Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy

Maybe “Lincoln” is a film about – as the title suggest – President Lincoln, not about abolition?
Just as “Schindler’s List” was – again as the title suggests – a film about Oskar Schindler, not about the Holocaust (which would be a bit too much for one film).

Yes, the comment from Kushner is an unpleasant surprise, given his gift for empathy with people who don’t ever enter into history as individuals with a name. His (Angels in America, is, in my opinion, as much a triumph in this respect as anything Studs Terkel ever published.)

The subversion of American collective memory by southern irredentism seems to have been much more complete than I realized. Growing up in the South, I was used to it, but I never expected it would be found as far north as Kushner.

I rather agree with Kushner: part of the outcome of the Civil War and Reconstruction was to produce a society of three castes with mutual hatred for one another: White Americans, Southerners, and Negroes. It was about the worst way one could have proceeded to get rid of slavery and reincorporate the South, short of killing all the Negro slaves (or all the Southerners). Kushner’s remarks, as quoted above, have nothing to do with Dunning and company’s romantic claptrap. Rehabilitating the Southerners and ex-slaves would have been very expensive and tedious; much more fun to exploit them in their weakness. The Klan and so forth were the natural result of wrecking the South and then leaving its people mostly to their own devices as long as they formed no political threat to the national ruling class of the day.

“But his presidency, as it is depicted by Spielberg/Kushner, actually comports more with how the bloggers over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, and the poli sci literature more generally, understand the presidency: as a radically constrained institution, which is often buffeted by forces it can’t control—in Congress, and elsewhere.”

If you’re focusing on the circumstances around the passage of this one individual piece of legislation, possibly. But there’s a fair argument to be made that for a time it was Lincoln holding a shaky enterprise together more or less by force of will (as depicted in Vidal’s novel, for example). “Constraint” is the last word most would use for Lincoln’s exploitation of his presidential powers, although of course he could have done far worse.

Corey Robin@7:
You wrote”What is so odd about this film—and something I would not have anticipated from Masur’s op-ed—is that it really is trying to show that abolition is the democratic project of the 19th century. Democratic in its objective (making slaves free and ultimately equal) and democratic in its execution, involving a great many men beyond Lincoln himself, and a great many lowly men at that”. Now you say this view of abolition does not represent your own view.
Rather, you say they are only the film’s view of abolition as the greatest democratic project of the 19th century. You will forgive me for observing that, if you in fact disagree with the film’s view, you might have indicated your dissent much more clearly.

Corey Robin 11.25.12 at 7:56 pm:

#5: Just out of curiosity, are you basing this claim on any scholarship that’s not at least 75 years old?

No scholarship at all. Just sixty-odd years of reading, talking, and direct experience, some of it in the remnants of the ‘Old’ South. What do you disagree with? When I was growing up in mid-century New Jersey, (White) Southerners were generally despised by most adults in my environment as culturally and possibly genetically backward. I don’t think such constructions of caste just pop unaccountably out of the void.

Suzanne 11.25.12 at 8:00 pm:
‘… But there’s a fair argument to be made that for a time it was Lincoln holding a shaky enterprise together more or less by force of will (as depicted in Vidal’s novel, for example). …’

America’s Bismarck. Given some of Lincoln’s mystical utterances about the Union, one might wonder if he had read Hegel. So he was forced into Emancipation, because he couldn’t have the Union otherwise — as we know from Glory.

It is indeed a shame that Tony Kusnher has bought into the Dunning School of Reconstruction. I was already angry at The Smithsonian Magazine for letting the old reactionary white Southerner, Roy Blount, write about the making of “Lincoln,” the film. Here is my letter:

My letter:

What possessed The Smithsonian Magazine to hire Roy Blount, Jr. to write about the new Lincoln film? I opened his article with dread and saw him almost immediately refer to the Civil War as a “wasteful” war. Considering he offered no explanation for that judgment, it is deeply insulting for him to call that war “wasteful,” when it was initially fought to hold together the Union, and then finally ended slavery as a legal institution.

Just as bad, and possibly worse, Blount promotes a profound ignorance of the Reconstruction era (1866-1875) when he feverishly wrote that the North tried to make Reconstruction as “humiliating” as possible against the South, and used the lone example of the Northern dead soldiers being re-buried with federal money, but not the Confederates. He is wrong about how that came about besides being ridiculously insensitive to the betrayals of blacks during and especially after Reconstruction, something his white-centric world obviously does not comprehend.

There was, in the initial months after the war ended, no initial U.S. government provision for burying either side’s dead. Private Southern Ladies organizations began to immediately organize to bury Confederate dead, and some Northern societies did the same. But later, an outcry arose among Northern constituents at the poor treatment of Northern dead in the South (and) led the U.S. government to form more organized protection and burial of the Northern dead. The issue about “honoring” the dead followed that decision, and was not the immediate motivating factor.

Blount whines about the loss of Lincoln’s admonition of “malice toward none,” but never mentions the betrayal of and violence against blacks almost immediately after the war as most U.S. (Union) troops were removed within a year after Lee’s surrender. Yet even the most radical of Radical Republicans did not support executing most of the leaders of the Southern cause of slavery, starting with Jefferson Davis and the psychopath Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early and ardent leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Blount’s fact-free hyperbole about treatment of the Southern white aristocracy stands in contrast to his refusal to even acknowledge black suffering at the hands of those aristocrats who led other whites in almost immediate retaliation against blacks for daring to stand up as freed people.

If the U.S. government had to do Reconstruction again, it might well have been better to have had Nuremberg-type Trials and then executed Davis, Stephens, the Cabinet of the Confederate government, generals like Forrest for causing so much suffering for the cause of slavery. It remains a stubborn fact that in the earliest pronouncements from the Confederate side, slavery, not States’ rights, was the justification for the secession. And why not States’ rights? Because the Southern leaders had just spent the 1850s enforcing the federal Fugitive Slave Act law over the rights of free states which had been trying to protect runaway slaves–and it was highly hypocritical to start whining about States’ rights at that particular moment.

Goodness knows a complete repudiation of the Confederacy and what it truly stood for would have spared our nation a lot of the sick, twisted nonsense about the “Lost Cause” or merely calling the war a “War Between the States.” Black Americans would have been better protected from the violence and ultimate betrayal which was the result of a half-hearted Reconstruction that ultimately led to terror-imposed segregation laws and sharecropping neo-slavery. The late historian Rayford Logan’s “The Betrayal of the Negro,” written in the 1950s, is must reading on this subject.

Overall, it would have been far better for the Smithsonian to have asked historians with a literary flair to have reviewed the new film and background for the film. People such as David Biron Davis, Drew Galpin Faust or Eric Foner. The only saving grace to Blount’s article is that he didn’t red-bait the screenwriter, Tony Kushner. Thank goodness for small miracles, one supposes.

I suppose Anarcissie envisions the Klan as a kind of white street gang that was practically necessarily formed because the North supposedly destroyed all the existing grown-up institutions in the South and neither constructed new ones (like in nation-building) nor permitted native institutions to rise up and form themselves. Put that way, it seems ridiculous. The Klan itself was seen as just that kind of grown-up institution, presumably. And it’s equally arguable, I think, even if you’re assuming most societies have grown-up institutions of the kind envisioned, that the South never had that kind of grown-up institution, precisely because of slavery. (And it’s curious, too, that this is exactly the Southern critique of the North–Cannibals All!, and all that–that it lacked institutions like slavery.)

latent white supremacy in a piece of mass entertainment that hardly differs from the current master-narrative

Yes, but. These unforced choices—his choices—effectively precluded the inclusion of blacks as political agents in their own right. It was not the constraints of history or genre, in other words, that produced this film; it was the blinkered vision of Steven Spielberg. is also a good point, unless you think a filmmaker’s vision can’t “preclude” anything that really already existed.

I agree that a movie about Frederick Douglass would have been much more interesting (versus Lincoln, who, based on my reading of his collective speeches, seemed like actually a fairly boring politician picked by the Republicans because he wasn’t as controversial), but for better or worse this movie is about Lincoln.

How would you have incorporated African American characters into this story? You never specified.

Maybe the broader question is why the white man, Lincoln, is lionized as the Great Emancipator — but that’s a different question than critiquing this movie.

