Good evening and welcome tonight's meeting of Commonwealth Club of California. I am Joe Epstein, a past President of the Commonwealth Club's Board of Governors. It is my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker, Andrew Ferguson, Senior Editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of "Land of Lincoln". Pulitzer Prize-winning Author Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote the following about Andre Ferguson's new book, "Land of Lincoln". She said,"Writing with humor, inside imagination and warmth, Andy Ferguson has accomplished a most unusual feat. He gives us a fresh look at Abraham Lincoln and his impact on our country. As the title suggests, "Land of Lincoln" is also a wonderful and serious book about the enduring impact of one of our greatest Presidents. P.J. O'Rourke says that Andrew Ferguson is the single most important writer about American politics and that Abraham Lincoln was the single most important American politician. Before he grew up to be one of Washington's most respected reporters and editors Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff. And like so many citizens of Illinois he hung photos of Lincoln from his bedroom wall. He memorized the Gettysburg Address and repeatedly read the Second Inaugural Speech and the "Letter to Mrs. Bixby." Tonight you'll hear Ferguson tell us about his curiosity fueled Journey "Coast-to-coast" through our contemporary Lincoln Nation encountering everything from hatred for our 16th President to adoration. Ferguson's acute interest was heightened when he read a curious headline in a local newspaper that stated and I quote, "Lincoln Statue Stirs Outrage In Richmond". Thus his journey began, to gather as much information as he could, traveling from California to Rhode Island. Andrew Ferguson as I said is the Senior Editor at The Weekly Standard and has written for The New Yorker, the New Republic, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and many others as well. Please welcome The New York Time's, best selling author for nonfiction, Andrew Ferguson. Thank you Joe for that nice introduction. I don't want to disappoint anybody but I tell my publisher that the main reason I became a writer was so I wouldn't have to be a talker. Unfortunately that doesn't work any more in the book business, especially since I had this blindingly original insight that no one had ever had before, I would write a book about Abraham Lincoln. But, actually as it turns out, and as that could be discovered, there are rather a lot of Lincoln books to the point where any author of a Lincoln book has to answer the first question, why write another which is a nice way of saying, how dare you write another? By the less count there are more than 14,000 books that have been written on Abraham Lincoln which makes him second only to Jesus and just above Napoleon and Barry Bonds, I think. Actually I got a sense of how crowed the field was earlier on in my research. I was down at Springfield, Illinois which of course is Lincoln's hometown and there was a big Lincoln conference going on and this room was full of about a 100 Lincoln buffs and a few scholars and hobbyists and enthusiasts and people in off the street. And the moderator suddenly stopped and asked all for a show of hands. He said, how many people here, just out of curiosity, are writing a book about Abraham Lincoln? And of course I happily I raised my hand; and half the people in the room raised their hands. That's not an exaggeration. I started to see this everywhere I went. There is for example, this Lincoln glut - we have started running out of titles for Lincoln books. In fact, every memorable phrase from his speeches has been used from, "With Malice Toward None" to "With Charity for all". There is a book "Of the People", there is one "By the People", "For the People". In the last few years, there has been books called "The Sword of Lincoln", one called "Lincoln's Sword", there is "Lincoln and Grant", there is "Grant and Lincoln", there is "Lincoln's Generals", Lincoln and the Generals", "The Lincoln nobody knows", "The Lincoln no one knows", there is the "The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln", "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln", "Abraham Lincoln's World", "Abraham Lincoln's Intimate World", there is "Lincoln's Virtues", and "The Virtuous Lincoln", there is "In Lincoln's footsteps", "In the footsteps of the Lincoln's" and for variety sake, "In Lincoln's Footprints". At last count there are at least three books that I know of called the "The Real Lincoln". And I suppose that gets to the point which is that each of those books called "The Real Lincoln" presents a Lincoln that is totally different from the Lincoln presented in the other two. In fact, that's one of the things that sort of inspired my own book, "The Land of Lincoln" which is not to be confused with "The Living Land of Lincoln", which came out three years ago before I got this idea. Over the last generation or so there just seem to be so many Lincolns running around. Every one seemed to be have his own. As was mentioned I was I grew up as a Lincoln buff in the early to mid 1960's. And from this massive figure of my youth, where