Book Review: Abraham Lincoln & Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking
Abraham Lincoln & Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking. By Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 252 pp. $45.00.
Reviewed by Samuel Flowers
As more recent scholarship about the life of Abraham Lincoln continues to grow and evolve, it is safe to say that his memory in popular culture will also become more relevant to how historians interpret him and his times. Such is the case in a new monograph by coauthors Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli titled Abraham Lincoln & Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking. Wetta and Novelli use their study as a new tool to help better understand how Hollywood interpreted the women in Lincoln’s life and how those relationships also affected how both historians and the general public understood the sixteenth president’s major life events.
According to the authors, they argue that in today’s modern historiography there were two versions of depicting Abraham Lincoln; the “Good” great emancipator or the “Bad” colonizer and dictator. (3) Both interpretations of how we perceive Lincoln come from a partnership of Hollywood and early Lincoln biographers. Historians like Carl Sandburg and his multi-volume works not only inspired major motion pictures and plays that show how Lincoln lived, but also how the women around him influenced his life. Wetta and Novelli focus on a few different women in Lincoln’s life, but three are perhaps the most telling: Nancy Hanks, Ann Rutledge, and Mary Todd.
Nancy Hanks was Abraham’s biological mother, who died when he was very young. Early films and plays that incorporated the role of Nancy, depicted her as a Mother Mary-type figure who gave birth to the sainted, almost Christ-like American leader. This particular interpretation was largely due to historians like Sandburg and David Herbert Donald writing about the “Good” Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, fighting the evils of slavery. Hollywood used these historians’ interpretations as the basis for their films, and those movies then inspired how the general public perceived the relationship between Lincoln and his mother.
Hollywood depicted Ann Rutledge in film and memory as not only Lincoln’s first love, but his true love as well. Rutledge and Lincoln shared a courtship for some time until Ann died suddenly of typhoid fever in the summer of 1835. Although their relationship was relatively short, mediums like a 1938 Broadway play titled Young Mr. Lincoln and D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln depicted Abraham grieving the loss of Ann as though he had lost his mother all over again. The emphasis of Lincoln contemplating suicide after her death and the mediums depicting him still mourning even while being married to Mary Todd place a heavy significance on Ann’s influence on Abraham.
The last major female figure in Lincoln’s life that Wetta and Novelli discuss is his wife, Mary Todd. The authors argue that like Lincoln, there were two ways to interpret Mrs. Lincoln; the scorned wife whose depression and unhinged behavior drove Lincoln to episodes of despair, or the politician’s wife who gave of herself and was a devoted companion. The two authors argue that Mary Todd’s character depictions match well with the evolution of Lincoln’s historiography. What started off as a “Bad Mary” trope in films came to complete alternatively with Sally Fields’ nuanced performance of the president’s wife in director Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln.
Overall, Wetta and Novelli bring a new perspective to the ever-growing Lincoln historiography in terms of how we view him and the women who impacted his life, not strictly through an academic lens, but how Hollywood interpreted them in popular culture. One mild criticism of the book is its last chapter. In it, the authors examine Lincoln’s impact on 20th century actresses Shirley Temple and Marylin Monroe. Although Wetta and Novelli discus film projects that involved and inspired the two actresses, this chapter feels slightly out of place juxtaposed against the primary focus of the rest of the book. Other than that minor quibble, Abraham Lincoln & Women in Film is an interesting read for those wanting to learn more about Lincoln, Civil War women’s history, and the influence of popular culture on the history of Lincoln and his era.
Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches American History at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the significance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is currently researching the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned perpetuating Confederate myth and memory.
Speaking of Lincoln on film, we have not made a film about young Lincoln in over 70 years. It’s hard to believe that an American who has become so mythologized – let’s face it, he was a great and good man, but has been turned into marble by the Civil War History Revisionists – they even hand out a yearly award for anybody who can write the greatest fantasy about Lincoln while passing it off as historical fact – has not been depicted in his youth in so long. Did you ever see ‘The Thin Red Line’? In 1998, the second I saw Jim Caviezel, the film’s star, up on the big screen, especially in the scene where he’s sitting in the field talking with Sean Penn following his regiment’s first battle, I said, “There’s young Lincoln.” It’s a shame no one made such a film.
Everything I ever needed to know about the Civil War I learned in the great movies “Abe Lincoln Vs. Zombies” and “Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”, both of which came out in 2012!
Said nobody ever!!
I quite enjoyed ‘Lincoln the Vampire Hunter’ – very entertaining – but did not see the Zombies one. Too frightening.
To call Abraham Lincoln the ‘bad’ coloniser shows at best a total unawareness the there were two distinct perspectives or ‘branches’ of Black American colonisation; the first wherein it was an alternative form of American White Supremacy and the other, ‘Equality Abroad – Bringing America to the World’.
For most of his life, Abraham Lincoln did conceive of the scheme in the former terms, as had his political idol, Henry Clay.
But after the emergence of the USCT, like a high number of Americans on both sides, Lincoln had a change of perspective in his racial views to at least a significant extent because of his wartime experience and interactions with Black Americans.
In the ‘second branch’, Black American colonisation became a way of convening ‘equality abroad’, as now, Black Americans who emigrated would be given the same rights, governmental support/right of plea and most importantly of all, status and influence as ‘Americans abroad’ as their Whote American counterparts did from about the end of the Revolution to almost the start of WWII.
Its key to understand that in above era, Americans who left the country didn’t look upon themselves as leaving America; they saw themselves instead as ‘bringing America to the world’, with its self-proclaimedly ‘exceptionalism’ values, institutions, etc. Cornelius Van Horne of the CPR in Canada was an aberration in not adhering to this.
Lincoln thus reframed his conception of Black American colonisation along these lines, in light with many of his fellow Americans, both Black and White, who embraced a sense of ‘America abroad’ as a form of global ‘Manifest Destiny of Influence’.
I think the understanding of Mary Todd Lincoln was informed by both the understanding, or lack there of, of trauma and mental issues, as well as gender roles in the 19th century.