@18 – On this, I’d think Du Bois’s account of a general strike would be a needed reference.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~aholton/121readings_html/generalstrike.htm

@#19:

I saw those sentences too. It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as “Spielberg’s blinkered vision.” There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?

Look, I would be perfectly excited to see a representative slave (Slaveraham Lincoln?) putting emancipation on the agenda in some scene. But the fact that such a scene is missing hardly warrants 1500 words of shock (shock!) at finding there is white supremacy haunting the cinematic Civil War equivalent of The West Wing.

Spielberg also made Amistad. How does it fit into your “Speilberg’s White Men of Democracy” thesis?

Amistad was a Spanish ship, owned by a rich white guy in Cuba. I didn’t see the film, but I assume the ship plays a big role?

@30: The South never did authorize blacks to serve.

I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.

The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make.

Yeah, a movie about abolition would need to have slaves and blacks at the center of the story.

But Lincoln is a movie about the passing of the 13th amendment and the battle between more idealistic and more pragmatic legislators to get the amendment passed. It shows a little bit about Lincoln’s personal life (not much) and a little bit about how people around Limcoln (including his black servants) view the 13th amendment and him. But politics is the heart of the story. (I think the movie is intentionally meant to parrallel contemporary political battles between pragmatist democrats and idealistic liberals, which is another matter, BTW.)

I would love to see a movie about abolition itself in addition to this movie on Lincoln and the politics of the 13th amendment, but it is hard to criticize Spielberg for making this movie and not a movie about abolition more generally. After all, this is an important period and the politics of the period are interesting and important, too.

I do think people will take the wrong lesson from this movie, i.e. that blacks were not agents in their own abolition, but that isn’t Spielberg’s fault. It is the fault of idiots and the bad educators who left them in ignorance.

@30 (LFC) that’s actually part of the ‘myth of the lost cause’ argument. In fact, the real puzzle is how the North was able to prevail in light of the vast terrain that it needed to occupy; or, to put it differently, why the guerrilla war came against reconstruction rather than re-incorporation itself.

Funny, I just got back from seeing Lincoln and I thought it was about the politics and what it took to get the 13th amendment to get 2/3 of the House to approve it. Except that the obstructionists were the Democrats in der Vergangenheit.

I find myself in a bit of a disagreement with Corey on this film – it opens with a battle scene, where black soldiers are fighting to the death for the union. It then takes us to a scene where two black soldiers are speaking quite frankly to the president about the need to free slaves. So “Lincoln” opens by focusing on the contributions of blacks to the war – and by giving a black soldier the lines about the significance of freeing the slaves.

There is also a scene where the visitors from the Confederacy are shocked to see black soldiers in positions of responsibility (though the US military did not integrate until Truman, right?)

And it shows Mary Lincoln, whose brothers were Confederates, who was raised in a slave-owning household, in a close friendship with her seamstress, a former slave. Perhaps they didn’t attend congressional sessions together, but Mrs. Lincoln & Mrs. Keckley apparently shared a friendship for a time.

And after all, this is a film about the passage of a bill through congress in the 19th century. That this is the subject of the film may not provide the narrative opportunity to focus on the contributions slaves to the abolition issue. But then again, this is a movie called “Lincoln.” Not “Fredric Douglass” or “Taking the UnderGround Railroad Public.”

I loved the film for the acting. Hated the clumsy zooms that indicated “A Significant Moment.” And felt some of the lines said by the white folk were indeed ponderous (“The fate of human dignity is in our hands.”)

There are countless history books about the Civil War, each with a different focus. This is but one film about one of the most seminal moments in American history. That its focus is not on the slaves does not make its story irrelevant. Without an alliance with Lincoln, all the agitation of slaves would have been for nought. And without that perilous passage through Congress (filled with white men terrified at the notion of blacks and women getting the vote), the 13th Amendment would never have been signed. Kudos to the filmmakers for making the passage of an amendment something interesting and engaging to watch.

I just came back from seeing Lincoln and I thought it was excellent. Feel I need to see it again to sort out some of the minor characters. I don’t know how Corey Robin can ignore the characters of Elizabeth Keckley or Lydia Hamilton Smith. I had known nothing of them and immediately went and looked them up. Each of them deserves a movie in her own right, but this is a first step. I had also known little of Thaddeus Stevens, (though I understand my FIL graduated from Thaddeus Steven’s high school in Central Pa.

All historical movies reflect contemporary concerns as well as the history they are supposed to represent, and this one reminds me of the difficulties we are now having with the republican majority in the house trying to block healthcare and labor legislation. Walmart is today the modern equivalent of slavery and cries out to be crushed. Kushner did an excellent job.

Janet Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked.

There can be other movies about Keckley and Smith. Nothing precludes it, and now that people know about them as a result of Speilberg’s movie, audiences will find such movies even more interesting.

My apologies for my confusion over Kate Masur and any other inaccuracies! Thanks for pointing them out. Nevertheless …

“Parents of 10 or 12-year-olds, who come in asking for a biography and then, in hushed tones, ask if I can find one that’s, you know, about somebody relatable. Of course, they hasten to add, they’re not averse to a biography of a black/Jewish/white woman…but so many of those are already on reading lists, you know.*”

To Witt – you have parents come and ask for “relatable” biographies – about white men? That’s awful. A terrible seam of racism continues to run through the nation – even all these years after the Civil War.

Just because an historical film does not incorporate more of what the most recent achival research holds as relevant aspects of an issue does not mean that the work of art “fails” or signifies a gross misrepresentation of the facts or can be characterized as motivated by “blinkered” choices (whatever that suggests – beyond the obvious aesthetic concerns with the medium and its time constraints). Spielberg (and Kushner) didn’t make the film you wish he (they) had. The film they did produce, however, is quite good and rather remarkable in that its central plot elements are the machinations behind a piece of legislation, a process that is not in itself usually spell-binding. Robert Bolt also received significant criticism concerning Lawrence of Arabia: that his depiction did not fully appreciate the agency of the Arabs and his script took far too many liberties with the historical record. And of course it focused most of its attention on a white man. I don’t think Lincoln is nearly on the same level as Lean’s epic; however, its flaws and weaknesses do not deserve to be darkened by the sort of motivational attributions that you suggest. And while Schindler’s List may not have been your cup of tea, it was considerably better as a film than Defiance, despite its concentration on a German gentile protagonist.

Maybe the broader question is why the white man, Lincoln, is lionized as the Great Emancipator — but that’s a different question than critiquing this movie.

Perhaps because he was the most prominent and successful anti-slavery politician of his time and was the single most important (individual) actor in emancipating American slaves? It’s like people today are completely incapable of getting their mind around a genuinely anti-slavery leader who was not an abolitionist. Lincoln forced the Civil War because he was unwilling to compromise on the spread of slavery and although Lincoln did not favor immediate abolition, both sides knew that this would in time lead to eventual abolition.

One thing that gets me is how clearly people at the time understood the issues behind the Civil War but how muddied our vision has become since. If you want to understand why Lincoln was a great anti-slavery leader even while not being an abolitionist and being somewhat racist by contemporary standards, read Frederick Douglas’ speech at the dedication of the Freemen’s Monument. A quote:

Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

The problem is that today most lack the historical imagination to understand the sentiment of America in 1860 and are stuck viewing everything from ‘genuine abolition ground’, which is anachronistic. And in some ways our contemporary vision loses some of Lincoln’s radicalism. What Lincoln grasped very clearly was that black slavery was a mortal threat to free white labor, because the right to free labor cannot survive for anyone in a nation where it is not given to everyone. A lesson that is still relevant today.

