A survey taken in Great Britain may lend credence to the charge that learning history at the movies is not “a good thing.” The 2011 poll revealed that 20 percent of those surveyed believe Sherlock Holmes was a historical figure, while a substantial percentage is convinced that Che Guevara, Florence Nightingale and Jesse James were fictional (Daily Mail, 2011). If it is true that the film and entertainment industry has become so powerful that it has a measurably misleading effect on historical knowledge, then learning history at the movies would, if anything, appear to be detrimental. Many filmmakers have skillfully blended art and history in such a way that a dramatic representation does not obliterate historical accuracy. In the case of Young Mr. Lincoln, director John Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti assumed their subject was so familiar to audiences that a loose presentation of the facts was considered acceptable in the interest of emphasizing the human, urbane, pre-iconic Abraham Lincoln. This goal the film achieves admirably, and entertainingly. But it cannot be considered history.
Ford and Trotti were concerned with those aspects of Lincoln’s character that would one day lead him to greatness. Many of the events depicted in the film, such as the murder trial of
the two young men whom Lincoln saved from being lynched, are fictional and intended to portray Lincoln as an empathetic young man with remarkable communication and leadership abilities. Though not historical it does contribute to an endearing character study of the man who would one day emancipate the slaves and preserve the union through sheer determination and force of will. If one is concerned with history as the accurate and objective presentation of fact, then Young Mr. Lincoln does little to support the idea that history can be learned “at the movies.” In truth, only the documentary form can truly be said to portray history with real accuracy (O’Connor, 1988).
On the other hand, it may well be argued that Young Mr. Lincoln does lend considerable credence to the assertion that film can add “color” to a historical figure or subject. Indeed, Ford’s film does a remarkable job of rounding out Lincoln’s personality in portraying a comparatively obscure period of his life and career. The film’s presentation of a young, unsophisticated country lawyer is affecting, but many of the scenes and situations stretch the bounds of credibility but succeed in creating a memorable piece of Americana. In one notable scene, a barefoot Lincoln is playing a mouth harp while his legs dangle out the window of his law office, a colorful take on frontier life but one that bears little resemblance to the highly ambitious young lawyer who sought to minimize his rustic past and make his mark both socially and professionally (Ford, 1939).
Historians have made numerous charges that the film is “laden with undocumented images, such as those of the Independence Day celebrations, and that the filmmakers’ Lincoln is a symbol of the American spirit” (Smyth, p. 186). Nevertheless, Young Mr. Lincoln is
no exception when it comes to life imitating art. Critics and casual observers alike have criticized the courtroom scene as a mawkish slice of frontier life that relies on stereotypes from the period, right down to the corn-cob-pipe-smoking judge. And yet one historical eyewitness, a New York lawyer visiting in Springfield during the 1830s, reminds us that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. “To us, just from the city of New York with the sleek lawyers and the prim dignified judges, with audiences to correspond, there was a contrast so great, that it was almost impossible to repress a burst of laughter. Upon the bench was seated the judgein his mouth a veritable corn-cob pipe; his hair standing nine ways for Sunday” (Thomas and Burlingame, pp. 54-55). One may laugh at John Ford’s idea of a circa-1830s frontier courthouse, but even a film that relies heavily on poetic license can open a window on the past.
As such, Young Mr. Lincoln makes no pretence of historical authenticity. In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J.E. Smyth notes that Young Mr. Lincoln features no “serious exhortations to the camera, it does not use document cutaways, photographic allusions, or biographical sources to bolster its reputation as a historical film and to justify its script” (p. 188). Smyth goes on to contend that it is assumed the viewer “really knows all about Lincoln” and that this ingrained knowledge will provide the viewer with both sufficient historical context and background details. While this may be true (in varying degrees) based on the individual observer’s personal knowledge of the subject, it refutes Young Mr. Lincoln as a source of credible historical knowledge because its thematic material has been intentionally fictionalized to elicit pathos, which was characteristic of many Depression-era American films.
One must bear in mind the context in which a film is offered when considering how it succeeds and how it fails. As has been noted, John Ford and Lamar Trotti intended that Young Mr. Lincoln should be a paean to Lincoln’s early life and the ways in which his struggles to succeed as a lawyer and to make his mark on the world helped form his persona. In this, Young Mr. Lincoln succeeds notably. Yet the film was no more concerned with the seminal issues of mid-19th-century American society, such as slavery, than Ford’s The Quiet Man was concerned with the social inequities of Irish society under British rule. The historical Lincoln knew ex-slaves during his years in Illinois and remained friends with many of them, even after his career took him to Washington. The Abraham Lincoln who tells prosecutor John Felder that he “may not know much of law Mr. Felder, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong. And I know what you’re asking is wrong” (Ford, 1939).
Slavery was an important issue in Lincoln’s life from his childhood in Kentucky, where his family belonged to a church headed by a preacher who openly denounced the institution of slavery. “Tom and Nancy Lincolnwere just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man,” a family friend was quoted as saying (Tarbell and Davis, p. 74). As such, young Abraham Lincoln was constantly exposed to the abolitionist position early in life, a position that came to define his political career but which the film passes over. If it was indeed Ford and Trotti‘s intention to paint a picture of the important moral influences on Lincoln’s development, the anti-slavery cause was one they clearly failed to identify. In this respect, Young Mr. Lincoln clearly fails as a medium for the dissemination of representative history and as a film that sufficiently explored Lincoln’s moral make-up.
Filmmakers often change facts, in effect “altering” history, in the interest of producing a dramatically compelling and emotionally engaging story. Ford and Trotti place their Abraham Lincoln in the role of defense attorney in a murder case, which is certainly more compelling than the land acquisition, property rights and right-of-way cases that the historical Lincoln typically argued during his days in Springfield. Put simply, a murder case produces a better story. And it is to the goal of producing a good story that a filmmaker sacrifices facts and historical accuracy. Consequently, movies follow a linear, black-and-white story line in the interest of simplicity, but in doing so they neglect subtleties and nuances of history that are also important to the development of their subject. Thus, the audience is presented with a homogenized, iconic version that distorts the truth in simplifying the story.
Based on this example, it must be said that movies such as Young Mr. Lincoln are unable to provide a sufficiently comprehensive view of the motivations and experiences that form an individual’s persona and shape the actions that make him historically significant. The primary motivation for making movies is to entertain, in spite of the attention to detail that goes into producing a successful film. Such detail must, ultimately, be subjugated to the production of an interesting story, and it is this reality that makes film an inappropriate genre from which to learn history, as is the fact that movies based on historical subjects affect the general public more profoundly than do academic analyses (“The Mission and Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of History,” 1995). There truly is no adequate substitute for books and other substantive sources of historical information.
Works Cited
“The Mission and Historical Missions: Film and the Writing of History.” The Americas,
Academy of American Franciscan History, 51(3), January 1995.
O’Connor, John E. “History in Images/Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film
and Television Study for an Understanding of the Past.” The American Historical Review, 1998.
“One in Five Britons Think Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and Even Blackadder Were Genuine
Historical Figures.” The Daily Mail Reporter. 5 April 2011.
Smyth, J.E. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane.
Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Tarbell, Ida Minerva and Davis, John McCan. The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln: Containing
Many Unpublished Documents and Unpublished Reminiscences of Lincoln’s Early Life. London: S.S. McClure, 1896.
Thomas, Benjamin P. and Burlingame, Michael. Abraham Lincoln: A Biography. Carbondale,
IL: SIU Press, 2008.
Young Mr. Lincoln. Dir. John Ford. 20th Century Fox, 1939. Film.
