100 Interviews

#33. HAROLD HOLZER - “An Abraham Lincoln expert.”

When Harold Holzer was in the fifth grade, his teacher put pieces of paper with the names of historical figures into a hat. Everyone in the class had to choose a name at random and then go to the library and get a book on who they’d chosen.

Harold drew the name “Abraham Lincoln.”

The rest is 19th century history.

A lot of people have asked me why I put an Abraham Lincoln expert on the 100 Interviews list. I guess that requirement stands out because it implies an interest in Lincoln beyond the average President. We’ve had 44 of them by now. What makes Abraham Lincoln so special?

Really, I love Lincoln because he’s fascinating and mysterious. But beyond that, I think that 1860 is the closest parallel to our current political situation and that it’s kind of irresponsible the way no one seems to realize this.

When Lincoln rose from obscurity to take our nation’s highest office, the country was divided, just like it is today. Where they had the abolitionists and the slaveholders, we have the too-liberal left and the Tea Party. And I’m sure this is a controversial opinion but I believe that in our age, the parallel to slavery is gay rights.

Obviously, gay people aren’t literally enslaved in this country, but they are second-class citizens. This is not a comparison meant in any way to lighten the atrocities black people suffered under slavery, but rather it’s meant as a way to open people’s eyes to unfair treatment of any one group by the government in what is supposed to be a free country. Perhaps gay marriage is more equivalent to civil rights, as suggested by my friend Tasha. Where now, it would be horrendous for a lawmaker to suggest black people should be slaves or that blacks and whites shouldn’t marry, so in a hundred years, should it be equally as atrocious for a member of Congress to say they oppose gay marriage. [Edit: Perhaps this passage is unclear. I am not saying they are the same AT ALL. I am saying that the way we today would find the re-institution of slavery blatantly wrong, so should, in 100 years, we look back and find the denial of gay people rights, blatantly wrong. Obviously gay people are not suffering the same atrocities at all that blacks suffered during slavery. AT ALL. I thought this was clear, but if it wasn’t, I apologize.]

In a previous interview, I mentioned I am reading a textbook about Abraham Lincoln. “Textbook” is a word I chose to emphasize how thick the book is, but it’s actually Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tome on Lincoln’s political strategy, ‘Team of Rivals.’ Goodwin is a general presidential enthusiast, having written books on the Kennedys and the Roosevelts too. I did reach out to her for this project, but she did not respond.

Harold Holzer, however, is more of a fine-tuned Abraham Lincoln expert of the classical definition; one of about fifty in the country. The man loves Lincoln.

I arrive at his large, well-decorated office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he works as Vice President of External Affairs, on Tuesday afternoon. While he briefly talks to his assistant, I nose around a bit. There’s a gorgeous painting of our 16th President on the side wall that Harold tells me is from the 1860s. It’s on loan to the Met but he requested that until it’s put into a proper exhibit, it stays in his office. His desk has two small copper busts of Lincoln, and there are a few framed political cartoons and full bookshelves of Lincoln writings. He’s also got two seats from Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC, the location of Lincoln’s assassination, next to one of his brown leather sofas. They were given to him after a renovation in the 1960s so they’re not originals, but they’re still kind of eerie.

“Wow,” I tell him when he comes back in. “You just get to do what you love all day, huh?”

Harold laughs, “Oh, yeah,” he says, gesturing for me to look around because he doesn’t know I already did.

The hour I spent talking to Harold was the most fun I’d had in weeks, which is probably a sad fact about me. I’d read a lot about Lincoln in college and was reading more lately to prepare for the interview. Truthfully, I’d been crawling out of my skin to talk to another enthusiast about him. First, there were infinite questions: How did Lincoln, a poor lawyer, become president seemingly out of nowhere? Did he emancipate the slaves because he truly believed in it, as legend goes, or was it a political move? Was he a closeted homosexual?

Plus, on a personal level, I was dying to ask an expert about my theory on the connection between abolitionists and gay rights.

“Everybody sees a little of themselves in Lincoln,” Harold says from across his wooden desk, overflowing with papers. He’s an older, gray-haired, bespectacled man, balding on top and with a kind, yet confident face and demeanor. “Every president, and I’ve talked to quite a few presidents, from Nixon to Johnson to Clinton, they all identify with Lincoln.”

