The Contributions of Bernhardt Wall and Edwin Markham to the Legacy of Abraham Lincoln Edited by ROBERT J. HAVLIK
EDITOR'S NOTE: Charles Hubbard is the Director of the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum at Lincoln Memorial University and the editor of Lincoln and his Contemporaries and Lincoln Reshapes the Presidency. Chloe Nichols is the Education Coordinator at the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, Lincoln Memorial University.
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot in the head by an assassin in Dallas, Texas. He was in the company of his wife, Jacqueline. Almost a century earlier, the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was shot in the head by an assassin while in the company of his wife at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.Almost immediately after President Kennedy's death, word went out that the funeral arrangements and the forms of national mourning should resemble, as much as possible, those made for Abraham Lincoln in 1865. This identification of the Kennedy family with the greatest of American heroes reflects their need to place their family member along side a righteous and virtuous historical figure and thereby rank him in the cadre of America's heroes.
While history does not repeat itself, and new generations find inadequacies in previous ones, people seek to identify with the past. A meaningful past enables people to make present experiences emotionally and morally comprehensible. A society sustains in a kind of containment a minimum of bad memories while it expands and builds a positive, collective memory largely tied to those past experiences or legends that it considers good. Wicked historical figures are recalled as examples of an ever-present evil threatening a virtuous society. So it was that the Kennedys in 1963 sought solace and nurturing within the nation's collective memory.
Abraham Lincoln, however individual, is also a component of the nation's collective memory. That memory defines the values and culture of a people and is an amalgamation of history, legend, myth, and shared experience.Long before the Kennedys evoked it, the martyred sixteen president had already lent his memory to various individuals and groups within the larger whole of American History. Various religious, ethnic, political, business and social groups have co-opted the Lincoln legacy to defone the values or ideology each considers important. Lincoln remains the single most important personal presence within the collective memory of a great nation, with every expectation of remaining a role model for future generations.
Walt Whitman defines the concept of collective memory when he says, "What we believe in lays latent forever through all the continents>" Collective memory is, in a wide view, a component of the formation of a national conscience, a deeply accepted consensus of identidy, history and aspiration. Morover, it can even become adversarial and resistant to perceived changes. Whether the icon is G.I. Joe, Nathan Hale, Simon Legree, Charlir Brown or Elvis Presley, or whether it is factually based or imaginative, we claim it inwardly and without, to show us who we agree that we are and who we are not, and who we want to become. The icon first flashes merely from a group consciousness and begins as some spark of interest or event. Then, inevitably, it grows moral as its meaning stabilizes. Some writers and artists understand this concept and the imperitive to creat or identify new ...To read the entire article be sure to: Subscribe Now!
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