Lincoln

For you Doris Kearns Goodwin fans... just in time for the 150th Anniversary, a new Spielberg film based on Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Lincoln.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_%282012_film%29

Should be a good one!

It should have been based on Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, a real historian with a message. Spielberg's Lincoln will offer the Disney version of American history, including the token black role and probably a slave owner with a good heart. The movie trailer already papers over reconstruction and Jim Crow. What is an amendment worth if it is not protected?

This movie could have been perfect to hammer home the message what happens when one major party is hellbent on destruction and making people's lives worse for the profit of a tiny elite. Instead, it will be a patriotic fairy tale to warm the hearts even of those that enact voting suppression laws.

Still, a must see in November/January.

Fortunately, the Spielberg film was quite interesting, and since I read the Goodwin book, it seemed a pretty accurate story as well, at least in spirit, if not the tiniest details.

A rather low hurdle to jump over.

The main fault of the movie is that it glorifies a non-decisive moment. Slavery was already dead and like Humpty Dumpty could not be put together again. The formal legal acknowledgment of this might not have been easy but was all but guaranteed in the end (a similar out come is expected with gay marriage. When the US congress finally will grant legality to a human right, it will be one of the last to do so among Western nations.). The real struggle to end slavery happened much earlier as told in (not an easy read but recommended) Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

My last book of 2014 was Lincoln's Men: the President and His Private Secretaries by Daniel Mark Epstein. I thought it was an interesting look inside the Lincoln White House as described in the letters and diaries of Lincoln's three private secretaries, two of whom in particular were quite brilliant in their own rights, or at least as described by Epstein. Anyway, I found the book to be well written and informative.

On the topic of Lincoln and slavery,mmy own high school U. S. History teacher was of the EPDFASS* school. In later decades this developed into a shrugging off of Lincoln
as supposedly just another bigoted Redneck* politician, so that my younger son came out of high school, completely
believing this picture of Lincoln, which was based on half-truths about his changing attitude, derived from disclaimers that he made trying to refute the fiery rhetoric of Stephen Douglas in the famous 1958 debates.

*Since Lincoln was born in Kentucky of poor White Virginian parents, the
"Bigoted Redneck" school
had that much historical fact, and not much else, going for them.

*"The Emancipation Proclamation Didnʻt Free
a Single Slave"

#6> One of the most interesting aspects of Lincoln's Men (see above) is that it is full of descriptions of Lincoln, his personality and his beliefs, provided by people who worked closely with him every day.