Lincoln's Legacy Hardly Black and White

"President Lincoln and Family," an engraving by A.B Walter in 1865
and published by John Dainty, Philadelphia;
from my family's private collection of vintage Americana

 

On this day in 1809, in a tiny Kentucky village, the 16th president of the United States was born.

For all of his modest beginnings, however, Abraham Lincoln would become one of the most pivotal figures in American history.  And after his assassination in 1865, his life would develop a legendary status of almost mythical proportions.  At least among Northerners and minorities, anyway.

For many white Southerners, Lincoln was and has remained a man of tyranny at worst, or duplicity at best.

It has been said that a war's victors get to write its history, and that has indeed been true of America's brutal Civil War.  Although Southern whites have long protested the saintly virtue and stoic resolve that has been inscribed into Lincoln's epitaph, such protestations have been met with derision by a country eager for heroes and anxious to move on from those awful, bloody war years.

It's not that racism didn't - and doesn't - exist in America's North, or that all Southerners were - or are - racists.  The factors that contributed to our Civil War, and its legacy, are far more complex than racism.  There were - and are - raw economic factors, and Constitutional questions, and plain old desperate politicking.  Warring amongst ourselves for four years proved to be the most bitter scourge we've inflicted upon our country to date, and every year, it seems, Lincoln's birthday, or some commemoration of his presidency, increasingly rubs salt into those wounds.

You see, the Lincoln that was wasn't the Lincoln many Americans want him to be.

Ever since I moved to Texas as a teenager, I've heard that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.  It was about states' rights.  Federal officials from the president on down had no right to dictate to states the manner in which they should modernize their economy, which in the South, according to conservative Southerners, was a topic that included slavery only in the context of a labor force.

When I was in college, I heard that the Civil War wasn't about states rights, but about economic prosperity.  The South, thanks to cheap labor from slaves, had become mired in an agrarian economy, while the North was rapidly expanding, thanks to the Industrial Revolution.  The bit about slavery was, more or less, the straw that broke the camel's back.

Yet when I was a small boy, growing up in rural New York State, in a region near Syracuse that was, during the Civil War, a hotbed of Abolitionist fervor, Abraham Lincoln was practically deity.  He won freedom for the slaves because he valued their humanity.  And throughout almost all of my life, I've held to that notion, even if states rights and economics were valid components of the Civil War.  More than anything, I'd been taught that Lincoln was the great emancipator, and I assumed people who claimed otherwise were simply poor losers, or blatant racists.  I never idolized Lincoln, or worshiped his legacy, but since most of the grumblings against him were coming from Southerners who seemed preoccupied by the Civil War, it was easy for me to assume that Lincoln provided them a better scapegoat than their venerated general, Robert E. Lee.

Perhaps, however, it's inevitable that tides turn, even in political history.  Because recently, it seems that more and more questions are being raised publicly about how we should view Lincoln and his role in civil rights.  In 2009, which was the 200th anniversary of his birth, several controversial books about the president were published, and one of them seemed to sum up what many of them were saying.  It was entitled Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, by George M. Fredrickson, and it dared to revive a debate between historians about the level of Lincoln's own personal racism.

Wait, you say - somebody's saying Lincoln was a racist?

Well, actually, it's simple deduction, based on Lincoln's own speeches and writings.  When he was running for the United States Senate in 1858, he mentioned more than once that he did not believe blacks and whites should be socially or politically equal.  He once scoffed at the notion of "negro equality," claiming that only fools believed such a thing.  Even after delivering his Emancipation Proclamation, he was trying to negotiate with some Central American countries to deport America's blacks.  In fact, if he wasn't assassinated so soon after the end of the Civil War in 1865, who knows if Lincoln would have succeeded in his clandestine deportation efforts?  Like John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated before he had the chance to irreparably damage his own reputation, Lincoln died at a sort of zenith of his presidency, before his true beliefs about blacks could have been codified into whatever post-slavery laws he might have pursued during Reconstruction.

