Review

Brian J. Snee. Lincoln before “Lincoln”: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America’s Greatest President. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Pp. 166.

 
Abraham Lincoln was a man of flesh and blood, virtuous but flawed. Within moments of his untimely death by the hand of an assassin, however, he ascended to the realm of legend—Lincoln, as Edwin M. Stanton purportedly noted at the president’s deathbed, belonged to the ages. Today he is a near-immortal figure in American history. We remember his life and legacy: a rise from obscurity to political greatness, the center of America’s most heartbreaking tragedy, and the exalted emancipator, delivering four million from bondage. Lincoln the legendary figure is in some ways far greater than Lincoln the actual man. The enduring story of Abraham Lincoln is interwoven with America’s national identity. And in the past 150-plus years since his death, tens of thousands of books, songs, and poems have taught us all: fact, myth, and legend. He is a man Americans know well.

But how do we know what we think we know? Brian J. Snee’s Lincoln before “Lincoln”: Early Cinematic Adaptations of the Life of America’s Greatest President looks to Hollywood for answers. Snee refers to Hollywood as “the nation’s unofficial historian and storyteller” (14). He is without question correct. The film medium has the power to bring historical figures to life in visually striking ways; it has the power to hold viewers’ attention, if only for a short time, and impart a meaningful message.

A meditation on Hollywood is prudent here. If calling Hollywood the unofficial historian is indeed a fair assessment (it is), then we must ask ourselves whether America’s movie-going “students” have been shortchanged. I would suggest that they have. While motion pictures have the power to educate, they also have the ability to manipulate history for the sake of a compelling (or, rather, very particular) story. All of this should be known to those versed in memory studies broadly defined. John Bodnar explains and Snee quotes, “Public memory is a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.” This, of course, means that individuals can select (or invent) memories that suit their present circumstances. And individuals often do precisely that. Our collective historical consciousness reflects these memories; they are the bonds that hold American identity together.

With all of this in mind there is little wonder that filmmakers in the past have used selective memories of our sixteenth president to create specific stories fitting specific purposes. Snee suggests Hollywood has provided a profoundly instructive historical narrative that has lent much to the creation of Lincoln’s legendary status. So why is there little scholarly inquiry into the matter?

It is true that scholars such as Merrill D. Peterson, in his celebrated Lincoln in American Memory, dedicate a few pages to the work of David Wark (D. W.) Griffith and his portrayal of Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation (1915). But Peterson, for all of his exceptional scholarship outlining the creation of the Lincoln legend in other media, notes only briefly that in Birth, “the President is portrayed as a compassionate father” and that he “drearily repeats, again and again, ‘the Union must be preserved!’”[1]

For a comprehensive study specifically focused on film depicting the Civil War era, one ought to turn to Gary W. Gallagher’s outstanding Causes Lost, Won, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Gallagher observes a visual representation of Lincoln’s magnanimity in The Birth of a Nation and likewise underscores portrayals of Lincoln’s Unionist message (though not necessarily Lincoln himself) in other motion pictures. It is Gallagher’s study of the film medium as it relates to history that complements Peterson’s scholarship about memory as a shaping force in our understanding of American history and of Lincoln himself. Together, these studies best introduce the reader to memory and film as profoundly powerful avenues of instruction, for better or worse.[2]

Snee builds on both scholarly fields. Reflecting on the latest incarnations of the “reel” Lincoln, he praises Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), a semi-biopic about Lincoln’s role in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s political biography Team of Rivals (2006). And he dismisses as absurd Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), based on Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel of the same name. Snee nonetheless notes that both films depict Lincoln as the same character: “a heroic Lincoln who fought for the weak and freed the enslaved” (15). But how strange it is that not until 2012 did Lincoln the Great Emancipator receive a starring role.

For those not fluent in Lincoln filmography, this revelation may come as something of a shock. Though one could conjure any number of the many Lincolns for the sake of underscoring a particular chapter in American history, Lincoln the Emancipator seems the most obvious choice. And it stands to reason, considering that freedom from slavery is among the most momentous of historical events. In prose and poetry, sculpture and painting, many Americans have inextricably linked Lincoln and emancipation since 1865. Then why, one might ask, did so many other Lincolns overshadow the Great Emancipator in motion pictures before 2012?

One answer could engage the film industry’s power to educate in the context of a business explicitly designed to entertain in short, visually compelling segments. This goal suggests, of course, a lack of visual or narrative space to explain history in all its complexity. Rather, film has the tendency to distill historical events into simplified, less than nuanced stories as a matter of practicality. But I am not convinced. The more likely answer is that filmmakers staging Lincoln craft a specific narrative in much the same way an individual delivering a commemorative speech tailors her words to a specific audience, context, or purpose. In this sense, films function as one of many realms of memory.

Snee’s most valuable contribution to Lincoln literature is his assessment of the film industry’s many visual Abraham Lincolns before Spielberg’s monumental Lincoln, and thus the placing of Lincoln films in historical context. Snee begins with an appraisal of the silent era, noting that it made sense to include in the advent of “stationary images suddenly come to life” the story of Lincoln, one of America’s most thrilling historical characters (16). The fallen president particularly captivated early filmmakers. “Flickers” featuring Lincoln, many of which are now lost, were produced in greater number during the medium’s formative era than in any other period. This makes sense; to the early twentieth-century public, Lincoln was still within living memory. Snee examines such obscure Lincoln films as The Seventh Son (1912), Lincoln for the Defense (1913), and Son of Democracy (1918).

