Rereading the Gettysburg address: Social change and collective memory

Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1996

Rereading the Gettysburg Address: Social Change and Collective Memory

Barry Schwartz

Recent scholarship depicts the Gettysburg Address as an unchanging symbol of American democracy. This investigation shows new meanings of the Gettysburg Address arising as successive generations interpret it in light of new situations and challenges. Lincoln's supporters interpreted the Gettysburg Address as a call to arms, a plea to grasp the victory that the Union's dead had brought into sight. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Gettysburg Address was recognized for its aesthetic appeal, but rare(y commemorated. As early twentieth-century Progressive reforms redistributed political power, as Northerners and Southerners renounced old hatreds, and as foreign wars enhanced America's global role, the Gettysburg Address became a multivalent symbol of industrial democracy, regional solidarity, and patriotism. Abraham Lincoln's Address assumed its present meaning, which incorporates the often conflicting ideals o f racial equality and regional unity, in the late twentieth-century. As the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s expanded, Lincoln's prestige fell dramatically. Lincoln, paradoxical(y, was reduced by the power of the egalitarian ideal he symbolized--even as that ideal became embodied in his own words. To resolve this paradox, postmodernist conceptions o f author-reader relations are brought to bear on current understandings of collective memory.

KEY WORDS: collective memory; Postmodernism; Gettysburg Address; Lincoln, Abraham.

Monuments resolve in stone the contradictions of the nations that erect them. Believing this, architect Henry Bacon had proposed in 1912 "that the Memorial to Lincoln take the form of a monument symbolizing the Union of the United States of America." He did not mean a new union

Direct correspondence to Barry Schwartz, Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602.

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of whites and blacks, immigrants and native-bom, rich and poor; he in- tended the Memorial rather to be "a striking symbol of reunion between the North and the South" (U.S. [1912] 1913, p. 26). And so it was. On the interior southern wall of the marble temple Bacon had inscribed the Get- tysburg Address; on the opposite, northern wall the closing words of the Second Inaugural: "With malice toward none; with charity for all." At the Memorial's dedication, uniformed Union and Confederate veterans lined both sides of its wide front steps. President Warren Harding capped the ceremony by asserting in his dedication speech that the reunion of North and South, not emancipation, was Lincoln's war aim. 1

Thirty-six years later, as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momen- tum, Lincoln's war aim was reinterpreted. Given the persistence of racial segregation in America, Peter Edson of the Washington News observed that "The words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address have become something of a mockery: 'Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal....' If the [forthcoming] Civil War Cen- tennial and the Lincoln Sesquicentennial are to mean anything, there are five years in which to make good on Mr. Lincoln's pledge at Gettysburg" (Cited in U.S., Oct. 2, 1958).

That the Gettysburg Address seemed to refer to a regionally integrated society when read in 1922 and a racially integrated society when read in 1958 is understandable. Collective memory, according to Maurice Halbwachs, "is essentially a reconstruction of the past [which] adapts the image of ancient facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present" (1941:7). The Lincoln Memorial dedication ceremony and Edson's article in the Washington News are good examples of how past utterances and events are reinterpreted in the context of present aspirations. It is this phe- nomenon- the transformation of a "symbolic past"--that I wish to explore through the Gettysburg Address.

For a long time it has been said that Lincoln expressed at Gettysburg what Americans of his own and later generations felt about democracy. The most recent version of this claim is Garry Wills's Lincoln at GettYsburg (1992), whose subtitle, The Words That Remade America, summarizes its argument. Wills believed that once Lincoln delivered his speech, its meaning never changed. Having permanently remade America, his words de- scended to succeeding generations in their original state. My concern is to show that the Address's meaning is not embodied in Lincoln's words, but rather changes as new generations interpret it in light of new situations and challenges. Not all texts are so malleable. 2 Critical theory, Edward Said observed, "has placed undue emphasis upon the limitlessness of interpretation" (1979:171). Said, like Erving Goffman (1981), believed that the na-

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ture of the situations in which texts are read and words uttered restrains what can be done with them interpretively. But the reverse is also true: texts' and utterances' susceptibility to contrasting interpretations expand the number of ways they can be situated in the world. The Gettysburg Address is a case in point: its abstractness makes it ever usable in a rapidly indus- trializing and democratizing world and ever suitable to the reconstructive machinery of collective memory. The Gettysburg Address, like Emile Durk- heim's sacred totem ([1915] 1965:121-336), has little meaning independent of the readers and audiences that bring it to life.

The second point of my essay is related to the first. Given its susceptibility to reinterpretation, the Gettysburg Address cannot be studied in the late decades of the twentieth century with sociological concepts that were devised in the century's earlier decades. This second point is important because it refers collective memory to a new understanding of human agency and authorship. Roland Barthes has observed that in egalitarian environments where authority and hegemony appear as interchangeable evils, authors (and authorities in general) can no longer define absolutely the meaning of anything--not even the meaning of their own words. Texts are thus "read without the father's signature...or guarantee" (1979:78, see also 1977:148, see also Foucault 1979). One need not accept literally Barthes' pronouncement of the "Death of the Author" to appreciate his logic, which conceives the traditional relation of author and reader as a relation of dominance and subordination. If this logic has merit, then author-reader relations must change as authority structures erode, and this change must affect the way we interpret all historical documents. Thus, in considering the American Revolution, Pauline Rosenau explains, "no claim can be made that the exact intentions of the founding fathers who drafted the Uni ted States Const i tut ion need be considered or respected" (1992:32). 3 Texts break loose from their authors as the latters' authority recedes and meaning becomes more dependent on readers' viewpoints.

Assuming with Karl Mannheim that the fact of belonging to the same generation endows its members with "a common location in the social and historical process" and predisposes them "for a certain characteristic mode of thought and experience" ([1928] 1952:291), I propose to show how social and historical changes draw new meanings out of the Gettysburg Address and new ways of contemplating its relationship to its author. I do not un- derestimate the difficulty of this task, for no one can be certain what most Americans at any given time believed and felt about the Address. One can only study the impressions of it that a small number of people wrote down for others to read and drew or painted for others to see. Yet, these impressions reflected the public taste. Some writers and artists shared that taste; some exploited it, dealing mainly with features of Lincoln's speech

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that would interest a mass audience. Others believed their efforts would be of no significance if they did not somehow affect as well as reflect the way the Address was understood. Assuming that depictions of the Gettys- burg Address simultaneously shaped and reflected the public's conception of it, we can take change in writers' and artists' characterizations as an indication of change in the way it was generally perceived.

