Looking to Lincoln

AS PRESIDENT OBAMA took the oath of office a week ago, his hand rested upon the same Bible Abraham Lincoln had sworn his oath on 148 years earlier. Obama had arrived at the ceremony via a train that followed the same route Lincoln took to his own first inaugural.

If Obama, the first Illinois statesman to assume the nation's highest office since Lincoln, made comparisons to the 16th president in a particularly overt fashion, he differed from his predecessors only in degree. Most presidential candidates - perhaps every one since 1868 - have looked to the model of Lincoln for inspiration and guidance.

In 1956, historian David Donald wrote an article, "Getting Right With Lincoln," that examined the trend of politicians of every stripe invoking Lincoln's name to further their own causes and self-interest.

Earlier this month, the man who ran for the presidency and lost 16 years after that article appeared, George McGovern, was at the National Constitution Center promoting his new biography of Lincoln and offering his own interpretation.

But aspirants for high office are not the only ones who gaze Lincolnward for inspiration. This year, as the country prepares to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth and begins its tenure under a new president who seems finally to fulfill the promise of Lincoln's efforts, artists, historians and other interpreters of America's story are joining together to honor the man and the myth in myriad ways.

Two major efforts being undertaken locally, by the Walnut Street Theatre and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, view Lincoln from the perspectives of two centuries, the 19th and the 21st.

As Chris Kubick of the Oakland, Calif.-based multimedia artist duo Archive put it, "Lincoln is represented and owned by a vast array of different perspectives and different people. Lincoln is this idea that everyone wants to get a part of, from insurance companies to carmakers to civil rights activists to people that make little salt and pepper shakers."

Kubick and his Archive partner, Anne Walsh, are making one of several contributions to "21st-Century Abe," an interactive Web site the Rosenbach will launch on Feb. 12, Lincoln's 200th birthday.

The site will host 30 Lincoln-related documents from the Rosenbach collection, with commentary by historian Douglas Wilson and creative interpretations by artists from several different fields. An exhibition at the museum will follow in May.

"We're hoping that the documents and the artists' projects will be able to engage people in examining history for themselves in a new way, inspired by what the artists that we've commissioned have been able to do," said Kathy Haas, curatorial assistant at the Rosenbach, who had a lead role in developing the Web site.

Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Illinois' Knox College and the Rosenbach project's Lincoln scholar, helped select documents from its Lincoln holdings for the Web site. The pieces include a letter from the 1840s in which Lincoln explains his lack of knowledge about his family history; a humorous invitation to a female friend written in mock-courtly language; and a letter written by former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in response to reports of Lincoln's assassination.

The collection's highlight is the manuscript of Lincoln's 1864 Baltimore Address, given as the president prepared to run for re-election.

"Lincoln gave almost no public speeches as president," said Wilson. "So the Baltimore Address is very interesting for that reason, but it's also interesting for the things that he says. He talks about the meaning of liberty, using an Aesop-like fable to talk about the way in which both sides in the war claim to be fighting for liberty.

"But it's not enough to call your act a love of liberty; it depends on what the substance of that act is and how it compares with other claims for liberty. I've always admired that speech and thought it deserved to be better known."

Artists responding to the Rosenbach documents include Bryce Dessner, guitarist for indie-rock band the National, who has composed music incorporating 19th-century tunes and snippets of interviews with former slaves recorded in the 1930s.

Graphic artist Maira Kalman has created a series of panels, called "Looking for Lincoln," that reflect upon her own exploration, including visits to Springfield, Ill., and Washington, D.C.

Archive's piece, "One Lincoln After Another," follows on other work the artists have done using spirit mediums who claim to commune with the dead to assemble biographies of a subject.

"One of the hallmarks of this project is figures from history complicated by multiple interpretations," Kubick explained. "We usually assemble a composite portrait out of material from several spirit mediums that come together to create this hall of mirrors."

While he may not have claimed to communicate with Lincoln from beyond the grave, poet Walt Whitman did set out to use his gift for language to interpret Lincoln. Late in life Whitman, who had often crossed paths with the president, gave a series of lectures on Lincoln, the Civil War years, and assassin John Wilkes Booth. Actor/playwright Bill Van Horn has taken those lectures as the basis for "O Captain, My Captain: Whitman's Lincoln."

For the performance, the (also 200-year-old) Walnut's intimate Independence Studio on 3 has been transformed into a Camden parlor circa 1887, with the audience serving as a group of Whitman's friends invited to watch as he rehearses his lectures.

Van Horn intersperses lecture snippets with Whitman's own reminiscences and his righteous anger at Booth. As opposed to the Rosenbach's modern interpretations, or scholarly approaches, Van Horn views historical events as firsthand, deeply personal - and startlingly relevant to the present day.

"There's a scrap in Whitman's diary about the soldiers retreating from the first Bull Run defeat into Washington," he said. "So here people are, sitting on their porches or dining in cafes, and all of a sudden you see blackened, bloodstained, gun-smoked Union soldiers in shredded uniforms straggling into town in the nation's capital.

"Suddenly people were like thinking they had to pack up and leave right away. So of course you go right to 9/11 and how you felt that day."

Van Horn, who refers to himself as a "research geek," has pored through information on Whitman and Lincoln to arrive at the tale told through his play.

"It's put a lot of stuff that I thought I knew about Lincoln and preconceptions that I had about that period into perspective," he said. "It's also shown up Lincoln's blemishes as well as his amazing strengths, and enabled me to see Lincoln as a whole man rather than as an icon, as well as seeing him as the great president that he definitely was."

As McGovern stressed during his recent visit, this great president had a mere one year of formal education, during which he learned little more than the basics of reading and writing.

"But once he learned to read, he was a constant reader until the end of his days," McGovern said. "And he learned to write not just to communicate, but to write in ways that still inspire us to this day." *

"O Captain, My Captain: Whitman's Lincoln," Independence Studio on 3 at the Walnut Street Theatre, 825 Walnut St., through Feb. 8, $30, 215-574-3550 or 800-982-2787, walnutstreettheatre.org.

21st-Century Abe, interactive Web site, www.21stcenturyabe.org; exhibition, May 27-Aug. 30, Rosenbach Museum & Library, 2010 Delancey Place, 215-732-1600, www.rosenbach.org.