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Preserving Our Cultural Heritage
On a postcard-perfect day, a tourist family ambles around the
Old State Capitol Plaza in downtown Springfield. Mom and dad and
the two pre-teens have already posed for digital images in front
of the grand, eroded columns of the Old State Capitol Building.
They have just discovered that this old sandstone building was
erected through the efforts of Lincoln and “the Long Nine,”
a group of Springfield legislators who finessed the movement of
the state capital from it former site in Vandalia. Today, it shines
brilliantly in the warm October light. The whole family has also
sniffed around the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, a
few paces north on Sixth Street, and peered with obvious interest
at the adjoining Abraham Lincoln Museum, nearing completion and
scheduled to open in the spring of 2005.
Now the family members are focusing on the life-sized bronze
statuary group Springfield’s Lincoln by sculptor Larry Anderson
who symbolically evokes the Lincoln family on the critical day
of October 4, 1854. Always attentive to her husband’s appearance,
Mary is tenderly smoothing Abraham’s bronze lapel, while
their favorite son Willie stands dutifully at their side and Robert,
the eldest, scampers away--always the independent soul. Lincoln’s
first major speech tucked into his hatband, “Repeal of the
Missouri Compromise,” and his long journey to the White House
is about to begin. Encircling the group of bronzes is an inlaid
circle containing the opening lines of Lincoln’s “Farewell
Address” to the citizenry of Springfield, one of his most
poignant and heartfelt utterances: “To this place, and the
kindness of these people, I owe everything.”
Now the contemporary family is drawn to the wayside exhibits
that flank the statues, storyboards in aluminum erected by the
Looking for Lincoln Heritage Commission (LFL), with considerable
assistance from the Illinois Historical Preservation Agency (IHPA).
This first pair of exhibits highlights the key events of 1837
(the year Lincoln settled in Springfield) and 1854 (the year dramatized
by the statues). Each exhibit has two tracks of commentary, one
on Lincoln himself, and the other on Springfield history and culture
in general. These two exhibits are the first of thirty-three which
have actually been funded even though seventy-five are ultimately
planned. The visitor to each exhibit will feel a kind of historical
doubleness, simultaneously experiencing the present moment and
the resonant events of the past.
For each exhibit is located at the exact physical spot it commemorates,
including the site of Lincoln’s barber, William Florville;
the location of his carriage-maker, Obed Lewis; the handball alley
where Lincoln played ball; the site of George Hall’s haberdashery
shop where he bought his famous stovepipe hats; Samuel Ball’s
Bath Shop where he took his weekly baths; Dr. French’s Dentist
Office where the future president received dental care; and Brunswick’s
Billiard Hall where the usually disciplined lawyer could unwind
with his friends.
Every exhibit features a four-inch medallion or raised disk which
can yield a handsome rubbing, and the overall effect of the completed
exhibits will be educational. Each wayside exhibit will provide
factual information about Lincoln’s life and also about the
everyday culture of nineteenth-century Springfield. This family
of tourists--and the thousands who will follow—will learn
about the personal habits, hygiene, dress, and amusements of Americans
who lived a century and a half ago. This kind of user-friendly,
interactive historical instruction will build upon the exhibits
at the Abraham Lincoln Museum, which will feature state-of-the-art
technology, including holograms of President Lincoln, an exact
walk-through replica of the Lincoln Log Cabin, and historically
accurate period costumes.
The seventy-five Lincoln sites in Springfield (including the
Lincoln Home operated by the National Park Service as well as
the Lincoln Law offices and the Lincoln Tomb) will also be linked
to a larger heritage network of Lincoln sites throughout Central
Illinois, many of them administered by the Illinois Historic Preservation
Agency. These sites include the David Davis Mansion (Bloomington),
the Lincoln Log Cabin (Coles County), the Mount Pulaski Courthouse
(Logan County), the New Salem State Historic Site (Menard County),
and the Vandalia Statehouse (Vandalia). If one adds such culturally
significant structures as the Vachel Lindsay Home (also administered
by IHPA), the Dana-Thomas Frank Lloyd Wright Home, and the James
Millikin Home in Decatur (on the National Register of Historic
Places), it is no surprise that the Looking for Lincoln Coalition
is petitioning Congress to expand its current ten-county base
of operation to include at least forty-one additional counties,
making LFL eligible for federal funding.
Thus, the opening of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
and the ongoing construction of the Abraham Lincoln Museum have
become catalysts for much broader, grass-roots efforts at preservation.
Probably at no other time in its history has the State of Illinois,
county historical societies, and local museums been so self-consciously
active in resurrecting and showcasing the most important sites
and artifacts of Illinois heritage. Cynics might argue that cultural
preservation makes good business sense, since it often brings
in tourism dollars. And while that claim may be superficially
true, the roots of these initiatives go much, much deeper.