My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, I situate Lincoln's words by incorporating them into the texture of grief and anger that permeated the North in the autumn of 1863, after two and a half years of war. I then focus on two critical periods: (1) the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the Gettysburg Address, assimilated into the Progressive movement, became a symbol of democracy, and (2) the third quarter of the twentieth century when, assimilated into the civil rights movement, it evolved into a symbol of equality. Cultural significance is always era-specific. The meaning of Lincoln's Address in the heat of civil war and in movements to extend democracy and racial justice was not the same, no matter how fixed the formal and stylistic features that determine its aesthetic power. The Get- tysburg Address has become a sacred text, I submit, not because of Lin- coln's genius for applying antique literary forms to current events, but because those forms are enigmatical enough, that is to say, rich enough, for successive generations to see themselves in. Their ability to articulate the urgency of war in the mid nineteenth-century, the awakening democracy of the early nineteenth century, and the dissolving racial boundaries and inclusive equality of the late twentieth century is what gave power to Lin- coln's words. Finally, I will claim that the late twentieth century is distinctive because it is a "postmodern" phase, one in which texts, far more than images of their authors, set down roots in contemporary concerns and aspirations.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS: FIRST READING

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address amid great uncer- tainty. In hindsight, the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg broke the power of the Confederacy; but this was not apparent during the months following the battle. Meade's federal army, which failed to pursue Lee's army beyond Gettysburg, was floundering in Virginia; two federal armies were bogged down in Tennessee; Confederate cavalry units were harassing federal lines everywhere. Invited to help dedicate the Gettysburg cemetery in November, 1863, Lincoln could bring little encouragement. He could bring only consolation and a few words to justify the long suffering of the people. 4 He wrote an inspired speech and when he arrived to deliver it, according to


one eyewitness, he seemed to be impressed with the sanctity of the occasion (U.S., June 29, 1911). Lincoln's earnestness amplified the power of his words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of f reedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The opening line of the Gettysburg Address, "Fourscore and seven years ago," meant 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration had created a "new nation," and Lincoln had come to honor "those who here gave their lives that that nation might live." The angry connotation of these lines cannot be felt without appreciating the profound esteem in which Lincoln's generation held the Founding Fathers (Forgie 1979). Lincoln's speech evoked in his listeners the polar image of Union soldiers determined to preserve the sacred legacy of the American Revo- lution and Confederate soldiers determined to destroy it.

No mere words, Lincoln continued, could express the significance of what Northern fighters had accomplished. Theirs was an historic victory that renewed hope for the survival of democracy. For many political op- ponents, however, Lincoln's references to "a new birth of freedom" and "the proposition that all men are created equal" expressed his wish for blacks and whites to mingle socially and enjoy equal rights. The Democratic Chicago Times (November 23, 1863) believed he meant this and reacted indignantly: "It was to uphold the Constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died....? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges."

Northerners who believed Lincoln's war aim to be racial equality voted against him overwhelmingly in the next year's presidential election. Lin-

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coln's supporters, however, believed he opposed slavery and racial equality alike. In the 1860 presidential election, for example, 32,000 New Yorkers endorsed Lincoln's antislavery position by voting for him, but only 1,600 voted for the black-suffrage amendment appearing on the same ballot. This vote reflects prevailing attitudes toward slavery and race. Many, if not most, Northerners opposed slavery as a moral wrong, but they also feared the prospect of millions of liberated slaves entering their states. (Lincoln's own state, among others, legally forbade the immigration of free blacks.) Draft- ing the Emancipation Proclamation a full year before the Battle of Get- tysburg, Lincoln went out of his way to stress its military necessity and to explain that colonization--the physical removal of black people from the United States to Central America and Africa--was integral to his (and his administration's) emancipation policy. He had always favored deportation of the "captive people to their long-lost father-land" (Lincoln, v.2:256) and continued to favor it publicly after others deemed it impractical (Quarles 1962:193). Thus, Republicans had good reason to believe that the Gettys- burg Address affirmed the sacredness of the union, not "race amalgama- tion" or even emancipation.

What, then, did people think Lincoln meant by "a new birth of freedom" and "the proposition that all men are created equal"? I do not know what Lincoln was thinking about as he prepared the Gettysburg Address. My concern is how ideas about emancipation, freedom, and equality fit together in the public's mind, not Lincoln's. Freedom and equality were resonant ideas in mid nineteenth-century discourse. In 1832, while slavery was still unchallenged, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible" (1947:102). Thus, few Northerners, whatever their views on Lincoln, thought of "emancipation" when they heard the words "freedom" and "equality" (even if they thought of "freedom" and "equality" when they heard the word "emancipation"). Freedom and equality were polysemic concepts that meant more than emancipation. Lincoln's words to an Ohio regiment make this clear:

It is in order that each one of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence, that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations--i t is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright....[T]he nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel" (1953, v. 7:512).

Plainly, the "inestimable jewel" worth fighting for is capitalism. At Gettys- burg, too, Lincoln was referring to capitalism--a fair chance in the race of life--when he valorized the freedom and equality of man. (For a discussion


of the culture of capitalism and its effect on Lincoln's personal and public life, see Howe 1979:263-298.) That the race of life was run by white con- testants alone, and its fairness threatened by slave labor, went without say- ing.

The Gettysburg Address did not express America's ideals prominently, for most newspapers did not report, let alone reprint it. The few Demo- cratic newspapers that covered the Address refused to take it seriously. The Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Patriot and Nation (November 24, 1863), like other Democratic newspapers, condemned the entire Gettysburg proceed- ing as a "panorama that was gotten up more for the benefit of [Lincoln's] party than for the glory of the nation and the honor of the dead." Repub- lican editors and commentators, in contrast, recognized the significance of the Gettysburg dedication and referred often to the emotional power of Lincoln's speech. No one could read it "without a moistening of the eye and a swelling of the heart" (Philadelphia Bulletin, November 20, 1865). They referred often to its militant inspiration. The Gettysburg Times editor (November 19, 1863) declared: "More than any other single event will this glorious dedication nerve the heroes to a deeper resolution of the living to conquer at all costs." The Boston Transcript's (November 20, 1863) editor likewise noted: "The ideas of duty are almost stammered out...as the inspiration not only of public opinion, but of public action also. One sentence should shine in golden letters throughout the land as an exhortation to wake up apathetic and indolent patriotism. 'It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on.'" The Republican press expressed its militant sentiment by re- porting that Lincoln was interrupted continually by applause and g iven three cheers when he finished--a strange response to a funeral oration.