“Obama did too,” I say, hedging my bets. “I think he’s the closest parallel.”

Harold nods, “He did a lot in the beginning and during his campaign but recently he’s dropped that,” he says, reminding me that Obama actually quoted Lincoln’s infamous “friends and enemies” speech, which goes as such:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory will swell when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.”

It was a time of great division in the country that eventually led to the Civil War. I nervously tell Harold my theory and he considers for a moment.

“There’s a lot of anger now,” he says, “but it’s not one issue dividing us like slavery did back then. I mean, it’s social issues but even now, the Tea Party is reducing their stances on the social issues because they know they’re losing on those ends. With gay marriage, eighty percent of people say, ‘Do it already’, so it’s difficult to say. They say they’re about the deficit but is that really worth destroying the whole country about? There’s not really an issue of people having rights that is as seething as slavery was. We don’t have that now.”

“I would say it’s still gay rights,” I counter.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But it’s more than that that’s dividing us now. There’s a vagueness to the discontent that no one can put their finger on.”

In Goodwin’s book, the thesis statement surrounds Lincoln’s choice to appoint his greatest political rivals to the Cabinet seats after he won the Presidential election. Namely, his chief rival was a man named William Henry Seward, who was considered the front-runner until Lincoln rose to prominence. After his victory, Lincoln made Seward his Secretary of State. Sound familiar?

“What about Obama appointing Hillary Clinton?” I ask. Mostly, I just want him to validate my idea that we’re repeating the 1860s all over again. “Isn’t that exactly like Lincoln and Seward?”

“There are parallels,” he says. “With all due respect to Doris, who’s a friend, but ‘Team of Rivals,’ I mean, that was par for the course. It was only smart for Lincoln to appoint Seward and for Obama to appoint Clinton.”

Smirking, he reaches behind his desk and pulls up a framed political cartoon. It depicts Obama as Lincoln and Clinton as Seward. It’s my idea sketched out.

“I had this hanging up when the Clintons were in my office,” Harold says sheepishly. “That was embarrassing.”

“Did they see it?!” I ask. “I mean, it’s not like Hillary Clinton doesn’t know she’s Seward.”

Harold smiles, “Yeah, but still. Bill pointed it out. I said, ‘Oh, uh…it’s a magazine cover,’” he pauses, putting it back down. “So embarrassing.”

Before going into his office, I was very nervous to meet Harold. He’s a prominent and accomplished figure in his field and the elegance of meeting in a museum office, when I’m used to coffee dates was intriguing. Harold seems to understand his own intelligence but throughout, I start to feel pleased with my own ability to keep up with him.

“Why do you think people are so interested in Lincoln over any other president?” I ask. Harold looks quizzical. “I just mean…there’s no like Polk or Garfield enthusiasts.”

“And there wouldn’t be,” he laughs. “Lincoln is so many things to so many people. He was mysterious and he was a martyr. He was the first photographed President and the first assassinated. He rose from obscurity making him a very story book figure of Americana. He freed the slaves.”

“What do you mean when you say he’s mysterious?”

“Well, did he have a bad speaking voice or a good speaking voice? Was he really a  conservative or really a liberal? Was he gay?,” Harold shrugs. “Some people think so.”

“Because they want him to be gay?” I ask tentatively.

Harold chuckles, “Because he slept with his law partner for two years.”

I remember reading that. Lincoln’s long-time friend Joshua Speed shared his bed while they were both struggling lawyers. Their letters to each other contain much more emotion and expressions of love and devotion than men today are comfortable with.

“Well,” I say, clearing my throat. I’ve been pushing myself in these interviews to go where I’m most uncomfortable. “It was a different time. Men could talk to each other like that.”

“Maybe,” Harold says, shrugging again like Lincoln’s sexuality is the most boring subject about him. “There weren’t labels like ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ back then. People just did things.” I ask if, as an expert, Harold would care if our 16th President was gay. “No,” he tells me. “Some people would though.”

