The visible sign of this mushiness is Rogers’s boast that the Museum does not contain a single actual firearm. I can give you scandalous Lincoln, conservative Lincoln, liberal Lincoln, racist Lincoln, Lincoln over easy or Lincoln scrambled” (though evidently not hard-boiled). Without hearing a word.” Of course, without words, explanations, or speeches, why have any particular devotion to the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Or to the wartime addresses which adorn his memorial? Rogers effuses, “I can give to you any way you want, cold or hot, jazz or classical. They require constant stimulation.” In his view “a great movie” is one where “you still get about seventy percent of what’s going on. For Rogers, television and video games have made “today’s audiences…subverbal. The genius behind it all is Bob Rogers, a former Walt Disney executive. This reduction is on display in the garish new Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, an extravaganza of “emotional engineering” and multi-screen special effects. The “myth or the icon” had been replaced by “a Lincoln that’s much more human”-and ordinary. But what can you expect when Lincoln has largely been stripped of his noble achievements by the academy and au courant museums? Ferguson is dismayed to find that the Chicago Historical Society has dismantled the beloved dioramas and deathbed scene that had moved him to tears as a boy. But it wasn’t until years later that the controversial unveiling of a new statue of Abraham Lincoln in the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, set him off to travel the country, interviewing the officials, curators, collectors, reenactors, and management workshop executives who populate his new book, in order to see how our 16th president is remembered today.Ī senior editor for the Weekly Standard, Ferguson engages Lincoln fans on their own terms-with all their vanity and vulgarity, not to mention their ignorance-yet without denying their attraction, however inchoate, for greatness. Growing up in Illinois, Andrew Ferguson had a healthy admiration for Springfield’s most famous resident. A review of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America, by Andrew Ferguson
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