real person whose character and achievements helped shape his country's future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226741982
• ISBN13: 9780226741987
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 382 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Legacy: A Product or Culture, Time, and Context

Barry Schwartz, in Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History, argues that the legacy of Abraham Lincoln is transformed, is a product of culture, and dependent on time and situation (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History xi). Schwartz undertakes this project through a discourse analysis. He examines the archive of newspaper articles, prints, paintings, statues, sermons, and speeches. Schwartz's theoretical intervention vis-à-vis Levine is that history is not limited to opening up the same to radical ways of thinking. Schwartz goes beyond Gary Nash, et al's argument that history and commemoration are subject to ideological clashes. Finally, he extends Rosenzweig and Thelen argument that history and commemoration are both subject to the contingency of place. Schwartz does argue that Lincoln's commemoration (as a stand in for history and commemoration) is contingent on context (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History xii). Schwartz's project is important in the discussion of public history vis-à-vis the three other books cited above because it extends the contestation of history and commemoration to include historical context. Schwartz addresses and carefully cites all the important positions en route to this macro argument relating to memory and history. Schwartz argues that the common sense understanding of Lincoln changed over historic time contingent to the transformation of national interests and priorities. First, in the Progressive era, Lincoln is the "common man" who from his "humble" birth in a log cabin rose to prominence and fame all the way to the White House -- despite the odds. Conversely, in the mid-20th-century, during the apex of the civil rights era, Lincoln is venerated as the "Great Emancipator" (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History 84 and 89). According to Schwartz, "Lincoln, symbolizes Durkheim's benefactors, became America's universal man: changing and remaining the same; standing beside the people and above the people; a reflection of and model of them - at once behind, above, and within them" (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History 312). In the end, this project focuses on the transformation of Lincoln as a man to one of symbol. It was not, historical discoveries that elevated Lincoln's standing. According to Schwartz, it was "cultural" and I would add "temporal" forces that made Lincoln into as Schwartz argues a "national deity" (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History xi). Lincoln, Schwartz moreover contends, took on a dual image of the "plainness, familiarity, and sympathy" of the common person, concurrently taking on the image "stateliness, authority, and dignity" of the state (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History 256). Lincoln, in the end, became "part of the soul of American society" (Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National History 255). Schwartz is very interested in the