To be sure, Lincoln opposed the institution of slavery, but not because it involved the commoditization of human beings.  Lincoln opposed slavery because it provided the South an unfair economic advantage in the eyes of Northern industrialists, who had to hire their employees.  Lincoln also desired to preserve the Union, believing that both the North and the South created a far more formidable nation together than they could as separate entities.  But in terms of black people having the same intrinsic rights, qualities, and humanity that whites have?  No, Lincoln's writings and speeches prove that he did not believe that at all.

So where does this leave us today, as we've come to equate emancipation with civil rights?  The same civil rights that Lincoln, were he alive today, would likely want to deny non-whites?

Some people give Lincoln the benefit of the doubt, rationalizing something about him "being a product of his day," where, for example, it was practically inconceivable even in the North for a black person to marry a white person.  Lincoln's viewpoint, supposedly, contrasts with the progress we've made as a society, where today, racists may frown on interracial marriage, but that doesn't keep it from successfully happening.

Is that enough?  Is taking what's left - Lincoln's practical opposition to slavery on economic grounds - a sufficient redemption of his legacy?  Or might it simply help to explain why many Southerners seem to still be fighting the Civil War, with their continuous refusal - that is often mocked - to embrace the leader who proved militarily superior?  Remember, since them ol' Yankees were the ones who wrote the war's "official" history, it was in their best interests to let their hero's faults slide into the dustbin of inconvenient memories.

For better or worse, a politician like Lincoln likely wouldn't have survived very long in today's world anyway.  Not with our sound-bite news organizations, insatiable social media, and on-demand information technology.  When people now ask where all of our great leaders are, perhaps it's more accurate to wonder how great our past leaders would have been had they been forced to endure the same deep scrutiny our leaders today endure.  Then again, perhaps Lincoln really was a visionary for his day, and the progress he made towards equality - even though he didn't believe in it personally - was as good as could have been made in 1860's American society.  If he were alive today, Lincoln might have navigated our current political waters with the same duplicity many other modern politicians do.  He said what he said back then to win elections.  That's all politicians do today.

What we can learn from all of this is that national leaders can't necessarily be extracted from the day and age in which they lived, and examined by a different era's standards.  This is particularly true in a democratic republic, where a society, as they say, elects the leadership it deserves.  It's one of the reasons why I bristle when right-wingers try to romanticize America's past, and put our Founding Fathers on pedestals.  It's easier to fashion our own nostalgia than it is to wrestle with facts for which we may have to dig.  Or facts which cause us to relinquish long-held beliefs and assumptions.

We're learning that Lincoln wasn't the saint many of us were taught he was, and that he might have even been more of the villain many Southerners have been grousing for generations that he was.  Is that enough to revoke his tenure as one of America's greatest statesmen?

Probably not.  Despite his disappointing shortcomings, he was still a pivotal president, upon whom hinged the direction of a country that hadn't even reached it's centennial when he was assassinated.  He was a racist, but he sought the survival of the union of a country that has come to identify his faults for what they are.  That counts as progress, doesn't it?

Our modern leaders can only hope to approximate such an imperfect legacy.

Four Buildings, One Impressive Roof

Dallas Cowboys Stadium (a.k.a. AT&T Stadium) in Arlington, Texas

 

Sure, it's an impressive stadium.

And yeah, it looks pretty unique.  So unique, in fact, that a local architecture critic here in Dallas was surprised to see its design so brazenly copied for one of the Sochi Olympic venues.

Back in 2009, the Dallas Cowboys football team left their storied home in Irving, a pile of steel and concrete whose only distinguishing characteristic was a hole in its roof, so, as was said, "God could watch His favorite NFL team play."  They moved over to within a couple of miles of my home, in the bustling city of Arlington, Texas, and set up shop in a dazzling, commanding, and sleek palace that holds a unique place within the National Football League.

In a sport known as much for blue-collar bravado as it is for its gridiron gladiators, the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium - which was recently officially rechristened "AT&T Stadium" - and its owner, Jerry Jones, have created a paradox.  Sure, it's where American football is played, as well as soccer, and rock concerts, college football, and a host of other sweaty, pop-culture events.  Yet all of that loud, raucous activity takes place in a drop-dead-gorgeous building that itself is its own world-class attraction.

