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Harold Holzer, vice president for external affairs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and renowned Abraham Lincoln scholar, was in the city Thursday for a lecture at IPFW sponsored by the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics. He spoke with editorial writer Stacey Stumpf about the Lincoln Museum and his current Lincoln project. Here are excerpts of the interview; listen to the entire interview by going to The Journal Gazette’s home page at www.journa1gazette.net, click “opinion,” then click “5 Questions for Harold Holzer
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It’s sort of a good news-bad news result. My preference as a visitor, as a historian who used that museum for 30 years, is that I wish everything would have stayed the same.
It was convenient. It was inspiring. It was a very rich museum. It was sort of incomparable in many ways. And the people were fantastic. They were great to visitors, and they were great to scholars, and that’s the best combination.
How it was decided? I find it mysterious. I don’t know what it was all about. Was there a real national search for a home? Was it always going to stay in Indiana?
I guess the result is good for Indiana because it’s in Indianapolis and in the Allen County (Library) museum.
On the research side it remains to be seen. I’ve spoken to some of my old contacts at the museum who tell me that at some point it will be welcoming and accessible and, even more, it will be digitized and reproducible. And that will be a great service.
I’m not sure it couldn’t have been done in its original home, but that will be good. But the thing we will be missing and cannot be replaced digitally – I don’t think you can replace reality with digital reality.
I’ve learned my lesson; I’m staying home. I’m about to open an exhibition that I’m chief historian of – even though I work at an art museum.
My director and my president very generously allowed me to serve as a guest historian at the New York Historical Society. We’re opening an exhibition next week, Oct. 9, called “Lincoln and New York.” Just as Fort Wayne claimed Lincoln for 75 years, we’re going to claim Lincoln.
The most interesting thing is always the fact that he was so brilliant and yet self-educated – that his formal schooling did not amount to a year in his entire life. And all of that experience was sort of perfunctory; it was just going to blab schools where they would just recite aloud. The only recognition you ever got from teachers was if you weren’t reading aloud, you got belted with a stick.
But out of that, he somehow, and I don’t know if this was a gift from God or his unique personality, he was just determined to read and learn and memorize.
The conflict is it’s tough to find the time, especially to make trips – which I love to do. In the last few weeks, I’ve been in St. Louis and Detroit and Fort Worth, so it’s been a lot of travel.
The MET people are very generous about it as long as I don’t exceed my allotted vacation days – like every other employee. But I’ve gotten to serve as co-chair of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission – the federal commission that’s organized the 200th birthday. But the down thing is that you don’t get to have real vacations because vacation is used up for Lincoln.
