According to Mark E. Neely Young Mr. Lincoln “was mostly fiction, and corny fiction at that” (p. 126). The historian acknowledges that the film’s content had been “largely dictated” by The Prairie Years, the first two-volume installment of Carl Sandburg’s popular multi-volume biography of Lincoln. But Neely apparently regards the film’s references to that “patchwork of folklore, poetic language, and history” (p. 124) not as an asset but as a flaw, unworthy of further exploration. J.E. Smyth takes issue with such a dismissive view of Young Mr. Lincoln’s historical discourse, arguing instead that screenwriter Lamar Trotti, director John Ford, and producer Darryl F. Zanuck “were examining the difference between the real ‘historical’ Lincoln and the myth in American consciousness” (p. 200). According to Smyth, one crucial component of the film’s “complex and deliberately constructed historiographic vision” is “its unique response to contemporary historical writing” (p. 193). Surprisingly, though, Smyth does not elaborate on such references, either. Instead she confines herself to noting that “Young Mr. Lincoln shares both structural and stylistic qualities” (p. 204) with contemporary biographies, specifying only two direct quotations from a textual source. Other scholars’ comments on this film’s relation to historical writing have been similarly vague. On the rare occasions that intertextual references have been noticed at all, authors have invariably confined themselves to rather general remarks and a few casual examples. However, as I am going to argue in this essay, only a close analysis of those episodes and snippets of dialogue, which had been modeled on textual sources, will reveal the subtle ironies of the film’s historical discourse.

Most of the film’s intertextual references support the image of ‘the folklore Lincoln,’ which had been given new currency by Sandburg and which can be traced to another of the film’s (uncited) key sources, “Herndon’s Life of Lincoln”, written by the president’s former law partner, William H. Herndon. As we shall see, however, in at least two cases verbatim quotations radically subvert the original meaning of their templates. In these cases, words, which had been uttered by the historical Lincoln (or at least had been attributed to him by biographers), are put into the mouths of supporting characters, who in Young Mr. Lincoln act as contrasting foils to the protagonist.

Judging from the contemporary discourse on Young Mr. Lincoln, those ironies must have completely escaped the notice of the film’s original audience. As George F. Custen notes in his study of the biopic genre, “The intensity of the research effort expended on a project was part of the publicity campaigns for many biopics.” (p. 34) That fact was echoed by the reviews in the trade press and the leading US-newspapers, which regularly hinted at Young Mr. Lincoln’s relation to historiography, but did so only in the broadest terms, giving no specific examples and leaving textual sources unmentioned.[1] Likewise, even a New York Times article that was exceptional in that it called special attention to the research, which had gone into the production of the film, did not go into details. Appearing two days prior to Young Mr. Lincoln’s world premiere in Springfield, Illinois, the article pointed out that Twentieth Century-Fox’s research workers had faced the intimidating task of “[f]inding out new things about” Abraham Lincoln.

Naturally, they couldn’t find any facts that nobody had heard of, but they did uncover much with which very few people are familiar. There are plenty of little known stories, though, and it was through these that Lamar Trotti […] decided to create the picture of Lincoln. Much of Trotti’s writing, he found, had been done for him by Lincoln himself. Those little amusing anecdotes, those brisk turns of phrase, so dear to the heart of the Hollywood history writer, were all supplied by the rail-splitter. (“Chips,” X4)

The article, though, did not specify any dialogues or scenes, which had actually been based on such “little known stories”. Instead it relayed a few anecdotes, which “had to be left out” of the film. And only in passing is “Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner”, identified as “one of script-writer Trotti’s special sources” (“Chips,” X4).

Two study guides, which were published on the occasion of Young Mr. Lincoln‘s release and were intended for classroom use, did not identify any intertextual references, either. An issue of Film Guide devoted to the film went as far as to claim that Young Mr. Lincoln “presents […] an excellent opportunity for students to evaluate the presence and importance of historical and biographical incident” within a film. And the author suggested a break down of the film into six thematic blocs and encouraged students to “[s]tate the dialogic reference or picturization of each one in the film, and then describe it as found in the available source materials listed in the bibliography”. (Turney, n.p.) But although its bibliography listed the aforementioned books by Sandburg and Herndon, among others, the brochure did not mention any of the film’s quotations from those sources.[2]

It was Life, of all publications, which identified one specific dialogue that had been modeled on a historiographic source. Interestingly enough, the magazine’s anonymous author was among the few, who commented on the fact that the trial, which dominates the film’s plot, was based on a famous incident in Lincoln’s career as a lawyer. “As befits a Hollywood Plutarch, [Young Mr. Lincoln’s] Producer Zanuck is never much concerned with historical accuracy,” the author ironically remarked. “Lincoln did indeed act as defense counsel in a murder case but the trial did not occur until he had been married 15 years” (“Movie,” p. 72). What is of greater interest to us, though, is the fact that a caption under a film still from first scene, in which “Lincoln makes a drawling speech,” casually informed the readers that “Screenwriter Lamar Trotti used the exact words spoken by Lincoln at Pappville, Ill. in 1832” (p. 74).

