Monday in Gettysburg was a day for the storytellers.
Steven Spielberg, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tony Kushner, and a slew of Civil War re-enactors all gathered in memory of one of the greatest storytellers of them all - Abraham Lincoln - and the 149th anniversary of his delivery of the Gettysburg Address.
"History at its best, I believe, is about telling stories ... and no president understood better the power of stories than Abraham Lincoln," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said. "Indeed in the Gettysburg Address we commemorate today, Lincoln translated the story of our country into words of enduring clarity and beauty, a country founded on the majestic idea that ordinary people could govern themselves."
Goodwin is
Spielberg took to the rostrum in the Soldiers' National Cemetery very humbled, he said, not just because he was "standing near where Lincoln stood when he recited what many people ... consider the most perfect prose poem ever penned by an American," but because of the sacrifice made by the men buried only a short distance away from his feet.
"The name of this place still resonates with the shuddering in the hearts of the American people," Spielberg said.
Gettysburg is the physical manifestation of the pain, trials, and tribulations of the Civil War, Spielberg said. It is also, he joked, the home of a large percentage of the country's Lincoln obsessors, of which he said he is now one.
"I wanted, impossibly, to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of 1½ centuries," Spielberg said of his movie, "even if only for 2½ hours and even if only in a
As a storyteller, said Spielberg, that is one of his main goals - "to enlist the imagination to bring what's lost back to us, to bring the dead back to life," he said.
Remembering Lincoln in this grand and revered way would have made the 16th president very proud, said Goodwin. She explained that even as a child Lincoln was very aware and fearful of his own mortality and was constantly searching for meaning in his life.
"He derived increasing comfort from the thought that if he could accomplish something worthy, something that would stand the test of time, his honor, his reputation, would outlive his earthly existence," Goodwin said.
This ambition to be forever remembered in the annals of history drove Lincoln to his greatest accomplishments, said Goodwin. She told the story of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, explaining that his hand was so tired from a day of handshaking with the public that he feared his signature would look weak.
"'If my hand trembles when I sign this,' he said, 'all who examine the document later will say, "he hesitated." Yet never in my life did I feel more certain that I was doing right. If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it,'" said Goodwin, repeating the words of Lincoln. "So he waited and waited until he could sign with a bold and clear hand."
Many of the same sentiments expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation were also brought to light in the Gettysburg Address. In his two-minute speech, Lincoln reminded the nation that it was about to embark upon a "new birth of freedom," one with more equality and an even stronger democracy than ever before.
The men buried at the Soldiers' National Cemetery died, said Spielberg, "testing that proposition that democracy can work not in the hands of angels ... but in the sometimes clumsy, sometimes bloody, error-prone hands of the ordinary people we are."
Lincoln's bold proposition continues to live on in modern history, in the hands of today's storytellers.
With the direction of Spielberg, the research of Goodwin and the words of Kushner, "Lincoln" brings to life t