“When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German” is a great joke line, but it’s wrong. Spielberg didn’t make a movie about the Holocaust; he made a drama about Oskar Schindler. Schindler was the lead character because he changed from a Nazi party member and “opportunistic businessman” (Wiki) to a man who risked his life and lost his fortune saving Jews. If you want to make a drama – or almost every genre, from romantic comedies to caper movies — that people will watch, you need to have a character who changes over the course of the movie — and Schindler was perfect for that.
Did some people who would never watch a film involving Jews and the Holocaust watch it because Schindler was a gentile and German? Maybe. I don’t know. But people probably watched it and found it uplifting not because Schindler was “relateable” in the sense of “like them,” but because they would like to believe that in similar circumstances they, too, would do the right and noble thing.
Haven’t seen Lincoln and so can’t comment on it (and not sure if it will be released in Russia; may have a long wait for a DVD). But I recall reading that the original script idea was the friendship between Lincoln and Douglass, that it went through several writers, at one point covered his entire presidency, was something 500 pages long (an average full-length feature film script is 100-120 pages), and then was cut down again to focus on passage of the 13th amendment. Not sure Kushner was so ignorant; sounds like he read widely about Lincoln and the period, although the historical consultant on the movie wrote about some of the bloopers in the film.
I also saw a clip about the sound guy who found, wound up, and recorded Lincoln’s pocket watch and used the sound in the film. He also got into the White House to record the doors closing and such for “authenticity.” I suppose that’s rather silly, but it seemed cool to me.

Oh, should have mentioned that another 40-ish percent of the population were state slaves (ie owned by the Russian royal family). They were emancipated in 1866. Can’t remember if that included slaves owned by the church.

I don’t think Brazil abolished slavery until 1880.

You know, if this film existed in a world which had a multiplicity of films in existence about abolition of slavery and about black slaves and their role in demanding and fighting for their own freedom, all of this “but but but he was making a film about Lincoln/politics/13th amendment/anything-but-black people might have a point.

But since we don’t live in such a world, this film, about Lincoln and the passage of the 13th amendment – i.e. the abolition of slavery – is a sad case of a story that is at its roots about black people being about white people. Corey’s criticism is spot on, as far as I’m concerned, and honestly all the excuses and but but buts are pretty depressing.

What Katherine said. There are of course economic pressures to make certain topical choices (somebody asked about a film about Toussaint Louverture – Danny Glover has had this project but could not get financing) but how does this invalidate the criticism? Especially when it comes to an industry giant like Spielberg, who surely could get financing for just about any movie project he chooses. And he chose – this. A topic out of all the history of the abolition of slavery in the US that (conceding the point for the sake of argument) excludes black people as agents (I am not counting a personification of a white man’s conscience in the form of a black servant as a historical agent here).

So, once again pre-parodied by Mr. Show:

“Are commentators seriously suggesting we avoid depicting all historical topics in which black people did not play a role?”

Eh, no

Oh, come on. Spielberg wanted to make a movie based on the book A Team of Rivals about Lincoln and his cabinet, which he apparently thought was a dramatic and therefore inherently cinematic relationship, or set of relationships – with a really dramatic ending. But he should not have made that movie because other people have not made good, comprehensive movies about abolition and the emancipation movement that focus on the role of black people?
Really?

So Watson Ladds proposal to ban “all historical topics in which black people did not play a role” has passed. Good on you Watson

Also, for god’s sake, please don’t comment just to say the “b-b-but the movie was about the passage of the amendment, it makes sense that no black people were involved.”

Next time your partner’s ex takes a group photo and coincidentally leaves you out of the frame, console yourself that the ex just chose to take a photograph containing only your partner and your partner’s friends.

I haven’t seen The Color Purple, but I don’t see Amistad as a great example of black people having agency. Morgan Freeman’s character finds Chiwetel Ejiofor’s, who can translate what Hounso’s is saying, so that Matthew McConaughey’s and Anthony Hopkins’s characters can brilliantly save all the slaves.

I’m surprised people are bringing up Amistad as a counter-example. I was about to mention it as one more example of a white-person-saves-the-oppressed Spielberg movie. John Quincy Adams is at the center of that movie. In the climax of the film he gives a big moving speech to the Supreme Court with overbearing inspirational music telling us to feel good about his heroic advocacy for Cinque and the other ex-slaves. A great movie could have been made of this story, and it probably would have included the actual, real speech Adams gave rather than inspirational, ahistorical drivel. And it would have highlighted the absurdity of the legal loopholes that distinguished the Amistad rebels from American slaves.

Gosh darn, why with all his money why Matt Damon hasn’t finally made a first class movie of Howard Zinn’s peoples history I’ll never know … it would fix all the problems …

Leaving aside the question of the absence of Blacks and accepting the film on its own terms, the character of Thaddeus Stevens is something of a joke. As the only Radical Republican in the film, he has nothing to say except to call pro-slavery Democrats “nincompoops”, etc. If Kushner had at least taken the trouble to write some lines for the character that conveyed the worries that existed on Lincoln’s left, the movie would have been only half-bad than totally bad. He did not do so because he had a message to deliver, namely that Lincoln was the Obama of his day, pushing aside the kinds of people who Robert Gibbs once described as needing to be “drug tested”. Since Kushner is totally committed to that kind of politics, who can blame him for turning a great abolitionist like Thaddeus Stevens into Yosemite Sam?

What makes you think I haven’t heard of Amistad or The Color People, both of which I’ve seen?

Because you wrote a post saying, about the director of Amistad and The Color Purple (or indeed The Color People, interesting slip there), “when he makes a movie about abolition, he focusses on a white man”, and not even mentioning either of those two films.

@ 52:
I can’t remember enough of the Color Purple to remember if it commits the same crime of focusing on whites and erasing black characters from story lines to which they are essential.

A quick look at IMDB pretty much confirms my memory of the movie: all the major characters (and actors) are black. (I suppose it’s possible that, say, a minor white character might have had, relatively speaking, slightly more of a role in the film than in the book, but I’ve no idea whether this was the case. But it certainly wasn’t a case of “focusing on whites and erasing black characters from story lines”.)

Because you wrote a post saying, about the director of Amistad and The Color Purple (or indeed The Color People, interesting slip there), “when he makes a movie about abolition, he focusses on a white man”, and not even mentioning either of those two films.

The Color Purple is not about abolition, so you can knock that film off whatever Steven-Spielberg-does-super-films-about-abolition list you’ve got going on there.

There’s a real transformation from the “old” Spielberg to the “new”: The Spielberg of Jaws, ET, even Gremlins, liked to tell stories of extraordinary events happening to ordinary people. Even the Blues Brothers and the first Indiana Jones are ultimately about very human heros faced with extraordinary events, not supermen bearing enormous loads of moral responsibility nor presenting us with moral accounts of their deeds. Somewhere around Jurassic Park, that Spielberg disappeared, and we get more and more stories of heroic individuals whose moral calibre plays a more and more central role, starting most clearly with Schindler’s List.

There are not a lot of black Civil War heros who fit Spielberg’s model, and making a film about some rather ordinary person enmeshed in the enormous questions and deeds that surrounded the Civil War is just not Spielberg’s schtick anymore. You might as well ask him to retell Munich as a film about Palestinian street children; or The Terminal as a Brazilesque parable of an ordinary man dealing with the enormous stupidities of bureaucracy; or refocus the last Indiana Jones movie on the character of a KGB henchman who’s struggled all his life to learn languages, marksmanship, and military discipline because he dreams of seeing the world on the KGB’s dime, only to struggle to survive against a greaser from Orange County and some conniving old grandpa. Someone else might be able to fund and sell films that do those things, but it’s not Spielberg.

Even the Blues Brothers

Landis, not Spielberg, right? Tho Spielberg gets a cameo?

I think we can all agree that John Landis’s Lincoln would be problematic.

I dunno about that belle, at least he features black people with agency.

All I said in comment #91, Peter, was that The Color Purple isn’t about abolition, which someone above had implied that it was, intending that to be an argument that Steven Spielberg is just super duper when making films about abolition.

As for the rest, I point you towards Corey’s comment #93.

Re: Landis’ Lincoln

“Did you know that every seven minutes a black person is born in this country without soul?” It’s true, Landis’ picture of African Americans is a lot more interesting than Spielberg’s and I would probably pay to see it.

bianca steele 11.25.12 at 9:07 pm:
‘I suppose Anarcissie envisions the Klan as a kind of white street gang that was practically necessarily formed because the North supposedly destroyed all the existing grown-up institutions in the South and neither constructed new ones (like in nation-building) nor permitted native institutions to rise up and form themselves. Put that way, it seems ridiculous. …’

I suppose this would be irrelevant to this discussion, except it impinges on Lincoln’s mystical idea of the Union, which necessitated not only the conquest but the integration of all large groups in the social order. Otherwise you get the Balkans. The course that was actually run in the U.S. towards this end seems to have been to do as little as possible as late as possible. But since Black military units had proved they could and would fight, Emancipation was the necessary first step in that direction; otherwise a second civil war would have followed the first.