Jones tasked his wife, Gene, to commission millions of dollars in custom artwork for his trophy property, a trophy property he paid HKS Architects of Dallas to design with meticulous attention to detail.  Slick curtain walls of silver glass sheathe the sides of his stadium, and most importantly, triumphant steel arches soar across the length of the playing field, supporting a retractable canopy.  Massive plate-glass doors at both ends of the stadium let natural light inside, and also glow with dazzling effect when night games are being played inside.

I'm not a fan of the NFL, or of Jerry Jones, whose tenure as owner of America's Team has been anything but stellar.  But I'm a big fan of this stadium, even though taxpayers here in Arlington have picked up part of the tab for building it.  It's the most iconic building in the State of Texas, I believe.  It's more spectacular than our grand state capitol building in Austin, and far more recognizable than the original Kimbel Art Museum by Louis Khan in Fort Worth, arguably the most architecturally significant building in Texas.

Fisht Stadium

Fisht Stadium in Sochi, Russia

So with all of that going for it, Mark Lamster, the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, sounds appropriately puzzled that officials with the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, would agree to build a stadium that so closely mimics it.  You'll see it tonight, if you watch the opening ceremonies for these winter games, and at the closing ceremonies, and you'll likely marvel at the arching trusses that support its roof, a key element of its design.

Key elements that have been boldly copied, and not entirely successfully.

It's called Fisht Stadium, in honor of a nearby mountain of the same name, and we're told its roofline is meant to suggest snowy mountain peaks, which sounds appropriate, considering this is the Winter Olympics.  However, the Fisht's roofline also suggests either a low-budget job to begin with, or too much corruption eating away at its pricetag to complete it as it was intended.  As Lamster points out, most of the design execution below the roof and those impressive trusses looks cheap and sloppy; but this is Russia, after all.  As we've already learned from many reporters already posting tweets and blog entries from Sochi, Russian planning for these Olympics seems to have been long on first-glance wow-factors and woefully sort on everything else.

That cheapness, however, might also explain Russia's willingness to accept what is virtually a miniature version of the Cowboys Stadium concept.  Fisht Stadium has some extra girth around its belly to try and disguise its uncanny resemblance to Cowboys Stadium, and its bubble-wrap skin lacks sleekness, just as a pillow-stitched down coat does.  But maybe this too is supposed to evoke a Russian motif?  Perhaps we could call the Fisht Russia's "Babushka" version of the Cowboys prototype?

Just don't presume that Cowboys Stadium really is an original prototype.  For all of the accolades HKS has garnered with its design for the NFL's largest venue, they're not making much of an effort to educate their fans on their own inspirations for their project.  Because, for all of its glamor and intrigue, Cowboys Stadium is not the first of its kind.

It may not even be the second.

Ōita Stadium

To explain what I mean, we need to travel over to Japan, where a couple of lesser municipal venues have been languishing in the shadows of Cowboys Stadium.

Ōita Stadium in Ōita, Japan

First, let's consider the remarkable similarities Ōita Stadium, opened in 2001, shares with the HKS concept for Cowboys Stadium.  Designed by Kisho Kurokawa, Ōita Stadium is a multi-purpose building in the Japanese city of the same name, and it utilizes the elegant sliced-dome aesthetic to the same powerful affect as Cowboys Stadium.

A significant difference exists between the two buildings, however, and it comes in regard to Ōita Stadium's saucer-shaped roof.  It employs lateral trusses, attached to a central longitudinal truss, whereas Cowboys Stadium goes all-out with just two mammoth longitudinal trusses, onto which the rest of the building's roof structure is attached.

Still, at least visually, the resemblance is uncanny, isn't it?

Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium

Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium in Fujisawa, Japan

Even if you don't want to concede that Ōita Stadium is a legitimate precursor to Cowboys Stadium, you have to give serious consideration to an even earlier building, the Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, again in the Japanese city of the same name. 