he seemed to hover over the country, almost this sort of universal icon; he seemed to have been shrunk and cut down to size, cut to fit every ones individual needs and preconceptions and biases. It's as though this great national possession that we have had been privatized. And again you see it in the books. Just in the last few years we've had books proving that Lincoln was a Fundamentalist Christian which was written by a Fundamentalist Christian. We had another that proved that his greatness lay in his struggle with clinical depression which is written by a journalist who struggled with clinical depression. Most famous of all I guess in 2005, there was a book proving that Lincoln was gay, written by a gay activist. We even had a book arguing that if Lincoln were alive today, his political beliefs would be essentially those of Mario Cuomo's and guess who wrote that book. But what I wanted to know was, wasn't there a LincolnLincoln? You know, a universal Lincoln, that we could all lay claim to and draw inspiration from as earlier generations had. And I though I could get to him sort of indirectly, may be by going through the people who obsess over him, who hate him or revere him, imitate him, study him, teach him, collect him, and make him otherwise the center of their lives. One of the first places where I went was back to my hometown at Chicago where the Lincoln myth in certain important ways first began after his death or his martyrdom as it was then called. Chicago was home to one of my heroes Jane Addams who founded Hull House on the city's west side in the 1880's to sort of bring in this massive waves of immigrants who were reaching our shores from Central Europe and Ireland. And Jane Addams' goal was, as she put it to Americanize by holding out Lincoln as sort of the exemplary American, as the guy that any one could be like if he was sort of behaved like him and learned from him. And I wanted to see if that was still going on in Chicago. And I was fortunate enough to come up across a man - I'll read about briefly here, and his wife, excuse me, named Oscar Esche, a Thai immigrant who has a restaurant up on the city's North-West side. I was on my way to meet Oscar Esche who had a Lincoln statue of his own I wanted to see. I read about Escher and his statue in a wonderful book called "Never a City So Real" by Alex Kotlowitz; about the difficulties immigrants face in Chicago these days now that Americanization, both the word and the idea seems so weirdly quaint, a phrase not just from another time but almost in other language, a civic language which is that is dead as Babylonian. Mr. Esche owns the Thai little home café in the city's Albany Park neighborhood. To get there you take Lincoln Avenue from where it starts at the Southern tip of Lincoln Park, by the statue of Lincoln by Saint-Gaudens and you drive north on Lincoln Avenue for several miles, pass the Lincoln Restaurant and the Lincoln National Bank and the Lincoln Life Insurance company and the Lincoln Towing Company and the Lincoln Pest control Service till you get to Lincoln Square. Or you turn left and pretty soon you are in Polyglot, Chicago. Mr Esche's restaurant is on a stretch of Kedzie Avenue tucked in among tucked in among the Casa Blanca Hair Salon, the Arab jewelry outlet, a Supermercado, Marbella's bakery, DeSuno's Burrito - excuse me; almost ahead Book Keeping plus the Star Bucks. The Thai little home cafe is in a converted storefront too. But inside it's neat and homey. A young woman came out to greet me and brought me back to meet oh thank you, ecstasy excuse me, I am really sorry. Mr. Esche came out to greet me and brought me back to the back of the restaurant were he was sitting with an elderly woman, rolling forks and knives and paper napkins for the evening rush hour. Mr. Esche is tall and handsome, in his late 80's I would guess with sharp features and large black Buddy Holly glasses. He looked at me and nodded. I told him I had read about him in Kotlowitz's book and I was intrigued by what Kotlowitz had written about him and Abraham Lincoln and would he mind telling me a little more. He didn't say any thing but he turned instead to the old woman at the table. He spoke for a minute or two in Thai and I heard him say the word not that I heard him saying the word Lincoln and her face suddenly broke into a smile. She rose from her seat, she was very short, scarcely five feet, but commanding with a wide friendly face humorous and shrewd. She extended her soft hand for me to shake and Mr. Esche proceeded to translate what she said from the Thai. My wife says we move here in 1973, opened the third Thai restaurant in Chicago, and we see on the license plate all the words, Land of Lincoln. She wonders who is this Lincoln. So she gets a book from a friend to read about him. She says in our country it is our custom that we pay respect to the person who is in charge of the country. And here it is Lincoln's country. He is the head man in history. You see him every where. Every one loves him. My wife reads the book and we realize we must go, pay respects to this man. He is a very great man. He helps the poor. He tells every one that they are equal, that no man is better than any other