It was only over the past two decades, with the rise of scholarly interest in the representation of history in film, that film scholars and historians have begun to pay attention to the film’s intertextual references. Thus, for example, J.E. Smyth specifies that Lincoln’s stump speech, which had been pointed out as historically authentic by Life, had originally been “documented by Herndon” (p. 203). She also notes that one of the following scenes, in which Lincoln reads a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England, “references a passage from Herndon’s biography” (p. 206). Norman Rosenberg identifies the same quotation, although attributing its source just as persuasively to Sandburg, and he implies that the preceding scene, in which Lincoln finds Blackstone’s book in a barrel, had probably been inspired by The Prairie Years as well. (p. 219) He also comments on the one scene, which has most often been identified as a quotation from a textual source, stating that, when Lincoln arbitrates a dispute between two farmers named Hawthorne and Woolridge, “the film’s dialogue here follows Sandburg’s account closely enough to support a prima facie case of plagiarism” (Rosenberg, p. 219; cf. Custen, p. 272, n. 1; Wexman, p. 23).

However, neither Rosenberg nor Smyth, Custen or Wexman endeavor to closely analyze the film’s intertextuality. Tellingly, Rosenberg confines himself to hinting vaguely that “much of Fonda’s courtroom humor comes directly from popular histories of Lincoln’s law practice” (p. 219).[[3]  In fact, there are well more than a dozen additional intertextual references in Young Mr. Lincoln. To give just one example of the high degree of intertextuality, let us return for a moment to the aforementioned scene, in which Lincoln reads Blackstone. As indicated, templates for it can be found in Sandburg and Herndon. That is not the case with the subsequent dialogue between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, but it still consists largely of snippets quoted from Sandburg. Ann’s statement that she had her “heart set on you [Lincoln] goin’ over to Jacksonville to college when I go to the seminary there”, is based on the biographer’s remarks about the alleged couple’s doomed future plans. (p. 187; vol. 1) Likewise, when Ann tells Lincoln, “Father says you’ve a real head on your shoulders, and a way with people, too”, the latter part of the sentence is yet another quotation from Sandburg. (p. 187; vol. 1) And the same goes for Lincoln’s ironic rebuttal that he is “more like the old horse the fella’s tryin’ to sell: sound of skin and skeleton and free from faults and faculties” (p. 288; vol. 1). Finally, even a somewhat marginal remark like Ann’s coy reminder, “Some folks I know don’t like red hair”, had obviously been inspired by The Prairie Years(187; vol. 1). In various other instances, a few words or single sentences can likewise be traced to textual sources. [4]

Intertextuality is not in itself unusual, of course, for a biopic of Hollywood’s classic era. As Custen has pointed out, by using textual sources “to link the film to current popular tastes,” Young Mr. Lincoln actually conforms to one of the main structural elements of the genre. (p. 180). However, in at least two cases quotations from textual sources have a dramatically different effect, on the one hand subtly undercutting the very image of a ‘folklore Lincoln’ that the film largely upholds, on the other, obliquely hinting at character traits, which even contemporary populist tastes would have deemed unfit for onscreen representations of ‘great men’. Apart from Lincoln’s aforementioned arbitration between the farmers Hawthorne and Woolridge, Custen specifies one more scene, whose dialogue has been appropriated verbatim from Sandburg: “the Lincoln/Buck confrontation where Lincoln challenges Buck to ‘wet [sic!] his horns’ and prove that he’s the ‘biggest buck in the lick’” (p. 272; n. 1). That dialogue was indeed most likely inspired by Sandburg (p. 52; vol. 1), who in turn probably had quoted it from Herndon (p. 41). Yet, a significant detail escapes Custen’s attention. According to The Prairie Years (as well as to Herndon’s Life of Lincoln) it was Lincoln, who during a violent fight exclaimed, “‘I’m the big buck of this lick.’ And looking around so his eyes swept the circle of the crowd he let loose the challenge, ‘If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns’” (Sandburg, p. 52; vol. 1; cf. Herndon, p. 41). In contrast to this, however, it is a ruffian named Buck who in Young Mr. Lincoln boasts to be “the biggest buck in this lick”.

