I have no doubt Daniel Day Lewis did a wonderful job bringing Lincoln to life and that the movie is a triumph of cinematic skill and story telling thanks to Steven Spielberg as argued by my father in law (aka tony blog) in the email i've copied below. I have not seen the movie yet, and I am eager to see it thanks to Tony blog's positive review. But… But. But.
The historical portrayal of Abe Lincoln in this movie is consistent with the history of the War written by the winning side, i.e. the North. To the winner goes the spoils. That is true of most narratives we consider to be “history.” history is not some objective or true account of what happened. It is a story usually told by the winning side following a definitive War. The losing side in war never gets to tell the definitive narrative of the time. This has been true since the Greeks invented history.
Harold Holtzer ia one of the so called “gate keepers” of the North’s narrative of the cause, consequence and meaning of the Civil War – all centered on Lincoln’s great passion to remove slavery from the American landscape. Holtzer is like a modern day priest from the early church who was given absolute power to interpret an authoritative reading of the Bible. We have experts to tell us what exactly happened in history and to tell us how to think about the world including by scientists/experts in every field of human analysis; economists tell us how to think about public policy, climate scientists tell us what to think about global warming, and historians tell us how to think about the implications of past events.
The problem with our age of experts is that there is no such thing as an objective reading of history or of science. Every reading of history is enormously impacted by the assumptions and goals of the so called expert doing the history. and the same goes for science.
I am reading a history of taxation from the birth of civilization in Sumer to modern America. The author offers a fascinating hypothesis. he suggests that history can be viewed as a series of incidents related to public TAX policy. Of course the Revolutionary War was very much about “taxation without representation.” Other great events throughout history can also be viewed through the “taxation” lens, including the Civil War. Having said that, the author of this book points out that there is no more controversial and emotional claim that he makes in his book challenging the received wisdom of our common understanding that the civil war is a war about slavery. People don’t want this story challenged. It goes to the heart of “our” common understanding of the deep moral beginnings of America. Abe Lincoln is one of the most beloved figures in our common history.
However, Charles Adams points out that the history of Civil War can also be told using “taxation” as a fundamental back drop. In fact, Adams found articles written by contemporary Northern writers of the time writing in pre eminent journals published in the North hypothesizing that the Civil war was fundamentally about taxes, not slavery. The story outlined in one of these journal articles argued that Lincoln’s first priority in disallowing the South’s secession plans was to protect Federal tax revenues which came mostly from export tariffs from the Southern states! The north contributed very little to public revenues, which meant if the South seceded, it would leave the North’s federal government just about broke. Lincoln could not let the South secede under such conditions – and he succeeded. But, the north could not let the story of the Civil War be told using the tax story as the back drop. That would seem unseemly. Instead the North focused on Lincoln’s later rationalization for the war, i.e. to end slavery. Conventional wisdom is allowed to safely rationalize the tragic human element required for the North to successfully prevent the South’s secession plans. In other words, Lincolns great goal to end slavery in America is still used as justification for the death of over 600,000 soldiers on both sides of the war. This is more fatalities than all the other wars combined in US history, including 400,000 in WWII and 100,000 in WWI.
Lincoln didn’t only successfully wage the Civil War, he also laid the foundation for the justification of the interventionist Federal Government that we have today, which is justified via the basic rationalization that if the ends are sufficiently important, then any means are justified.
The historical myth of Abe Lincoln promoted by Northern academic elites portraying honest Abe as the great leader, liberator and emancipator sowed the seeds for – and still provides continued justification for the “modern interventionist state ideology” we take for granted in America today that holds the following proposition: that our society needs a powerful executive office and a powerful president and that the end goal of public policy is justified by the means, as long as the ends are sufficiently important, such as in promoting social justice or the material safety of American citizens.
the greater the meaning of the policy goal, the greater the latitude we give for the achievement of the goal no matter what the unavoidably negative implications are for individual liberty. George Bush used an ends justifies the means argument to promote the logic for waging “pre-emptive” war in Iraq. He turned the logic of defensive war upside down. In our new Islamic terror world with WMD Bush argued – and I bought this argument myself at the time – that in order to defend our homeland, we needed to root out terror before it had a chance to hit us again.
We forget sometimes when we tell the story of Lincoln that there were 625,000 casualties in the Civil War. Or if we remember these facts, we use it as part of the justification for our view of Lincoln as a great leader. We see the human toll as a necessary sacrifice for a larger goal facilitated by a great leader. We sanctify Lincoln because he pursued a worthy goal and achieved it despite the wrenching human casualties – and thanks to what is viewed as great human strength dealing with the wrenching agonizing he must have lived with in conduction the war. The story of the Civil War is written by the north. Thus, the story we assume is “the truth” today, is written in a way to glorify Lincoln’s leadership in pursuing moral ends no matter the means. We still do talk about the bloody outcome of the Civil War, but the human tragedy of the war is set against Lincoln’s great moral commitment to ending slavery.