It was designed by the celebrated architect Fumihiko Maki and constructed in 1984, replete with steel arched trusses to support the roof, and broad flanks fanning out from those trusses exactly like the roof atop Cowboys Stadium.  

Okay, so the Fujisawa roof isn't retractable, but in terms of aesthetics, aren't the similarities between it and Cowboys Stadium too obvious to ignore?  So why ignore them?  Isn't seeing believing?  With Cowboys Stadium, its dominant feature is its roof design, a design that could almost have been copied from Fujisawa Gymnasium.  Just look at more photos of it, if you need further convincing.

Not that the HKS interpretation of what is obviously an inspiration from Maki's gym design is a bad one.  And if the designers at HKS literally had no idea that Maki's Japanese gym even existed, it speaks to the universal triumph of the roofing conceptualization they share, and the drama the two-arched-truss system affords rooflines covering broad, uninterrupted rooms.  After all, one of the reasons why so many sports fields are open to the elements is that the conventional method for supporting a roof involves pillars or columns, and those can seriously interfere with playing most sports!  It could be that with, first, the Maki design, and now, its application by HKS on a much grander scale, we'll be seeing more and more of these stadium roofing solutions around the world.

Indeed, Russia's Fisht Stadium is proof of that.  Even if it looks like an inferior knock-off of its far-better-executed progenitors.  And should we be surprised?  Russians have a reputation of copying Western technology and design with impunity, and masquerading them as comparable to their originals.  Again, perhaps with their Fisht, it's all in pursuit of a Russian motif.

As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

So, as an Arlington taxpayer who helped pay for the new home of the Dallas Cowboys, to Russia I say "Спасибо!" (pronounced SPAH-see-bah)

Which is "Thank you" in Russian.

Proof Theory in Creation Debate

 
Proof.

It's what we all want.

We want proof that God exists.  We want proof that Mr. X did or did not kill Mr. Y.  We want proof that I'm not lying.  We want proof that Barak Obama is a born-again Christian.  We want proof that life begins at conception.  We want proof that our tax dollars are not being wasted.  We want proof that somebody we secretly admire admires us back.

Of all the topics for which we want proof of something, how the world began is one of the biggest.  A lot of people would love to have proof about the science and/or the theology of our origins.  Recently, apparently, there was a televised debate between two experts named Ken Ham and Bill Nye in a showdown to advance arguments for and against Creationism.  I say "apparently," because this age-old discussion really doesn't interest me much at all, so I didn't know about this particular debate until after the fact.  Kinda like our origins, right?

Now, in terms of ordinary human curiosity, and being a moderately literate resident of the planet, exploring whatever differences and similarities may or may not exist between creationism and evolution represents a pursuit of basic relevance for all of us.  From where did we come?  It's one of those universal questions, isn't it?  For many people, the scientific and theological fields necessary to seriously study all conventional aspects of our origins forces those of us with other tasks to perform in life to mostly watch these debates from the sidelines.  However, that doesn't mean that some of us become deeply absorbed in proving or disproving their theories and beliefs on the subject.

But I'm not one of those people.  For one thing, I'm not ashamed to admit that most of the required science - and some of the theology - in which I'd have to develop considerable expertise is simply over my head.  And for another thing, I believe there are far more important arguments to address in our world.

Not that how our world came to be isn't important.  And not that I'm shying away from the debate simply because I'm not smart enough to sound intelligent about it, even though I'll readily admit that no, I'm not smart enough.  But I shy away from debating the origins of our world because it seems that such an activity rarely accomplishes anything productive.

And the reason why is simple:  After thousands of years of human existence, I'm not convinced any side in this debate has been able to secure the proofs to settle all debate.

Even the best scientists can only advance theories, despite being able to quantify a lot of facts about a lot of aspects of our natural environment.  And theologians - including the ones that try to stitch plausible parts of each side together - still need to rely on aspects of theology that atheistic pragmatists show no interest in accepting as fact.

Personally, I have some problems with the intellectual evangelicals who like the stitched-together approach to our world's origins.  For one, I question the problems they seem to have with taking God at His Word, and giving Him the benefit of the doubt if He says He created everything in six days.  Calendar days.  Literal, 24-hour increments of time.

