Honest Abe, flesh and blood
SPRINGFIELD, ILL. --To hear its backers talk, the high-tech Abraham Lincoln museum opening here this spring is designed to save the 16th president from a fate worse than death: being boring. "Washington was embalmed while still alive and still hasn't recovered," says Richard Norton Smith, director of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Which is why no whiz or bang has been spared: Smoke and mirrors rouse a holographic ghost of the martyred president while nine life-size replicas show him reclining by a glowing fireside or relaxing while his sons run riot. Then there are the cannons, blasting smoke from a three-dimensional film into a theater where the seats shake during battle scenes.
It's not too shocking that such a flashy approach has its critics. More surprising, perhaps, is that Springfield has never had a major museum honoring its most famous citizen. For decades, the town depended on Lincoln's understated home and law office to draw tourists and a basement library to serve scholars and preserve artifacts. "We were running out of space," says Susan Mogerman, former director of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which has been building a Lincoln collection for over a century.
History. Since FDR persuaded Congress in 1939 to fund a library for his personal papers, presidents have overseen the construction of their own shrines. Still, it wasn't until the 1990s that a Lincoln library began, slowly, to come into being. The state of Illinois put up most of the $150 million, with Springfield kicking in some and Congress promising about $50 million over time. Political fights raged early and often: A Chicago columnist crusaded against a governor dumping cronies into museum management, and a nearby college lost state funding to run its own Lincoln center.
But without a former president fretting about his place in history, the museum was largely free to do as it pleased. A group of Lincoln scholars helped set the themes, but the design of the exhibits was farmed out to a Hollywood company with experience in theme parks and interactive museums. BRC Imagination Arts drew up a journey through Lincoln's life, opening with a replica of the president's first home--yes, a tiny log cabin--on one side and the facade of the White House on the other. Life-size tableaux show the young attorney reading a newspaper in his office or courting Mary Todd. In one eerie scene, the Lincolns enjoy a laugh at Ford's Theater as John Wilkes Booth slips in behind them.
All this schtick raises concern among some historians; one outspoken scholar says the "Disney" approach is sure to rob the story of authenticity. "People then question if Lincoln really did that or said that," says John Y. Simon, a Lincoln expert at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. "They've done childish things in trying to make it a museum for children."
The museum is not without historic artifacts: There is a copy of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's own hand, a print of the Emancipation Proclamation, the briefcase Lincoln used as president, and a jewelry case owned by Mary. But BRC wants visitors to do more than just shuffle past fading parchment. "We want to engage them, sweep them up in the subject," says CEO Bob Rogers.
And a bit of dissent seems to sit fine with museum organizers, who say the exhibits stress that Lincoln was hardly beloved in his time. Marble memorials are cold and pale, while Lincoln's days were rich in color and radical change, says director Smith: "The question is how to bring it back to life, to flesh and blood." -David LaGesse
This story appears in the February 21, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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