Nation is drawn to Lincoln

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, we still seek him in words and in action, in lessons from his life, in reminders of his legend — and in pilgrimages to the temple built in his honor.

We are drawn to the Lincoln Memorial in so many ways.

Protesters stand among hundreds of thousands as civil rights are invoked, or peace demanded; the great, godlike head looks on from above as if nodding in approval. Barack Obama makes a surprise appearance just days before taking office, communing with the statue as if to offer a blessing to a much-invoked predecessor and somehow be blessed in return.

Ordinary visitors stop by on a rainy winter’s night, as fog and bluish clouds suspend like a canopy over the National Mall: a student from South Africa; a chemical engineer from Amsterdam; a group of American teachers in training, wondering how they might relate to the most human and most mythic of presidents.

“It does have that deified aspect,” says 26-year-old Tim Laughlin, who as a native of Gettysburg, Pa., has lived with Lincoln history for much of his life. “And that’s a fine line, because you don’t want to look at him as a perfect person, but at the same time you want students to recognize why leaders like Lincoln matter to us.”

We measure presidents by how they represent ourselves, and how we wish to be. Lincoln, the rail-splitter raised to destiny by war and to near-divinity by assassination, embodies both. More than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln is our sage and aspiration, the ordinary and unexpected man of greatness, the victor and martyr of the great American narrative, the Civil War.

Decades ago, around the time the memorial was dedicated, H.L. Mencken mocked “the growth of the Lincoln legend” and the transformation of flesh into plaster. Mencken and other skeptics have labeled Lincoln a racist, an imperialist, a dictator, a buffoon.

But the legend of Lincoln has held, and even grown, if only because we have thought so much harder about him.

“Lincoln’s accomplishments and a century and a half of mythologizing have had Lincoln’s image so capacious that you can find anything there,” says historian Henry Louis Gates, editor of “Lincoln On Race and Slavery” and producer of a new PBS documentary on Lincoln. “Any constituency looks in the mirror and sees Lincoln staring back at them.”

Presidents of both parties have honored him, and, in doing so, honored themselves. And no president has more openly compared himself to Lincoln than Obama, who announced his candidacy two years ago on Lincoln’s birthday and identified Lincoln, and himself, as “a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer.”