Lincoln may have thought very deeply about the cause to end slavery, but Lincoln originally came to think of the War as unavoidable NOT based on its implications for the future of slavery in America. He initially pursued the Civil War because letting the South leave the union would have devastated the ability of the Federal government in Washington CD to raise sufficient tax revenue even to conduct basic operations. The only tax going into Federal coffers leading up to the Civil War was the tariff … and the south’s booming cotton and agriculture trade produced just about all of the tax revenue for the federal government at the time. Only later, did Lincoln justify the Civil War as a war to end slavery. And by the way, it is also true that Alexander Hamilton supported a stronger central government compared to Articles of confederation – because the Articles created competition amongst the states for the lowest tariff. A central government charged with setting tariffs could raise the tariff with impunity, which is one of the very first acts by the new congress under the US constitution!!! the tariff was made a uniform 8% or something on that order versus 1 to 3% that prevailed under the Articles of confederation.
Libertarians view Able Lincoln as the father of the modern American welfare / warfare state. both major parties consistently argue that the ends justify the means for Federal government mobilization of special interests, the Dems favor funding the welfare complex and the GOP favors funding the military industrial complex. Both parties favor funding for special interest subsidies including: to housing sector, Wall Street, big banking, public education, infrastructure, big pharma, big agriculture, big health care, big insurance,….
– all funded by the central bank money machine, which allows the government to implement an inflation tax rather than direct taxes.
The myth promoted by Northern academic elites of the historic Lincoln makes us nostalgic for a powerful leader who can meet the crisis of OUR own times with leadership, commitment and bold decision making. However, we need the opposite. The boldness we need from our public leaders is the awareness and articulation that the model of the interventionist state Lincoln created via the Civil War is not the model we want to secure our future. Bold in the context of the challenges which currently face now as a culture and country means undoing Lincoln’s big government interventionist legacy.
Ps… Lincoln’s Civil War mobilization economy sowed the seeds for the late 1800’s Gilded Age and the Robber Barons who learned how to build crony capitalist ties with the Federal government to win sweet heart land deals to develop the American railroad infrastructure. Government created the Robber Barons, not the so called “free market.” The crony capitalism that rose up out of the Lincoln Civil War mobilization / central planning model not only sowed seeds for the Robber Baron era, but also set the stage for the crony capitalism model that has continued to evolve through American history such that when we fight to save the “free market” today, there is very very little to save. Just like in the Gilded Age when Robber Barons earned massive fortunes thanks to government subsidies, we have analogous booms and busts, all directly caused by market distortions related to special interest subsidies and easy money, thoughout our history including in the 2000’s boom and post 2008-9 bust. The answer each time has been to blame the market and to deploy increasingly sophisticated government intervention – no matter whether we are talking about the Patriot Act of Dodd-Frank. Which are in fact new avenues for special interests to socialize risk and privatize profits in special interests.
Subj: 11-25-12 NYP Finally, an honest Abe By? HAROLD HOLZER
Dear Readers:
We bring this to you because the article is very effective and correct.
It is written by an authority on Abraham Lincoln, Harold Holzer. It really reviews the new movie, "Lincoln" that was directed by Steven Spielberg. The lead actor is Daniel Day-Lewis who did an extraordinarily fabulous job in portraying Lincoln, his voice, walk, passion etc. It focused upon the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, forever derailing slavery.
He did this during the lame duck session of his first term and prior to succeeding to his second term. He felt it had to be accomplished and if the war ended too soon, slavery would return if there as not a constitutional amendment.
It's a fascinating movie and quite possibly, the best movie I've seen.
We recommend the movie and this review. It's extraordinarily effective, appropriate, accurate, historically precedent and a must.
We bring this to you knowing many will have seen the movie .. but if not, go.
Tony Blog
Finally, an honest Abe
Last Updated: 11:00 PM, November 24, 2012
Posted: 10:57 PM, November 24, 2012
Director Steven Spielberg, whom I introduced last week at Gettysburg at ceremonies marking the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speech, said he was deeply humbled to be delivering an address on that history-making spot.
Spielberg kept his remarks simple — like Lincoln before him. After seven years of work on his new film “Lincoln,” Spielberg feels almost as if the 16th president is “one of my oldest and dearest friends,” he said.
He made it clear that his own greatest contribution to history would come through images, not words; through the magical, not-always-realistic art of film, not the sometimes unbearable truth of history.
But compared to the historians and scholars in attendance, he admitted an advantage in making Lincoln eternal.
“I’m luckier than nearly all of you, in one sense,” he said. “I have Daniel Day-Lewis’ phone number in my speed dial.”
If many of us, sadly, get the bulk of our American history from television and film, Spielberg’s address book at least provides a silver lining. For Daniel Day-Lewis gives the definitive portrayal of our time, perhaps ever, of Honest Abe.
For people like me, who have spent their lives studying Abraham Lincoln, the film is chilling — as if he’s really come to life.
Day-Lewis does it by avoiding the traps most Lincoln actors fall into, the stoic, “Hall of Presidents”-esque stereotype that probably most Americans imagine.
There are no moving pictures of Lincoln, no recordings of his voice. But after his death, everyone was Lincoln’s best friend, and there are descriptions of everything from his accent to his gait.