The Republican press, responding positively to all Lincoln speeches, found nothing special about the one at Gettysburg. Nor did any other Re- publican body. Not one lithograph or statue of Lincoln at Gettysburg appeared during or after the Civil War. As the years passed, however, the Address gradually attracted attention. Its first significant commemoration was marked by Albion Harris Bicknell's Lincoln at Gettysburg (Fig. 1), a life-size painting commissioned in Philadelphia during the observance of the 1876 United States Centennial. Bicknell's painting is a commentary on the enduring militant dimension of Lincoln' s speech. His figures, modeled on photographs, express the rigid formality of Victorian authority. Arrayed behind Lincoln, who dominates the scene at center-foreground, are twenty military officers, state governors, senators, vice presidents, and journalists. Although few of them were actually present with Lincoln at Gettysburg, Bicknell's scene is not entirely fictional. Completed as Southern influence reasserted itself and Reconstruction ended, the painting recreates symboli-

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cally the coalition that fought the war. The pictured assemblage (whose members are identified by a key accompanying the printed reproductions) is weighted in favor of antislavery sentiment--epitomized not only by radi- cals Henry Wilson, Salmon Chase, and Benjamin Butler, but also by black journalist and political leader Frederick Douglass (with whom few politi- cians, including Lincoln, would have dared to share a public platform in 1863). Many of these antislavery Republicans opposed Lincoln as vigorously as did Democrats Horatio Seymour and George McClellan, who sit among them. Bicknell's composition portrays the enactment of a ritual of solidarity. As anthropologist David Kertzer observed, "Solidarity is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together" (1987:76). Bicknell depicts men of differing opinion whose presence together dramatizes their common identification with the nation.

National integrity is what the Gettysburg Address affirmed in 1876, but it was not yet the sacred document it would become. Not until the early twentieth century, when an industrial democracy replaced an obsolete rural republic, did Lincoln's speech become part of what Robert Bellah (1966:177-178) calls the "New Testament" of America's civil religion. "The true applause" for the Address "comes from this generation," Charles E. Thompson wrote in 1913 (N.Y Times, Sec. V, June 6, 1913:3). In the same year Major William H. Lambert told the Pennsylvania Historical Society

Fig. 1. Albion Harris Bicknell, Lincoln at Gettysburg. 1879. Malden Public Library, Malden Massachusetts.


that none of Lincoln's contemporaries saw unusual merit in his Gettysburg Address. "It is difficult to realize that [the Address] ever had less appre- ciation than it does now" (1909:391-2. See also p. 399).

SECOND READING

What did the American people find so appealing in the Gettysburg Address during the early decades of the twentieth century that they did not find during the late decades of the nineteenth? Literary elegance and moving content, yes, but one cannot account for the appeal of a speech merely by describing it; one must also know the social context within which its elegance and content were appreciated.

The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new social order: "The decade of the nineties is the watershed of American history," said Henry Steele Commager. "On the one side lies an America predominantly agricultural; ...on the other side lies the modern America, predominantly urban and industrial...experiencing profound changes in population, social institutions, and technology; and trying to ac- commodate its traditions and habits of thought to conditions new and in part alien" (1950:41). Commager is talking about the culmination of an industrial revolution.

Against the problems of the industrial revolution--unregulated immigration and urban growth, massive slums, decline in moral values and, above all, a widening gap between rich and poor--the Progressive movement harnessed federal power. Antitrust legislation, a pure food and drug law, child and sweatshop labor laws, federal workmen's compensation, the progressive income tax--these and other measures helped to transform the plutocratic jungle of the nineteenth century into the humane capitalist order of the twentieth. Even more significant were the political reforms, including women's suffrage, the direct election of United States senators, the primary election, the voter initiative, the referendum, and the corrupt prac- tices acts.

Progressive reforms made the United States more democratic, but they were not revolutionary. They were meant to protect, not undermine, free enterprise and property. The gap between rich and poor was in fact greater at the end of the reform era than at its beginning. And Progressive re- formers had little or nothing to say about religious intolerance, racial in- justice, or nativist disdain for the "hyphenated Americanism" of burgeoning immigrant communities. The inculcation of a stronger sense of economic and political equality, defined in terms of equal opportunity and expanding suffrage, was Progressivism's achievement. Within this limit, the Progressive

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Era witnessed the arousal of a new spirit, a revitalization of democracy and unprecedented concern for the rights and well-being of ordinary people. Progressivism, according to Richard Hofstadter, "must be understood as a major episode in the history of American consciousness," a "spiritual growth in the hearts of the American people . . . a moral movement in democracy" (1963:15, 36).

Theodore Roosevelt' s assertion that "Lincoln and Lincoln's supporters were emphatically the progressives of their day,"and that "the Progressive platform of to-day is but an amplification of Lincoln's," did not convince everyone, but in 1913 it seemed perfectly reasonable that he should make it. American progressives, whether friends or enemies of Roosevelt, defined Lincoln's presidency as the first phase of their movement; the Gettysburg Address, its manifesto (Roosevelt 1913: 1, 3; Stewart 1912). Thus, in 1913 The Nation magazine (July 10, 1913; 27) complained: "Nobody knows, and there is nothing in Lincoln's acts or words to tell, whether or not he would have been for the initiative and referendum, for endowment of mother- hood, or for single tax; yet enthusiastic advocates of almost any 'advanced' proposal of our day find little difficulty in persuading themselves that it is a corollary of the Gettysburg address." The Address's cultural resonance, in turn, grew. It seemed natural that James T. McCleary, realizing that Lin- coln's eulogy "will be recited by school boys a thousand years from now," should propose to acknowledge the 1909 Centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with a memorial highway connecting Washington, D.C. and Gettys- burg, Pennsylvania (1909:339). 5

The populist myth of the Gettysburg Address became more compelling as Progressivism took root. Lincoln, according to the best known account of the day (Andrews 1907), was aware that his speech would follow Edward Everett's two-hour oration. Everett, a Greek scholar, former editor of a leading intellectual journal and president of Harvard College, had served as Governor of Massachusetts, Ambassador to Great Britain, U.S. Repre- sentative, and U.S. Senator. Lincoln had read Everett's "silver sentences," knew he could not equal them, but had to try. So while on the train to Gettysburg "he put a hand, big, powerful, labor-knotted, into first one sag- ging pocket and then another, in search of a pencil, and drew out one broken across the end" and wrote his Address on the back of a scrap of paper (p. 5). This is an important part of the story: words written im- promptu on paper bags during shakey train rides are heartfelt words, words that summarize deep-seated sentiments. At Gettysburg, the story reaches its climax. Everett's noble bearing and intonation impress everyone, while Lincoln seems awkward and his speech simple in comparison; yet, it is Lin- coln's words, not Everett's, that will become immortal. The Gettysburg Ad- dress is thus fit into a binary mythic structure: Lincoln's words affirm the


power of democracy to raise the common man above the man of privilege, learning, and refinement.

