Legend and Fact in Young Mr. Lincoln
John Ford's 1939 Oscar-nominated classic prints the legend.
Film director and historian Peter Bogdanovich once observed that when John Ford would speak to him of Abraham Lincoln in his old age, there was “such an extraordinary sense of intimacy in this tone, that somehow it was no longer a director speaking of a great President, but a man talking to a friend.”
It is safe to say that Ford was not the first to speak of Lincoln as if he was a friend, nor will he be the last.
Society’s fascination with Lincoln has not diminished since his assassination.
If anything, our shared interest has only deepened in the passing years.
After all, there are over 17,000 books published on Lincoln.
While the numbers differ depending on the source, he is usually cited as one of the most studied persons in the history of the world.
Lincoln’s presence on celluloid is no different. Though a much younger art form than literature, Hollywood has already produced two defining but wildly different interpretations of Lincoln.
The first is John Ford’s 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln starring Henry Fonda.
The second is Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Historically speaking, with a few minor quarrels aside, Lincoln is biographical in that it was based on actual events. This underrated masterpiece demonstrates Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner’s efforts to give the audience a complete picture of the complicated man and his private and public struggles.
And while Spielberg’s interpretation is by all accounts biographical, Ford’s Lincoln was something entirely different. Unlike Lincoln, the plot of Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln did not take place.
Loosely inspired by Lincoln’s 1858 successful defense of Jack Armstrong, the film tells the story of the newly minted Springfield lawyer’s first legal case, in which he defends two brothers who have been accused of murder.
In telling a story that never happened, Ford’s film turns the traditional Hollywood biopic on its head and provides a unique and revealing characterization of Lincoln. Rather than basing Lincoln on his historical counterpart, Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti fashioned a film that calls to mind the works of the Greco-Roman philosopher Plutarch rather than the scholarship of historians.
Until the very end of the picture, when Lincoln — quite literally— walks into an oncoming storm as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” triumphantly plays, it appears as if Ford has little interest in even connecting his Lincoln to the real one. In doing so, Ford practiced what Plutarch wrote of his in his introduction to Parallel Lives:
…just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.
We see this mythologizing of America’s politicians in places such as Parson Weems’s fictitious Life of Washington. Remember the story of a young Washington cutting down the prized cherry tree and admitting his guilt? Yeah, it’s purely fictional. However, it effectively established that Washington was an honest and respectable man.
And we all know how successful that was.
It’s a tall tale that’s still passed down to this day.
Lincoln is a figure Plutarch would have had ample material to write on like Weems wrote on Washington. However, since Plutarch had perished by the 1930s, the task fell upon John Ford and company to craft such a tale. And succeed, they did.
Young Mr. Lincoln captures the spirit of the man, from his uncanny awkwardness and grace to his tall stature — intellectually and physically.
The strong correlation between Plutarch and Ford can be best seen in the film’s most effective sequence, in which Lincoln stands at the jailhouse door and shields his clients from the oncoming mob.
Watch that scene below, courtesy of the Criterion Collection:
This scene never happened in real life. There are no accounts of Lincoln doing anything like that.
Cinematically, it was a plot device concocted by Ford to demonstrate Lincoln’s ability to not only persuade but also to show glimmers of his future greatness. It exhibits Plutarch’s belief that one's most impressive feats of strength or wisdom are not always a manifestation of virtue or vice.
Rather, “a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.”
In the scene, Lincoln does not battle a thousand men single-handedly or besiege Springfield, but he quietly stands on the steps of the county jail and persuades his neighbors to be patient and allow the law to serve justice in due time.
This scene also demonstrates another tendency of antiquity.
When speaking of great military and political speeches, the Greek historian Thucydides’ was known to write not what was true but, instead, what the main idea was — even if it meant a little embellishing.
In the scene, Lincoln talks to his fellow citizens of Springfield, denounces their aggressive actions, and compares them to mob rule.
Trouble is when men start taking the law into their own hands just as in all the confusion and fun to start hangin' somebody who's not a murderer as somebody who is. Then the next thing you know, they're hangin' one another just for fun till it gets to the place a man can't pass a tree or look at a rope without feelin' uneasy. We seem to lose our heads in times like this. We do things together that we'd be mighty ashamed to do by ourselves.
Although not an accurate deception of a real event, this scene conveys the main idea of Lincoln’s first great political speech in 1838.
At that specific moment in American history, an uptick in lawlessness was seen up and down the Mississippi River. Mob rule became almost commonplace, with lynching, hangings, and destruction of private property becoming regular news from St. Louis all the way down to the State of Mississippi.
In that speech, Lincoln warns his audience that when men take the law into their own hands - to hang or burn those they deem guilty - they should remember that the mob they lead today could be the mob that hangs them tomorrow.
The mob “will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is.” He also describes an act of mob rule in Mississippi, where a violent mob started to hang all peoples that they thought were guilty of the crime.
From gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss… as a drapery of the forest.”
Do you notice the similarities between Lincoln’s speech and the monologue from Young Mr. Lincoln?
Ford’s scene does not restate every point in the multi-paged speech but summarizes Lincoln’s warning against mob rule and places it into a fictional context that was created to emphasize the spirit of the man.
It is the epitome of the ideal that Plutarch strived for when he wrote their histories and parallel lives centuries ago. Still, it was done in twentieth-century America by one of Hollywood’s greatest directors. Those ancient writers, aiming to focus on the spirit of the man, looked to the intimate moments of the subjects they wrote about for the individual’s spirit, as did John Ford.
What Ford was able to do through his film was write the Plutharican story of Lincoln, one that does not necessarily focus on his legislative and military achievements but the man as he was.
Reader, what biopics do you think reveal the character of its subject well? Let us know in the comments below!