Lincoln Belongs to the Ages -- and the Marketplace

The front door opens and Abraham Lincoln appears -- tall, lanky, just a bit melancholy. He smiles gently, assesses his visitor for a good five seconds. Then he draws a breath and slowly, deliberately, speaks.

“Did you park at the Holiday Inn?” the 16th president asks.

It seems we have caught the Great Emancipator in his off hours. His hat is not stovepipe but Chicago Cubs. His mole isn’t on. The TV is tuned to Fox News, and he has a “Bush/Cheney ‘04” sticker pasted up in his study -- a loyal Republican still.

Tomorrow we celebrate Abraham Lincoln, dead 140 years this April. But he is walking around, giving speeches, flourishing in the form of Jim Getty, Lincoln impersonator, gentle soul and wise man -- wise enough to know that the portrayal of an American demigod is more than just good fun. It’s a living.

“We’re a mom-and-pop operation, and Lincoln is the family business,” Getty says. And across the land, entrepreneurial Americans of all stripes share his enthusiasm.

Today, Abraham Lincoln is an empty vessel for dreamers and schemers, for humorists and educators and trinket salesmen and appliance dealers looking to add cachet to Presidents Day sales. “Time to take Lincoln and Washington shopping,” an ad for Macy’s encouraged last week.

The marketing of history is hardly new. Nor is the marketing of war -- particularly such an epic, almost biblical conflict that remains an emotional touchstone for the blue and the gray.

But there’s more happening here. American mass culture loves to chew things up and spit them out. And the masticated pieces, though still identifiable, become an amalgam of the serious and the frivolous -- fragments commandeered to serve a need, make a point, sell a product. Think of Paper Mate’s “Write Bros.” pens.

The Lincoln obsession is particularly obvious in Gettysburg, where the economic lifeblood is the story of the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here. Commercial phantoms dot the battlefield and its edges, cashing in on the hunger for yesterday in ways that would perplex a Civil War-era American.

You’ll find the Robert E. Lee House Quality Inn along the Lincoln Highway outside town. Out Chambersburg Road sits Carpetbraggers, your one-stop shopping mecca for floor coverings. And, God help us, there’s even the General Pickett’s All-U-Can-Eat Buffet (“tempting dessert table with homemade pies and cakes”).

And everywhere is the man with the beard -- in faithful photograph, in somber silhouette, in exuberant caricature. “He’s an anchor for us in our times of trouble,” Getty says.

Not to mention our times of snacking. At the Lincoln Diner, the spiral-bound menu depicts a somber Lincoln encircled by a cornucopia of lunch-counter fare -- burgers, onion rings, syrup-drenched flapjacks and one very tasty-looking club sandwich. Oh Captain, my Captain: Would you like the house salad or the corn fritters with that?

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“Hold the phone, Booth!”

--Abraham Lincoln, as the caped superhero “Great Emancipator,” battling supervillain John Wilkes Booth in the Web cartoon “Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln.”

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Lincoln didn’t fret about his legacy, and it’s just as well. A moment after the president succumbed to the Booth bullet, his war secretary, Edwin Stanton, said, famously, “Now he belongs to the ages.” But no one could have foreseen what the ages would do.

“He’d be amazed that we’re all making money off his character,” says Todd Mickley, co-owner of Gettysburg Souvenirs and Gifts near the battlefield. His crowded emporium offers Abe Lincoln shot glasses, Abe Lincoln busts with price tags on their foreheads ($7.95) and cartoonish Abe-Lincoln-with-Gettysburg-Address figures, in which the famous words appear on a scroll, medieval-like.

The obsession began early. “Lincoln collectors became active even as Lincoln lay dying,” according to Stuart Schneider, author of “Collecting Lincoln.” At the 1893 World’s Fair -- a showcase of American mass culture’s beginnings -- an exhibition of “Lincolniana” was one of the most popular, Schneider writes -- along with the first Ferris Wheel and the debuts of Aunt Jemima’s syrup, diet soda and Pabst Beer (which didn’t have its blue ribbon yet).

The pace quickened. The Lincoln Financial Group secured permission from Lincoln’s son to use the presidential image. The Lincoln Highway was christened. The Lincoln penny, the $5 bill and the Lincoln Continental appeared. But that was what we’d now consider Serious Stuff.

These days, 196 years after that Kentucky cabin birthed an icon -- and inspired Lincoln Logs -- things are different.

Want the Abraham Lincoln talking action figure? It’s just $29.99 on Yahoo! Shopping. How about the sterling silver Abraham Lincoln Iced Tea Spoon or the Abraham Lincoln Hybrid Improved Tomato Seed? If furniture is your style, consider the $739.95 “Lincoln rocker” -- a replica of the chair the president was in when Booth ended his life with a Derringer slug in the head. Marthastewart.com offers a recipe for a Lincoln cabin built with “pretzel logs, cracker shingles and peanut-butter mortar.”

Lincoln even popped up on “Star Trek” in 1969, beaming aboard the Enterprise in the show’s self-flagellating final season. He fought alongside Kirk and Spock against a Klingon warrior and Genghis Khan before suffering his final indignity -- dying with a spear in his back on the distant planet of Excalbia. How was all this explained? It wasn’t, to anyone’s satisfaction.