You're trusting Christ for your eternal salvation, but not how God tells us He created us in the first place?

I also tend to doubt those evangelicals who seem to need science to help them affirm a longer timeframe than the six-day scenario.  Most of the stitched-together folks who tinker with literal creationist belief follow some version of what's called "old Earth creationism," or "theistic evolution," or "intelligent design."  Now, proponents of each of these three views would likely bristle at being lumped together so closely, but hey - they're the ones trying to assuage their thirst for proofs by being dissatisfied with the literalist folks.  And the reason I lump them all in together is because, as I understand it, there is a certain amount of death, degradation, and atrophy that is implied in their versions of how the physical world got put together.  By contrast, my understanding of death, under which heading things like degradation and atrophy would fall, is that it first appeared after Adam and original sin in the Garden of Eden.  Which, um, puts us beyond all of this creation/evolution stuff, right?

Then there's Hebrews 11:3, which teaches "that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible."  Which, to my non-scientific brain, sounds as though God pretty much started with zero raw materials when He created the world, and I'm not sure how not having raw materials supports the logistics for the folks intrigued by old Earth creationism, theistic evolution, or intelligent design.

But then again, like I said, I'm no scientist, so maybe death wasn't needed for things to die before original sin corrupted life.  And maybe it depends on what your definition of "raw materials" is.

Anyway, in my feeble brain, all of this is secondary to the main reason for why people argue about the origins of our world.  And what is that main reason?  I have a theory about that!  It's because, deep down, we want proof, isn't it?  And if we can't get definitive proof, we want the closest thing we can get to it.  Hard-core evolutionists scoff at creationism and literalists because they think faith is only for intellectual weaklings, yet for all of our evangelical gusto about faith being the substance of things hoped for, might we also subconsciously think evolutionists have a point?  Might we lack confidence in something as wacky-sounding as "And God Said, Let There Be Light."

It's too simplistic.  It sounds too uneducated.  It defies all that we've come to know and understand about the complexities within our world.  We denigrate the nobility of science by not trying to at least stitch together its plausible theories into some sort of rational framework for explaining to skeptics about how God didn't just command things into existence.

Are we ashamed of what God might be challenging us to believe?

Perhaps this scientific dialog many evangelicals pursue over our physical origins is somehow helpful in fulfilling our overall mandate of glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.  But it isn't obvious to me.  There are even evangelicals who debate the use of the word "day" in the Bible, which risks opening up a Pandora's Box of insecurity regarding whether we can trust each individual word that we read in what we say is God's holy Gospel.

Besides, at the end of the day - regardless of how long your day happens to be - aren't we still left with the whole proof issue?  Not whether proof exists, but our very need for proof in the first place?  We're looking for signs, indicators, studies, tests, educated guesses, anything - so we don't have to take by faith that God made Creation in a total of 144 literal, Timex-tested hours.

Not that I'm a rock-solid six-day creationist myself, mind you.  If God did indeed deploy a strategy in which His Creation was created during a longer timespan than six literal days, that's His business, right?  I don't know why there would be the discrepancy between His timeline and the account He provides for us in Genesis 1.  But because I trust in Him, I don't have to understand everything He's done, is doing, and will do.  I don't really understand how or why He came up with the whole process of original sin, the lineage of Christ, and why He uses people like you and me to glorify Him here within the spheres of influence we inhabit on His Earth.  I have some ideas about why He chose the plans He chose, and have learned some theories from different pastors and theologians over the years, but again, at the end of the day, it's all faith, isn't it?

In fact, sometimes I think it takes more faith to believe in origin theories that involve anything longer than a literal six days, because in that scenario, you have to really be careful about whose theory you choose to support.

Not that wanting proofs, or wanting to prove something, is a wrong or bad desire, in and of itself.  But needing to prove something when God says we don't need to just might be.  Why?  Because needing to prove something might betray our own desire to know more than God intends for us to know.

Obviously, God is not threatened by all of this debate over how His universe began.  Yet it seems as though some humans are.