Refracted by the resurgent nationalism of World War I, whose goals were expressed through progressivism's political rhetoric, the Address evolved into an '~mericanist" interpretation of democracy. My survey of immediate reactions to the Gettysburg Address finds much being said of its moving language and militant inspiration, but nothing of its reference to democratic government. (See also Barton 1930:113-123.) By 1918, however, the theme of democracy assumed central importance. Jtmius B. Re- mensyder was present at the Gettysburg dedication and recalled in 1918 how Lincoln had eased the burden of the people by revealing "the generic truths of democracy" (Outlook, Feb. 13, 1918:243-244). It seems therefore inevitable that in 1917-18 the last line of that revelation, concerning government of, for, and by the people, would become a war cry and appear frequently on war bond announcements. With the war over, Representative Wells Goodykoonts (Congressional Record, Feb 13, 1920:8785) called the Address "the most perfect definition ever given of the word democracy," while Albert Griffith found in it "the mighty reality, the fundamental es- sential," of "people 's government" (Congressional Record, Feb. 23, 1925:4448).

In a sense, the word "democracy" played the same part in the public vocabulary of the Progressive decades as the word "Union" played in the years leading up to the Civil War. That Union dropped out of the public vocabulary when the Civil War ended gives hint of why it was so pervasive before. During the antebellum decades, Union meant "disunion" or at best "not quite a union," "not quite a nation." During the first quarter of the twentieth century, democracy meant "freer and more equal, but not fully so." Nevertheless, the democracy that Remensnyder, Goodykoontz, and Griffith found in their Gettysburg Address was far more encompassing than the democracy Lincoln put in his. During Lincoln's lifetime, political par- ticipation was the privilege of white men--less than half the population-- and the fruit of democracy was not equality, but unrestrained economic competition and massive disparities of wealth and power. Progressive reforms did not eliminate these, but by the end of World War I American capitalism had entered its "late phase" (Habermas 1975) wherein the state defines and regulates individual rights in relation to corporate power. Black workers were excluded from this "New Freedom," as Woodrow Wilson called it, but its scope need not for that reason be underestimated. A "people's government" based on universal suffrage and progressive taxation may not have been what Lincoln had in mind in his reference to government "of the people, for the people, by the people;" but as this government

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emerged at the turn of the century it established its own legitimating past tense by making Lincoln its founder and symbol.

The "people' s government" of the Progressive Era was reflected in a new and informalized Gettysburg scene. In 1876, the one significant painting of the Gettysburg Address (by Albion Harris Bicknell) depicted a formal Lincoln standing before a renowned assemblage (Fig. 1). The people on Jean Leon Gerome Ferfis's (1925) platform are mostly anonymous, and Lincoln's chair (bearing his stovepipe hat) is placed beside theirs (Fig. 2). The scene's informality sustains its egalitarian cast. Behind Lincoln on the fight sit people who casually wipe their brow or look toward him, to the side, or at the floor. Behind Lincoln on the left sit a young couple and their dog. Behind them, Edward Everett, the other celebrity on the platform, arrives late. Framed by the American flag, Everett is the speaker for whom everyone waits. To show Lincoln dominating the scene physically but

Fig. 2. Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, The Gettysburg Address. c. 1925. Betsy Ryder, Brewster, New York.


waiting like everyone else is what Ferris wished to accomplish and what his viewers had learned to appreciate.

Reconciliation

The main component of the Progressive program--centralization of political power--necessitated the reconciliation of regional animosities. Southern communities built no monuments to Lincoln after he died, and they read about, rather than celebrated, the anniversaries of his birth. As the Civil War generation died out and the Lost Cause mentality diminished, however, Southerners learned to appreciate what Lincoln had done for the country. In 1904, unreconstructed George Edmonds reported, sadly, that

Even in the South the real Lincoln is lost sight of in the rush and bustle of our modern life, and many Southerners accept the opinion of Lincoln that is furnished them ready-made by writers who are either ignorant, or else who purposely falsify plain facts of history. To such extent has this proneness to accept fiction for fact gone, this proneness to take ready-made opinions from others, that even in Mississippi the proposition has been seriously made to place a portrait of Lincoln in the halls of the State Capitol (1904:1-2).

The Mississippi legislator who proposed the Lincoln portrait repre- sented the views of a minority. Mr. Edmonds, too, exaggerates the extent of Southern affection for Lincoln. Yet, the alarming tone of Edmonds's essay echoes the change in Southern attitudes toward Lincoln and toward the North. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that every South- ern city formally celebrated the 1909 centennial of Lincoln's birth and that every Southern Representative approved appropriations for the Lincoln Memorial. The mellowing of attitudes toward the South is reflected in turn in scores of silent movies (all produced in the North) depicting soldiers and civilians on both sides assisting one another during the Civil War (U.S. n.d.) and in scores of songs (all written in the North) celebrating the solidarity of descendants of the Union and Confederate cause. 6 Messages of reconciliation and amity were also found in Century magazine's reproduc- tion (1907:505-508) of Abraham Lincoln's and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens' little known but friendly wartime letters, in Atlantic's documenting Lincoln's belief that Southern states never really seceded and required no pardon (Sept., 1905:359-376), in the establishment of a Lin- coln-Lee (temperance) Legion, in President Theodore Roosevelt's (1907) letter praising Robert E. Lee on the centennial of his birth, and in his Lincoln Day speech praising Southerners for dealing so intelligently with their "Negro Problem" (Charleston News and Courier, Feb. 14, 1905:1). Amid thickening regional friendliness, it was easier to believe that Lincoln went to Gettysburg to mourn both Southern and Northern dead. Mary

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Shipman Andrews' story of The Perfect Tribute (1907) did as much as anything to sustain this belief. It reveals how the audience at Gettysburg "grew restless" when Everett "spoke of Americans as rebels, of a cause for which honest Americans were giving their lives as a crime," and how much better it felt when it heard Lincoln include both Southern and Northern boys in his eulogy. Soon after returning to Washington, the President visited a dying Southern prisoner who had read the speech and thought it wonderful: "Other men have spoken stirring words, for the North and for the South, but never before, I think, with the love of both breathing through them." The sensitive Southern lad at last shook Lincoln's hand; then, before re- leasing it, died (pp. 11, 44). The Perfect Tribute sold more copies when published in 1906 than any other Lincoln story. Schools stocked copies of it for years. Movie houses showed it to growing audiences.