These films, coupled with the writing and other visual imagery of the early twentieth century, Snee concludes, made a significant contribution to how Americans remembered the president. With motion pictures, viewers recalled the “real” Lincoln through visual representations of some of his most indelible characteristics. But more important, we find the first incarnation of filmmakers mixing history with creative fiction, thus setting the tone for future generations. By far the most important of these early Lincoln visual biographers was D. W. Griffith. Snee’s examination of the silent era focuses on the depiction of Griffith’s groundbreaking and controversial “sensational photoplay” The Birth of a Nation. Lincoln is not the focal point of the film and may to some viewers seem almost incidental, but the major scenes that include the president are noteworthy for the development of Lincoln’s public character.

Film critics have made mostly passing references to the appearance of Lincoln in Birth. But, as Snee suggests, the film is remarkable in that it greatly “influenced other filmmakers who later brought Lincoln to the screen. . . . [Griffith] established the cinematic style and narrative scenarios within which Lincoln would be endlessly situated” (40). Three of the most essential Lincolns appear in Birth: Lincoln the Great Heart, struggling with the prospect of war against his countrymen; Lincoln the Reconciliationist, pardoning a Rebel soldier, a scene that would eventually appear in nearly all subsequent Lincoln films; and of course, Lincoln the Martyr, dying so that the nation might live.

One of the most enduring Lincolns is Lincoln the Savior of the Union. By 1930 D. W. Griffith’s popularity as a filmmaker had dimmed. Nevertheless, he managed to create a lasting testament to the great Savior in Abraham Lincoln, a film that Snee suggests was so singular of purpose to depict the Savior motif that it “drastically minimized or entirely ignored” others aspects of Lincoln’s career (44). It makes sense to Snee that Griffith would leave emancipation out of the story, given the overt racism of his other films, as a way of not only obscuring Lincoln’s connection to the question of race but also altering America’s memory of the man, something that would be greatly consequential in the struggle of memory in the twentieth century.

In 1939 famed director John Ford (who, not incidentally, had played a bit part as a Klansman in Birth) captured another of the most enduring Lincolns: Lincoln the Commoner. This representation presents a challenge to those who know the ending of the story: Lincoln, a simple man of humble origins, achieved great success as a statesman and as Savior of the Union. How does one reconcile this seeming contradiction?

Snee explores the theory of dialectical cinema to contend that Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln represents Lincoln as simultaneously great and common. Ford’s story is a purely fictional tale that places Lincoln, a young Springfield lawyer, at the center of a murder trial involving two brothers. Snee demonstrates that Young Mr. Lincoln is “possessed of a dual nature, and . . . that multiple means are available to reconcile the potential incompatibility” (80). As Lincoln solves the murder, the viewers are prepared to solve the mystery of a young Lincoln, and thus the film, emphasizing harmony, ends on an image of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., a “combination of different elements forming a perfect whole” (81). Though scholars have all but slighted the effects such films have had on shaping Lincoln’s image, Snee argues that we should not minimize these popular forms, lest we “sacrifice an understanding of how our collective memory of Lincoln continues to he shaped by cinema” (81).

Snee traces the film and then television history of the president through the twentieth century, underscoring additional layers of memory (and the many Lincolns) along the way. Americans would easily recognize other aspects of Lincoln lore. We get to know Lincoln the First American in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) and the popular legendary account of Honest Abe in the 1970s television series Sandburg’s Lincoln. The 1980s, however, presents the viewer with something of a conflict. With a spate of television miniseries, we understand that there were antithetical Lincolns: the unorthodox Lincoln, struggling with personal and political conflict as depicted in Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988), and the traditional (though peripheral) Lincoln of memorable mythical proportions as depicted in The Blue and the Gray (1982) and North and South (1985). These films together are significant in that they reveal a divergence between a Lincoln tradition and an anti-Lincoln one.

What is missing from much of motion picture Lincoln lore is Lincoln the Emancipator. Viewers were not offered that Lincoln in any meaningful sense until Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln. Perhaps emancipation was simply too controversial in a reconciled America. Midcentury America was so fraught with contention concerning race and the future of civil rights for all Americans that many would surely have rejected such a cinematic effort. Perhaps deviating from previous Lincolns, which Americans know so well, was too problematic. Catapulting unreconciled disputes over race, slavery, and the Civil War out of the shadows and into the forefront and explicitly connecting them to Abraham Lincoln would have only exacerbated existing tensions.

Snee’s work is a valuable contribution to the vast literature on Abraham Lincoln. It at once underscores the power of film as a historical influencer while noting how the industry veers dramatically from other forms of popular memory and indeed from Lincoln and memory scholarship. Anyone familiar with even some of the Lincoln studies published over the past several decades knows that motion picture lore and scholarship are not, for most of the history of film, in lockstep. Lincoln before “Lincoln” is a perfect jumping-off point for further research into exactly this discrepancy. Even further review of Hollywood’s “reel” world and history’s “real” one would serve the viewing public well—if only to note that movies tell only a certain story, interpretive license helps sell that story, and there is often more context, more nuance, and more complexity to history than what appears on the silver screen.

1. Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 170, 344.

2. Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Lost, Won, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 107, 114–45.