A new book by Richard W. Etulain explores Abraham Lincoln's impact on the establishment of Dakota and other western Territories. The book also tells the story behind Lincoln's Mount Rushmore sculpture. SDPB's Lori Walsh inteviewed Etulain on "In The Moment."
Lori Walsh: Today's images of the past has us talking about the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, a book from the South Dakota Historical Society Press by Richard Etulain talks about the role Lincoln had in remaking the West. The book is called Abraham Lincoln; A Western Legacy, and the author joins us today. Richard welcome, thanks for being here.
Richard Etulain: Thank you very much.
Lori Walsh: Such a timely book. As the first in a series, it's going to look at the faces on Mount Rushmore and what the legacy of these men were particularly in South Dakota and the Western States. Tell us a little bit about, I mean, you've written, let's see more than 50 books as an author or an editor, many of them about Abraham Lincoln. But when you look at focusing on making really a reader friendly look at how he got on the face of Mount Rushmore through sculptor Gutzon Borglum and such, where did you begin when you've already done so much research and say, "What else needs to be said about this President?" And why now?
Richard Etulain: That is a real challenge, when you think about 17,000 books on a person, and this came because I got an invitation from Nancy Tystad Koupal, the editor at the press, and she and I had been friends for a long time and she asked me if I would be interested in doing this. Think about this, if you took the two subjects that interest you most and you could do a book bringing those two together, it was a very beckoning request because I'm a specialist in the American West and I had an outside specialty and interest in Abraham Lincoln, which goes all the way back to boyhood. So here was the possibility of bringing together those two. So it started with that wonderful enthusiasm of being able to do a project, united two subjects that you were really interested in.
Lori Walsh: Yeah, most people don't think of slavery as a Western question, but it very much is and you make the argument for that in this book. Tell us just a little bit, a snippet of that today, of how can we think about what was happening at this time through migration and through expansion and slavery and what that looked like. Why is slavery a Western question?
Richard Etulain: When I taught for 40 years in college classrooms, I would emphasize a subject that historians try to argue for a point of view and my point of view was that slavery was the most important for bringing about the civil war. But I wasn't adding the Western element to that. And if you think about the South and North competing for the West and not only the West, but slavery in the West, that means that the subject that I'm talking about is both a national and a Western subject, that is would you have slaves in the American West or would you not? South said yes, the North said no. And so, there was this struggle of who's going to win the West by in fact, keeping slavery in or keeping slavery out and Lincoln was one of the most outspoken statesman for saying no more slavery expanded into the West.
Lori Walsh: You also unflinchingly look at his legacy, how other writers have looked at it, the mythology around him after his assassination if you would talk about that a little bit, during a year when we think very much about what our heroes mean to us, how do you look at Lincoln and realize his whole person, his failures in policy and his successes in policy? How do you come at that as a historian?
Richard Etulain: Yeah. And what I had to do is come to a mixed bag conclusion because so often people want to do either black or white and I quickly put together, well, here's George Washington, he was a great President, but he was a slave owner. Here's Andrew Jackson who was probably a good President but he treated Indians miserably. Here's Abraham Lincoln whom I considered to be our greatest President, but by our definitions now he was a racist because he did not believe that Whites and Blacks were equal in all ways and yet he was a wonderful human being. Teddy Roosevelt was a good President, he didn't like Indians. So when we look at the people that have been really strong Presidents, if we bring in the human side, I think it gives us a more complex and a more comprehensive view. So Abraham Lincoln may be our best President but that doesn't mean that he is a Saint. He in fact was a man of his time and he was more sympathetic to Blacks in his time than most people were. Nonetheless, by the perspective of 2020, he was a man who held racial attitudes.
Lori Walsh: You say on page 57, "Generally Lincoln's record with American Indians does not receive high marks." What do we need to understand about what was happening with westward expansion and his policies toward American Indians that we look at now today and realize that we're still seeing the results of Abraham Lincoln's policy decisions at that time?
Richard Etulain: He did have a Native American people come to the white house and he promised that he would do a great deal to make changes, he did not, he did not get that done. And if you look at his daily schedule, Lincoln will have anywhere from 20 to 50 telegrams he's sending out almost every day. What are they dealing with? Which battle, which military leader, which decision? So policy dealing with Native Americans didn't get put on the daily schedule for today. And I think he had attitudes that would have brought change, but he never got to it. So when I say we don't have much on him and by the way, there's a wonderful book coming out by an author by the name of Michael Green on Lincoln and Native Americans that'll add a lot of information to our subject.
Well, when he looked at what happened there, that terrible incident in Minnesota, which then had impact on the Dakotas, he makes a decision that's very positive. He's not going to allow the military to hang those 300 and some Indians, but he does allow 38, 39 Indians to be hanged. So I always asked my classes, which do you see? That he saves the lives of about 270 native Americans or that he allows 30 or 38 or 39 to be hanged? Almost always the students chose the negative side, that is that he allowed those native Americans to be hanged for either murder or rape, that was the cause. Well, I find it more complex, that is he made the decision after a good deal of research that he would allow that to happen. And it seems despicable for our time, but looking at what he did, he also saved the lives of 270 Native Americans.