One might be inclined to dismiss that as a trivial error on the part of the filmmakers, but in light of another similar case this curiously displaced quotation has to be taken as a conscious ironic statement. As has been pointed out before, the text of the speech, which young Lincoln makes in the film’s first scene, has been documented by Herndon. But, as a close analysis of the film’s intertextuality reveals, the preceding speechmaking by his political ally, John T. Stuart, on which the film opens, was modeled on a historically documented Lincoln speech as well. In fact, it is a carefully condensed passage from a speech, which Lincoln had made at the Illinois House of Representatives in Springfield on December 26th, 1839.

I know that the great volcano in Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot nor living thing. (Sandburg, p. 241; vol. 1; cf. Lincoln, p. 178)

Thus, on at least two occasions Young Mr. Lincoln attributes words of Lincoln to other characters. This has apparently never been publicized by the studio or by the filmmakers and it has gone unnoticed by the many critics and scholars, who have written on the film. Therefore these displaced quotations have apparently never taken on any function apart from being subtle in-jokes on the part of the filmmakers. Yet, significantly, they touch upon key points of the discourse surrounding the film and they indicate a remarkable degree of self-reflexivity with regard to the film’s relation to myth-making and historiography.

The studio’s publicity discourse claimed that Young Mr. Lincoln revealed nothing less than a ‘hidden Lincoln’. According to a brochure that was distributed among exhibitors, the film was “dramatizing the two-fisted, character-forming early manhood of [the future president] (…) It is this hidden Lincoln – not the war-burdened Emancipator and martyr of popular imagination (…) – whose thrilling personality inspired the cinema document” (20th Century Fox, n.p. ). Over the past three decades, though, the critical discourse on the film has been dominated by the contrary claim that the film does not so much reveal as produce a ‘hidden Lincoln’. In the most famous (and equally notorious) article on Young Mr. Lincoln, the editorial collective of Cahiers du cinema tried to make the case that the film’s structure as well as its ideological project were based on a “double repression – politics and eroticism” (Editors of Cahiers du cinéma, p. 497). That reading of Young Mr. Lincoln was offered up as a methodological model of ciné-structuralist analysis, which would make classic films “say, what they have to say within what they leave unsaid, to make them reveal their constituent lacks” (p. 496). This is not the place to discuss once more the intricacies and shortcomings of that well-known article. For our purposes it should suffice to remark that Cahiers apparently had no idea of the film’s relation to contemporaneous historiography. Therefore, the French ciné-structuralists, ironically, were unaware of the fact that the film obliquely but consciously acknowledges at least one of its own ‘repressions’ by putting words of the historical Lincoln into the mouths of other characters.

The film’s displaced quotations are inserted into two pivotal scenes. As Marsha Kinder has remarked about the aborted lynching,

This sequence, essential to the melodramatic plot, is also constructed as a midpoint in Lincoln’s movement between the two images of plain Abe and the Great Mediator. (…) From this point on in the narrative, his physical size will no longer cast him in the role of bully (he will use his mental powers to impose his will), but will elevate him to the position of grand statesman. (p. 35).

Even more significant, though, is the film’s first scene, which Cahiers dubbed “the initial political sequence” (p. 505). Of Lincoln’s stump speech the editorial collective claimed “that the points of the electoral programme are the only indications of a positive relation between Lincoln and politics” within the whole film, “all other being negative (separating Lincoln from the mass of ‘politicians’)” (p. 504). However, since Lincoln’s meeting with the Clay family, which immediately follows upon the speechmaking, is “the true expository scene of the fiction”, the preceding speeches are, according to Cahiers, immediately “becoming pretextual and possibly even extra-textual (…) the first step in the operation of the repression of politics by morality which will continue through the whole film” (p. 508).

Curiously, though, the Cahiers’ authors missed the fact that the ‘initial political sequence’ itself constitutes a prime example of the mise-en-scène ‘separating Lincoln from the mass of politicians’. As J.A. Place comments on this scene, “The first view we have of Lincoln is premonished by low music. It immediately removes what will follow from the preceding level of [John T. Stuart’s] pompous, over-acted, tongue-in-cheek speech-making” (p. 32). In a similar vein, Tag Gallagher states, “as [Lincoln] rises, the noisy chatter of a politician suddenly gives way to solemn calm” (p. 166). The German historian Winfried Fluck has detailed the various aspects of mise-en-scène – music, costumes, gestures, camerawork – which effectively set up Stuart as a contrasting foil for Lincoln, who in turn stands out as a simple, yet upright man, seemingly above politics. (pp. 82f) Indeed, the resulting contrast between both men’s appearance, clothing, and rhetoric is so stark that at least one writer, actually mistook Stuart for a political opponent of the future President. (Arnold, p. 209).

