Words, Ideas, and Thinkers

SPOTLIGHTING THE SPEAKERS IN THE INAUGURAL AUTHORS BOOK FOUNDATION FESTIVAL

By Anastasia Stanmeyer
April 26, 2022

The Authors Guild serves as the collective voice of American authors, long supporting the rich and diverse literary culture of our country. Members include novelists in all genres and categories, nonfiction writers, journalists, historians, poets, and translators. It seems more than fitting that the home for the Authors Guild Foundation’s new Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival is the Berkshires. Monumental writers such as Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville have called the Berkshires home. The inaugural WIT Festival, which is free and open to the public, has the purpose of expanding our understanding of critical issues, celebrating America’s literary culture, and amplifying new voices and perspectives. Held on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox from September 22–24, the festival will explore “Reimagining America” through thought-provoking conversations, presentations, panels, and speeches. (authorsguild.org)

COURTESY DAVID BLIGHT

David Blight, who is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies at Yale, is a scheduled speaker at the inaugural WIT Festival. Since this year also marks the centennial of the Lincoln Memorial, we thought it fitting to begin this series leading up to the WIT Festival with Blight, who is now working on two new books. One is on James Weldon Johnson, who is closely linked to the Berkshires. Johnson is most renowned for co-writing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is also referred to as the “Black National Anthem.” The civil rights giant, songwriter, and poet had a cabin next to the Alford Brook in Great Barrington, where he sought peace and inspiration in the 1920s and ‘30s and wrote a collection of spiritual prose. His papers are, for the most part, at Yale, says Blight. The other book that Blight is deep into writing is a history of Yale’s 300 years of entanglement with slavery and abolition. We talk with Blight on the WIT Festival, on Douglass, on Lincoln, and on the Lincoln Memorial.

The WIT festival’s title is “Reimagining America.” Do you think that is a good topic? It’s a big subject, but it’s worth doing. I’ve spent a lot of my life working on people who are good with words—Douglass, Lincoln, DuBois, and others. Are we not in a time of rethinking America? It’s something we have to do. We have a political culture, we have a Constitution, we have a structure of our society in deep trouble, and we’re divided. So, yes, I think it’s a great topic.

You have said that the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Douglass changed your life. How so? Douglass became the subject which I talk all the time in one capacity or another. He had such a protean life over the course of the 19th century, his relevance and his resonance today is enormous. Especially in the age of Trumpism, and then in the pandemic, we discovered that without even trying that Douglass’s life, and his writings in particular, have such power still, whether they were about slavery, the end of slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, even into the Jim Crow era and beyond, they are all centerpieces of Douglass’s life. So I’ve ended up talking about many of those things.

Are there parallels between Douglass and Lincoln? Lincoln was a craftsman of language. That’s exactly what Douglass was, and even more so. Words were the only weapon he ever had. He was never elected any public office. He didn’t hold any real political power. He had three or four appointed offices in the federal government after the Civil War, but his medium was language, and it was prose in many forms. He wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography and short form editorials in his newspapers for 16 years, hundreds and hundreds of those. And then the speeches, just dozens and dozens and dozens of great speeches. He was probably the greatest orator of the 19th century. It’s language that Douglass and Lincoln can be compared. They met three times. In August of 1863, at the White House, Douglass went to Washington to protest the discriminations against Black soldiers. He simply got in line at the White House and insisted on a meeting with the President. They had an exchange of ideas. They met again a year later in August of 1864. At that time, it was at Lincoln’s invitation. He needed Douglass’s opinions and imprimatur and his voice. They met a third time right after the Second Inaugural at the White House reception. They would have met a fourth time, because Lincoln invited Douglass to come for afternoon tea in late March of ‘65 at the Soldiers’ Home where Lincoln would go as a retreat, but Douglass couldn’t go because speaking engagements around the country. He always regretted he hadn’t gone, after Lincoln was shot two weeks later. Douglass had a lot to say about Lincoln in his editorials and in his writing and then later in his various eulogies of Lincoln.

