Wrestling Lincoln
The Source
Now a week or so past Lincoln’s 203rd birthday, I’m reminded that he was a wrestler long before he became President. Many tales still drift around the New Salem woods of the long-legged Kentucky boy who crashed into the dam at Petersburg and soon became known as a reader, thinker, and one pretty good wrestler. The most famous tale involves his fight with Jack Armstrong of the Clary’s Grove Boys, and there are three differing stories about the fight, with Lincoln ending up either as the victor, the loser, or the co-winner in a draw. In any case, our tallest President could tussle. I can sympathize with Jack Armstrong since I’ve been wrestling with our 16th Prez for a number of years. In some 25 years I’ve had the pleasure of writing seven plays about Lincoln and each one has involved at least one of us getting thrown to the ground. A word about dramatizing historical figures: It’s tough. You are never going to make everyone happy. I was asked to write a show for Mary Todd Lincoln to be presented all summer at the Old State Capital in Springfield. My instructions were to pen a one-act play about Mrs. Lincoln on the day she moved out of the White House. I did. In fact, I can remember doing the final draft in Taylorville’s seediest motel with snow actually blowing through the cracks around the windows. It gave me a real “prairie” feeling, I guess. I presented the script to the historical powers that be and in their words, “We really like it, but it seems so dark…so sad.” Dark? Sad? Her husband had just been assassinated and she’d been forced to leave her home. Should Mary have broken into a chorus of “Happy Days are Here Again!”? Of course the biggest mistake you can make in writing historical drama is to turn out something that’s historically incorrect, and it’s been my observation that in Central Illinois there’s a “Lincoln expert” to be found approximately every four feet. A group in Philadelphia recently approached me to write a play with three characters….Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and George Washington. Their closing admonition: “Of course it must fulfill vigorous historical standards.” Huh? I searched my reference books and Google for any occasion on which Washington, King and Lincoln chatted together and there are none to be found. A similar request came from the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. I received something to the effect of, “Mr. Bradbury, we know that you are a capable playwright on historical topics. We are considering an on-going play to be presented for the tourist crowd featuring the four Presidents depicted on Mt. Rushmore.” Again, a request for an historically accurate presentation of the meeting of four men of which only two had actually met. And when it comes to Lincoln, the problem becomes even more bothersome. Kennedy was a President. Taft was a President. Lincoln has become a god. Any playwright knows that gods make lousy drama. They walk around on clouds, their noses never run, and they never go to the bathroom. There are some really interesting, humanizing things about Abraham Lincoln, but no one wants to hear them. He was named after his grandfather who’d been killed by a Native American, but we’d rather not mention that. He had to bail his father out of a financial mess, and didn’t attend his own daddy’s funeral. He was more than a bit hen-pecked as a husband and as a disciplinarian to his sons…well….he abstained. He told ribald jokes and the rumors of his dilly-dallyings in Beardstown may or not be true. In other words, Honest Abe was honesty human. Local actor Gene Ferguson once portrayed Newton Bateman, the state’s first Superintendent of Education, based on Bateman’s own words of how Lincoln had once pronounced his deep religious faith in a conversation about Springfield preachers. When we put this scene in The Shadow of Giants at the Morgan County courthouse, a Springfield historian objected. He said, “Lincoln didn’t say that,” to which Bob Crowe and I answered, “Bateman said he did.” I love it when you can leave them to argue with a dead man. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’d rather see our heroes as who we wished them to be rather than who they were. That’s a shame. Lincoln unadorned remains one of the greatest men in our history, and the next time I wrestle with Lincoln I intend to let him win.