TRANSITION

The Gettysburg Address, delivered in the context of war, acquired its symbolic importance at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, the Address's importance had grown. Other great battlefields have been forgotten, observed William E. Barton in 1930. "What makes Gettys- burg immortal is less the military victory than the speech of Lincoln" (p. 124). Barton, however, does not ask what made the speech itself immortal. Certain pictorial representations, viewed in light of Edward Shils's obser- vations on "mass society," whose groundwork was established during the 1930s, provide a basis for speculation. Shils conceived "the entry of the mass of the population into greater proximity to the [political] center of society" and the emergence of the center's active concern with the welfare of the masses as a pivotal phase in the development of the modern world (1975:92; 102-3). Artist Leon Bracker marked this milestone by picturing "proximity" literally (see cover illustration). He dresses elderly men and women of his own day (c. 1935) in Civil War era clothing and situates them directly in front of Lincoln as he speaks at Gettysburg. 7 Norman Rockwell, too, places Lincoln's listeners close enough to touch him (1942). Rockwell's is the vintage Lincoln--long-legged and bespectacled, his right hand grasp- ing the lapel of an open coat while reading from a small piece of paper reminiscent of the mythic scrap on which he is said to have written on the way to Gettysburg. New pictures of Lincoln at Gettysburg are figurations of the new relationship between the modern state (symbolized by Lincoln) and the masses (symbolized by Lincoln's audiences). As spatial proximity denies social distance, the Gettysburg Address is democratized.


Images of Lincoln's proximity to the common man endured throughout the Second World War while the original meanings of the Gettysburg Ad- dress-consolation and renewal of militancy--reemerged. 'A new birth of freedom" meant military victory (N.Y Times, March 19, 1943:22). That democratic government "shall not perish from the earth" now meant that it would prevail over fascism (Congressional Record, House , Nov. 1941:A819). The most frequently quoted line during World War II, as during the Civil War, was "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced" (See, for example, Congressional Record, House, Feb. 1, 1945:A409; Apr. 17, 1945:A1767). Accordingly, the New York Times editor marked the eightieth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address (Nov. 20, 1943): "In this tremendous war, whose every day adds to the number of our dead, Mr Lincoln's words of eighty years ago are as strong, inspiring, and immediate as if they were heard today for the first time."

Seven years later, Representative Emmanuel Heller of New York marked the invasion of South Korea by observing that "the cause for which the men who fell at Gettysburg gave the last full measure of their devotion has no t . . .won the final victory. " In the face of the communist menace, "anxious humanity still yearns for a new birth of freedom" (Congressional Record, Nov. 20, 1950:A7375). Commentator M. L. Duttus also located the Gettysburg Address in terms of its relationship to America's wars, specifi- cally "at the half-way point of the Republic's progress from the Declaration to the dedication of our own and other nations to stand against aggression in Korea" (N.Y Times Magazine, Nov. 19, 1950:31). From the early 1940s to the early 1950s the Gettysburg Address was understood in the context of war; not until the 1960s did it become the document with which the present generation is familiar. The shift in meaning was determined by dramatic changes in the structure of the society.

PROTESTS AND CENTENNIALS

The twentieth century began with a Progressive government expanding political rights and intervening to promote fair competition in the free market, then a New Deal government providing relief in the wake of the free market's collapse. After World War II, a new welfare state began regulating affairs previously subject to local authority. The scattering of the city's com- pact ethnic populations into sprawling suburbs, accelerating interstate mo- bility, the extension of national communication networks, including television--all these developments, according to Lipset (1981) and Bowles and Gantis (1986), broke down primordial attachments, prejudices, and

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communities. New movements arose: black rights, employment rights, Na- tive American rights, womens' rights, gay rights, prisoners' rights, animal rights. As ethnic enclaves disappeared, power distributions changed and social distinctions deteriorated. Men and women, ethnics and native-born, blacks and whites seemed more equal than ever before.

New Lincoln stories matched the new pluralism. A 1968 episode from Startrek, for example, begins with a mysterious image of Abraham Lincoln, arrayed in his stovepipe hat and seated in a chair of state, appearing on the spaceship's video monitors and requesting to come aboard. A personal hero of Captain Kirk, Lincoln's request is granted and he is welcomed with proper military ceremony. For the ship's crew, however, the question is whether Lincoln is real or an illusion. "Kindness, gentle wisdom, humor-- everything about him is so right," Kirk declares. "The President" is intro- duced to crew members, one of whom is a black woman. He greets the "charming Negress" cordially, comments on the status of blacks during his lifetime and apologizes to her for "the foolishness of my century. ''8

Coincidences of tragedy magnified Lincoln's role in the politics of in- clusion. 9 Abraham, Martin and John, a popular song, first appeared under a sheet music cover picturing Mount Rushmore. The noble rock leans de- cisively to the left. Abraham Lincoln remains, but John Kennedy has replaced George Washington while Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King appear in place of Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. "1~ As Lin- coln symbolized racial equality, his connection to the rights of labor became more secure. His "work is not yet done," explained New York governor Mario Cuomo, "for many Americans still suffer under a ruthless economic system, still feel racial, religious, ethnic, and gender discrimination." Few people were surprised to hear Cuomo say this. The Union's victory "established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished its work," explained Barbara Field in The Civil War (Ken Burns's [1990] television documentary). "If some citizens live in houses and others live in the street, the Civil War is still going on. It is still to be fought, and...it can still be lost" (cited in Hayward 1991:26). Two years later, a new television documentary on Lincoln's presidency, New Birth of Freedom narrated by Andrew Young, made the same point. Lincoln's war aims included neither a multi-racial nor poverty-free society, but in the late twentieth-century it was reasonable to assume they did. 11

THIRD READING

The new Lincoln of the 1960s was manifest in new readings of his Gettysburg Address. Backgrounded by the civil rights movement, Lincoln's


funeral eulogy became a plea for racial integration. 12 At the 1963 Gettys- burg Address Centennial, Secretary of State Dean Rusk revealed that Lin- coln meant emancipation to be a first step toward a racially integrated society: "[L]et us not forget that Lincoln's reaffirmation of the American commitment to the 'proposition that all men are created equal' had been preceded by the Emancipation Proclamation" (Gettysburg Times, Nov. 19, 1963:4). Poet Archibald MacLeish, also present at the Centennial, echoed Rusk's thought: "[T]here is only one cause to which we can take increased devotion"--the cause of race relations. "Lincoln would be disappointed at the slow pace of their improvement." William Scranton, Governor of Penn- sylvania, underscored Rusk's and MacLeish's comments by including the civil rights issue in his official Centennial address: "Today, our nation is still engaged in a test to determine if the United States, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure. Blood has been shed in the dispute over the equality of men even in 1963" (Gettysburg Times, Nov. 19, 1963:1, 6). The "dispute over the equality of men" refers to civil rights marches and demonstrations taking place throughout the South. According to E. Washington Rhodes, African American editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, these events proved that the "hopes of Abraham Lincoln for a united nation remain unrealized, unful- filled in American life" (New York Times, Nov. 20, 1963:1).

