Hopes were high five years ago, when some of the
biggest names in Illinois formed the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
and Museum Foundation. The foundation expected to rake in as much as $20
million a year from donors during its first three years of existence and to
have $50 million in the bank by the end of June 2003, according to the
foundation’s application for nonprofit status submitted to the
Internal Revenue Service in 2000. The money would be spent to promote the
Lincoln complex, pay construction costs and fund educational programs,
foundation organizers told the IRS, which expedited the application so that
donors could start writing checks. Several million dollars rolled in right away. But,
five years later, the foundation has fallen far short of its financial
goals. Not one dime of private money has gone toward construction costs. In
its most recent tax return, the foundation reported raising just $44,722 in
the fiscal year ending June 30, 2004. That’s less than the foundation
reported spending on accountants that year. Fundraising wasn’t much
better during the previous fiscal year, when the foundation took in just
$219,520. Financial plans submitted to the IRS three years earlier had
called for $20 million to be raised that year.
By the time Richard Norton Smith was hired in 2004 as
the foundation’s director and, simultaneously, the director of the
publicly owned museum and library, the foundation existed in name only. It
had no offices or telephone number. “There was no foundation,”
says Estie Karpman, who was hired last year as the foundation’s
development director. “No energy, no staff, no plan,” Smith
writes in an e-mail in response to an Illinois
Times interview request. Besides lending his
considerable reputation and name to the museum and library, Smith was
brought in to help resurrect fundraising efforts.
Judging from interviews and financial records, he has
a lot of work to do.
In the beginning, the foundation was supposed to
help build the museum and library, which has cost state and federal
taxpayers $150 million. In its application for nonprofit status, the
foundation told the IRS that part of its mission was paying construction
costs. Melaney Arnold, spokeswoman for the state Capital Development Board,
says that state officials once envisioned $10 million in private
contributions for construction costs. The state got zero. William Nugent, a former president of the University
of Illinois Foundation who was brought in to help with fundraising in the
Lincoln foundation’s early days, confirms that helping pay for
construction was part of the original plan. He says he can’t say why
that didn’t happen. By the time fundraising fell, he had focused his
energies elsewhere.
Maynard Crossland, former head of the Illinois
Historic Preservation Agency, is blunt: The foundation never raised money
for construction because it didn’t have to. No one held the
foundation accountable for its promises. “It became obvious there wasn’t the time
to go out and do the fundraising; there wasn’t the staff,”
Crossland says. “That’s when the state stepped up and said,
‘We’re going to pay this bill.’ That, early on, took the
pressure off the foundation to do that. When Blagojevich got elected, it
languished for quite some time. There was no leadership, basically.”
Karpman, the foundation’s development director,
says that she can’t say why such an important fiscal mission
foundered even as opening day for the museum and library drew near.
“I wasn’t here,” she explains. “I can only surmise
the board was not as active as it should have been.”
One person who might know is Julie Cellini, a board
member since the foundation was formed and one of the earliest backers of
the library and museum, going so far as to tour presidential libraries
across the nation during the 1990s in search of ideas. Cellini, who is also
chairwoman of the board of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency,
declined via e-mail to discuss the foundation’s fundraising efforts
and why they broke down. Instead, she referred questions to Smith and board
president Jim Edgar, a former governor, neither of whom were members of the
foundation when fundraising collapsed. Cellini and her husband,
William, a longtime Republican powerbroker, have donated money to the
museum, which has put the couple’s name on an exhibit called Ask Mr. Lincoln. By the time Karpman was hired last year, the
foundation was a mess. One of her first tasks, Karpman recalls, was to get
in touch with people who had made pledges to figure out whether they would
actually pay and what, if any, strings were attached to their donations. “I didn’t know what these people had been
promised in the beginning, so I asked them: ‘What were you promised,
and what would you be willing to pay?’” Karpman says.
“There hadn’t been any address they could send money to.
We’ve been very lucky — everybody’s been honoring their
pledges. I must tell you that Abraham Lincoln is probably the best sell
I’ve ever had. You don’t have to explain who he is.”
But the lack of fundraising in past years has put the
foundation in a deep hole just as it needs real money. Unlike other
presidential libraries, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
relies entirely on private money for programs, acquisitions, and new
exhibits. “Unlike libraries in the federal system, it was built with
public funds and only now is dependent on private money to support
temporary exhibits, conferences, acquisitions, etc.,” Smith says.
