“Not your father’s Lincoln museum: With a sly blend of scholarship and showman-ship, a new museum reintroduces our 16th president and places us in his world.”
It has been a good year for Abe Lincoln and his new museum in Springfield. In just eight months, attendance at the facility has reached nearly 500,000, and, according to director Richard Norton Smith, will top 600,000 by its first anniversary.
Not bad for an institution that came into being after 14 years of stops and starts — and one that, even as it opened, was the target of critical brickbats for its mixture of theatrical razzmatazz and scholarly research.
On top of that, the museum was criticized in August for having only seven non-whites among its 107 staff members. In September, the administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich began efforts to recover $15 million in what it said were cost-overruns on the $150 million project.
Even so, the visitors have come — often more than once. Smith estimates that as many as 20 percent of those who tour the museum return. In addition, he says, “Clearly, there are a lot of people coming from a lot greater distances than we expected — literally, people from all over the world.” So much so that new signs at the institution are in German, French, Spanish and Japanese, as well as English.
This fall, Smith inaugurated “Evenings to Remember” in which prominent Illinoisans from the past — the first were ex-Gov. Jim Thompson and former U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski — reminisce. “The idea,” says Smith, “is to get folks at a time when they’ve got nothing to lose, and hopefully they’ll be more reflective and more candid than when they were running for office.”
It’s an example of what Smith frequently says about the museum: “This is more than a tourist attraction — and about more than Lincoln.”