Lori Walsh: I want to talk a little bit, going back before he becomes President earlier in the book and his persona, his relationship with his father, his relationship with farming in general, he's an academic guy but yet in order to win election as President, this image of him as a rugged rail splitting candidate is also really important. Talk a little bit about what's happening in the nation at this time, where you can have someone like Abraham Lincoln really relying on this image of who he is, which might not be entirely, I won't say is not authentic because it's all true, but it's also maybe not what he would have normally leaned toward in his desire to present himself.
Richard Etulain: First, the unusual part, that is being labeled a Western person and actually Illinois is considered the West in the 1850s, that's unusual because American voters did not usually look that far West for a candidate. So having him advertise himself and being known as a Western candidate that was unusual. Abraham Lincoln was a good compromiser. And none of us wants to be known as a compromiser, but American politics is based on compromise. And so, when I say he was a good compromiser, he was able to work with diversity, both in his new Republican party and also even before he becomes President, but especially after President to work with not only his own new party, but with the Democrats.
And so, what he did is I think he learned there in the West, in the newness of what it was and the new political party, the Republicans, he learned how to compromise and that worked very well when he got to the white house. But he was seen as a Western person and quite often people then would suggest that he was maybe backwoodsy, but when they were around him they realized he had the personality to be able to work with people. And that idea, that mythology around the Western person, the backwoods person gradually went away and by the end of his life, he did have a good reputation. It didn't mean that they were making him a saint and nor were they saying he was our greatest President, but they saw that he was willing to work with people.
Lori Walsh: The treatment of this in the book is several chapters, really so I'm asking you to answer it in just a few minutes, so I appreciate that, but how does he come to be on Mount Rushmore? Why is it Gutzon Borglum who says, "This is the man that has to be included." What can you tell us about the sculptor of Mount Rushmore and his relationship and his admiration for President Lincoln?
Richard Etulain: The first two that he mentioned were Washington and Jefferson and that's interesting because it is very clear that he saw Lincoln as the hero. He named his son Lincoln. So you got the feeling and he mentioned several times that Lincoln was his favorite, but he wanted to begin at the beginning. You see, he was requested by Doane Robinson, the South Dakota historian to do something with Western subjects, [inaudible] Lewis and Clark, but Borglum from very beginning wanted to do Presidents. And that's magnificent because what it did is it brought something to South Dakota that wouldn't naturally have been there. The Western subjects would have been naturally there, but by doing that he brought a different thing together. And Borglum was interested in the Presidents and so, gradually then he developed saying Lincoln to, the unusual one was Teddy Roosevelt.
And what happened is the people, South Dakotan's, Peter Norbeck and Doane Robinson were very strong supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, so was Borglum and quite often they had conflicts, but not on Teddy Roosevelt. So the first three were great American Presidents. Roosevelt had only been gone less than a decade when they decided that he will be a member of Mount Rushmore. That was unusual because if you put Lincoln in and the time period from 1865, it was 60 years after, the Roosevelt was less than 10 years and yet they make the decision. But for Borglum, it was to put Presidents of the United States who had made a great deal of difference in American history.
Lori Walsh: One of the things that I found oddly comforting in this book Richard, is the idea that as we sit in 2020, and there's these great arguments and debates over presidential legacy and heroes and statuary that Abraham Lincoln wasn't universally loved during his life. He wasn't universally loved immediately after his assassination, he wasn't universally loved when he was running for office. This argument about who he is and what he's done well and what he's done poorly is anything but new. And as I read this book, I felt a little comfort for, oh, here we are in 2020 grappling with this issue and sometimes I think we think we're the first ones to think about that, clearly we are not.
Richard Etulain: What I'm going to advocate as a professor and now a book writer is embrace complexity, realize that no issues are simple Democrat or Republican, good or bad. Abraham Lincoln is a wonderful example of a person who's a flawed human being, but a great man to none the less. And yes, his reputation has gone up and down. For example, here's something- ...
Lori Walsh: Very quickly, we're almost out of time. Very quickly.
Richard Etulain: Okay. His reputation right after the civil war was very high with African Americans. It goes down in the 20th century when people realize he doesn't believe Black and Whites are equal. And right now among Blacks it's not nearly as high as it was in the 1870s, 1880s, but for being able to compromise and to lead our country and to make compromises and to do good leadership, Abraham Lincoln deserves to be right near the top, on Mount Rushmore and and everything else.
Lori Walsh: The book is called Abraham Lincoln; A Western Legacy. It is written by Richard Etulain. Thank you so much for this book and for spending time with us today, we appreciate it.
Richard Etulain: My pleasure.