History and story: Two tools for abiding in challenging times
Photograph by Pixabay via Pexels
Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot
As time goes on, I appreciate the practice of reading a book again after a period of years. It helps me appreciate the writer’s craft as well as my own growth as an attentive reader in the intervening years. Certainly, the Bible is one of those books, but there are other books that I reread — works of fiction and nonfiction and even a graphic novel or two for good measure.
I have learned the same practice applies to film. As pandemic restrictions changed, a local “art house” type cinema restarted its weekly schedule by calling upon the back catalog of films. Four years later, they continue to mix a couple of “vintage” films with new releases on their schedule.
Every month, a selection of films (usually grouped by an overarching theme) are available, allowing my wife and me the opportunity to see some films on the big screen for the first time. Recent offerings have included “Citizen Kane,” “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
With the United States in a sustained era of political upheaval, I think the older films are a comfort food for some. In other ways, they provide a glimpse into eras long past, where audiences had different attention spans, types of popular humor, and sometimes, cringeworthy moments of then-acceptable stereotypes, particularly about the role of women and racial/ethnic caricatures best left long into the past. (In its own recent celebration, Saturday Night Live modeled that truthful retrospective, presenting its past while acknowledging some tasteless choices over fifty years of lampooning American life and politics by showing these moments as the “In Memoriam” part of the show, when other shows recall those who died.)
The film I keep hoping our local theater will select soon is from director Steven Spielberg: his 2012 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. Set during the last months of his life, the film depicts Lincoln’s efforts in 1864 and 1865 to gain passage of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery within the United States while dealing with the Civil War still raging on.
The film was a big hit at the time, especially for Albany, NY, audiences, when in one moment of political intrigue, Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward offhandedly notes he has connections back home in New York State with the right people to get what they want.
Seward says to Lincoln, “If procuring votes with offers of employment is what you intend, I’ll fetch a friend from Albany who can supply the skulking men gifted at this kind of shady work. Spare me the indignity of actually speaking to Democrats. Spare you the exposure and liability.”[1]
The next two minutes of the film were lost as the local audience was laughing hysterically. We were at a screening just blocks away from the Albany state capital complex, a place well known for its political history and some instances where opaque strategies carried the day within its halls. (Not coincidentally, an ongoing local effort to launch a museum about political corruption continues.)
We need to revisit our past to bear the weight of the present. The burden is necessary, if we are to remain a democracy. The burden is necessary, if Christians are to read the Bible faithfully, where the earthly powers are more prone to agendas that eclipse the biblical call to be wary of Empire and for us to align more closely with those who are left at the margins.
The playwright Tony Kushner was asked to script the Spielberg film. Kushner consulted historical materials as well as the best-selling history “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Admittedly, Kushner engaged in some storytelling himself, a craft somewhere between dramatization and dramatic license that few films crisscross successfully.
With the Lincoln film, Spielberg and Kushner created a film worthy of award season buzz (Day-Lewis won the “Best Actor” Golden Globe and Oscar) and much complaint from historians. Responding to his critics, Kushner detailed in various interviews his methodology for drawing together the script. He quoted directly from some sources. At other times, he composited from period sources to create dialogue for the characters. And yes, he opted at other times to create dialogue drawn from his imagination.
In December 2012, journalist Bill Moyers interviewed Kushner. Moyers cited a scene as a place where Kushner wrote a bit of his own created dialogue. Moyers asks if these are “Lincoln’s actual words or Tony Kushner’s dramatic license?” Kushner replies, “You know, I can’t remember with that line.” Smiling, Moyers says, “You don’t know where you start and Lincoln stops?”
Kushner writes a compelling story, yet he leaves some room for his own creativity to shape the film into something less ready for the History Channel, let alone a film that makes muster with some American history scholars. He wrote a film script able to attract today’s movie audience. He hoped the Lincoln film made us aware of the history as well as the pressing questions such history leaves us with many generations later.
As I left the theater after seeing Lincoln back in 2012, I realized Kushner and Spielberg asked “big picture” questions for modern day America and our own issues of the day. The film entertains and provokes, leaving me with a profound sense of the difficulties we face in maintaining democracy and freedom for all, not just some.
Navigating the times at hand in 2025, I realize we need to revisit our past to understand, or perhaps better said, bear the weight of the present. The burden is necessary, if we are to remain a democracy. The burden is necessary, if Christians are to read the Bible faithfully, where the earthly powers are more prone to agendas that eclipse the biblical call to be wary of Empire and for us to align more closely with those who are left at the margins.
Lincoln knew this as he addressed the nation in his 1861 inaugural address. He closed with these words:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot serves as the Associate Executive Minister for the American Baptist Churches of New York State.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[1] Kushner, Lincoln: The Screenplay, New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2012, p. 26.
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