Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory

Abstract

You mig ht say that if Abraham Lincoln had not existed, historians of memory would have invented him. Fortunately, according to Barry Schwartz, Lincoln did exist, and while generations of Americans have repeatedly remade him in their own image, this is less because Lincoln's reputation is an endlessly pliable social construction than because the essence of the man has made him available for many legitimate uses. In this, the first of two planned volumes, Schwartz traces some of these uses from the assassination to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. Schwartz, a sociologist who has written a number of works about the commemoration of historical figures, has an avowedly revisionist agenda. In the theoretically elaborate introduction of the book, he challenges what he calls the dominant “politics of memory school”—typified by John Bodnar's Remaking America (1992)— because of what Schwartz considers an excessive emphasis on the way conservative elites manipulate history as a means of social control. He also calls for a fuller approach toward understanding the dynamics of memory; in contrast to Merrill Pet erson's Lincoln in American Memory (1994), which focuses on the “what” of Lincoln's reputation, Schwartz takes a more sociological approach, emphasizing the “how” and “why.”