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When Steve Spielberg’s movie "Lincoln" came out Time
magazine featured interviews with him and his historical advisor on the film,
Doris Kearns-Goodwin. Spielberg said the movie is based on part of Goodwin’s
book, Team of Rivals,
because he was so impressed with her scholarship and the great detail and
abundance of historical facts in the book. Goodwin herself wrote in Time
that she spent ten years researching and writing the book to assure audiences
that the movie was in fact very, very well researched. (This project was
commenced shortly after she was kicked off the Pulitzer Prize committee and
PBS for confessing to plagiarism related to an earlier book of hers).
Tim’s cover story included another article by another
historian, in order to further persuade Americans that the movie portrays The
True Story about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution
that ended slavery. Another major theme of the movie, one which is accurate
but not developed nearly enough, is how much of a political conniver, liar
and manipulator Lincoln was, and how he ignored the law and the Constitution
in myriad ways. This was brought out in the movie so that the punditry could
then editorialize about how President Obama should be "more like
Lincoln" and ignore any and all constitutional constraints on
presidential powers. The punditry did indeed behave in exactly that way
before and after the November election.
A couple of years before the movie came out Goodwin was a pervasive
presence on various news programs proclaiming how brilliant and magnanimous
Lincoln was to have appointed several former political rivals to his cabinet
and praising Obama for doing the same (keeping Bush’s Defense Secretary, for
instance). In an LRC article entitled "Team of Liars" I pointed out
that numerous presidents had done exactly the same thing for generations
prior to the Lincoln presidency; the main theme of Goodwin’s Team of
Rivals is therefore trivial and false. Nevertheless, these instances are
examples of how dishonest "historians" like Doris Kearns-Goodwin
attempt to twist and manipulate history in service of the state.
Yours truly recognized the Spielberg movie as fraudulent from the
beginning. In another LRC article entitled "Spielberg’s Upside-Down
History" I pointed out that Harvard’s Pulitzer prize-winning historian
David Donald, the preeminent mainstream Lincoln historian of our time, wrote
in his biography of Lincoln (page 545) that Abe in fact had almost nothing
whatsoever to do with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, contrary to
the main story line of Spielberg’s movie. In fact, as Donald wrote, when
asked by genuine abolitionists in Congress if he would assist them in getting
the Amendment passed, Lincoln refused. (He did struggle mightily, however, to
try to get a first Thirteenth Amendment, known as the Corwin Amendment,
passed in 1861 that would have enshrined slavery explicitly in the U.S
Constitution).
To my surprise, a member of Congress recently noticed a glaring
falsehood in Spielberg’s "Lincoln" and called him out on it.
Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut was sitting in the movie theater when
he was informed by the film that Connecticut congressmen voted against the
Thirteenth Amendment. He smelled a rat, and contacted the Congressional
Research Service, which informed him that the "facts" portrayed in
the movie are false; the entire Connecticut delegation voted FOR the
Thirteenth Amendment.
Congressman Courtney wrote to Spielberg asking him to correct the
inaccuracy in the DVD version of the movie but was ignored. Spielberg was
painted into a corner: If he did what the congressman requested he would be
admitting that his film contained a heavy dose of propaganda, contrary to the
great effort that had been made to assure audiences of the movie’s historical
accuracy. If he ignored the Congressman he risked having him make a big deal
of the issue with further press releases. So Spielberg’s screenwriter, Tony
Kushner, eventually came out with a feeble defense of the falsehood by
writing in USA Today that the purpose of the now-admitted falsehood
was "to clarify to the audience the historical reality" of how the
Thirteenth Amendment was passed. There you have it in the words of a famous
left-wing Hollywood screenwriter (is there any other kind?) clarifying
historical "reality" for the public requires lying about historical
reality.
This is the kind of bait-and-switch game that is played by Hollywood
leftists with their statist propaganda films. They trot out
"distinguished presidential historians" like the disgraced,
confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin to assure audiences of the movie’s
historical accuracy, but then when they are caught red handed in a pack of
lies they plead "poetic license" and argue that "it’s only a
movie, after all, and not a portrayal of reality." No wonder some people
believe that the word "cinema" is a combination of "sin"
and "enema."
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