man. This is very important. Every one is equal. Every one has the same right. This is what he says and he makes sure the country is this way. Every year the Esches then would bring down bring their children down to Springfield to the tomb of Lincoln and they would have a picnic on the grounds. And one year they brought back a statue of Lincoln, the Daniel Chester French Statue that sits in the Lincoln Memorial. We bought this statue to show our respect, he said and he to show their respect they put it on the back bar, next to all the Beefeater bottles and the Johnnie Walker black bottles and we put this here and ever since that time we have the statue our business never go down, always go up. I asked about the Esche's children, when they were younger did they learn about Lincoln in school. Mr. Esche translated the question to Mrs. Esche and she shrugged. We don't know, he said. We make sure that Lincoln the children know what we tell them. We make sure that they understand Lincoln and be grateful to him for our country and for letting us live here and bringing us this good life he make for us. We pass this down to them; they will pass it down too. We must remember and respect. Finally Mr. Esche showed me a plate of Chicken Satay that sat behind the Lincoln statue. As the final form of commemoration every morning he and his wife set out a meal for Lincoln in the restaurant next to his statue. Its full meal, he said, everything, entree, dessert, appetizer, drink also. We change the meal every day so it's always different. We give him every thing. Mrs. Esche interrupted. Yes, Mr. Esche said, everything but no pork. Oh, I said. He said we do not want to be disrespectful. I guess he saw my puzzled look. He is Abraham Lincoln. Yes, he said, Jewish people, they don't eat pork. When a Thai restaurant owner in an Arab neighborhood builds a Buddhist shrine to a Jewish President, my interest has peaked. And I knew I was headed in the right direction. In my business there is those are the sort of superstitious that believe in the journalism gods and I knew early on that the journalism gods were smiling on me when a friend called him, told me about an organization called the ALP which is the Abraham Lincoln Presenters. And it's actually an organization of men who believe it or not, make a living dressing up like Abraham Lincoln. And I thought yes, thank you, this is very good, I will go, write about these guys. But then I really knew I had hit it big when I found that they were holding their annual convention in Santa's Lodge in Santa Clause, Indiana, which is a little cross roads town in the southern toe of Indiana and Santa's Lodge is the the only restaurant, I mean the only actually the only restaurant and the only hotel there. So I drove down, it was a beautiful spring weekend in April. I parked my car in the parking lot and I walked in through doors of Santa's Lodge and there was you know Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was blaring out of a tiny speaker and there were a little snow drifts made out of cotton balls and animatronics elves happily hitting their little work benches and you know little tiny reindeer kind of moving about like this on on a rail and 150 man dressed just like the Abraham Lincoln staring at me. And the first thing that occurred to me was a lot of these guys were dressed like Lincoln but they didn't really look like him at all. I mean some of them were about this tall and about this wide many of them were bald which Lincoln was not. There was one guy in particular, I remember, who did look quite a bit like Lincoln, astonishingly so. He had Lincoln's coloring and he was very tall and he had the hair just right, he was slender and and I was talking to him you know, complementing him because you know, I said, you really you really got it down. I mean you have even got you know the famous Lincoln mole on the crease of your cheek. He says, oh here, you can have it. And he dug is fingers in and I reared back and I turned away. What he did that was clip the eraser of a number two pencil and he poxied it onto his cheek which he does every morning, to kind of getting himself in the mood to be Abe everyday. But of course the oddest thing about it was the given male vanity the oddity that anyone would really want to look like Lincoln at all. But actually even Lincoln himself understood that point those I will read here briefly if I can find it. Lincoln himself wrote this part. If any personal description about me is thought desirable, Lincoln once wrote, it may be said I am in height 6 feet 4 inches nearly, lean in flesh, weighing on an average 180 pounds, dark complexion, coarse black hair and grey eyes, no other marks or brands recollected. This was typical Lincolnian understatement. A good 7 inches over average height, always ill dressed, hair uncombed, loose jointed and high waisted, narrow at the upper chest with long gumby arms enormous hands and feet, Lincoln was by all accounts one of the most extraordinary looking man any of his contemporaries had ever seen. Extraordinary is the least prejudicial term I can think of. Others weren't nearly so kind. I have seen in Washington and in the West several public monograph appearance