To understand this contagious interest in Illinois heritage,
not merely in central Illinois, but in places like Oak Park, Galena,
Carbondale, Bishop’s Hill (Knox County), and the Mormon-related
sites in Nauvoo, one must appreciate the quite revolution that
took place in the 1980’s and 1990’s as historical interpreters
and re-enactors virtually redefined cultural preservation by laying
greater emphasis on commemorative and participatory activities
of all sorts (battles, peace treaties, debates, and speeches)
and by involving ordinary people in re-creating these events,
through acting, interpreting, story-telling, and by imitating
the crafts traditions (sewing, tool-making, cooking, and the production
of furniture, musical instruments, and weaponry) appropriate for
each place and event. During these decades, historical meccas
like Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Williamsburg, Virginia boomed.
“Heritage” became the popular word to encapsulate this
phenomenon, a quintessentially American response to history and
culture, amounting to personal ownership, a way of laying claim
to the past—not merely collecting memorabilia but making
a kind of existential commitment to history and culture by re-living
the past.
Re-enactors at Gettsyburg, for example, would arrive with their
families, all dressed in period costumes. And for three days they
lived in tents and cooked food that duplicated the period grub
of July, 1863. The inherent danger, of course, was that these
historical interpreters might sometimes place too much emphasis
on the physical uniforms, swords, and battlegrounds and not enough
on the ethical and political controversies that engendered them
in the first place. So there still remained plenty of work for
the academic historians, who could provide the important contexts
and interpretations of battles, speeches, artifacts, and grave
sites. In the best venues, heritage and history reinforced one
another superbly. Many deep readers of Civil War history may well
have been inspired by mock battles witnessed at Chickamauga, Pea
Ridge, or Shiloh.
Heritage became part of the national media when filmmaker Ken
Burns, who worked tirelessly through the late 1980’s, produced
his 1990 twelve-part miniseries, The Civil War, a beguiling mixture
of documentary photographs, photomontage, sound-dubbing, voice-overs,
and quotations from actual letters of Civil War soldiers (read
by the likes of Garrison Keillor and Morgan Freeman), punctuated
by carefully edited commentaries from famous historians. Burns
performed similar feats of magic with his documentaries on baseball
and jazz, and all of these masterworks were aired on the Public
Broadcasting System (PBS).
In fact, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and
the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as institutions
like the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the National
Air and Space Museum, and the Library of Congress (LC) have all
played significant roles in our national dialogue about our past.
Americans today enjoy a much richer appreciation of their national
and local heritage because of the combined efforts of these taxpayer-supported
institutions.
Of course, Ken Burns and PBS were not the first to recognize
the powerful attraction of the past. Filmmakers have long recognized
the national obsession with nostalgia in all its forms. So they
typically employed old cars, furniture, swords, ships, houses,
and automobiles as historical shortcuts and visual cues for American
audiences that had to be shown, not merely told, the historical
era of the film they were watching. A little rock and roll or
big band jazz on the soundtrack provided an equivalent orientation
for the ear. The recent “biopic” Ray, about the life
of singer Ray Charles Robinson, established its historical authority
early on by evoking the cars and clothing of the rural south in
the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, and by duplicating
the infectious jive and blues that issued from the roadhouses
and honky-tonks. Nostalgia always appeals to Americans because
their culture changes too often and too fast for them to apprehend
it; nostalgia offers another opportunity to linger over and appreciate
the artifacts of the past. And as a nation of consumers, Americans
really do identify themselves with objects and brands, Hershey
candy bars, Campbell soup cans, Ford automobiles, and the blue
and butternut gray of Civil War uniforms.
The Smithsonian Institution recognized and encouraged this nostalgic
love of things, thereby becoming the most American of museums
by saving the juke boxes, arrowheads, kitchen gadgets, and cars
that made Americans American. The Smithsonian has been in the
business of cultural preservation of artifacts since the Civil
War era, while another Washington institution, the Library of
Congress, has struggled to preserve our written past, including
books, letters, pamphlets, catalogs, broadsides, proclamations,
treaties, and other archival documents, including photographs,
films, and recordings. Many of the books and papers housed in
that vast repository have become dangerously brittle, and it may
not be technologically feasible to save them all. But many can
still be digitized before they flake and crumble into dust. The
Library of Congress is now transferring its most fragile recorded
materials—ambient sounds and spoken words over a century
old—onto compact discs. If they don’t save these sounds,
children of the future may never know what Henry Ford’s Model-T
sounded like or recognize the chugging and puffing sounds of a
typical steam locomotive.
The Library of Congress has most recently inaugurated the National
Digital Infrastructure and Preservation Program, an initiative
designed to save web sites and other internet material, thereby
creating a kind of digital archive. The “point and click”
generation of today’s students routinely uses internet sites
to write term papers, just as professional researchers depend
on even more sophisticated sites for access to academic articles,
historical documents, and other archival material. Yet internet
sites often have a very short shelf and can disappear without
any warning, leaving their precious data in a kind of electronic
limbo. Avoiding that kind of frustrating loss is the precise intent
of the new infrastructure initiative at LC. But that is only one
of the potential problems with the exciting new information technologies.