The most important thing is the voice. Far from having a stentorian, Gregory Peck-like bass, Lincoln’s was a high, piercing tenor. Those who attended his speeches even described it as shrill and unpleasant for the first 10 minutes, until he got warmed up (or his endless stories managed to cow them into submission).
As an eyewitness said when Lincoln took the stage at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860: “There was nothing impressive or imposing about him . . . His clothes hung awkwardly on his gaunt and giant frame; his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle. His deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious.”
Lincoln was so unsure of his voice — and whether it would carry to the far reaches of Cooper Union — that he asked an old Illinois acquaintance to plant himself in the back row of the cavernous Great Hall and raise his hat on a cane if he couldn’t hear. He never had to do so.
“When he spoke,” noted contemporary Joseph H. Choate, “he was transformed before us. His eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly as by electric flash. For an hour and more he held his audience in the hollow of his hand.”
Lincoln’s accent fluctuated between rural Kentucky and Indiana; some describe him as pronouncing “chair” as “cheer,” others as “char.” These accents don’t really exist anymore in America, but we can approximate them from recordings from the early part of the 20th century. Day-Lewis decided on the “char.”
Like any good politician, Lincoln would crank that accent up or down depending on the audience. The educated lawyer could speak the King’s English, then, like Bill Clinton, signal to rural voters that he was one of them with his drawl and folksy charm.
When he would speak, witnesses say Lincoln’s gestures at first seemed disjointed from his words. He was all limbs, awkward in his movements. We all know Lincoln was tall, but it’s not always conveyed just how unusual he was for his time. He was 6-foot-4, at a time when the average height of a man was 5-foot-6; the Amar’e Stoudemire of presidents.
Lincoln joked about his feet that he “had a hard time getting blood down there.” He’s described as stomping, shambling along, so it’s both amusing and thrilling to see Day-Lewis doing the same, walking, as Lincoln was described, “where his leg comes down all at once.”
Lincoln holds such a profound place in American history that every group wishes to claim him, everyone wants to interpret them as their own. But he did not have clinical depression, he wasn’t gay and, despite that odd gait, he didn’t have Marfan syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that elongates the body.
I know this because one of the symptoms of Marfan’s is that you lose power in your hands, but Lincoln was strong and eager to show off. Anytime he saw an ax, anywhere, he’d always want to show people a “frontier trick.” He’d hold the ax by the handle, just between his thumb and forefinger and hold it straight out, parallel to the ground, perfectly still, before dropping it to the ground. It was the 19th century political equivalent of Vladimir Putin posing shirtless with a gun.
If “Lincoln” has one flaw, it’s that we don’t really get to see this folkiness. Though he does get to tell a dirty joke.
But that’s a minor quibble. Over 2 1/2 hours, Day-Lewis does show us his melancholy, his political craftiness, his oratorical powers and his passion.
It’s that passion that also provides an important corrective to the modern study of Lincoln. It’s fashionable to suggest that the president was indifferent to the injustice of slavery, that he pushed for emancipation purely for military purposes.
That’s not true. As “Lincoln” shows, he cared deeply about race and slavery, and felt the Thirteenth Amendment was absolutely necessary from a moral standpoint.
In 1865, the Civil War was drawing to a close, but Lincoln worried that if the Union won too quickly, slavery would continue. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed the slaves, but some might interpret that as a temporary measure during war, and there were no constitutional protections for African-Americans.
The negotiations took place during a lame-duck session, and the drama has many parallels to today. Instead of the fiscal cliff, they faced the racial cliff. And for anyone who thinks that politics are dirtier work today, the backroom deals Lincoln made should dispel notions of a “simpler time.” He offered judgeships, promised to undo railroad regulations in New Jersey — anything he could do to get a vote. Honest Abe was cutting corners.
“Lincoln” doesn’t approach this with lapel-gripping remove, but with foot-stomping, face-slapping and fist-pounding — just as the real Lincoln did. It’s a president that’s fighting to bend a reluctant Congress to his will, a human Lincoln that isn’t always pretty though his cause is right.
The movie ends with Lincoln enshrined with honors as a liberator and then transformed into a martyr after his assassination. But it’s good to remember that while he lived, he was hugely controversial. Even his last great speech, the second inaugural, which Spielberg has recreated with a great sweeping set piece, with Day-Lewis really shouting out the words the way Lincoln would have done to reach the vast throngs on the US Capitol Plaza — even that great speech was not universally admired at the time.
It ended, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Faced with these words, a Democratic newspaper from Chicago thought it “slip-shod” and “puerile.”
Few great people are appreciated in their time. And it’s good to remember that, no matter how right the decisions seem now, they were hard-fought then.
“I wanted — impossibly — to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries,” Steven Spielberg said at Gettysburg, “even if only for two-and-one-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”
And most important, just the right number on his speed dial.
Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. His new book is “Lincoln: How Abraham Lincoln Ended Slavery in America,” a companion book for young readers to the Steven Spielberg film “Lincoln,” published this month by Newmarket Press for It! Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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