Richard Norton Smith
One of America’s most distinguished historians discusses our nation and our Presidents—in particular, Abraham Lincoln, whose Presidential library and museum he has just opened.
Richard Norton Smith
Historian Richard Norton Smith has worked for Republican politicians (Senators Edward Brooke and Robert Dole), written biographies of Republican leaders (Herbert Hoover, Thomas Dewey, and, forthcoming, Nelson Rockefeller), and directed the libraries of GOP Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan. So it is fitting that his latest job is connected to the granddaddy of all Republicans. He recently became director of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.
The museum opened in late April to much fanfare, and also some controversy: Quite unlike the usual staid Presidential reliquaries, the Lincoln museum features realistic life-size figures set within painstakingly re-created tableaux that take a visitor from Lincoln’s rude birthplace into the White House and on to Ford’s Theater. Critics have attacked this populist approach as the “Disney-fication” of Lincoln.
TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman interviewed Richard Norton Smith in his office
in Springfield.
TAE: If not for John Wilkes Booth, would all this exist?
SMITH: It would. The larger question is whether all this would exist were it not for Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan.
Eliminate Booth from the picture for a moment. You still have the Civil War. You still have Gettysburg. You still have emancipation. You still have the age-old and continuing conundrum of race, and Lincoln’s personal evolution on that subject, which in so many ways mirrors our own and makes him such a contemporary figure.
TAE: But he achieves apotheosis through assassination, right?
SMITH: Yes. But the figure he cuts in American history would not be smaller had he lived to grapple with the problems of Reconstruction. His political genius might have proved insufficient, or it might have changed history dramatically. Maybe he’d be a Franklin Roosevelt: someone who dealt with the twin crises of economic depression at home and world war.
Lincoln navigated the greatest crisis in American history, followed by a sequel pregnant with possibilities for good or ill. The effects extend right down to our own present times. The sheer dimension of what Lincoln grappled with would ensure him a place on Mount Rushmore and a library-museum of this size.
TAE: What do you find most appealing about Lincoln the man?
SMITH: His growth: moral and personal. I don’t want to sound hagiographic, but there’s a reason why Lincoln is a secular saint in America’s civic religion. Mysteries still attach to this man: that someone with so little formal education would go on to write the most enduring prose of any American. We like to believe that Presidents become noble once they take the oath of office, but their elevation is just as likely to expose weaknesses. In Lincoln’s case, he gloriously validates what we like to think about ourselves—that the condition of your birth doesn’t matter. That how far you go in life is entirely the product of your own striving.
Throw in the passion of Lincoln being shot on Good Friday and it rounds out the story in a way that’s almost too cinematic to be credible. The great drama of Lincoln’s Presidency is his dawning realization that a war over states’ rights, a war for “the union,” could only be justified and ultimately won as a war for human rights and high principle.
TAE: What do you find least appealing about Lincoln the man?
SMITH: There is legitimate criticism to be made of aspects of his Presidency. For instance, how he handled the military side of the war. And some would argue that he was slow to see the moral imperative that this was, in fact, a war about slavery.
TAE: Is it fair to call Lincoln the father of Big Government Republicanism?
SMITH: You can portray Lincoln credibly as a link in the chain that extends through Hamilton and includes his beau ideal of a statesman, Henry Clay, and stretches on through Big Business-Big Government Teddy Roosevelt. Yet Lincoln praised Jefferson. He said that the core of everything he believed politically was to be found in the Declaration of Independence.
He celebrated a system in which it was possible for the lowliest wage-earner to better himself. Lincoln, unlike Sandburg and other biographers, never romanticized his youth. It wasn’t the young flatboatman that Lincoln celebrated, but rather the system that allowed that flatboatman to escape the position in which he found himself, by climbing the rungs of America’s economic ladder. That system of social mobility was linked to our capitalist economy. Does that make him Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian or a hybrid?
And remember that Lincoln was a Whig a lot longer than he was a Republican. Part of the fascination of watching Lincoln is seeing this Whiggish figure whose instinct was to defer to the legislature become anything but deferential in the crucible of events. It’s very American: this ability to reinvent oneself, politically and otherwise. That’s part of what makes Lincoln so timeless and elusive.
TAE: The Lincoln Library and Museum is different from other Presidential libraries and museums, is it not?
SMITH: It’s not run by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). That has advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that the people who are putting this together went around and talked with other directors. They talked to users. They got a sense of what works and what doesn’t work. A decision was made to give the museum an importance at least equal to the library. The facilities run by the National Archives, on the other hand, understandably tend to direct resources overwhelmingly toward the processing of paper.