For as media philosopher Marshall McLuhan warned his readers
two generations ago, the “medium is the message.” So
for a new generation raised on computers, cell phones, e-mail,
I-Pods, Palm Pilots, Blackberries, Game Boys, and Play Stations,
information and entertainment have become de facto digital experiences.
To a sixth-grader, for example, the older technology of printed
pages may seem like a hopelessly dull or nightmarishly slow way
to access information. The challenge for teachers, artists, interpreters,
curators, historians, and librarians is that pop-up ads, instant
messaging, and surfing the net tend to create a mind set that
is radically different from the mentality of traditional readers,
who may be more patient and detail-oriented. Traditional learners
may actually enjoy teasing out the subtle meanings and implications
of a text without having them spelled out in telegraphic style
within a colored box on an illuminated screen in what might be
called “Power Point Style.”
There is abundant evidence that electronic technology can safely
preserve printed texts and data; the problem is how to teach new
generations to “read” (literally and symbolically) those
earlier texts, like Shakespearean plays, Victorian novels, and
key political speeches, many of which (like those of Lincoln)
are already available online. The English language itself is a
highly sophisticated technology that, after all, precedes any
digital communication.
Educators, not merely classroom teachers but historical and cultural
interpreters of all stripes, including site interpreters, professional
historians preparing background material, archeologists, and literary
critics will probably be practicing some form of what is now called
“cultural criticism” as the technologies catch up with
the different expectations of a new generation of students and
tourists. Cultural criticism means that anything under study will
be seen in its broadest possible context, and nothing will be
studied in isolation from its cultural and social environment.
Many educators are already heading in that new direction. Cultural
criticism can be assisted by creative uses of available computer
software and by devising more and more interactive programs. Tenth-graders,
for example, could read a true, not a “dumbed-down”
copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, perhaps with interlinear or
parenthetical definitions of archaic language and easy links to
sites on Elizabethan culture and music (complete with lute music
and madrigals that could be easily downloaded, along with spoken
versions of the speeches). And for heritage enthusiasts, an on-site
digitized recording of an actor reading, for example, the First
or Second Inaugural Address or the Gettysburg Address is already
possible and probable. Digital texts of all kinds will surely
become more ubiquitous, and the more links, the more opportunities
to “point and click,” the better. Technology should
exist, finally, to make all culture more “user friendly.”
The written word, then, may be challenged but also ultimately
rescued by the same digital culture that is clearly becoming the
contemporary.
Even today, a visit to the Vachel Lindsay Home on Fifth Street
in Springfield is not complete without reading one his poems and
appreciating his original artwork in the physical setting where
he lived most of his life and died. In the 1920’s this Illinois
poet was the famous bard in the Western world, better known than
Robert Frost. Each year the Vachel Lindsay Association (VLA) helps
to commemorate and preserve his verbal artistry by inviting his
son, Nicholas Lindsay, and other members of the family to present
public programs and to conduct workshops in the schools. The VLA
also sells videotapes about the life of the poet and colored reproductions
of his distinctive artwork. This small-scale outreach echoes a
larger literary showcasing that occurs at the Illinois State Library
with its biennial Illinois Authors Book Fair, an event that celebrates
and honors the Illinois writers of poetry, history, crime fiction,
and children’s literature. And the Illinois Arts Council
(IAC) regularly offers enabling grants so that poets and writers
may visit schools and colleges to conduct workshops and read their
work.
So preserving and extending the state’s and the nation’s
cultural heritage are indisputable mandates, the results of popular
will and public policy. If anything, the trend seems to be growing
stronger as new museums open (Under the Prairie Archeological
Museum in Elkhart and the Hieronymus Mueller Museum in Decatur),
while older museums like the Illinois State Museum complete major
renovations using more digital technology. At the same time, the
State of Illinois is also fortunate to enjoy such world-class
museums as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural
History, and the Museum of Science and Industry. Indeed, the overall
efforts at cultural preservation in the State of Illinois might
even be taken as a model for other states to emulate.
Recently, the Macon County Historical Society in Decatur unveiled
a new Abraham Lincoln statue by acclaimed sculptor John McClary,
who will also be executing the Lincoln statue in the entrance
to the new Abraham Lincoln Museum. McClary’s bronze in Decatur
depicts a life-sized Lincoln in ordinary clothes, studying a map
of Illinois in 1837, imagining its future growth and seemingly
limitless possibilities. Seen in this context, the use of new
information technology by agencies like IHPA, especially in the
new Abraham Lincoln Museum, and the many grass-roots heritage
activities occurring throughout the state may be precisely the
sort of thing that old Abe anticipated.
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