We tried to educate him. We heard that an editor from the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard had attended the Lincoln conference we reported on in spring 2003 (Vol. 23, No.2). All of the conference speakers were contributors to Southern Partisan, so we were curious what the neocon reaction would be. Sadly, and expectedly, we never saw one.

Until now.

The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bruce Cole, sat down with Andrew Ferguson and interviewed him about his latest book, Land of Lincoln. What a farce. The book is a mystic journey through the footsteps of Lincoln and his “ancestors” in America―as if even the Mormons claimed to have answered the question of Lincoln’s genealogy.

Take your children on a journey through the Illinois Department of Tourism’s Lincoln Heritage Trail and learn all about “honoring the places he’d been, the places he’d touched,” said Ferguson. Find the Lincoln Cabin, where Lincoln was born. Walk the five or six blocks from his home in Springfield to his law office. “You can trace the path.” And from his law office, “you can look out the window … onto the old State Capitol, which is exactly the view he would’ve had―it can be a haunting place.”

You get the drift. But we just wonder why Ferguson didn’t include the Lincoln Marriage Temple, which is an official state park in Kentucky. The log cabin in which he married Mary Todd now has a church built around it, complete with steeple and stained-glass windows. A holy place, indeed.

Ferguson reminisces: “[I]f I had my faith in Lincoln shaken … I’d take down a volume from his collected works. And I’d just start reading. The power of his words, their clarity, the emphatic moral content of what he wrote was cleansing. It was like a bath.”

He admits that, in fact, it was him, a senior editor from The Weekly Standard, who attended the Partisan contributor Lincoln conference in 2003. “I was expecting a bunch of crackers and hillbillies,” he said. Pardon us, but would you please pass the caviar and Grey Poupon? They sure do mollify the palate when the nearness of mere plebians becomes distressing.

“But they were actually, you know, just regular ole American guys. They could’ve been airlifted off any suburban golf course in America and transplanted to this hotel in downtown Richmond. They were wearing Izod shirts, the khakis, the brown loafers, you know, the native dress of my people,” said Ferguson. How long, not long, Mr. Ferguson, our God is marching on for thy people. Did they also have the hair, the arms and the legs, you know, the hands and the feet, too. What a surprise. Maybe they’re also marvelous croquet players?

But in all seriousness, we happen to know that even though this writer may be a golfer, none of the speakers were, with the exception of Tom DiLorenzo. Most of them would be proud for Ferguson to mistake them for crackers and hillbillies. But does anybody actually use those terms anymore? That is, outside racially exclusive Cape Cod country clubs?

Ferguson admits that our contributors “knew a hell of a lot more about Lincoln than I did.” But what settles the question is that he refers to them twice as “haters”. Case closed. He considers himself, of course, a Lincoln expert, because he grew up with pictures of Lincoln on the walls of his parents’ house.

So, on went Ferguson to a conference of the now known-to-be fraudulent Historical Society, which praised Lincoln profusely. He says “they were terrible” (italics in the original). They were ambiguous and filled with typical bloated and meaningless academic jargon.

To remedy the situation, Ferguson has not acknowledged Lincoln criticism. Instead, he’s written another flattering book about Lincoln, adding to the heaps for the burnings after the revolution. We must restore the icon, he says―the proposition of the Union, dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal. “Without [the Lincoln] icon, without the personification of this principle … we risk losing the principle.”

Thank heavens for the NEH for doing this interview. Anybody have a barf bag?

You can read the full interview here [http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-11/Interview.html] (the Lincoln stuff is in part 2).

TIM MANNING JR. is
Email this author | All posts by TIM MANNING JR.