wrote his political ally, Carl Schultz but none who looks quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque is Lincoln. Even as a boy, a childhood friend remarked, he was dried up and shriveled. The man who knew him best, Joshua Speed, wrote he was a long, gawky, ugly, shapeless man. And these were his friends. A few of the Abes of the ALP take offense therefore when you point out that many of the members look even less like Abraham Lincoln than for example your grandmother does. Scanning the lobby at Santa's Lodge, I noticed men who were dead ringers for Abe and many more who weren't. Dr. Dan Bassuk, their President, for example, was short and bald while Lincoln was neither. And every syllable of Dr. Bassuk's speech betrayed his urban north eastern upbringing in contrast to what acquaintances recalled, as Lincoln's country draw. But because Dr. Bassuk's understanding of his hero is essentially spiritual, Lincoln is as close to perfection as any man could be expected to be, Dr. Bassuk once told me. Dr. Bassuk never considered this lack of height, hair or draw to be a deterrent to his vocation and vocation is the word more often than not the call comes unbidden. Dr. Bassuk heard it some time in the late 1970s; it began with a beard he said. He grew the beard, a Lincoln like affair, trimmed down almost to the jaw line, no moustache because he liked the austerity of the style and before too long he said, people began calling him Abe. Then one thing led to another. Talking to other Abes I discovered that this is how it almost always happens. A fellow minding his own business decides to grow a beard. Soon multiple people are telling him that he bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. It doesn't matter that very often these people are wrong. So strong is lure of Lincoln that when people tell a man with a beard that he looks like the greatest of all Americans he believes it. And if is of a curious cast of mind he begins learning about Lincoln. And pretty soon someone gives him a stove-pipe hat as a gag or ask him to appear at a child's birthday party or lead the Memorial Day Parade and then he gets it in his head to make a living out it. Well if you can imagine making a living at it with was, preoccupied a great deal of the discussion of the weekend of the Abraham Lincoln Presenters, no matter how early or late in the day, what kind of session we were having, a plenary session or a breakout session, they would always dress to the nines in their Lincoln clothes with a top hat, they don't call it a costume by the way, as one of them told me, clowns wear costumes, we were suits. Now the one odd thing I noticed about this if you are in a convention with in any gathering place with a 150 people who all dressed in the same black frock coat and black boots and black pants and stove-pipe hat, you don't know what the dress code is. I didn't know whether I should wear a tie, so I dressed in usual kakis and loafers and Izod shirt, which is the native dress of my people and but it sort of it was a fly on the wall through some of this and this is the passage I record in which, during one big plenary they addressed the question of how to drum up business which is always a problem if you make a living as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator. This is sort of a brief colloquy that happened while I was there. The seminar was opened up into a free wheeling discussion about how to make a living. Schools, it's generally agreed present the best profit potential for the entrepreneurial Abe but how do you generate business. Get in to a car and drive, said a no nonsense Abe from Georgia. He said he often travels cold to new parts of the country. There is simply no substitute for it, sometimes I can get 20 schools in a day, I might get four or five bookings, that sure pays the grocery bill. Another Abe from Illinois rose from his chair to disagree with that approach. Where I come from, you show up unannounced at a great school, dress like this, he flapped his lapels glumly, and the chances are very high that they will call the police. They sure will, said an Abe sitting next to him whose voice seem weighted down with painful experience. In that case, no nonsense Abe said, when you hit a new town you should find the Superintendent of schools and ask for permission to speak to his district's school principals You can try to sent a mailing in advance but that wont work he said, important people get lots of mail. Besides they want to see you, they want Abe, you need to put yourself before the people who sign the checks. Others suggested attending conference of educators, event planners or booking agents and doing the presentation for them as an advertisement for free. Maybe that works maybe it don't, said another Abe bitterly. But oh how they love that word 'free'. This lead to the dicey question of money. How much, said one of the younger Abes, should we charge. There was an awkward silence followed by some hemming and hoeing in the ballroom. Nobody likes to talk about money. Finally, Dr. Bassuk, the bald President of the ALP who was seated at the front of the room spoke up, come now, he said, this is nothing to be ashamed of. As an Abe you deserved