The Clinton Library is 150,000 square feet, which includes a museum of 18,000 square feet. Here, without stinting on the library (which is about 98,000 square feet), we’ve included a museum of 102,000 square feet. The museum is not an afterthought, but the heart and soul of the enterprise. We take Lincoln scholarship and make it accessible to a large audience, and try to tear down these artificial distinctions between the scholarly community and the public, to make public history something other than an oxymoron.
TAE: You are a historian without a Ph.D. Does that tilt you toward that position?
SMITH: We have got to reverse the trend of specialization and marginalization that has produced a generation that doesn’t know when the Civil War was fought or who surrendered to whom at Yorktown. At a time when this country is afflicted with rampant historical illiteracy, the last thing we should be doing is having accredited medieval academic historians tossing mud at best-selling historians. There’s snobbery at work: the notion that only the members of a guild are intellectually and otherwise equipped to explain the past.
There is no one way of presenting history. Research has to be rigorous, it has to go back to primary sources, it has to be as divorced of personal bias as any human can make it. But having done that, why not share the results with different kinds of audiences with different levels of sophistication?
Look at David McCullough, William Manchester, Edmund Morris, Ken Burns: there is clearly a large audience out there for history that is intellectually substantive and accessible. There are lots of people who may never write a book yet are anxious to read lots of them. There are lots of people who may never get a Ph.D. but who appreciate intellectual life as much as those who do.
If we were just creating a museum of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and we didn’t have scholars involved, and there wasn’t a world-class research center as part of the facility, then I would understand the criticism. But one thing that makes this project radical and different from other Presidential libraries is the dialogue that took place—which almost never occurs—between great scholars and storytellers, between Lincoln experts and professional exhibit designers. Authorities were brought in not as window-dressing but to provide substantive input into informing and educating our exhibit designers.
Edna Medford pointed out something very interesting. The initial impulse was to do what everyone else does: put up horrifying pictures of brutalized slaves. But she said that the greatest brutality of the system was not so much physical, it was the violence done upon the black family, the fact that families were routinely separated and sold off. So you will see in our museum a three-dimensional slave auction where exactly this is occurring. If you’re not as horrified today as Lincoln was in 1830, when he took a flatboat down to New Orleans and encountered this aspect of slavery himself for the first time, you’re missing something.
Our treatment of emancipation begins in the White House kitchen. We’ve done an authentic re-creation based upon the one existing photograph of 1859. You will hear the voices of black servants gossiping about what they heard upstairs. Then you walk into the White House Cabinet room, where the official debate is going on. You leave the Cabinet room and walk through the illusion gallery, and will be assaulted on both sides by the voices and faces of people—strident voices, hopeful voices. It is meant to be discomforting as you are plunged into a racist culture struggling in wartime to come to terms with its own crimes. At the end, you find Lincoln alone in the telegraph office preparing to sign the landmark Emancipation Proclamation which overnight redefines the war.
TAE: The finest poet of this region, Edgar Lee Masters, despised Lincoln as a dictator. Is the Masters point of view represented in the museum?
SMITH: People will be surprised and disturbed by the ferocity of the criticism of Lincoln, including the Masters thesis that this was a dictator running roughshod over the Constitution. There are two theaters here, and our 250-seat theater will show a 17-minute program called “Lincoln’s Eyes” which looks at Lincoln through the eyes of contemporaries—critics as well as admirers.
TAE: Springfield must see this as tourist manna from heaven.
SMITH: Every Presidential library is built on a wave of enthusiasm, and that distorts expectations. Boosters invariably overestimate the appeal of such a facility, and do not factor in the long-term decline of visitors that most Presidential libraries experience. In most new Presidential libraries the permanent exhibit tends to be a shotgun marriage between a stab at popular appeal and a lot of timelines and public policy papers. We’re lucky because we don’t have the Lincoln White House staff around to write the script.
TAE: The poet Vachel Lindsay wrote “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.” Seeing the job that urban renewal did on Springfield in the 1970s, does Lincoln’s ghost still walk Springfield?
SMITH: If he does, he probably finds himself visiting an awful lot of parking lots.
The Park Service has done a marvelous job trying to re-create the area around the Lincoln home. Part of what has happened here is what I call the Washington Monument syndrome: if you’re a D.C. resident, you lose sight of its appeal. If you’ve grown up here in Springfield, it’s easy to lose sight of why people are willing to come from all over the world to experience something that to you has just faded into the woodwork.
But a different kind of urban renewal is about to occur. The 1890 train station is going to be renovated. We’re going to turn this square into a park of vastly more imagination than was originally envisioned. I thought Mrs. Lincoln got a bum rap from historians so I pestered the designers into including a Mary Todd Lincoln Garden in that park.