That these comments, expressed by political and intellectual leaders, reflected the way people in general thought about the Gettysburg Address is suggested by the era's children's literature. Children's history books so- cialize by transforming complex political decisions into simple declarations of moral will that transcend the situation in which they are made. In Get- tysburg: Tad Lincoln's Story, President Lincoln's son explains: "Pa believes that this country belongs to all of us--not just to the ones of us who's white. And when all those boys died at Gettysburg, that's what they was dying for--so all men could be free and equal....At least, that's what I take Pa to mean. Why else would he say a new birth of freedom" (Monjo 1976:43. See also Fritz 1993). This story was published in the bicentennial year, 1976, but it reflects sentiments that were commemorated nationally for the first time in the early 1960s.

The Lincoln of the 1960s, however, was much more than a frustrated civil fights prophet. If his Gettysburg Address were to become a warrant for racial integration without stirring regional animosity, then it had to become, in the midst of the 1961-1965 Civil War Centennial, a tribute to Southerners. During the first quarter of the twentieth-century, promoters of regional reconciliation had already read between the lines of the Get- tysburg Address and found friendly feelings extended toward the South. Fifty years later, in the intensity of the civil fights struggle, the rhetoric of

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reconciliation became more imperative. In his 1959 Lincoln Sesquicenten- nial Address to a joint session of Congress (reprinted in the Gettysburg Times, Nov. 19, 1963), Carl Sandburg explained:

His words at Gettysburg were sacred, yet strange with a color of the familiar: We can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

He could have said the brave Union men. Did he have a purpose in omitting the word Union? Was he keeping himself and his utterance clear of the passion that would not be good to look back on when the time came for peace and reconciliation? Did he mean to leave an implication that there were brave Union men and brave Confederate men, living and dead, who had struggled there? We do not know, of a certainty.

Was he thinking of the Kentucky father whose two sons died in battle, one in Union blue, the other in Confederate gray, the father inscribing on the stone over their double grave, "God knows which was right"?

If, in the heat of war, Northern parents suspected that Lincoln did not know which cause, Union or Confederate, was right and that he wished to honor the traitors who had killed their children, he would have never left Gettysburg alive. This is what Josephine Roedel, a minister's wife visiting from WytheviUe, Virginia, believed. South-central Pennsylvania is Un- ion territory, she wrote in her (1862-1864) diary: 'gdl who are not true union people had better go south. They have a heavy burden to bear" Bit- terness toward the South was so intense during the war that for many years after no Confederate soldier was allowed burial in the Gettysburg cemetery.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, however, Lincoln's assumed friendliness toward the South soothed new sources of distress. In the midst of segregationist dynamitings of black churches and schools, Drew Pearson reminded all his readers that Abraham Lincoln "was the only man in history who ever lead an army into battle loving his enemies more than he loved himself" (Milwaukee Journal, n.d.). At about the same time, high school student Murray Harris won Arizona's essay prize by explaining that the Gettysburg Address contained "words of tribute to the men of both sides who had died for what they believed" (Congressional Record, Senate, Sept. 1, 1960:A6944). Tim Mahoney told American Legion Magazine readers that Lincoln's speech contained no inflammatory terms. "Nor did he restrict to Union soldiers 'the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here'" (Readers Digest, 1963:149). Representative Carl Schwengel of Iowa asserted: "Lincoln could not bring himself to deliver his funeral oration in honor of one part of the country and in derogation of the other. For him, even in this high moment of intense crisis and antagonism, there were no soldiers of the Union and no soldiers of the Confederacy. There were only soldiers" (Gettysburg Times, Nov. 19, 1963:6). As Schwengel spoke, he may have been thinking of an old print showing Abraham Lincoln, hat in hand and ac-


Fig. 3. Anon. Lincoln at a Confederate Grave. Civil War Centennial Collec- tion. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

companied by a Union Soldier and delegation of local citizens paying tribute to a Southern soldier, whose grave is marked by a Confederate flag (Fig. 3).

To say that Lincoln bore no hard feelings toward the South was more than polite Centennial rhetoric. It was part of a reconciliatory tradition extending from the early twentieth-century. Thus, in 1980 The Perfect Trib- ute (1907), showing Lincoln visiting a dying Southern soldier, was recovered and dramatized on television. In 1988, Andrew Delbanco's "To Gettysburg Station" (New Republic, Nov. 20, 1989:38) summarized prevailing beliefs about Lincoln's view of the South by comparing it to Edward Everett's. Everett's "interminable" address, as Delbanco describes it, "blasted the enemy as alien, infernal, and bloodthirsty," while in the President's address "no enemy is ever mentioned." That Everett's audience was dissatisfied with his interminable remarks is doubtful, for it was made up of frightened and grieving people trying to make sense of a horrific war. Certainly Everett was not the only public man who "blasted the enemy as alien, infernal, and bloodthirsty." Throughout the North, congregations imagined the great dragon--the malevolent beast that symbolized the Confederacy's cause--as their ministers enumerated from the pulpit the Confederacy's atrocities. To late twentieth-century revisionists, however, there were no dragons, no atrocities. For them it was not strange to fight a war against enemies no worse than one's friends.

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A Gettysburg Address for the Nineties

By the end of the twentieth century, Lincoln's Address had become thoroughly entwined in the claims of racial justice and regional unity. Garry Wills's Pulitzer Prize-and Critics Circle Award-winning best seller, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), carried this latest conception of the Address to its logical conclusion. Wills's book is important to me not because of its argument, which I take to be mistaken, but because so many today find that argument so appealing.

Wills attributes more historical significance to Lincoln's funeral oration than any contemporary ever dreamed it had. The Gettysburg Address is as authoritative as the Declaration of Independence, Wills asserts, "and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Dec- laration. For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means...." Lincoln knew that the Declaration of Independence was designed to preserve a hierarchical society that condoned slavery, but in an "open-air slight of hand" he convinced his Gettysburg audience and his generation that it was designed to institute and preserve equality. "The crowd...walked off from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America" (pp. 38, 147).

Lincoln, according to Wills, did not intend for his trick Address (which justified emancipation without mentioning it) to be an insult to the South. Holding both sides equally to blame for the war, his speech rose "above the particular, the local, the divisive." It mentioned no names of men or battles "or even of sides." In the Gettysburg Address "the people were consecrated as a whole" (pp. 145, 186).