This stark contrast is dramatically subverted, though, if one recognizes the speech, which the film attributes to Stuart, as having originated with the historical Lincoln. In light of this knowledge, the first sequence takes on a completely different meaning. At the very moment that the mise-en-scène sets out to paint Lincoln as the opposite of a typical politician, we are subtly reminded that the Civil War president was, of course, very much a politician himself. One might paraphrase Cahiers and state that in the very act of its repression of politics, Young Mr. Lincoln consciously acknowledges this constituent lack. While on its surface the film hides certain facets of Lincoln’s biography, which would contradict the populist image of the future president, it obliquely makes them come to fore by displacing them onto other characters. While the film’s protagonist appears to be above politics, “[b]ombastic politician John T. Stuart” (Smyth, p. 203) comes to embody the full-blooded politician the historical Lincoln actually was. Similarly, by having a ‘hidden Lincoln’ take on the body of the backwoods ruffian Buck, the film subtly acknowledges that its protagonist was coarser in his youth (according to Herndon and Sandburg) than Hollywood even at the height of popularity of the “folklore Lincoln” deemed fit to show. In quite a different sense than Cahiers had in mind, Young Mr. Lincoln does indeed say a lot within what it leaves unsaid.

Works Cited

20th Century Fox. “Box Office Angles, Young Mr. Lincoln”. n.d.
Frank Arnold. “Young Mr. Lincoln im Kontext. Legende und Politik bei John Ford.” Young Mr. Lincoln: Der Text der Cahiers du Cinéma und der Film von John Ford. Ergebnisse und Materialien eines Seminars. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Berlin: John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, 1978. Pp. 204-209.
Nelson B. Bell. “A New Sort of Lincoln Finds His Way to the Silver Sheet.” Washington Post 4 June 1939: TS3.
“Chips From the Rail-Splitter’s Log.” New York Times 28 May 1939: X4.
George F. Custen. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.
Editors of Cahiers du cinéma. “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.” Movies and Methods. Vol. 1. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Pp. 493-529.
E.F.M., “‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ Arrives.” Christian Science Monitor 9 June 1939: p. 12.
Winfried Fluck. “Fortlaufender Kommentar zur Cahiers du Cinéma-Interpretation von John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. Zusammenfassung. Diskussion. Kritik.” Young Mr. Lincoln: Der Text der Cahiers du Cinéma und der Film von John Ford. Ergebnisse und Materialien eines Seminars. Ed. Winfried Fluck. Berlin: John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, 1978. Pp. 67-105.
Tag Gallagher. John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.
Katherine Helm. Mary,Wife of Lincoln. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1928.
William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik. Life of Lincoln: The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. With an Introduction and Notes by Paul M. Angle. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930.
Emanuel Hertz, ed. Lincoln Talks. A Biography in Anecdote. New York: Viking, 1939.
Max J. Herzberg. “A Guide to the Study of the Historical Photoplay Young Mr. Lincoln.” Photoplay Studies 5.9 (1939).
Frederick Trevor Hill. Lincoln the Lawyer. New York: Century, 1906.
Marsha Kinder. “The Image of Patriarchal Power in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Ivan the Terrible, Part 1(1945).” Film Quarterly 34.2 (1985-1986): pp. 29-49.
Abraham Lincoln. “Speech on the Sub-Treasury.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. I. 1824-1848. Ed. Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1953. Pp. 159-179.
“Lincolniana and Lackadaisia.” Boxoffice 10 June 1939. n.p.
“Movie of the Week: Young Mr. Lincoln.” Life 12 June 1939: pp. 72-77.
Mark E. Neely. “The Young Lincoln.” Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. Ed. Mark E. Neely. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Pp. 124-127.
Frank S. Nugent. “Twentieth Century Fox’s ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ Is a Human and Humorous Film of the Prairie Years.” New York Times 3 June 1939: 17.
J.A. Place. “Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939.” Wide Angle 2.4 (1978): pp. 28-35.
Norman Rosenberg. “Young Mr. Lincoln: The Lawyer As Super-Hero.” Legal Studies Forum 15.3 (1991): pp. 215-231.
Carl Sandburg. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926.
Jennifer E. Smyth. “Young Mr. Lincoln: between myth and history in 1939.” Rethinking History 7.2 (2003): pp. 192-214.
Harold Turney. “Film Guide to the 20th Century-Fox Picture, A Cosmopolitan Production, Young Mr. Lincoln.”Film Guide 3.10 (1939).
Virginia Wright Wexman. “‘Right and Wrong; That’s [Not] All There Is to It!’ Young Mr. Lincoln and American Law.” Cinema Journal 44.3 (2005): pp. 20-34.
“Young Mr. Lincoln.” Film Daily 2 June 1939: 6.