TAE: You used to direct the very fine Herbert Hoover Museum and Library. Is Hoover the most unjustly reviled President?
SMITH: He is the most unjustly dismissed President. He is one of those rare figures—Taft, Madison, and John Quincy Adams also come to mind—whose Presidency is in some ways almost a footnote to an extraordinarily rich career in public service. Hoover fed a billion people in over 50 countries around the world. As Secretary of Commerce he was a revolutionary figure. Hoover was groping for a third way: a singular blend of personal idealism, religious faith, and quasi-religious commitment to free enterprise. He’s one of these unusual Presidents who became President because he had a social philosophy. Yet he is now the Flying Dutchman of American politics: movement conservatives abhor him as a corporatist who signed Smoot-Hawley and raised taxes in the middle of the Great Depression; to Democrats, he’s been an evil poster boy for 80 years.
TAE: Yet his defenders range from Hamiltonians like you to William Appleman Williams and the New Left.
SMITH: There’s a thread of logic to that. Hoover railed against the creation of a welfare state, not because he lacked compassion but because he knew enough about bureaucracy to believe that the best of intentions could produce the worst of results. Then you have the isolationist Hoover railing against the creation of the national security state in the ’40s and ’50s.
Hoover’s fascinating because he doesn’t fit. He is the most caricatured of American Presidents, yet the more you know about him the more you realize he doesn’t belong in any pigeonhole. Hoover is this odd combination of collective morality and libertarian restraint. Abe Lincoln may or may not walk at midnight, but Hoover relentlessly prowls the margins of American history.
TAE: How important is a sense of humor to a President?
SMITH: It’s essential. Harry Truman said you couldn’t do this job without a sense of humor. People who can laugh at themselves and the absurdities of this temporarily exalted status and the ambitions of the people around them have a way of putting it all in perspective. It should be a Constitutional requirement.
TAE: You were a ghostwriter and friend to Bob Dole. What sort of President would he have made?
SMITH: I’m going to sound evasive when I say I don’t know. Like Gerald Ford, there is a Midwestern decency, a lack of pomposity, an impatience with protocol and ego. Dole would have been a Congressional President. There wouldn’t have been a lot of state dinners but he would have spent much time on Capitol Hill jawboning his former colleagues. It would have been a non-ideological Presidency, and that would have caused problems in his own party. Dole’s philosophy is not much more complex than making things work—and for a majority of Americans, who are essentially pragmatists, that’s not a bad philosophy.
TAE: You write with great descriptiveness and care of the final days of your subjects.
SMITH: Death scenes are my forte! My favorite is Tom Dewey. Dwayne Andreas told me this story. Dewey was down at the Sea View, Andreas’s place in Florida, and he was heading to Washington to Tricia Nixon’s engagement party.
There transpires this amazingly appropriate scene. When Dewey, who lived a monumentally tidy life, is not down in the lobby of the Sea View at the precise moment he says he’s going to be, Andreas knows there’s something wrong. So he goes to the room, and what does he see? Lying on the bed, fully dressed in his three-piece suit, his bags packed, his hat on top of his luggage, is Tom Dewey, dead of a massive heart attack. Nothing’s messy, nothing’s out of place. He ended in control of everything—except history.
TAE: What’s the best Presidential gravesite?
SMITH: For poignancy, it’s hard to beat Herbert Hoover’s in West Branch, Iowa. There’s the Quaker simplicity of those two stones with their view of that little whitewashed cottage 450 yards away. He said nothing could be planted or built that would ever intrude on that view, because he wanted to communicate the message that in America, you could be born in a house like that, you could be orphaned, you could be poor, and you could go on to do great things.
For sheer inappropriate grandiosity, it’s tough to beat Warren Harding’s hollow marble drum. A friend offered to build Coolidge a similar marble mausoleum. You can imagine the reaction: It was dismissed out of hand. Coolidge lies on his Vermont hillside with six generations of family.
Coolidge once said that it was a source of safety to the country, and reassurance to him as President, to know that he was not a great man. That’s a pretty profound observation.
FDR’s library and gravesite speaks, because of the ancestral hold of that place. The early libraries were built in the places that shaped and defined these men. To go to Hyde Park; Independence, Missouri; or Hoover’s West Branch is to be introduced to these people in a way that no museum or book can manage. It’s to be immersed in the culture that shaped them.
That doesn’t happen any more. The libraries are now usually on college campuses for lots of reasons, including the cost, and the relationship between academic departments and libraries. But this also reflects our nomadic, rootless culture.