“There has never been an acquisitions fund, meaning that, until now,
we have been entirely dependent on contributions of Lincolniana and other
items pertaining to Illinois history. Changing this is one of my top
priorities. We’re making progress.”
Lincoln memorabilia is pricey. A copy of the
Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln was auctioned earlier this
month for $688,000. By now, the foundation was supposed to have raised at
least $50 million. According to its most recent tax return, for the fiscal
year ending June 30, 2004, the foundation had slightly more than $8 million
in cash and another $2.26 million in uncollected pledges. The
foundation’s tax return for the year ending in June was due last
week, although nonprofits typically receive extensions from the IRS and
don’t file until nearly one year after a fiscal year ends. Through
September, Karpman says, the foundation has collected nearly $11.9 million
in cash and has slightly more than $5.6 million in pledges due for
collection during the next four years. Karpman figures that the foundation will need between
seven and 10 years to reach its $50 million goal. The money won’t
just sit around generating interest. Rather, the foundation is spending as
it goes along. For example, the foundation paid the entire cost of the
museum’s $800,000 dedication ceremony last spring, she says. The
foundation is also paying for lectures, conferences and other projects. And
it’s banking on the enduring popularity of Lincoln — and the
museum — to boost coffers. Karpman acknowledges that attendance at most museums
declines after the first year or so. “We are hoping to buck the
trend,” she says. The foundation is counting on the bicentennial of
Lincoln’s birth, four years from now, to keep museum attendance high
and donations to the foundation flowing. “We are lucky — we
still have a much wider window of opportunity than most museums
have,” she says. “We have a five-year window up until
2009.”
But some skeptics doubt that the museum in its
current form can continue drawing big crowds or that the foundation will be
able to raise enough money to keep it interesting. Crossland says exhibits in the museum will eventually
grow stale, and, when that happens, updates will be extremely expensive.
For one thing, each Disneyesque exhibit costs a lot. For another, the
exhibits are intertwined to tell a cohesive story so that a change in one
area requires changes everywhere. And the government largesse that made it
all possible could eventually prove a curse when the foundation asks for
private money to keep things fresh, he predicts. “There’s going to be this feeling out
there: The government’s paying for it — why should we use our
short resources?” Crossland says. “That’s going to be the
big nut they’ll have to crack. Without the [private] commitment in
the beginning, it’s hard now to say, ‘We need money for all
these great programs,’ when everyone’s reading in the paper
that the state’s spent $160 million or whatever on that facility. You
say, ‘You need me to make it work?’”
But Nugent believes that the foundation, through hard
work, can surpass its goal. “I think they need an endowment more like $100
million to do what they need to do — I’m sure they would be
happy to have half that,” says Nugent, who’s raised big money
for the University of Illinois and held top administrative posts at large
universities across the country. “And I think it’s possible
— I really do.”
The key, Nugent says, is the museum and
library’s status as more than just an archive. From Mobile Bay, where
Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes,” to the Canadian border,
which beckoned escaped slaves, the Lincoln era touches so much of
America’s past, present, and future that the foundation has a huge
reservoir of potential donors — if it can figure out how to tap it,
he says.
“I saw the Lincoln library from my very first
hour as far more than a physical structure with glass display cases —
there’s so much more than just Mary Todd Lincoln’s wedding
dress,” he says. “This is a home-plate treasure trove that can
be an engine for vital education of what our country’s all about. I
think the support is out there. I think there needs to be further
clarification of the mission of the Lincoln center — I’ll call
it that — and a new level of organized energy.”
That, Smith says, is exactly what’s happening. “In a little more than a year, the [foundation]
board has been rebuilt, several million dollars in new commitments has been
received, additional millions in old pledges have been paid off, and a
friends program is up and running and rapidly expanding,” he says.
The museum and library, he adds “isn’t content merely to see
itself as a tourist attraction or a research facility.” He talks
about tie-ins with Black History Month and working with the NAACP to
commemorate the Springfield race riots and the Lincoln-Douglas debates and
synergy and “fostering greater public awareness of Lincoln, to be
sure, but also of those themes in Lincoln’s America which are by no
means limited to his America. “I’m blessed with the ability to do a
lot, on multiple fronts, and with spinning off a lot of ideas, some of
which actually turn out to be useful.”
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2005.
