Historian John Y. Simon’s opposition to the use of lifelike figures to help tell the story of Abraham Lincoln’s remarkable life in the proposed Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is proof that although we don’t expect to please all of the people all of the time, there is no pleasing professor Simon (“Let’s bounce the rubber Lincolns,” Commentary, Jan. 24).
We know he disagrees with our plan to use lifelike figures because we have had a number of conversations with him about the figures.
We have shown him examples of modern exhibits that use lifelike figures to engage and educate visitors at the Smithsonian Institution, the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut and the Royal Armouries Museum in England, to name a few.
We have explained to him that the figures will be just one small part of an experience that will take visitors through every stage and every major event of Lincoln’s life. And we have expressed to him, many times, that to judge an entire project on the basis of one visual prototype is akin to condemning the architecture of a building when you have seen only a photo of a doorknob.
We did not plan the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in a vacuum. The comments that we received from the public when a prototype figure was displayed last summer were, as professor Simon noted, “overwhelmingly positive.”
Suggesting that the use of such figures in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum plays to the lowest common denominator is insulting to the public.
The planning committee for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum included history scholars, master teachers, museum professionals, historic site managers, tourism experts and interested citizens. This committee spent more than a year crafting the museum’s themes, carefully considering how to respectfully honor the legacy of America’s greatest president.
The thousands of artifacts and documents that lie at the heart of the museum must have life breathed into them and be placed in their historical context in order to make them relevant. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is a museum of the 21st Century. To dismiss this as mere entertainment harkens back to an earlier time when inanimate objects in glass cases were the order of the day for history museums.
