By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
Dana Prodoehl and Anna Thompson Hajdik presented lectures in the Spring 2014 Fairhaven Lecture Series, “The Legacy and Lessons of the Age of Lincoln,” on Feb. 24 and March 3, respectively. Prodoehl and Hajdik are colleagues in the Department of Languages and Literatures at UW-Whitewater, where Prodoehl is an assistant professor and Hajdik is a full-time lecturer.
Prodoehl gave her audience of 70-plus new ways to think about the lasting influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Until Tom’s Cabin,” published in 1852. She packed a lot of information in her talk, entitled “Revisiting ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in the Twentieth Century.”
She began by correcting the misconception that upon meeting Stowe at the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” In fact, that was a contrived anecdote publicized by her daughter in 1896 on Stowe’s death.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” first published as a serial in the abolitionist periodical “The National Era,” immediately gained notoriety as a novel. The reactions ranged widely from “spot on” to “not strong enough” to “complete hogwash.”
The novel went on to become the best-selling novel of the 19th century and the second best-selling book of that century, following the Bible.
After providing a snapshot of the primary characters and plot lines, Prodoehl said that although the novel’s connections with the War Between the States are tenuous at best, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” did help to create the genre of protest literature and even to define the “American” novel.
After falling out of favor following the Civil War and Stowe’s death, interest in the novel re-emerged during the middle third of the 20th century, especially among African Americans authors whose critical appraisals of the novel ranged widely.
Richard Wright, author of “Uncle Tom’s Children” published in 1938, described the influence of Stowe’s novel as keeping African Americans from civil rights, not leading them toward civil rights.
In 1949 James Baldwin wrote that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is a “very bad novel” whose sentimentality is “the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel … and the signal of secret and violent inhumanity.”
In a 1952 edition of the novel, Langston Hughes described it as “a good story, exciting in incident, sharp in characterization and threated with humor.”
In recent years, the racial stereotypes depicted in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” have to some extent overshadowed its historical impact in the antislavery movement.
Prodoehl suggested that the changing design for the novel’s cover over several different editions have hinted at changing perspectives about its central message.
Near the end of her remarks, Prodoehl cited the recent acclaim generated by “12 Years a Slave” as indicating the continuing national discussion about the social history of African Americans – though evidently without any insider information that the film would be awarded the Oscar for the Best Picture of the Year on March 2.
Changing with the times
In “Lincoln’s Long Shadow: Portrayals of Abraham Lincoln in American Popular Culture,” Hajdik treated her audience of about 60 to an intriguing exploration of five pictures of the 16th president that generally blend at least some fact with a good dose of fiction.
Hajdik warned that her lecture would not be as much about Lincoln himself or his accomplishments as a lawyer, statesman or president but about “how Lincoln has been remembered and interpreted in American popular culture, how our nation has made meaning from this man’s life and death, his accomplishments, his image and perhaps most significantly, his memory.”
As was the case with Prodoehl’s argument that influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” since its publication more than 150 years ago has continued even as it has evolved over time, Hajdik also suggested that the view of Lincoln in popular culture has changed over time but has remained important.
The vitality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Abraham Lincoln over the years attests to their quintessentially American character.
“Even in the age of the Internet, Twitter, and other social networking sites,” Hajdik said, “Abraham Lincoln’s image is adapted and reshaped for each new age we live in.”
Hajdik combined excerpts from poetry, film clips, and slides of cartoons, illustrations and statues, to present five commonly held conceptualizations of Lincoln, beginning with Lincoln as “Honest Abe” and the “Railsplitter” “frontier American.” Lincoln’s political opponents actually used this image of an “’Awe, shucks!” Lincoln to depict him as an “unrefined buffoon, kind of rough around the edges. Someone who would rather engage in storytelling and moralizing than in policy making.”
A second image of Lincoln is that of the “self-made man” who lived a life of “upward mobility from log cabin to the Whitehouse.” Hajdik offered a brief excerpt from the 1930 film “Young Mr. Lincoln” in which Henry Fonda portrayed the lanky Lincoln as a self-educated community leader with a strong moral core. This vision of Lincoln was especially “soothing” and “hopeful” for Americans living during the Great Depression.
The view of Lincoln as the “savior of the union” immediately emerged following his death due to the fact that he was assassinated on Good Friday, Apr. 14, 1865, leading journalists to draw parallels between “Lincoln the Martyr” and Jesus Christ. One journalist noted that “one of the great tragedies of his untimely death was that it forever more made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln.” Hajdik noted that illustration of Lincoln ascending into heaven, accompanied by angels or George Washington “put (Lincoln) on a pedestal from which he has truly never come down.”
Lincoln’s identification with ordinary Americans was inherent in his portrayal as the “man of the people” who himself “bore the weight and anxiety of a nation at war.” This image also differentiates Lincoln from other earlier presidents, including Washington, Adams and Jefferson who were upper class, aristocratic landowners. “[Lincoln’s] log cabin roots,” Hajdik said, “cement his reputation as relatable to the entirely of the U.S. population.”
Hajdik offered that the image of Lincoln as “the great emancipator” is “arguably the most popular way he’s remembered in post World War II America” and the reason for Lincoln’s “identification with the civil rights movement.” She described the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., as “such a hallowed piece of ground in our national discourse” about civil rights. At the same time, associating Lincoln with civil rights is somewhat ironic given “the fact that Lincoln the man held rather ambivalent views about slavery, especially as a political candidate.”
Hajdik ended her lecture in describing recent events associated with Lincoln, including the election of Barak Obama whose biography parallels Lincoln’s in several respects (humble origins, an Illinois lawyer who spent 8 years in Illinois state legislature and 2 years in US congress before running for president) and the acclaim garnered by Doris Keans Goodwin’s 2005 book, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” and Steven Spielberg’s 2012 motion picture, “Lincoln,” upon which it is based.
“No American’s life has been documented more fully, commemorated more often, and admired more intensely than Abraham Lincoln’s,” Hajdik said. “His life, at least in part, has come to embody the best of American mythology because it personifies egalitarianism, populism, quality, individualism and sacrifice.”
The next lecture in the Fairhaven Lecture Series will be on March 10 at 3 p.m. when Richard Haven, Emeritus Professor of Communication at UW-Whitewater, will present a lecture entitled, “Reinventing America: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”
All lectures are free and open to the public and are held on Mondays at 3 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 W. Starin Rd., Whitewater. Street parking is available adjacent to the building.
Links to videos of lectures, including those from prior series, can be found at http://www.uww.edu/conteduc/fairhaven.