Both of you seem to confuse this claim — “When Stephen Spielberg tells the story of an oppressed group’s liberation, he likes to focus on a member of the oppressor group as the liberator” — with this claim: “Stephen Spielberg never makes movies about oppressed people.”

If you didn’t want your quip to be overread you should try being less glib. The “say what you will he’s consistent” suggests more than the tightly circumscribed ‘in theses two movies’ only that you seem to want to pivot to now. The “In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group which has ravaged and ruined them” again suggests more than “in Lincoln” would have. If what you really meant was “he didn’t get Lincoln quite right, but has some examples which get at the US experience of blacks better than most major directors even attempt” that didn’t come across. Now it may be true that you intended your criticism to be sharply limited. But your language made it sound like the opposite: a general criticism with two examples given and a general problem to be inferred.

@109: your analogy really, really hurts your case

let me turn it around on you, then – do you deny that the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect a deeply sexist and classist society, given that the only people with agency are powerful male aristocrats? NB I have never read either completely, but to my recollection, the only women doing anything are Helen (passive), Briseis (kidnapped, passive), Circe (vile temptress), Penelope (this is one exception, where a woman does something that is actually clever).

Nobody is saying the Iliad or the Odyssey sucked. Nobody is saying Lincoln (artistically) sucked.

I think there is a very strong claim that Lincoln reflects Spielberg’s (and Hollywood’s) preference for white male saviors.

and if Indy really does fit into that theme, then you have Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as well

I wish some kindly, superior white man had saved me from that movie.

an almost amoral figure – Han Solo as archeologist – who gets frustrated and just shoots somebody

Somebody who’s threatening to kill him with a scimitar.

The old Indy was, of course, a man of pluck and audacity, but still a very human character…

As I recall, Indy spends an impressive amount of time getting the crap kicked out of him in the first movie.

“To attack him as if he is personally guilty of a moral failing, instead of pointing out that the phenomonon you’ve identified is a characteristic of the movie industry generally, is simply fatuous.”

To defend him as though the phenomenon identified is an ineluctable feature of the industry, rather than something the most powerful director in hollywood could change (in his own film at least) if he wanted to, is simply fatuous.

It’s not like there’s a limited amount of guilt to go around. The fact that many other directors do what Spielberg does does not make what Spielberg does more excusable.

I can’t tell exactly what tack you’re taking to handwave away the problem. It’s not Spielberg’s fault because … other people pressure him to? Many financiers assume a white lead won’t do well at the box office?

Are you seriously defending the integrity of an artistic choice because it would be harddddd to make a different choice? Or that it would make less money?

Just come out and say it, for heaven’s sake.

CR can speak for himself — quite eloquently, too, in my opinion — but what I take away from this post is that his criticism of Spielberg is first and foremost a means to an end, the end being to gain some clarity on what is indisputably a general failure of our cultural imagination. Bloix’ point, that in Hollywood this is the best one can do, is well taken, but it reminds me a lot of previous CR disputes on the lesser-of-two-evils defense of President Obama’s re-election bid.

I think that CR is right. We can do better than this. We have done better than this. If we can’t even envision a different future, we’re likely to have no future at all, at least none worthy of our unfulfilled promises to ourselves, which even the grumpy defenders of what we’ve got claim to cherish.

That Bady piece is just excellent and really hammers home how much of a choice the filmmakers had in portraying their story as they did, the violence they do to history, and the ways in which they hide what they’re doing to make it seem like there can be no other account of what they’re showing.

Anecdata: the Thanksgiving table was all atwitter about how magnanimous Lincoln was in taking the great burden on himself to end slavery, both in recognizing it as the supreme evil it was and being willing to do what it took politically, “unlike those idealists”, to “allow black people to have dignity”. It was all there, at that table, the great man hagiography, the restriction of black agency and condensing politics to dusty back rooms, triangulation as the only serious political maneuver and the garbled reading of the political stakes. All held together by not recognizing the choices the film was making, or that the film was making choices. As Bady says, “They [had] literally no idea what they are missing.”

This is what’s at stake with all the “but-but-but”ing, which is excusing a film that is provoking these kinds of reactions.

“But the heroic moral conflict between Jeff Goldblum and the people cloning dinosaurs is the dominant theme.”

You may need to watch Jurassic Park again. Jeff Goldblum’s character is barely in it.

Corey Robin @ 125:

I guess that’s why students at CUNY, where I teach, read books like the aforementioned Iliad or Shakespeare’s Henry V. Because the majority of them — Nigerian, Ukranian, Jamaican, Yemeni immigrants — are “similar ethnically and culturally” to an ancient Greek warrior, who was the son of a goddess, and an English king. Yes, that makes perfect sense.

21st Century students at CUNY were the original audience for both Homer and Shakespeare?

I consciously omitted the goddesses because I felt like they got a deity exemption from the typical misogyny, but I apologize for the others.

All of this goes to show that Homer was better on gender than Spielberg is on race. =)

I guess that’s why students at CUNY, where I teach, read books like the aforementioned Iliad or Shakespeare’s Henry V

I think we have established the solution here. All we need do is abolish the system where people buy a ticket for the film they judge will most entertain them. Replace it with one where they get assigned watching material according to the considered opinion of a panel of cultural academics, on pain of a failing grade.

“But criticizing Lincoln for not being that movie is as pointless as the classic pointless book review that basically outlines an entirely different book which the author, in the reviewer’s opinion, ought to have written instead of the one under review.”

Yeah, but the question is why ‘that picture’ tends not to get made.

Yeah, but the question is why ‘that picture’ tends not to get made.

Because no one would go see it?

re: 15

“the old reactionary white Southerner, Roy Blount …”

You appear to have a special meaning of the word “reactionary” that I’m unfamiliar with.

I walked out of the theater thinking “well, that’s only going to cement the ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ mythology” but still having thoroughly enjoyed the movie and the acting performances.

I’ve added Foren’s books to my “wish list” and hope to be checking them out in a month or so. I also finally got around to grabbing some of Douglass’s stuff from Project Gutenberg. Hopefully more people are similarly inspired to dig some more into this era.

#120 – Julian, I am saying that the original post attacked Spielberg personally for something that has nothing to do with Spielberg personally. Suppose I were a vegan and you were a chef. Would it be reasonable for me to write a review of your restaurant proclaiming, “Julian murders animals!”? No, it would be asinine for me to write that. “Julian’s steak au poivre is an example of his consistently heartless cruelty” – that would be idiotic.

Please don’t get the idea that I am defending Spielberg. No, I am merely attacking Robin. That’s enough work for today.

The notion that a more black-centered film by Spielberg would have suffered in any major way commercially seems ridiculous. All this fretting about the commercial viability of a Spielberg film is hard to take seriously. People are going to go see “Spielberg does the Civil War” regardless of how he does it. As such, Spielberg had an opportunity to reconstruct how people view emancipation, the civil war, Lincoln, and so on. By what’s been reported, it seems like he didn’t. (Rather, it sounds like he made inside baseball legislative wrangling exciting for a spell.) If he didn’t, then I’m not sure why people are so exercised about defending his failure of vision. Is this the *only* take on Lincoln/the Civil War Spielberg could have made a compelling film out of (‘Truly, this is the best of all possible Spielberg films’)

What’s the investment in defending the right to make politically anodyne popular films? What’s the big problem with saying, “Dear Spielberg, You could have done better. Sincerely, The Left.”? Why not demand more from film-makers who can turn out massive audiences through their personal brand?

@106
“There was some effort to pop Black people into White-people slots, and when this didn’t work out well the project was dropped and the region was left to its own devices, which were not very nice.”

That effort was called “letting the black people vote,” and the reason it didn’t work out was because the Black people popped into white-people slots (or, put another way, the legally elected office holders) were the victims of lynchings, violence and intimidation while the Klan and others erected the scaffolding of Jim Crow. The region was left to its own devices because anyone who tried to “interfere” was either (at the level of local activists) beaten, hanged or run out of town or they were blocked by a series of legal decisions made by racist judges (see Plessy v. Ferguson).

