By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I shook hands with Gerald Ford after he left office and with Ronald Reagan before he took it. I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s cat, chatted with John F. Kennedy’s brother, met Barack Obama’s receptionist, and my wife helped (from a distance) George W. Bush open the 2002 Olympics. Despite these close encounters, I never met an American president, yet I feel like I know Abraham Lincoln.
I even have enjoyed great moments with Mr. Lincoln. Yes, that is the title of the animatronics Lincoln exhibition at Disneyland that I visited again recently with my family. Since our now-adult children were young, the last thing we do together on the last day of any visit to Disneyland, is walk into the Opera House on Main Street USA and watch the Lincoln show.
Of course, over the years, we also have exposed our children to a fuller Lincoln context than just Disney’s snapshot in Southern California. We travelled to Springfield, Illinois to tour the sixteenth president’s home, old law office, and memorial museum. We also visited his elaborate but somber final resting place in nearby Oak Ridge cemetery.
In Washington, D.C., we stood in silent awe reading his eloquent words engraved onto the granite walls of the Lincoln Memorial. We paid homage at Ford’s Theatre where he was shot, and in the Petersen house just across the street where he died. It was there, according to one biographer, that his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton proclaimed the great and famous Lincoln death bed epigraph, “Now he belongs to the ages.”
I have encouraged the family to read excellent Lincoln nonfiction books (Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, With Malice Towards None by Stephen B. Oates). We have also watched Lincoln movies, including the great historical drama produced by Stephen Spielberg in 2012, and the not-so-great film from the same year about Lincoln hunting vampires with his axe that split heads, not just rails.
A bust of Lincoln adorns my office, a kind bequest from the family of the man (Don Holbrook) who shared my Lincoln admiration and helped found the current iteration of our law firm. Although these all have been great moments with Mr. Lincoln, something regularly draws me back to the Disney Lincoln
It has been criticized at times, and sometimes for good reasons. It is, after all, Disney-ized. It assumes you know something about the topic and its history is abridged. Lincoln’s “speech” is pieced together from four distinct orations and taken out of temporal and substantive context. Maybe this is just what happens when you condense and simplify complex facts into a 15 minute program that tries to educate and entertain at the same time.
Nevertheless, I admire that Disney attempts, even if clumsily, to inject a small serious something into its otherwise whimsical fantasyland. I like the attraction’s musical prelude, a touching song called “Two Brothers” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcUyY-oadp8), which vividly depicts the horrible divisions of the American Civil War. Disney’s efforts to remember Lincoln have helped me show my children why the man should be remembered, and opened the door for our wider Lincolnesque explorations described above.
Disneyland’s Opera House also is the closest I ever will get to attend a live Lincoln speech. And so I watched him rise from his seat, and I listened to him “speak” once again, just a few months ago. These lines stood out:
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must be the author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The best thing about Disney’s Lincoln may be not that it helps us get know the man, but rather that it shows, even 150 years after his assassination, how well the man still knows us.