Harold is right. Everyone does see a part of themselves in Lincoln. There are vehement ‘Lincoln was gay’ fanatics who write extensively about proof that the man was homosexual. Maybe he was. I find the idea more interesting than Harold seems to. There is also, surprisingly enough, a vocal anti-Lincoln segment who believe our devotion to the man is the root of all our government’s problems today. Harold isn’t particularly moved by either group, though he says the leader of the anti-Lincolnists once shouted at him at a conference.

Interrupting my line of questions, Harold asks me for more information about 100 Interviews since his assistant is the one who set up our meeting. When I explain my background in journalism, Harold tells me he worked for his high school newspaper and graduated college with a degree in English at only 20 because of an illness he suffered at 19, which he mentions again but never elaborates on. The illness and his own rebellious nature caused him to forgo graduate school.

“I was always sitting out in the hallway or in the dean’s office,” he says, and I tell him I can relate. “Tons of demerits.”

Instead, he went to work at a local newspaper, where he ended up taking over after the old editors left. “Not that I was so brilliant,” he chuckles. “I was the only one left. I was like Lou Grant in…ah, you probably don’t know,” he says, waving his hand at me.

“I know ‘Mary Tyler Moore’!” I laugh, indignant. “I get Nick-At-Nite!”

“Well, it was like that,” he says, amused (and I’m a bit pleased I’m amusing him), “Bottles of whiskey in the desk.”

Harold left the newspaper for politics in 1972 when liberal firecracker Bella Abzug ran against incumbent Bill Ryan in New York.

“Have you heard of Bella Abzug?” he says, and then looks surprised when I nod.

“She was Jewish,” I explain. “We had a painting of her in my synagogue.”

Harold clasps his hands together, smiling. “It’s so disappointing to me whenever a young woman doesn’t know who she is,” he says.

This is because Abzug is a renowned feminist icon. She ultimately lost the race (it would have been the first time a woman beat a man) but Ryan died shortly after his election and she took over his seat. Harold became her press secretary when he was just 26 years old and worked with her again in 1976 when she ran for Senate. It’s an impressive resume. He also worked for Mario Cuomo’s mayoral campaign a year later.

But four years before that, he’d also started writing articles about Lincoln, specifically about the use of images of the man, such as paintings, photographs or sculptures. Harold says he was always interested in Lincoln images; he’d assemble scrapbooks of Lincoln as a child and his sister got him a book called “Lincoln: Pictures of the Story of His Life” for his bar mitzvah.

He lovingly recalls the first painting of Lincoln he ever saw in person — at a flea market in 1971 while getting furniture for his first apartment with his wife.

“They’re so lovingly saved in these gorgeous frames,” Harold says. “My generation had posters of movie stars. Yours makes their screen saver a picture of Justin Bieber. Back then, they had political or military heroes on their parlor walls.”

Harold soon became the reigning specialist in rare Lincoln images, mainly, he says, because no one else was into it.

“He was an odd-looking person for his time,” Harold says. “He was 6’4 when the average height of the era was 5’5 for a man. He would have been like what a basketball player looks like to us now. He made fun of himself and the way he looked but he still chose to sit for photographers and artists and sculptures.”

“Do you think those people tried to make him look…better?” I ask. “Everything I’ve read makes him sound harsher looking than, let’s say, that.” I gesture to the beautiful 1860s painting on Harold’s wall.

Harold nods, “They probably tried to improve his look,” he also looks up at the painting, “That’s definitely a softened, romanticized picture.”

Harold’s choice of a specific aspect of Lincoln to study - his images - opened the door for him to publish his first book in 1984. From there, he became a board member for the Springfield Abraham Lincoln Association and the Executive Abraham Lincoln group in NY. Harold also founded the Lincoln Forum, which hosts an annual November symposium in Gettysburg, PA.

“Did you have to prove yourself to the other experts to get into the little top tier?” I ask.

Harold laughs, “It’s like a little crew, sure. You have to get into the little group,” he says. “Definitely, but you’re making it sound way cooler than it is.”

I think Harold is underestimating how cool the Lincoln crowd can be. For instance, the book Harold fatefully chose from the library as a child was called “The Lincoln Nobody Knows” by Richard Current. The author of that book, still alive and in his 90s, later became a good friend of Harold’s in the field. I relate immediately to whenever I meet a comedian I’ve admired since childhood, now that I too do comedy. (Most notably, I once told comic Mike Birbiglia I’d loved him since I saw him on TV when I was in middle school. He did not appreciate hearing that from a grown lady.)