What does the Lincoln Memorial symbolize, and how important are statues in our society? In the last six to eight years, statues, memorials—especially any obviously associated with the Confederacy—have been more important perhaps than any other time since they were erected. They go up for a reason, yet there are monuments and statues in cities that no one has paid any attention to. Why does one statue cause great consternation and protest, yet no one cares about another one? Memorials and monuments are representations of history, and they are also representations of whomever has political clout or money to erect them and can control a story or a narrative. That’s the story of Confederate monuments—they are the ways in which ex-Confederates and Southerners and their Northern allies managed to control the whole Lost Cause ideology, the narrative and meaning of the memory of the Civil War, especially in the South from roughly the 1880s right up to the 1920s.

How about the Lincoln Memorial? Like the other monuments on the Mall, it represents some aspect of the national experience. Every group, every extension of the political spectrum has used that monument at one time or another as the place of their demonstration or their protest or the representation of themselves. All kinds of right-wing groups, left-wing groups, whatever you want to call mainstream groups. We associate it today so much with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Marian Anderson’s famous concert. It’s associated with civil rights now. And that’s fine, because it links up with Lincoln and emancipation. But, of course, it’s been used by every other kind of group. There’s something about the Lincoln Memorial that just draws you in. Lincoln is the savior of the Union, which it says in the monument, and the emancipator of slaves. It’s those two powerful narratives that it represents, and it sits overlooking the entire Washington Mall, toward the Capitol.

What do you feel that hasn’t been told about the memorial that you wish people would be more aware of? There’s almost nothing about Lincoln that hasn’t been told. As for the memorial itself, I don’t think most people understand its inception. The early conception of the Lincoln Memorial goes back at least 20 years. There were different artists, and they had finally landed on Daniel Chester French. The idea of a monument to link to the Civil War and to emancipation is a very old idea in Washington. The idea that the monument doesn’t appear until 62 years after the Civil War is amazing.

Why did it take so long? Controversies over design, controversies over content, and control by the Lost Cause South of a lot of Congressional committees and power. There were no Southern-born presidents after the Civil War until Woodrow Wilson in 1912, but the white South got back into power in the federal government through the Democratic Party as early as the 1880s, and then on and off into the early 20th century, depending on who won elections.

Where did the Lincoln Memorial stand in the Black community? In the 19th century, African Americans honored Lincoln year in, year out. Emancipation Day, or sometimes called Jubilee Day, in Black communities from the 1860s to the turn of the 20th century and beyond, was a big deal. It was a much bigger deal than this day we now called Juneteenth, which was just established as a national holiday last year. That was a very local phenomenon in Texas, and maybe other little parts of the South in the 19th century. It was Emancipation Day that people celebrated, and that meant a respect for Lincoln. That meant often there were speeches about Lincoln, their honoring of Lincoln, pictures were put up of Lincoln. Now, was that just a love of Lincoln? No, not always. It was commemorating emancipation. I wrote about this at length in my book, Race and Reunion. Part of what Black communities were saying by the 1890s and into the 20th century is, yes, they would honor Lincoln on Emancipation Day, but it was a way of saying the United States freed the slaves. Lincoln freed the slaves and the United States freed the slaves became the same thing. So it was reminding the government, reminding the people, especially by the turn of the 20th century, when the Jim Crow system is almost completely put in place, when disenfranchisement of Black voters is crawling all across the South, and the problem of lynching has become an annual nightmare. That’s a time you want to celebrate Emancipation Day and remind your community that emancipation had even happened. In time, the Lincoln Memorial came to mean a great deal to Black Americans.

Are monuments first and foremost symbolic? Memorials are a symbol of something, but not the thing itself. Where does the March on Washington in ’63 go but to the Lincoln Memorial? It’s America’s temple; it’s the secular temple that you want to appropriate to your cause. The Lincoln Memorial has become this enormously useful icon to anyone who wants to use it.