The entire Civil War was fought basically because the rich, white southerners couldn’t stomach losing the money and revenue that relied on the unpaid labor of black slaves. The failure of reconstruction is evidence of their skill in manipulating the views of the poor white Southerners by demonizing the other, in the case, the black newly emancipated slaves.

How about a film about emancipation and its aftermath directed by Spike Lee, with a screenplay by Ta-Nehisi Coates? Starring Samuel L. Jackson as the Frederick Douglass of the abolition struggles, Morgan Freeman as the Douglass who delivered the final judgment on Lincoln and emancipation at the Freedman’s Memorial dedication?

Maybe the box office wouldn’t make anybody rich, but I’d like to see it nevertheless.

Spielberg is slated to direct “Robopocalyplse, A sci-fi story set in the aftermath of a robot uprising” next.

Perhaps he can address some of the OP concerns then.

Bloix is quite right, you know. Show business is a business, Spielberg has a status and the reputation, and he can’t just go crazy and do whatever he wants. Not to mention that he probably doesn’t have enough talent to cook anything other than a standard Hollywood feature: this much violence, this much sex, this much melodrama, this much humor, mix together and stir until emulsified.

“Why, exactly, should one confine themselves to criticizing what someone has done for not doing it well?”

Something missing?

As for the first case, brevity. There’s no end to the things that one hasn’t done.

Why, exactly, should one confine themselves to criticizing what someone has done for not doing it well?

You’re perfectly free to do so, of course. It’s just that, as with the corresponding type of book review, it’s a pretty fucking useless exercise. What exactly is the point? Do you want people to not go see Lincoln because it’s not entitled Douglass? They’re unlikely to take your advice. Better to simply write something pushing for the kind of movie you’d like to see made, rather than diluting your point and wasting words by dragging in the irrelevancy of a movie already made that isn’t that one.

I’m going to bow out of this thread now, but I’ll leave you with the most telling commentary anyone has ever made about Lincoln. It was said by Frederick Douglass, as perceptive, subtle and persuasive an orator as has ever lived, in his Oration on the Memory of Abraham Lincoln, given at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, DC, and if you keep it in mind when you go to the movie you will have a better idea of what Kushner and Spielberg were trying to say:

“President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

It would have been a better movie if it had included this:

“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” — Karl Marx, letter to Abraham Lincoln, 1864

David Dayen discusses the real agenda and sekret meta-message of this movie, mentioned in CR’s post, of helping the LGM-liberals excuse the Irrelevant-and-Immaterial-when-it-is-useful Obama and his Grand Bargaining. How much money did Spielberg give the Obama campaign to protect his IP rights? Lincoln is part of the deal.

The other outrage hinted at in this thread is the Spike Lee remake of Oldboy. I hate America.

And there’s plenty of room for Tyler Perry to make his movie about the slave uprisings of the South, including the one of his namesake, just like Spielberg didn’t have to make The Pawnbroker.

If your complaint is that by ignoring the role of the slaves in the Civil War Spielberg presents a misleading role of Abraham Lincoln that’s one complaint, and one I’m not honestly qualified to judge. But saying that he should be telling a different story, to present this alternate historiography, or maybe even avoid telling the story he wants to tell to buttress that historiography is a different complaint. While it’s not clear that this is a clean distinction, it does seem to matter when making this kind of critique.

And not to threadjack, as the I/P conflict tends to do, but not everyone thought highly of “Munich” (another movie I haven’t seen). “The Angry Arab” blogger (As’ad AbuKhalil) had the same criticism of that movie that Robin makes here.

spielberg’s munich

let me turn it around on you, then – do you deny that the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect a deeply sexist and classist society, given that the only people with agency are powerful male aristocrats?

Why would I, or anyone else, want to deny such a thing? It’s obvious. Indeed, it’s so f*****g obvious that I’d have to wonder about someone bothering to insist upon it in any company of reasonably well-informed persons. I, for one, would be very interested to read the Heleniad — though Homer himself could never have writtten such a thing, and any of our contemporaries might shrink from the inevitable comparisons if they took on such a project.Maybe Sappho could have done it, though, as far as we know, she didn’t. But criticizing the Iliad for not being the Heleniad is pretty damn pointless. And criticizing a movie mogul for doing the standard thing according to the usual conventions of the movie business is equally pointless. Movies about Presidents are a lot easier to craft, and a lot more likely to sell, than movies about vast social forces and the collective efforts of nearly anonymous men and women. Even the hyopothetical movie a lot of us would like to see probably stars Samuel L. Jackson as Frederick Douglass, and gives a lot of screen time to Sam Waterston as Lincoln.

Mossy @ 55’s account of the making of the film suggests that there was quite a bit of uncertainty about what, exactly, the movie would be about. Seems to me this should be taken into account when talking about how this movie had to have a certain subject matter. This wasn’t an adaptation of “The Passage of the 13th Amendment: The Untold Story”. But Corey also seems to be saying that, insofar as one settles on “Amendment XIII: This Time, It’s Unconstitutional” there are lots of compelling things one could have included within this narrower frame.

Main Street Muse @176. “This is a movie about politicians – who in the 19th century happened to be white men.”

Like this guy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Rhodes_Revels

@179: As he was first elected as a state senator in 1869, fitting him into a Lincoln biopic would be a bit of a stretch, unless you copied the other recent Lincoln film and went with the zombie angle.

The notion that people only want to be entertained by people who either look or are like themselves is so preposterous it hardly merits a response.

In a political film, people generally want a strong political narrative that agrees with their own, or perhaps differs just a bit for comprehensible reasons. So you get a Mandela biopic, or American History X, but rarely something weirder or more ambiguous and obscure.

Thing is, I don’t think you have succeeded in explaining, at least to me, what political narrative you think needs to replace or update the Lincoln one.

Presumably it’s all something to do with Obama and something he should or shouldn’t be doing? Some people do seem to get whatever code is being used and so can carry their political opinion cleanly across to the discussion of the film as good or bad.

But the rest of us are a bit left in the dark…

“racist/misogynist apologetics”? Julian, you need to take a few deep breaths. Not even Cory has suggested that the movie was racist or misogynist, even though it was set in a time when virtually everyone was, by our current standards, racist and misogynist. Just like everyone actually involved in the political wrangling at the heart of the movie was white. Maybe he’s implying such a thing about Spielberg, but I don’t want to think Cory is into cheap shots like that.
What the movie is is conventional, a “great man” story built around a bankable character. It’s true that the movie doesn’t instruct us in complexities of historical causation and the interaction of faceless social forces and largely faceless people with the workings of more visible, identifiable, and, yes, white big shots, but why should we expect it to? And for all the people who say — and I’m one of them — that they’d like to see that other movie, all I can say is do a screenplay. It’ll be hard to write, but then you can peddle it to Spike Lee or Tyler Perry or Morgan Freeman. Maybe they can get it done.

I suddenly had a vision of film buffs rewinding Lincoln and rewinding it again, pausing it and single-stepping through the frames, the way they might do with the fight scenes in The Dark Knight, making sure they get all the nuance.

I understand Corey’s point much better after reading this
New York Times review by Kate Masur:

But it’s disappointing that in a movie devoted to explaining the abolition of slavery in the United States, African-American characters do almost nothing but passively wait for white men to liberate them. For some 30 years, historians have been demonstrating that slaves were crucial agents in their emancipation; however imperfectly, Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary “The Civil War” brought aspects of that interpretation to the American public. Yet Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gives us only faithful servants, patiently waiting for the day of Jubilee.
This is not mere nit-picking. Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation. While the film largely avoids the noxious stereotypes of subservient African-Americans for which movies like “Gone With the Wind” have become notorious, it reinforces, even if inadvertently, the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main sources of social progress. […..]
Black oral tradition held that Lincoln visited at least one of the capital’s government-run “contraband camps,” where many of the fugitives lived, and was moved by the singing and prayer he witnessed there. One of the president’s assistants, William O. Stoddard, remembered Lincoln stopping to shake hands with a black woman he encountered on the street near the White House.
In fact, the capital was also home to an organized and highly politicized community of free African-Americans, in which the White House servants Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade were leaders. Keckley, who published a memoir in 1868, organized other black women to raise money and donations of clothing and food for the fugitives who’d sought refuge in Washington. Slade was a leader in the Social, Civil and Statistical Association, a black organization that tried to advance arguments for freedom and civil rights by collecting data on black economic and social successes.
The film conveys none of this, opting instead for generic, archetypal characters. […]

And now I hit submit and pray that my attempts with HTML will work.

