Some 25 years after the idea was first
hatched to honor Abraham Lincoln with his own presidential museum,
folks will finally get a chance to see what all the fuss has been
about.
The doors swing open to
the public on Saturday in advance of a big dedication ceremony that
many hope will bring President George W. Bush to Springfield
— although at press time officials still wouldn’t
confirm that he plans to attend.
For the past few months,
select groups of dignitaries, supporters, and media have been
allowed a sneak peek into the museum’s exhibits, which
include a pair of high-tech theater attractions that have already
stirred some controversy.
“Lincoln’s Eyes” offers a
three-screen presentation with seats that shake during battle
scenes and smoke rings that blow into the audience to coincide with
cannon blasts.
“Ghosts of the Library” presents a
live actor who is thrilled by the prospect of unlocking history’s
secrets. The performance, which features Holavision special-effects
technology, includes apparitions of historical figures.
Other exhibits include “The Whispering
Gallery,” whose walls are covered in political cartoons that
attacked Lincoln during his first months in office, and a
contemporary portrayal of the four-candidate 1860 presidential
campaign hosted by Meet the Press’ Tim Russert.
The museum also features replicas of
Lincoln’s boyhood cabin and the White House, plus dramatic
re-creations of a slave auction and the president’s
assassination and funeral.
The intent, says museum director and noted
historian Richard Norton Smith, has been to “blend
scholarship and showmanship” in a way that sparks renewed
interest in history.
But the museum has already garnered its share of
criticism from purists who say that its heavy reliance on technical
wizardry and replications rather than actual artifacts detracts from
the experience.
The Chicago
Tribune’s Blair Kamin, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic, recently took a swipe
at the building that houses the museum — which was designed
by Gyo Obata of St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum. Kamin
called the building an “astonishingly banal shell” that
“deadens everything around it.”
Critics such as Kamin suggest that the new
museum has “Disneyfied” Lincoln. The chairman of
California-based BRC Imagination Arts, which oversaw the
museum’s installations, once worked for Walt Disney
Imagineering.
But the museum does showcase some authentic
gems, such as an original copy of the Gettysburg Address and a
signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Also on temporary
display for the opening are the carriage that Lincoln and wife Mary
Todd rode in on the night the president was assassinated and the
bed in which he died.
Those seeking to pore over archives may walk
across the street to the presidential library, which opened last fall and boasts a collection of
some 47,000 Lincoln items.
The museum opening has already generated much
national publicity, with articles appearing in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post.
Tourism officials are counting on the mix of
a high local turnout and an influx of sightseers from across the
state and the country to draw as many as 20,000 visitors a day
downtown for the four-day public celebration. More than half of
Springfield’s hotel rooms were reserved as of early this
week, says Tim Farley, executive director of Springfield Convention
& Visitors Bureau.
Might those visitors include Bush? Or past
presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, or Gerald
Ford? Museum officials aren’t saying.
They’ve kept a tight lid on which
national and foreign leaders were personally invited and which have
committed to attending the dedication.
“We’re not focusing on
celebrities,” says Susan Mogerman, the museum
foundation’s chief operating officer.
“The celebrity here is the museum
itself.”
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2005.