to be paid. This is our livelihood. Of course we must be reasonable in our fees because really this is not about the money, we want to enrich the educational experience of children and adults. That's why they choose us, is it not? Suddenly Dr. Bassuk seemed gripped by rhetorical urge, he rose to his feet, "my dear friends, they are tired of the magic shows, they are tired of the dance troops, the cute animal acts, the disc jockeys. If you got a good product they will snatch it up". There were murmurs of ascend. "And do we have a good product, do we I say we do. This this is what they want" he doffed his hat and his bald head shown. There were more murmurs of ascend. "Bottom line", said Dr. Bassuk, returning to his seat, "$200 in appearance at a minimum please, let's do try to keep the prices up". Now if anybody is from the Justice Department Antitrust, I hope you don't go after these poor guys. But they do lead a difficult life. And I although I spent this weekend with them and came away deeply affected by them and and touched in fact, because with them, as I kept traveling around I started to see sort of glimmers of this Lincoln that I have been looking for. I went to you know, Providence Rhode Island and down to Florida and up to the Pacific North West, I went to Beverley Hills, California where I found myself sitting cross legged on the floor of a vault in a mansion in the hills above Beverley Hills with a woman who is the greatest Lincoln collector alive, you know, has the most amazing collection of Lincoln stuff in private hands and she was just handing me things documents and one of Lincoln's one of the three Lincoln top hats that we know survived, that she has it there. She had brought out Mary Lincoln's undergarments. She had Lincoln's wallet and his eye glass case and she even I discovered as we were walking through her house, she pointed to a piece of crockery and she said, oh that's the chamber pot Lincoln used in the White House. And I stopped and I looked at it and I said, you own Abraham Lincoln's chamber pot, which is one of these sentenced you never think you are going to say in real life. And she kind of stopped and she said, you know I do, as if it never occurred to her either, that that she owned Abraham Lincoln but from the stuff that she had she was able to conjure up some kind of essence of Lincoln or or so she thought. And as this Lincoln that endures started to emerge, this Lincoln that can still speak to us ended back in Springfield and learnt a story that I close the book with. It's a story about a very old man in his late 80s who had come to Springfield from his home and Czechoslovakia. He was looking for the same Lincoln that I was. And I will just tell part of his story as it was explained to me by the head door man at the Springfield Hilton about a week after it happened. Frank Walkers is the doorman's name. And he had said that about a week before there had been a commotion in the lobby and he had gone over to see what the problem was and there was this very old, stooped man who explained to Frank that he had spent half his life time to get to Springfield, and he had finally made it. And this is Frank telling me the story. It took him 40 years to save enough money to get here. But he made it, Frank told me. Then the man tells me this story. Suddenly he stands up straight as he can be while he tells me, he said he had been in a concentration camp, Frank said. He pulled up his sleeve when he said this. Every time he mentioned the concentration camp he pulled up his sleeve and you could see the numbers there. He said he knew about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from when he learnt about them in school as a boy in Czechoslovakia. Now here is what's interesting, Frank said. When he was in the concentration camp and he was all alone in his cell, it was the worst time in his life and he didn't think he could go on anymore. And he said Mr. Lincoln came to him Mr. Lincoln stood right in front of him just like I am standing here in front of you and Lincoln said to him, you will never forget. All men are created equal; this is true for all men for all times. And these men who would do this thing to you, who put you here, they are no better than you. You are their equal because all men are created equal. You keep remembering this and you persevere, you will be all right. Well Frank told me, this is what the gentlemen said in his broken English, I don't know about ghosts, I am skeptical, but this is what the man said. I get a chilled thinking about it. I told them I did too. Well Frank went on; from this time onward the man says he knew he was going to be all right. He knew he was going to persevere and he vowed, if he ever got out of that concentration camp he would come to Springfield to thank Mr. Lincoln. The man's name was Henry Duvin and I close the book with the story of what happened to him when he finally got to Springfield in a way that sort of run down Midwestern city embraced him. It's as inspirational a story as any of us could ever hope to find and it's a reminder of why Lincoln means so much and why we keep writing all these books about him. Thank you.
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