A Whistleblower Busted the Lincoln Museum for Improperly Renting a Copy of the Gettysburg Address to Glenn Beck for $50,000

Conservative media personality Glenn Beck, who for years
propagated wild conspiracy theories on Fox News and later via his
company the Blaze, has gotten a museum director in hot water by
paying the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, in
Springfield, Illinois, $50,000 to rent a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address.

The museum’s executive director, Alan Lowe, got a free trip to
Beck’s pop-up Mercury Museum in Dallas, where the document hung in
Beck’s office. Lowe lost his job following an investigation that
found that the rental and the free travel were illegal.

“On February 13, 2019,” says a September 3 report by the Office of the Executive Inspector
General, the Office “received an anonymous complaint alleging that
the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM)
‘pimp[ed] out’ the Gettysburg Address and other Lincoln artifacts
to Mercury One for $50,000 in 2018, contrary to standard museum
lending policies.”

The Lincoln Museum also rented Beck a lock of Lincoln’s hair and
an effigy doll of the assassinated 16th president. Lowe put the
money toward paying off the remaining $9 million of a $25 million
debt the institution had incurred in order to buy a group of
artifacts that included the hair and the doll.

According to a report from the Executive Ethics Commission of
the State of Illinois, there are just five copies of the address in
Lincoln’s handwriting. Schoolchildren across the state collected
pennies (which, you may recall, bear Honest Abe’s profile) to cover
the $60,000 price tag for their own copy in 1944. The document,
which includes Lincoln’s proclamation that “government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth,” is now valued at twenty million dollars. Every year on
November 19, the date Lincoln delivered the address in 1863, the
document goes briefly on public view; it’s highly sensitive to
light, so the rest of the year, it resides in a vault. It had been
out on loan just twice before, and those processes took more than
eight months to arrange. In this case, the document left the museum
just twelve days after the agreement with Beck was inked.

Lowe defied a policy set down by the Historic Preservation
Agency that said the document would not be lent out again, citing,
in part, “increasingly worrisome security issues.” (We’re looking
at you, Nicolas Cage.) Lowe had also offered the Emancipation
Proclamation to Beck’s team.

Lowe organized the loan so quickly that insurance documents
arrived about a half-hour before the FedEx truck bearing the
document left for Dallas, says the report. It was to go on view at
a two-day pop-up exhibition in June at Beck’s Mercury One studios.
The Lincoln Museum’s COO, Michael Little, also got free tickets to
Dallas. Neither he nor Lowe showed up for the transport, removal,
or unpacking of the Gettysburg Address, says the report. Five
months later, Mercury One sent a check for $50,000.

Michael Little, according to the report, was allowed to resign
in lieu of being terminated; shortly afterward, he took a job
working for Beck’s Mercury One, a nonprofit whose mission is to
“restore the human spirit by encouraging dependence on God,
providing humanitarian aid, preserving heritage, and empowering all
to stand for truth.”

With his typical grandiosity, Beck declares in a video that “the
summer of 2018 was game-changing for a lot of people because the
Mercury Museum opened its doors for the first time in a temporary
exhibit housed in the Mercury Studios in Dallas, Texas.” Mercury is
Beck’s radio and television studio. Numerous artifacts are on view
in the video, including a photo of Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump. The
exhibit was titled “Rights &
Responsibilities.”

In a Facebook live video, Beck dons rubber gloves and handles
the framed Address. (That’s where we couldn’t bear to keep
watching.)

A Mercury One spokeswoman said in an emailed statement to Artnet
News that the Office of the Executive Inspector General never
contacted Mercury One in developing its report. “It’s important
that the public both in Illinois and around the world have full
confidence in how the precious document was treated and in our
plans going forward,” she wrote. “We have an artifact handling
policy that was approved by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential
Library and Museum that is very much in line with their standards.
Mercury One is currently in a $160M capital campaign to build a
world-class experiential U.S. History museum in Dallas/Fort Worth.”
She did not reply to a follow-up question about whether Beck’s
handling of the artifact was in line with the Lincoln Museum’s
policies.

The Lincoln Library and Museum declined to comment.

The post A Whistleblower Busted the Lincoln Museum for Improperly
Renting a Copy of the Gettysburg Address to Glenn Beck for
$50,000 appeared first on artnet News.