The weird quotient has spiked from there. The fast-dying 1998 UPN sitcom “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” about a black British nobleman who became Lincoln’s advisor and cracked slave jokes, was bizarre enough.

Atop the oddball pyramid, though, “Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln” sits alone, soaked in cheap bourbon. It’s a Web ‘toon that postulates how history would have unfolded if Honest Abe had been a carousing, oversexed tippler who calls Mary Todd Lincoln a “pendulous nightmare” and lives behind a fence with a plaque that says “A. Lincoln, President. ‘As seen on the penny.’ ”

This specimen of something-to-offend-everyone humor is the brainchild of Mike Reiss, an Emmy-winning writer for “The Simpsons” who filtered the president through a mind he freely admits is warped.

Here’s his take: “To me, Lincoln and Santa Claus are equivalent. They’ve got lots of baggage -- so many things you can make a joke about ... his height, his beard, his wart, he split rails, all of it.”

Reiss embraces his secular sacrilege and is unrepentant. “I wouldn’t do this with any other president,” he says. “What makes me proud of ‘Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln’ is that it’s a totally undeserved attack. The comedy comes from the fact that this man did nothing to deserve this.”

Such Lincophilia clearly has infected Reiss’ “Simpsons” brethren. The show has featured a miniature-golf hole with Lincoln’s face, a talking Mt. Rushmore and a school play about Lincoln’s assassination that ends with Bart -- playing John Wilkes Booth as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, with wraparound shades -- dispatching the chief executive with a ping-pong-ball gun and the tagline, “Hasta la vista, Abey.”

Reiss, it’s worth noting, also wrote a children’s book called “The Boy Who Looked Like Lincoln,” in which a boy named Benjy, who has a beard and wears a stovepipe hat and gets picked on at school, is sent off to a camp “for kids who look like things” to learn self-esteem. The message is uplifting, but the dialogue and art are pure Dali.

What to make of all this? The guy freed the slaves, saved the union, took a bullet for the team. Can’t we let him rest in peace? Why do we keep trotting him out and repurposing him? James Twitchell, author of “Adcult USA” and other books on consumerism and commercialism, has a couple of answers.

“First, of course, he has a distinctive and definitive face and body shape, which is in some ways very attractive. He’s not like William Howard Taft. He’s not a big tub of lard. He’s this active, angular man,” Twitchell says. “No. 2, of course, is that he’s a man who all groups can see as their resolver, as their savior.”

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“Yeah, I pulled the president’s head right out of the fryer there. Made me very proud.”

--McDonald’s fry cook in Super Bowl commercial.

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Washington chopped down the cherry tree, or maybe he didn’t. Daniel Boone wrestled bears -- perhaps. But historians concur that Abe Lincoln never downed a quart of bourbon, donned a skintight superhero outfit, rescued Jenny Lind and choppered himself to safety with a personal stovepipe-hat propeller while John Wilkes Booth sprayed him with automatic-weapons fire.

Let’s pause a moment to let Lincoln speak for himself. “I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule,” he once said. And it’s still true.

It was true on Super Bowl Sunday, when McDonald’s -- based in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois -- ran a docu-commercial about a couple who found a Lincoln-shaped french fry in their drive-thru order and put it up for auction on the Internet.

A bidding war for the real commercial prop broke out, finally won by an Internet casino company, GoldenPalace.com. “This is a great day for marketing and a great day for Abe Lincoln,” said the company, which will send the $75,100 fry on a national tour, partly to raise money for charity.

Are these the better angels of our nature?

“There are people in the community who wish that Lincoln would be used only in the most reverential of ways. But an American icon, people are going to take advantage of the image,” says Sharon Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Springfield, Ill., Convention and Visitors Bureau. It uses a “mod Lincoln” with windblown hair and a pink bowtie to advertise itself. (“He looks a little punky,” Johnson says.)

Maybe it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Aren’t we in America, where capitalism reigns?

Lincoln was a robust free-enterprise man, and it’s tempting to picture him stroking his beard in amusement as he watches an episode of “Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln” from somewhere beyond the grave.

That’s basically how Getty sees things. “I think that he would be the first one to say, ‘Relax and enjoy.’ And I think it opens the door to people knowing about him,” Lincoln’s doppelganger says.

Sitting in a booth at the Lincoln Diner during the busy breakfast hour, you can almost believe Lincoln never left.

Across the street is the train station where he clambered down on a November day in 1863 and walked a block to the town square -- to the Wills house, where he put the finishing touches on his Gettysburg Address.

In front of the house today -- along the Lincoln Highway, a few doors up from the Lincoln Building, on what’s now called Lincoln Square -- are two statues. The Great Emancipator stands alongside a modern-day tourist who wears crew-neck sweater and sneakers. Lincoln is gesturing with his stovepipe, showing the way. And the tourist looks comforted.

And isn’t that it?

Whether we invoke Lincoln’s angular countenance to make money or make a point, to sell French fries or furniture or major appliances, we’re still seeking his comfort.

In jumbled days, it would be nice to believe that a man we consider of us, by us, for us hasn’t entirely perished from the Earth. That the seed he planted for our country so long ago lives on.

Even if what grows from it is a hybrid tomato.