I tell Harold I have another outlandish theory that since politicians were required to give speeches and present so often for a crowd, that 1860s politicians are equivalent to today’s stand-up comedians. Since stand-up hadn’t yet been invented as an art-form, it seems the only outlet for people able to talk and engage a crowd was politics.

Harold gets up and brings me over another framed political cartoon from the back of his office. This one shows a much more angular-faced Lincoln saying “This reminds me of a little joke…” I’ve mentioned above that Lincoln rose from relative obscurity to the office of the presidency, and the place where he got his start was with story-telling.

“He was a retailer of funny stories, but he didn’t make them up,” Harold says of Lincoln. “He remembered them because he had a computer mind. Any story someone told, he’d say, ‘That reminds me…’ He faced the same criticism Obama faces today when he plays golf. Lincoln was criticized for telling funny stories when people were dying in a war. Anyway, you’re not wrong. Lincoln was identified as the national storyteller and,” Harold smiles, “he read joke books.”

“I used to marvel at how people back then could watch a speech for three hours,” I say, “but then I realized they didn’t have TV or anything else to do.”

“Exactly,” Harold says. “It was their only entertainment. But Lincoln was specific with his speeches. He’d include stage directions and he read very, very slowly. Every writer should want to be like him. He wrote very clearly, never really editing, always processing or editing in his head,” Harold says reverently. “His son said that Lincoln would hold the pen, write a few lines and then hold the pen, write a few lines.”

Right now, Harold writes a Civil War blog for the New York Times website and is also working on a book on the press in the Civil War era and a children’s book on Lincoln and his sons. In total, he’s authored, co-authored or edited 36 books. He’s preparing for an upcoming reading of a Lincoln speech on C-SPAN. (“I’m such a ham,” he says, chuckling. “I love being on television.”) To list all of his Lincoln-related accomplishments would take this entire blog.

At the end of our interview, when I thank him for his time, he tells me it was his pleasure. He’d let our half-hour time slot bleed over into a full hour. Maybe he needed to talk to someone new about Lincoln as much as I did. “You let me talk about two of my favorite things,” he says, confirming my suspicion, “Lincoln and myself.”

“Do you identify with Lincoln at all?” I ask toward the end.

“No,” he says, surprising me. “I’m not as honest as he was. But I would have liked to be his press secretary. That’s a fantasy I have.”

“Is there a lot left to study about Lincoln?” After all this time, I can’t imagine there is. Harold says the Internet has created an overflow of Lincoln theorists, eroding some of the mystery he enjoyed in the ’80s.

“There is around the edges,” he says. “Everyone’s in search of this Holy Grail. They took his skull fragments and they did DNA testing, you know to see if he had syphilis because it would be in his bones.”

“Wow,” I say, thinking of notorious womanizer Benjamin Franklin. “Uh, but didn’t everyone have an STD back then?”

Harold nods, “Sure, but did it lead to his wife’s meltdown or does it explain his [two] kids’ deaths? Things like that.”

Harold tells me that the people who did Lincoln’s autopsy, after he was shot while watching a play at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, later wrote that holding Lincoln’s brain was an extraordinary moment. They felt a chill that just 24 hours before that very brain had been that of the most creative and honored writer of his age.

“His whole story is just incredible. Did he really learn to read just from the Bible and Shakespeare? Where did that brain come from?” Harold says. “His parents were illiterate. They signed their marriage certificate with X’s. I mean, where in the world did it come from?”

“He had to make his own opportunities,” I suggest. “He sought out books from everywhere and taught himself beyond his situation in life. He’s a role model in that way.”

Harold agrees, “He made the opportunity, sure. But he was stronger, taller, he wrote better than anyone else, he looked different. It’s a once-in-history combination. It was all going for him. Plus, he had the moment,” he says referring to the emancipation of the slaves. “Right man, right time. How often does that happen?”

“Could be happening right now,” I reply.

“Could be,” Harold says. “But nobody’s paying attention to history.”