Summers With Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments
By James A. Percoco

Illustrated, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 241 pp., 2008. Fordham University Press

Reviewer: Dr. Allen C. Guelzo
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.

Review:
This is the year, if ever there was a year, for Abraham Lincoln. Already, in the run-up to the Lincoln bicentennial on Feb. 12, 2009, we have seen a freshet of Lincoln books, with more to come (including a mammoth new biography from Michael Burlingame).

Alongside these books, a parade of secondary, self-reflective Lincolnia is passing in review — books that are not so much about Lincoln as they are meditations on how Lincoln has been written about — from Gerry Prokopowicz (Did Lincoln Own Slaves?), Andy Ferguson (Land of Lincoln) and Ed Steers (Lincoln Legends), and now, from James Percoco, on the fixing of Lincoln in statuary.

This is not so much a catalogue raisonne of Lincoln statuary, as it is a personal meditation on summers devoted to encountering Lincoln in stone and metal.

Although Percoco’s paths to the pedestals of Lincoln statuary are usually beaten in company with his students from a Northern Virginia high school, and informed by a high level of understanding of monumental statuary and the makers of them, it is always Percoco’s individual dance with the image of Lincoln captured by each of the sculptors which is the real story.

Apart from the wealth of technical detail on the statues and their makers, this is not a book which will figure big in other people’s footnotes.

But it will speak to those for whom the Lincoln presence is primarily imagined in terms of a great statue — the Lincoln Memorial, the Thomas Ball “emancipation group,” the mournful Saint-Gaudens in Lincoln Park.

There are, at last count, over 220 open-air statues of Abraham Lincoln. Of these, Percoco chose to concentrate on seven, installed between 1876 and 1932: the Thomas Ball “emancipation” statute, which has become the focus of controversy over Lincoln’s racial views; Paul Manship’s unwrinkled “Hoosier Youth” from Indiana; George Grey Barnard’s scrawny-necked “Lincoln”; Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ “Standing Lincoln,” the Man of Sorrows; the user-friendly “Seated Lincoln” of Gutzon Borglum (the chiseler of Mount Rushmore); James Fraser’s weary, resigned “Lincoln” in Jersey City; and Daniel Chester French’s 340-ton “Seated Lincoln” in the great temple to Lincoln in Washington.

Each of the seven statues earns a chapter to itself, complete with a history of each statue and the peculiar twist each has given to the Lincoln image.

“So, what do you think?” is the question Percoco poses to the students he takes to the Thomas Ball statue — and this, in fact, is the question he asks himself and us at each statue in sequence.

About the Ball statue, which has been reviled as a testimony to white racial condescension, Percoco is defensive. Lincoln “might fairly have been criticized” for his utterances on race, but in emancipating the slaves, “at least he did something.”

Manship’s advertising-copy “Hoosier Youth” allows Percoco room to criticize the way corporations have “trivialized the man” by using him to sell everything from toys to insurance.

The Saint-Gaudens in Chicago permits Percoco to indulge what has become almost a standard fixture in Lincoln self-reflection, the unscripted encounter with a Stranger who utters unqualified approval of Lincoln from a Foreign Land, and thus grants Americans permission to drop the scholarly and critical qualifications which might spoil their own admiration of the Great Emancipator.

For this is, in the end, a paean of admiration. At the close, standing in the dim, cool light of the Lincoln Memorial, Percoco feels both “challenge” and “reassurance” emanating from French’s mighty “Seated Lincoln.” And we feel much the same, standing there, in the reading imagination, with him.

Beautifully and evocatively written, bustling and enthusiastic in its tone, Summers with Lincoln will fill up a summer’s day or a summer’s travel with the kind of deep meditation that Lincoln — and his image — still has the power to call up in us all.