@115 @116: “The famous scene with the whip and the gun is very much about him being an almost amoral figure – Han Solo as archeologist – who gets frustrated and just shoots somebody.”

Really? I though it was about Harrison Ford waking up hungover that morning, and not feeling up to the drawn out, over the top fight scene that had been scripted? He did it as a joke, and they ran with it…or, so my uncle told me when I was a kid…

@194 That is the entire point of the OP: to point the ahistoricality and deliberate blindness of a movie that, by its choice of narrative framing, tells us what it thinks is important to know about slavery.

Very well put. And if some people, in making the argument that what Spielberg thinks is important to know about slavery relies on outdated and implicitly racist tropes, imply that a different movie should have been made, I don’t see why that’s a problem. Along these lines, I love this bit from James Livingston:

Bullshit. The past changed because the facts changed because the world changed. You can put these nouns in any sequence you like. The past in question here began changing for good in the 1950s, when the whole history of Reconstruction had to be revisited (“revised”) because the NAACP got the attention of the Supreme Court and the Montgomery Improvement Association meanwhile got the attention of everybody else. When black folk became visible historical agents by organizing consumer boycotts, denouncing apartheid, and demanding the right to vote, the political past looked different, and so did the future, or rather the past looked different because the political future did. In fact, the past was, suddenly, different.

So, I’d say the argument is that, now, in 2012, a movie like Spielberg’s Lincoln just won’t do any more, as our political future is one in which white savior narratives are not going to play a part.

“All I said is that your sole criticism of the OP (b-b-but everyone in hollywood does it, why do we have to talk about it on the iiiiiinternetttttt?) is a novel way of deflecting attacks on what even you have repeatedly admitted is Hollywood’s and Spielberg’s aversion to telling stories about anything besides white male saviors.”

The problem, it seems to me, is precisely that you and the OP discuss and attack Spielberg (another ‘great white man), instead of attacking Hollywood as an institution.

Long comment seems to have vanished into the ether…

“The problem, it seems to me, is precisely that you and the OP discuss and attack Spielberg (another ‘great white man), instead of attacking Hollywood as an institution.”

Why is that a problem?

I don’t find any of the above stupid.

The problem, it seems to me, is precisely that you and the OP discuss and attack Spielberg (another ‘great white man), instead of attacking Hollywood as an institution.

Is there any problem, say, in doing both? Does Spielberg get to avoid opprobium because he is merely a part of Hollywood as an institution (even though he is a major and prominent part)?

Both/and rather than either/or I think. Specifically referring to this film and this director does not preclude criticism of Hollywood as a whole, or vice versa.

But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg – isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

But it’s pointless try to clarify the disagreement in this one blog discussion without addressing the larger problems endemic to blogs as an institution.

“Well, if – if – this particular movie is a typical product of that particular environment, then indeed we should be addressing the environment rather than its mere manifestation.”

Let me get this straight. You said

“Bloix is quite right, you know. Show business is a business, Spielberg has a status and the reputation, and he can’t just go crazy and do whatever he wants. ”

In other words: OP, lay off Spielberg and stop saying he should have broadened the scope of the film to include black characters with agency in their own salvation – he made the movie he made and nobody can do anything about it

Now you’re saying that OP’s main mistake was posting about Spielberg, instead of broadening the scope of his comment to include all of Hollywood.

“What’s the problem with pointing out the historical truth that blacks could not and did not end slavery by themselves?”

Seems sort of useless, given that no one alive is laboring under the misimpression that blacks did and could end slavery by themselves.

“But black men were not the agents responsible for the 13th amendment!”

Spielberg carefully framed the story to exclude, as much as possible without upsetting audiences, any depictions of black people with agency. What’s more, my impression is that even if you arbitrarily confine the story to just the passage of the 13th Amendment, you’ll find black people who contributed to the effort – people Spielberg excluded from the film.

As a historian and a teacher, what is depressing about this whole thread is that plenty of people seem to miss Kate Masur’s point (and Tony Kushner’s denial of it). Kushner doesn’t think he’s written an artistic version of the past, he thinks he’s basically made a documentary. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that there are better and worse forms of history and that his is decidedly towards the worse forms (while still being reasonably “historically accurate.”). In other words, Kushner thinks he’s done good history, Robin and Masur point out he’s wrong and he sticks his finger in his ears and says “I can’t hear you!” How frickin hard would it have been (in a movie that was obsessed with getting historical details right) to have shown huge numbers of former slaves in the DC refugee camps. One frickin’ rally. Set one conversation or street scene passing some of those things. One or two mentions in the script. The legislation didn’t take place in a void, it took place in a social context that would have been easy to illustrate without altering the movie much. But Kushner didn’t do it, because “HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTERESTED IN THE ROLE THAT AFRICAN AMERICANS PLAYED IN THEIR OWN EMANCIPATION. AND HE’S OKAY WITH THAT.” But Kate Masur’s not, and I’m not. Again it’s not Kushner thinks he is making artistic choices here, it’s that they are claiming that he is doing good history that is the problem.

Made a comment earlier that went to some moderation hell, but Julian Sanchez’s post about the female role in/credit for the creation of the internet seems useful.

With great wickedness and abandon I called this tendency racist and misogynistic, and I abase myself in shame.

I’ll take this in the spirit in which it appears to be offered.

“I’ll take this in the spirit in which it appears to be offered.”

Thanks, what a great substantive response to the rest of my post!

@220

Without having seen TCP, based on what I know from wikipedia, I will assume that you are right. I think TCP is an exception to, and disproves, any claim that Spielberg uniformly denies the agency of black people.

However, good deeds don’t really change bad deeds (though as you suggest, they can change our understanding of what motivates both). And the fact remains that Lincoln appears to be guilty of everything Hollywood typically is, and everything that The Color Purple (presumably) repudiated.

The Color Purple does not mean it is okay that Lincoln is ahistorical and succumbs to Hollywood’s worst tendencies to whitewash things and make black people into quiet, suffering, passive recipients of white noblesse oblige.

Sorry, but why does it matter if some person finds it easy to conform to the submerged cultural attitudes? There are, and will always be, plenty of people who do. The question should be: how come a person like that becomes the most prominent director in the US movie industry?

Try it like this:

Question: How come a person like that becomes the most prominent director in the US movie industry?

Answer: There are, and will always be, plenty of people who do (find it easy to conform to the submerged cultural attitudes).

Corey Robin’s post is part of the solution, not part of the problem — whether he’s right or wrong about Spielberg in particular. Spielberg might very well say, as many artists have, that he responds artistically to what he knows, in the only way that he knows. If he’s to be true to his art, it has to be that way. Fair enough, but the critic’s job is to point out what he doesn’t know –which isn’t necessarily a call for Socialist Realism, as some here seem to think; it’s just a reminder that we’re not done with understanding ourselves, not yet, anyway. It’s a process, and CR or Kate Masur are no less a part of it than Spielberg himself.

“Would I like to see a movie about, say, a decent, honest, law-abiding, hard-working plumbing supply business owner who faces adversity honorably, cares for his family, employees, and customers, and makes the world a better place in his small way?….would require an artist of a high order to make it watchable.”

Like Super Mario Brothers?

183: Sadly, one would have to look really hard around my home state of Mississippi for any monuments to Hiram Revels.

The Wikipedia article you linked suggests Revels would make a good subject for Spielberg’s next flick:

He was the first person of color to serve in the United States Senate, and in the U.S. Congress overall…. During the American Civil War, he helped organize two regiments of the United States Colored Troops and served as a chaplain. * * *

When Revels arrived in Washington, DC, Southern Democrats opposed seating him in the Senate. For the two days of debate, the Senate galleries were packed with spectators at this historic event. The Democrats based their opposition on the 1854 Dred Scott Decision by the US Supreme Court…

Supporters of Revels noted that he had been born free and was a citizen all his life. They countered the Democrats by saying that the Dred Scott decision applied only to those blacks who were totally of African ancestry. As Revels was of mixed black and white ancestry, he was exempt. Supporters also noted that he had already voted in Ohio many years earlier, so had been accepted as a citizen. This argument prevailed, and on February 25, 1870, Revels, by a vote of 48 to 8, became the first black man to be seated in the United States Senate. Everyone in the galleries stood to see him sworn in.

