Two Hundred and Twenty

Pretty big day today... Abe Lincoln would be 2oo, and my daughter turned twenty. Though she's not yet on the cover of any magazines, my gut tells me she will be some day. She's just that kind of girl. As my Grandma Newman was fond of saying, "Now I hain't braggin', ya hear, but..." and it was usually something about what people said about her cooking, which was mighty fine. In this case, I sort of am braggin' 'bout something mighty fine. Like many dads do, I s'pose, they see something special in their girl.

This past weekend Christina and I went together to the Father-Daughter Ball here in Duluth, an annual tradition of 13 years for some dads, but approximately eight for us, I suspect. In the beginning her dance step was pretty basic. But she's got rhythm and she's a quick study, so she held her own. This year she showed me all the moves I've never had. She knows how to move dem feet. And with her old man, we danced ourselves out. Gosh, it was fun.

As for Abe, something tells me he wasn't that much of a dancing man. That did not keep him from being a significant president, though he has had his share of detractors, hated by many in the South who considered John Wilkes Booth a hero.

Lincoln was born 200 years ago, on February 12, in a cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. On a family vacation to my own Kentucky roots my present family (as opposed to the one I grew up in) visited this rough-hewn Lincoln homestead. Though he spent most of his adult life in Illinois, working a series of odd jobs before becoming a lawyer and eventually a politician, he no doubt felt the same as I regarding his modest Kentucky birthplace. It is a remarkable thing that here in America one can still, through hard work and a bit of luck, rise up from literally nowhere to achieve much.

Last week I found an article in the February Smithsonian that does an excellent job of putting Lincoln into perspective. "Lincoln's Contested Legacy" begins by outlining this premise, that Lincoln has been a touchstone for many points of view, even for contradictory viewpoints and political rivals. It reminds me a little of the search for the historical Jesus, except with a lot more material to work with.

Writes Philip Kunhardt III, author of the piece, in its opening, From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln's influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln's legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers—all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln. He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a "progressive man" whose death was an "unspeakable calamity" for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he "the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism," as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?

For an interesting, though brief, interview with Philip Kunhardt III, who also co-authored the book Looking for Lincoln, check this out.