Endnotes

[1] To give just a few examples, Film Daily remarked that “The painstaking research to insure historical exactitude is everywhere apparent”, (“Young,” p. 6), while Boxoffice noted that the screenplay “reflects painstaking care and research” (“Lincolniana” n.p.). Just as both trade papers’ anonymous reviewers did not elaborate on such remarks, neither did Washington Post‘s Nelson B. Bell when he stated that the film’s protagonist “embodies every trait of character with which the rail-splitter has been imbued by the history books, [and] the testimony of those still living who knew him” (TS3). While the headline of the New York Times’ review, “Twentieth Century-Fox’s ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ Is a Human and Humorous Film of the Prairie Years”, might be read as alluding to the title of Sandburg’s biography, the article by Frank S. Nugent did not even vaguely hint at the film’s relation to any textual sources (p. 17).
[2] The issue of Photoplay Studies that was devoted to Young Mr. Lincoln did not even hint at the film’s citations from textual sources. For further reading, though, it first and foremost suggested Sandburg’s biography; and Herndon figured prominently in the brochure’s bibliography as well. (Herzberg, p. 13).
[3] In an endnote (p. 229; n. 12) Rosenberg alludes to an anecdote, which Lincoln tells about a man, who had killed a farmer’s dog with a pitchfork and, upon being asked, why he had not tried to fend off the dog with the other end of the pitchfork, retorted: “Well, why didn’t he come at me with the other end?” Rosenberg traces that story to a book, Lincoln the Lawyer, by Frederick Trevor Hill. And although he only vaguely refers to some unspecified “story during jury selection”, (p. 229; n. 12) one can deduce from his reference to Hill that he probably has two dialogues in mind: Lincoln’s quip that he fears it might place him at a disadvantage if a juror did not know his opponent, the state attorney. And the scene, in which Lincoln casts a doubt on the key witness’s reliability by belaboring the fact that the man prefers to call himself J. Palmer Cass instead of John P. or “Jack” Cass. That anecdote had been handed down by Hill (p. 219) as well as by Sandburg (p. 44; vol. 2).
One might add that that dialogue’s punchline had been inspired by yet another anecdote. When Lincoln draws a big laugh from the courtroom, announcing that he will call the witness “Jack Cass” – that is, jackass, common slang for someone stupid or incompetent, one is reminded of Sandburg’s description of Lincoln, “jabbing at a hostile witness who had one large ear, with the remark, ‘If he bit off the other ear he would look more like a man than a jackass.’” (p. 288; vol. 1) Furthermore, at least one other courtroom episode had been modeled on a textual source: when Lincoln selects a juror based on the assumption, “If you take after your dad, you’re a smart boy and an honest one, too”, that episode closely follows a passage from The Prairie Years (p. 55; vol. 2).
[4]Lincoln refers to himself as a “jack-leg lawyer”, just as, according to Sandburg, the future president “had been known to call himself” (p. 59; vol. 2). When Lincoln at his clients’ log-cabin reminisces, “People used to say I can sink an axe deeper into wood than any man they ever saw”, that sentence is obviously based on a statement, which Sandburg had attributed to an anonymous neighbor of Lincoln’s (p. 44; vol. 1). According to Herndon, it was “known that [Lincoln] carried the office around in his hat” (p. 101); likewise, in Young Mr. Lincoln, the protagonist, upon being asked, where his office was, retorts “In my hat!” The wording of the newspaper advertisement, which announces Lincoln’s law services and which is inserted in close-up, seems to have been quoted verbatim from Sandburg (p. 216; vol. 1). And while Lincoln’s self-deprecating remark, “No Lincoln I ever knew amounted to a hill of beans”, can be traced to Sandburg’s book as well (p. 45; vol. 2), some snatches of dialogue in the same scene at the ball seem to have been appropriated from yet another textual source. In the film Lincoln tells his future wife, Mary Todd, “I’d like to dance with you the worst way”, and when they have danced, she mocks him, “I must say, you kept your word, this was the worst way I’ve ever seen.” The template for that dialogue can be found in Mary, Wife of Lincoln, written by Todd’s sister, Katherine Helm (p. 74), as well as in Emanuel Hertz’s collection of anecdotes, Lincoln Talks (p. 108).

Created on: Tuesday, 11 December 2007