There’s your rousing conclusion to the film, of course passing over the eclipse in Revels’s career as Reconstruction faltered and failed. Gotta uplift the audience.

CR @206
Since the focus on individuals rather than institutions is by no means peculiar to me or this post — indeed, it’s a fairly common way of doing criticism

And it’s produced some not-too-bad stuff (Twain’s “The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper” comes to mind as just one example).

Sometimes it is the tinpot academics who wear the blinkers!

Soru@231
“That story _is_ rather like the the story of how Germans stopped being Nazis, and not very much like the the stories of how Haitian colonists and the British empire respectively stopped being slavers, or indeed the story of how americans stopped enforcing segregation. A reactionary group, fearing economic change, overreached, started a war of agression, and lost it to the powerful and generally conservative figures who did retain something of a grasp on sanity and morality.”

As a description of the downfall of Nazi Germany, that has some merits, but only if you can conceive of of Uncle Joe as a “generally conservative figure who did retain something of a grasp on sanity and morality”. I find that rather difficult.

I’m glad you think it it is not very much like a description of how the British empire abandoned slavery, and vigorously repressed it. I would have said it is not even remotely like.

The film shows Lincoln the lawyer preoccupied to the point of obsession with questions of law. The fact is that Lincoln’s father had been the wealthiest man in the county in Kentucky, but he lost his property through boundary disputes caused by his insufficient knowledge of property law. This fact no doubt motivated the younger Lincoln to become a lawyer, just as similar histories it no doubt motivated Southern families into the twentieth century to keep law books near the bathroom for convenient study by all members of the family, as I heard happened in North Carolina, during the five years I lived there. Thus, the portrayal of Lincoln’s motivations was extremely plausible to me — regardless of the metaphysical question over whether the amendment would be have been passed sooner or later.

Sometimes smart people don’t know what they don’t know.

“am not a professor” would have been a more direct way of putting it

LFC my comment was not directed at you. My apologies if it seemed to be. In fact, I admire your blog very much. And I have a great admiration for scholars and historians.

I admit this thread has made my blood pressure rise.

@245, I’ll go with Foner, as quoted in @237 on this one. “Slavery is already dying at that moment.” That’s key.

@231, replying to me, See, here’s someone who really gets the code. They understand exactly how it is that a failure to produce an appropriately worded critical response to the film ‘Lincoln’ will doom the country, and perhaps the planet.Jesus, I said it “just won’t do,” which is a far cry from dooming the planet. Foner’s choice of “just inadequate” is pretty much what I was getting at. I think it’s clear now that thinking that way about the history of the Civil War is a dead end. Historians know that now, even if it hasn’t worked its way to the general public to the extent it needs to. To the extent that Spielberg is presenting an outdated version of Civil War history, probably the best way to describe the movie is reactionary history.

As far as people who complain that the movie is what it is, and that Corey shouldn’t expect it to be a different movie, maybe they should read movie reviews by people like Roger Ebert if they want movie reviews that adhere to Ebert’s standards. It’s really hard to have anything interesting to say from a political science perspective about a movie while refusing to contemplate that it should have been a different movie. The question “what is the matter with the stories that Spielberg chooses to tell?” is an interesting and useful question for a political scientist, less so for the Movies section of the newspaper.

“This was the movie he wanted to make; more cynically, maybe this is the movie he thought would sell. ”

72: Hmmm. Spielberg just unleashed on the multiplexes a long and talky period piece, shot mostly in dimly lit interiors and employing some archaic rhetoric, on the exciting, action-packed subject of getting a piece of legislation through the House. (The film is doing quite well, to the surprise of some in the industry.) I’m sure some non-artistic considerations were involved here – they always are in big budget feature films even if you are Spielberg – but a cynical grab for boffo box office probably wasn’t one of them.

Now, if you want to accuse him of going for surefire Oscar bait you’d be on safer ground…..

LFC has a blog? Link please – wanna check it out!

Harold: ok, a misunderstanding, no hard feelings.

Anderson: I believe you left a brief comment once on my blog, so you have visited it before, albeit a while back. I’m on a break from posting right now (and I *should* be on a break from the blogosphere in general, but…). Anyway, I’ve given the link w/ this comment, so you can click on my initials and that’ll get you there.

Senility has struck me, LFC … thanks!

The issue posed in Lincoln isn’t the existence of black agency, which it plainly acknowledges, but a different one: how should political agency be exercised in America?

The movie proposes a model for effective political agency based on three principles: 1) action through the state; 2) shaping public opinion through a discourse of moral suasion; 3) the indirect pursuit of moral imperatives through snakey retail politics.

Spielberg does show black soldiers exercising their agency through principles 1 and 2. First they align themselves with the state by fighting for the Union. Then they demand that Lincoln recognize their devotion and sacrifice as irrefutable proof of blacks’ right to freedom. That moral argument carries weight with Lincoln, as it did in real life; in his famous “silent tongue and clenched teeth” letter, he made a public commitment to honor that very claim. (And the example of black soldiers did indeed persuade many Northern whites of the legitimacy of abolition as a war aim.)

But the movie’s focus is on principle 3, snakey retail politics. That’s what makes the movie interesting, in part because it cuts against the grain of Lincoln hagiography by making him a shrewd, somewhat dirty pol. Unfortunately, that focus excludes blacks because, having no votes or patronage spoils to dispense, they had little role to play in that arena.

The critique in the OP etc amounts to the claim that Spielberg should have emphasized different modes of political agency, which we could broadly label as “insurrectionary social movement.” There should have been scenes of slaves defying their overseers, leaving the plantation for the Union lines, camping out in Washington and receiving aid from free blacks. Eric Foner’s NYT letter adds his wish-list for shots of slaves in South Carolina seizing land and sacking the plantation houses. These are the styles of political agency that supposedly killed slavery “on the ground,” in Foner’s words, before the 13th Amendment passed.

So the debate here is really about which kind of agency truly gets things done—state action shaped by public sentiment and corrupt parliamentary politics, or self-organized, bottom-up social movements? In emphasizing the former Lincoln isn’t so much an apologia for Obama as a rebuff to Occupy Wall Street.

I hate Spielberg, but I have to say I’m with him here. I disagree with Foner and you, Corey: slaves had not really freed themselves and slavery had not actually “died on the ground” (Foner) before the 13th Amendment. Yes, slaves did fiercely and stirringly resist, flee and repudiate slavery during the war. But without the North’s firm political and military commitment to emancipation, expressed in the 13th Amendment and many other measures, white southerners would have reinstituted slavery through terror at war’s end. In fact they did do that in the Black Codes, which had to be voided by federal bayonets. Black freedom in the South went exactly as far as the federal government would guarantee it: Washington and Northern opinion would not tolerate the reimposition of slavery but would, unfortunately, accept the disenfranchisement, humiliation and exploitation of blacks; that’s what they got in the settlement of 1876, social movements notwithstanding.

Self-organized marches and encampments and land seizures don’t meaningfully win freedom from exploitation, not in Zucotti Park and certainly not in the Confederacy. A robust freedom has to be enshrined in law, defended by the state, and achieved through messy, meat-and-potatoes democratic politics—exactly the style of agency that Spielberg lionizes.

Only a country that’s steeped in myths of innocence would find the most conventional and boring kind of realism about politics to be the trumpet blast of Truth, Brave Truth.

Nicely put. All you have to do is look at the endless Beltway hand-wringing about “polarization” and “partisan rancor” to know that there’s something truly weird — and, as you note, truly juvenile — about most Americans’ conception of politics.

Well, yes, that’s why I quoted and closely paraphrased you in the first place. It does not appear that we are in disagreement. As I understood it, you were saying if and only if X then Y. I agree with that and was simply affirming directly the truth of X.

Lincoln’s line in the sand and his politicking both were based on his interpretation of the rule and purpose of law — which could be flexible but was not “snake oil.”

CR: “In Spielberg’s [film], blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them.”

