Since it is I Heart Presidents' Weekend, I revisited the legacy of my favorite President, Abraham Lincoln. Part of this admiration can be attributed to the biographical fact that I grew up in East Central Illinois where everything is named Lincoln – Lincoln School, Lincoln Avenue, and Lincoln Lanes Bowling Alley. Not that I am willing to browse through one of 15,000 books written about him, but I did read with interest Drew Gilpin Faust's review of Richard Brookhiser's A Founder's Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, which looks at Lincoln's life and philosophies as a continuation of the ideas set forth in the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution.
By coincidence, I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004), with its unusual premise for a novel, which also has Presidential elements. Roth mixes his Jewish boyhood of growing up in Newark, New Jersey, with a “what if” the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, and friend of Adolph Hitler, had by some strange set of circumstances been elected President of the United States in 1940 instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In Roth's alternative history, he details how America would have stayed out of World War II, coupled with the tense account of a solid Jewish family such as his (it reads like an autobiography – like many of Roth's books, I am told ) would have disintegrated into domestic chaos. In one scene early in the book, after Lindbergh had been elected, Roth's father takes the family on a trip to Washington D.C. Here is the description of the Lincoln Memorial:
This time, while he parked, (our tour guide) Mr. Taylor warned us that the Lincoln Memorial was like no other edifice anywhere in the world and that we should prepare ourselves to be overwhelmed. Then he accompanied us from the parking area to the great pillared building with the wide marble stairs that led us up past the columns to the hall's interior and the raised statue of Lincoln in his capacious throne of thrones, the sculpted face looking to me like the most hallowed possible amalgamation—the face of God and the face of America all in one.
“Gravely my father said, “And they shot him, the dirty dogs.”
To complete my I Heart President's Day, I pulled out my copy of Long Life Cool White: Photographs & Essays (2008) by Moyra Davey. In addition to her thoughtful writing, Davey is even more well known as a photographer and thanks to my older daughter Cynthia I had the good fortune to see her exhibit 100 Copperheads, where she enlarged photographs of 100 Lincoln pennies that she found in various conditions. The photographs are then mounted as a grid on the wall. An example shown here on the left (Copperhead #6), comes from the Murray Guy Gallery in New York. Davey also likes to take stills of stacks of old books and vinyl records (coated in dust), which looks like they came from my home office.
