Mr. Spielberg, Connecticut Objects!
By MELENA RYZIK
David James/Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox A scene from “Lincoln.”“How could congressmen from Connecticut — a state that supported President Lincoln and lost thousands of her sons fighting against slavery on the Union side of the Civil War — have been on the wrong side of history?” Mr. Courtney wrote in a letter to Mr. Spielberg and DreamWorks this week. After a check of the Congressional Record, Mr. Courtney discovered, that in fact all four House members from his state voted for the 13th Amendment. “Even in a delegation that included both Democrats and Republicans, Connecticut provided a unified front against slavery,” he writes.
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“I understand that artistic license will be taken and that some facts may be blurred to make a story more compelling on the big screen,” he writes, “but placing the state of Connecticut on the wrong side of the historic and divisive fight over slavery is a distortion of easily verifiable facts and an inaccuracy that should be acknowledged, and if possible, corrected before ‘Lincoln’ is released on DVD.”
(Not to mention before it graces the Oscar stage.)
Team “Lincoln” did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but the Bagger will update you if Mr. Spielberg or the screenwriter Tony Kushner weighs in to explain what they had against the Nutmeg State.
Update: Is something other than the purity of the historical record – or the sanctity of the Academy Awards – at play here? Over at Awards Daily, Sasha Stone notes that none other than Ben Affleck once campaigned for Mr. Courtney, urging students to vote for him at an appearance at the University of Connecticut in 2006. (Mr. Courtney won the election by 83 votes, according to Salon.) And, Ms. Stone suggests, Mr. Courtney’s plea, delivered in a public statement rather than a private message to the filmmakers, may be as crass as politicking.
“A classy person would have simply sent an email to Tony Kushner but no, it’s Oscar season,” she writes. “Time to puff up like an angry peacock and defend the honor of your state! Or maybe try to give back to someone who once helped you win an election. Someone should tell him Affleck needs no help winning at this point.”
It’s unclear what Mr. Courtney’s position on “Argo” is, but in an interview with the Hartford Courant, the congressman notes that overall, he did like Mr. Spielberg’s movie.
“The portrayal of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens is brilliant, and to the extent that people maybe are thinking about how members voted, that’s a healthy thing for our culture to be focused on — our history — as opposed to the other content in movies,” he said.
He makes no mention of Mr. Affleck (who has also campaigned for or donated to Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Al Gore and John Kerry). In a statement late on Thursday, Mr. Kushner defended his adapted screenplay.
“We changed two of the delegation’s votes, and we made up new names for the men casting those votes, so as not to ascribe any actions to actual persons who didn’t perform them,” he writes. “In the movie, the voting is also organized by state, which is not the practice in the House. These alterations were made to clarify to the audience the historical reality that the 13th Amendment passed by a very narrow margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote. The closeness of that vote and the means by which it came about was the story we wanted to tell. In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what Lincoln is.”
Read his full statement after the jump.
Here is Mr. Kushner’s entire statement:
Rep. Courtney is correct that the four members of the Connecticut delegation voted for the amendment. We changed two of the delegation’s votes, and we made up new names for the men casting those votes, so as not to ascribe any actions to actual persons who didn’t perform them. In the movie, the voting is also organized by state, which is not the practice in the House. These alterations were made to clarify to the audience the historical reality that the 13th Amendment passed by a very narrow margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote. The closeness of that vote and the means by which it came about was the story we wanted to tell. In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what Lincoln is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters.
I’m proud that Lincoln’s fidelity to and illumination of history has been commended by many Lincoln scholars. But I respectfully disagree with the congressman’s contention that accuracy in every detail is “paramount” in a work of historical drama. Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here’s my rule: Ask yourself, “Did this thing happen?” If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, “Did this thing happen precisely this way?” If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama. The 13th Amendment passed by a two-vote margin in the House in January 1865 because President Lincoln decided to push it through, using persuasion and patronage to switch the votes of lame-duck Democrats, all the while fending off a serious offer to negotiate peace from the South. None of the key moments of that story — the overarching story our film tells — are altered. Beyond that, if the distinction between history and historical fiction doesn’t matter, I don’t understand why anyone bothers with historical fiction at all.
I’m sad to learn that Representative Courtney feels Connecticut has been defamed. It hasn’t been. The people of Connecticut made the same terrible sacrifices as every other state in the Union, but the state’s political landscape was a complicated affair. The congressman is incorrect in saying that the state was “solidly” pro-Lincoln. Lincoln received 51.4 percent of the Connecticut vote in the 1864 election, the same kind of narrow support he received in New York and New Jersey. As Connecticut Civil War historian Matthew Warshauer has pointed out, “The broader context of Connecticut’s history doesn’t reflect what Courtney had said in his letter. The point is we weren’t unified against slavery.” We didn’t dig into this tangled regional history in Lincoln because a feature-length dramatic film obviously cannot accommodate the story of every state, and more to the point, because that’s not what the movie was about.
I’m sorry if anyone in Connecticut felt insulted by these 15 seconds of the movie, although issuing a Congressional press release startlingly headlined “Before The Oscars …” seems a rather flamboyant way to make that known. I’m deeply heartened that the vast majority of moviegoers seem to have understood that this is a dramatic film and not an attack on their home state.