If this is a premise for the argument, it is a false premise. Lincoln most emphatically does not belong to the “very group”, which enslaved blacks. He was not a slaveholder, nor did he come from a slaveholding family. As the character in the film reveals in a story, his father was one of those, (one of many, historically), who left the South in the early years of settlement west of the Appalachians, in order to avoid slavery. Politically, the country divided geographically along roughly horizontal bands. The abolitionists were from the northernmost band: the band of settlement by Greater New England across the Great Lakes region of northern Ohio, northern Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, etc.

The southern reaches of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, were the band dominated by the descendants of men, like Lincoln’s father, who had left the slaveholding South, to escape, frankly, being collateral damage, in the oppression of the slaves. Politically, they shared many attitudes with an adjacent group, who had remained in the slaveowning South — the so-called Middle South region and Appalachia — who were also hostile to slavery and, especially, to the slave owners, as a social and political class. The issues, for them, were economic competition with negro slaves, whom they often despised with a deep racism, and the corruption of local politics and property rights by the class of wealthy slave owners. (The property claims of small farmers in the territory subject to the Northwest Ordinance, north of the Ohio River, were usually easy to secure; in Kentucky and further south, they were often easily lost to powerful and ruthless, manipulative men. Lincoln’s father may have been a victim of such machinations, with respect to his claims in Kentucky.) By the 1850s, the slave owners, as a political class, had become identified with opposition to western expansion and development of the country; the “Slavepower” in the Senate was widely believed to be blocking statehood for Kansas, a transcontinental railroad, free homesteading in the west, and the Morrill Act, granting land to endow State universities. These were the issues, beneath the issue of the right or wrong of slavery, which formed the subtext to the struggle between Lincoln and Douglas, in their famous debates and in the Presidential election of 1860.

Douglas was prominently identified with railroads and western expansion, but he had also been tainted by his attempts to reach compromises with the “Slavepower” in the Senate, compromises, which had borne repugnant fruit in Bloody Kansas and the Dred Scot decision. Douglas argued that the country could be held together by a common commitment to a democracy of white men; Lincoln argued for a common commitment to the principle of political and moral equality, saying that Douglas’ unwillingness to declare slavery a moral wrong, made Douglas a tool of the “Slavepower”.

In the film, an attitude typical of people in this middle band of the country, is given voice by the lady from Missouri, who speaks for her husband, and, under questioning by Seward, articulates her conditional support for the 13th amendment. And, conservative leadership in the middle South, is personified by Bates, the patriarch of a family deeply influential in Maryland and Missouri politics.

It is Lincoln’s ability to shepherd people identified with the conservative “faction” of the Republican Party, and people, who voted for his fellow Illinoisan, the Democrat, Douglas in 1860, which enabled him to hold the Union together in the Civil War. He was able to lead people in these middle bands of the country, in the southern reaches of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where the Democratic Party was strong, and in the middle South and Appalachian hill country, where slavery was weakest, from a politics of deep resentments and racism, thru the idealism of the Gettysburg address, to enactment of the 13th amendment.

In our own time, I see that idealistic liberals have a great difficulty in understanding that the price of political power in a democracy, is finding ways to pry those, whose political psychology is founded in the resentful, cynical and conformist attitudes of authoritarian followers, away from the demagogues offered to them by the would-be plutocrats. There’s no political alchemy, which can transform the base lead of authoritarian followers into some pure, ideal gold of liberalism, but it is possible, through patient leadership, to lead them toward support of better policy and patriotic support of political ideals, in place of ugly expedients.

Lincoln’s politics provides a great lesson. It is not, strictly, a lesson in the agency of the oppressed, though, maybe, it is a lesson in the dynamics of political triangulation, in how indifference becomes either complicity or decency.

Mary Lincoln was the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky slaveowner, and Lincoln’s best friend in early manhood was also from a family of Kentucky’s slaveholders. He was intimately acquainted with those in the Middle South, who were both dependent on slavery, economically, and, yet, ambivalent and dubious in their complicity, but, perhaps, not quite as intimately acquainted with African-Americans themselves — at least not before his Presidency. In the film, he articulates this ignorance, when questioned by Mary’s servant. This adds to the mystery of what relates imaginative empathy to abstract ideals in the formation of political character, attitudes and policy.

This adds to the mystery of what relates imaginative empathy to abstract ideals in the formation of political character, attitudes and policy.

FDR, LBJ as well. Whatever it is, I count us damned lucky it exists.

Lincoln was white ?

So it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s the color of your skin that counts after all.

@278 Palindrome — sorry, I think that is a real misunderstanding of what happened in 1861. Lincoln stood up to slavery and fought it in 1861, period. Modern commenters have a hard time understanding this because they focus on immediate abolition in the old South and not on the crucial question of the expansion of slavery to new states and territories. This issue had been at the center of American politics for decades. Lincoln’s position was absolutely no expansion of slavery beyond the Old South states where it was fully established under the Constitution, and no compromise on this principle. It was clear to everyone that the internment of slavery in a small portion of the continent would lead to its gradual elimination. The South seceded and fought to avoid this outcome. Lincoln’s stand was of the highest importance, but we cannot see this today because of the near-exclusive focus on immediate abolition.

If you want an excellent contemporary description of the issue, see this 1861 article by Karl Marx , where he clearly lays out how the Southern slave power had come to dominate the union and how important the Republican stand against them was. A quote from the article:

“A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South… The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.

It’s certainly a relevant contrast with certain modern politicians who would, in similar circumstances, reach a compromise that involved invading Canada to spread slavery to the 58th parallel.

‘Hey they asked for the 59th – I had to pull a lot of strings to get that deal’

Palindrome @278

I think Lincoln was articulating the principle, which would hold the Union together, in the full knowledge that slavery could not survive a long or hard war. In this, he was exercising a conservative leadership. I doubt that there were many, who failed to understand that the war was about slavery, ultimately, and Lincoln’s careful phrasing was aimed at convincing more that slavery must end, if the war was to end on terms of continued union.

“271: Lincoln was white. And as everyone from John C. Calhoun to Wendell Phillips to John Brown understood, slavery was sustained by much much more than the slaveholders. I don’t think it requires all that much to say white Americans (and Europeans) ravaged and ruined people of African descent.”
—

Can we lay the same collective guilt or your shoulders for the incarceration rate of blacks today ? or any number of gross injustices in a society as grotesquely unequal as ours ?

Corey Robin, 285

slavery was sustained by much much more than the slaveholders. I don’t think it requires all that much to say white Americans (and Europeans) ravaged and ruined people of African descent.

Eric Foner, linked by Corey Robin, 235

The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women’s National Loyal League,

Yes I know about Sojourner Truth, and about Frederick Douglass’s support for the women’s suffrage movement; and about that movement’s vexed history. Also, I agree with Katherine, 61. But “white Americans (and Europeans)” were no more an undifferentiated group than were black Americans (and Europeans). You mar your case.

@292
Sorry, wrong thread. I’ll go post it in the right one. Apologies to CR and the commenting crew.

The timing for its release seems to be caculated, and the heroics overdone, the prior efforts of many was takin advantage of by the politicians as expected.

@31 Mark Field

The South did authorize blacks to serve, right at the end of the war (March 13, 1865).

On William Timberman’s 292 post–

Which thread did it belong in? Because it was interesting (not quite sure I understood all of it, but what I think I got I agreed with). And as someone else said, it did seem to fit here.

@Corey (300) thanks for the link. This is a much more completely realized description of what is missing than the NY op-ed piece.

Donald Johnson @ 301

Sorry, I probably should have specified which thread I’d meant to attach my 292 to, but I thought that the reference to Madonnas and whores would do the trick. Anyway, it was meant for CR’s follow-up to the post above: The Madonna/Whore Complex in American Politics.

I may be wrong, but in that context I think what I was driving at should be a little clearer.

I’ll try again

#290 “If you think slavery can be explained merely by the actions of the slaveholders, and not many many other white people… But it would be like trying to explain Nazism without mentioning the Germans,”

I really don’t know how to address something as clumsy and as insulting as this as a response to my attack on your unqualified “I don’t think it requires all that much to say white Americans (and Europeans) ravaged and ruined people of African descent”. I think I’ll just say that I, like some others here, saw your words as a version of “there are no innocents”, and leave it there.