Proving that Lincoln's three-minute speech changed America is an in- surmountably difficult matter. Problems of proof, however, have no bearing on the Address' ideological appeal, or on the appeal of ideological expla- nations of what the Address means. Lincoln at Gettysburg, an eminently egalitarian commentary, conforms to the egalitarian mood of late twentieth-century culture. Reviewers reflected this mood as they conceded being "stunned," "fascinated," "dazzled" by Wills' "bold" and "provocative" yet "thrilling" work. Few mentioned shortcomings and those who did treated them casually, some going so far as to suggest they be forgiven in light of Lincoln's hypnotic eloquence) 3 The appeal of Lincoln at Gettysburg evi- dently transcended cold methodological issues. A touching speech that pays tribute to both combatants, North and South, as it affirms the equality of all men, black and white, makes sense in a postmodernizing society in which boundarylessness is idealized. Convincing so many that Lincoln made such a speech, Garry Wills has produced a symbol for his generation.


For Wills's readers, the Gettysburg Address is a verbal totem. Material totems, as Emile Durkheim ([1915] 1965) explained, are ordinary plants and animals to which preliterate societies ascribe extraordinary power, treat with ritual observance, reproduce in paintings and images, and venerate as embodiments of god. The significance of these objects resides not in their intrinsic qualities but in the ideals that society projects upon them. Some objects, however, convey changing ideals and sentiments more effectively than others. The Gettysburg Address excelled in this regard not because of its literary beauty ( at least not that alone), but its combination of brevity, memorizability, dramatic topic, and abstractness. During World War II it symbolized the will to fight to the finish. Afterwards, it symbolized the com- peting claims of regional harmony and racial justice--an unsurpassable testament to the virtues of ambiguity. To appreciate this most recent alignment, however, is to capture but one aspect of its transformation.

LINCOLN'S FALL

As the Gettysburg Address becomes an integrative manifesto, Lincoln, its author, is transformed. The individualist rail splitter is now the champion of the welfare state; the dedicated colonizer, now the proponent of racial equality; the sadist war incindiary, now the symbol of regional unity. Yet, the very nature of the beliefs projected onto Lincoln make him lifelike rather than godlike. Americans can still respect Lincoln's achievement, but cannot quite bring themselves to worship him for it. They can treat him as a celebrity, but not a god--nor even a great man in the image of god.

This restrained attitude toward Lincoln achieves pointed expression in Christopher Brown's 1989 painting, titled November 19, 1863 (Fig. 4). It is a large painting depicting a crowd of people who appear to be milling about randomly. The figures are slightly out of focus. Although some figures can be identified as soldiers in uniform, the scene can be positively identified only by the painting's title--which is the date of the Gettysburg Address. Brown's painting is based on a photograph of the scene, but it excludes Lincoln. Placing the reading of the Address outside the frame of his painting, Brown depicts "history from below." The grand narrative, "history from above," and Lincoln's role in it, is thus diminished.

Lincoln's diminished role in Brown's painting reflects his diminished renown in the collective memory. Historical renown can be indexed in many ways: article counts in newspapers and popular magazines, entries in the Congressional Record, nationwide opinion surveys, and shrine visitation. All these data show Lincoln's renown falling sharply as the lineaments of a "postmodern" culture emerged during the 1960s. The volume of New York

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Fig. 4. Christopher Brown, November 19, 1863. 1989. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum Purchase, The Anne Burnett and Charles Tandy Foundation Endowment Fund.

Times articles on Lincoln, for example, increases during the early Progres- sive Era, soars on the occasion of the 1909 centennial of Lincoln's birth, grows further until the early 1960s, then falls abruptly. The absolute mag- nitude of decline is considerable. During the 1940s and 1950s the Times published 422 and 518 articles about Lincoln. During the 1960s the volume fell to 262 articles, then to 104 and 67 articles during the 1970s and 1980s respectively. Readers Guide and Congressional Record counts from 1890 to 1990 show precisely the same pattern.

The Gallup Poll enables us to trace Lincoln's diminishing stature among different sectors of the population. In 1956, Lincoln was named one of the three greatest presidents by 52 percent of respondents with less than a high school education; in 1991, this number dropped to 19 percent. Among high school graduates the percentage nominating Lincoln in 1956 was 69 percent; in 1991, 35 percent. College educated respondents admire Lincoln the most and are doubtlessly the ones who made Wills book a best-seller. Yet, they too rated him a great president more often in 1956 (80 percent) than in 1991 (57 percent). The prestige of other presidents--


Washington, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower--exhibited different correlates but the same rate of decline (Schwartz 1996).

The prominence of the Gettysburg Address cannot be measured so directly. There are no survey data showing opinions about it, while the vast majority of references to it in the periodic literature are found in articles indexed under Lincoln. My inability to index the Address's renown inde- pendently of Lincoln's makes my conclusions tentative. Yet, my assumption that the Address remains prominent in the scripture of American civil religion is reasonable. Federal and Illinois state officials still treat the Ad- dress's original drafts as relics and struggle bitterly over proprietorship (N.Y. Times, Feb. 21, 1994:A10, 16; March 3, 1994:16, 20, Apr. 8, 1994:21). The Library of Congress and Illinois State Library are continually beset by the public's irreconcilable demands both to preserve original drafts of the Ad- dress and forever to display them (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 15, 1989:4; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 1990, 2C:4). Schoolchildren memorize and poli- ticians quote the Address at least as often as any other historical document. My argument, however, does not turn on the Gettysburg Address' prestige remaining unchanged while Lincoln's diminishes; it turns on a weaker claim: that Lincoln's prestige has fallen faster over the past 40 years than the power and prestige of his words. This discrepancy may be greatest among the least educated sectors of American society, where the decline of Lincoln's prestige has been steepest, but it is surely present to some extent among all sectors. Just as the prestige of the Declaration of Inde- pendence survived the fall of Thomas Jefferson's renown; the U.S. Consti- tution, the fallen renown of George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, so the Gettysburg Address has outlasted Lincoln's fall.

CONCLUSION

Since different interpretations of the Gettysburg Address claim authority by appealing to the same objective record, there is continuity in its se- quence of meanings. Across generations it has reflected the dignity of the common man, the vulnerability of his democracy, his willingness to die to preserve it. Constant renewal, however, is the Address's more notable fea- ture. The Gettysburg Address did not achieve its present status as a sacred text until the first decade of the twentieth century. Since then it has been interpreted through the lens of Progressive Era political reform and regional reconciliation, then post World War II civil rights reform and regional reconciliation. After the 1960s, a new dynamic appeared: the detaching of Lincoln's prestige from the meaning of his words.

