Peoria, of All Places

On the morning of October 8, The Piccirilli Factor will screen at the Giant Screen Theater of the Peoria Riverfront Museum, a guest of the Fine Arts Society of Peoria in its sixty-fifth season. I am grateful for the invitation, as I am for every room the film finds. But this particular room, in this particular town, carries a resonance I could not have planned if I had tried.

Peoria, of all places.

On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln stood in Peoria and spoke for three hours against the extension of slavery into the territories. The Peoria speech, as it came to be known, was more than an answer to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was the moment a prairie lawyer who had drifted away from politics found his way back — and found, in the process, the moral argument he would refine for the rest of his life: that the nation could not remain half slave and half free, because the declaration that all men are created equal was either true for everyone or true for no one. Historians point to Peoria as the beginning of the road that led to the presidency, to the war, to the Second Inaugural. If Lincoln's voice has a birthplace, it is arguably there.

Sixty-eight years later, in 1922, the nation dedicated its memorial to that voice: a temple on the Potomac, and inside it, the seated Lincoln every American carries in memory. Daniel Chester French modeled the figure. But the hands that carved it — twenty-eight blocks of Georgia marble, assembled so seamlessly that the seams disappear — belonged to six brothers from Tuscany working out of a studio in the Bronx. The Piccirillis. Immigrants whose names appear on no pedestal, whose contribution the country absorbed without ever quite learning it.

That is the story the film tells. And on October 8 it will be told in the town where Lincoln found his voice — to an audience watching, on a giant screen, the story of the men who gave that voice its face in marble.

I did not choose Peoria; Peoria chose the film. That is the kind of coincidence a documentary filmmaker learns to accept with humility, because it is better than anything we could invent. The circle closes on its own: from a courthouse town on the Illinois prairie, to a marble workshop in the Bronx, to the steps where Marian Anderson sang and Dr. King dreamed, and back — a hundred and seventy-two years on — to Peoria.

If you are near central Illinois this fall, the screening is Thursday, October 8, at 9:45 a.m., at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, 222 SW Washington Street. Members of the Fine Arts Society attend free; admission is $12 for adults and $5 for students. I hope the room is full — not for the film's sake, but for the brothers'.

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