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Roland Barthes (1977) has asserted that the "death of the author" is symptomatic of late twentieth-century egalitarian democracy. Barthes' death metaphor, however, is misleading. The author never "dies"; his presence remains behind his every word and utterance. It is the relationship to his audience that changes. The author's declarations, constitutions, and addresses become "writerly texts" interpreted by active readers, not pas- sively absorbed "readerly texts" (Barthes 1975 See also Jefferson 1982: 100- 104) Here, Freund (1987:142) observes, "the author proposes, or instructs and the reader disposes, or constructs." Here, the author's "capturing" of the reader is a manifestation of "tyranny"; the reader's "take" on the author, a manifestation of freedom (Fortin, 1989:28-29). As authority structures erode, readers are freer to interpret texts in their own way; but this does not mean that everyone actually interprets the Gettysburg Address as he or she sees fit. On the contrary, any social situation, Mannheim explained, induces and excludes "a large number of possible modes of thought, experience, feeling..."([1928] 1952:291). Consequently, there is as much agreement on the present meaning of the Address as there has been on previous readings. The Address rather is distinctive now because of its newfound autonomy. Before the egalitarian revolution of the 1960s, the sanctity of the Gettysburg Address and the renown of Abraham Lincoln were inseparable; afterward, the association of text and author remains, but its relevance (indexed by Lincoln paintings, citation counts, and opinion polls) diminishes.

This representational paradox--Lincoln, a symbol of equality, being diminished by the very ideal he exemplifies--was foreseen in Alexis de Toe- queville's theory of democracy and memory. Toqueville believed that democracy not only separates contemporaries; it also "makes every man forget his ancestors." And as people escape the authority of the past, they become resistant to authority in general. "It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever" (1945:4, 106). The present analysis, however, quali- fies Toqueville's claim. While "confidence in this or that man is destroyed [or at least mitigated]," his achievement remains sacred. Separation of author from text insulates the product against the declining prestige of its creator.

The contemporary condition is said to be a "postmodern" condition that intensifies long established egalitarian trends (Keane 1985-87). Post- modernism itself, however, is not part of an egalitarian tradition. Emerging in the context of late twentieth-century "post-industrialism" and "late capitalism," postmodernity possesses inclusive tendencies (expressed in the dissolving or "implosion" of social boundaries separating powerful and weak, white and black, North and South) that were unknown to the egalitarian


world Tocqueville described. It is perhaps the newness of their social condition that explains why so many people remain attracted to the Gettysburg Address. Americans have seized a eulogy delivered by Lincoln in 1863 to articulate disorienting changes arising from the structure of their own late twentieth-century society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was begun while I was a Fellow at the National Hu- manities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. I am grateful for financial support provided by Delta Delta Delta during my Center fellow- ship. The research was continued under Smithsonian Institution and Uni- versity of Georgia Humanities Center Fellowships. I also benefited from comments by Steven Dubin, Howard Schuman, Shaunna Scott, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici.

ENDNOTES

1. President Harding's statement deliberately contradicted Tuskegee president Dr. Robert Moton's claim to the contrary (New York Age, June 10, 1922:1).

2. The purpose of the text, no less than its internal structure, determines its susceptibility to multiple interpretations. Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, for example, was embel- lished by many abstractions, including the "mystic chords of memory," but on the whole its substance was concrete (Lincoln 1861). With civil war a possible consequence of mis- understanding, Lincoln deliberately composed his Inaugural Address in such a way as to minimize doubt about his administration's policy. The Gettysburg Address was, in contrast, justificatory and therefore deliberate in its ambiguity.

3. The death of the legislator, Zygmund Bauman (1987) believes, parallels the death of the author.

4. "It will be a source of great gratification to the many widows and orphans that have been made almost friendless by the great battle here to have you here personally, and it will kindle anew in the breasts of the comrades of these brave dead who are now in the tented field or nobly meeting the foe in the front a confidence that they who sleep in death on the battlefield are not forgotten by those highest in authority, and they will feel that should their fate be the same their remains will not be uncared for" (cited in New York Times, November 5, 1914:8).

5. Congress rejected McCleary's plan in favor of the Lincoln Memorial. 6. DeVincent Collection, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History,

Washington D.C. 7. Bracker must have been anticipating the 75th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg,

to be observed in 1938 by a camp reunion of its veterans. In the background of Bracker's drawing there appears a ghostly assemblage of soldiers preparing for the batt le-- the top- its of Lincoln's address.

8. Video supplied by Nachman Ben Yehuda, Department of Sociology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

9. This alliance was fictionally reinforced by Abe Lincoln- Freedom Fighter, a 1978 two-hour television drama that portrays Lincoln risking his career defending Henry, an alleged

420 Schwartz

runaway slave. In an act that would impress the most ardent twentieth-century civil rights advocate, Lincoln convinces the court to release the black man (whom everyone is eager to lynch) into his custody, promising to pay bail if he absconds�9 The judge relents and Lincoln takes Henry to live in his own cabin. For a white lawyer to share his home with a black client in antebellum rural Illinois, then successfully defend him by humiliating his white accuser, is historically improbable; but no plot better resonates with the mentality of the late twentieth-century. Lincoln may not have been able to create a racially integrated society, but no one could walk away from this story without believing that he would have if he could.

10. Lyrics make the connection explicit: "Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham. He freed a lotta people, but it seems the good die young." Bobby's name is not in the title, but "I thought I saw him walkin up over the hill with Abraham and Martin and John."

11. Steven Hayward asserted: "For the most part, people on the right have abandoned Lin- coln to the left" (1991:30). Hayward was referring to reactionary conservatives Wilmoore Kendall and M.E. Bradford, who believe that Lincoln's "radical" egalitarianism had de- railed America's political heritage�9 For more detail on Lincoln as an egalitarian symbol, see Kendall 1970; de Alvarez 1976; Goodhart 1964; Niebuhr 1964.

12. Two years after the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, historian John Hope Franklin became the first African American ever to recite Lincoln's Address at the annual Get- tysburg Address anniversary conference at Gettysburg College (New York Times, Novem- ber 20, 1957:1).

13. See, for example, Gabor S. Boritt, "Abe's Address for the Ages," Christian Science Moni- tor, August 31, 1992, p. 13; Gordon Wood, "Permanent Address," New Republic (July 13, 20, 1992): 40; George Will, "Lincoln Spurred a New Founding," Atlanta Journal, Au- gust 6, 1992, p. 16A; Herbert Mitgang, "Of the Gettysburg Address, and a Second Revo- lution," New York Times, July 1, 1992:21C. See also "Lincoln's Master Work Transformed America" (Detroit News, Dec. 9, 1992:15A); "Honest Abe's Sleight of Hand Redeemed a Nation" (Newsweek, June 15, 1992:54); "How We Were Created Equal" (N.Y. Times, June 7, 1992, Sec. 7, p. 1); "At Gettysburg Lincoln Rewrote History" (Detroit Free Press, June 8, 1992:5A); "How Lincoln's Gettysburg Address Changed the Way a Nation Saw Itself" (Detroit News, July 8, 1992:3D).

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