Young Mr. Lincoln was the middle film in the informal American trilogy, also featuring Stagecoach and Drums along the Mohawk, that John Ford made in his personal annus mirabilis of 1939. It is only ‘a slight exaggeration’, biographer Joseph McBride comments, to say that this was the year in which the famed director ‘discovered America’. Stagecoach (United Artists), the first of the productions, is set on the post-Civil War western frontier, Young Mr. Lincoln in 1830s Illinois, and the last to be made, Drums along the Mohawk, in Revolutionary War-era upper New York state (both the latter were 20th Century-Fox productions). Their filming coincided with the high point of Ford's identification with the Popular Front, whose ideals are evident in each one. Arguably the most interesting of the three in this regard is Young Mr. Lincoln for its treatment of an American icon as a common-man hero before his rise to greatness. This chapter assesses how the movie can be interpreted in relation to John Ford's involvement with the Popular Front phase of Depression-era politics.

Ford's politics over the course of his life were, to say the least, transient, inconsistent and contradictory. A New Deal liberal and internationalist in the 1930s, he became to all intents and purposes a conservative nationalist in later life. This former devotee of FDR supported right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, became a very public admirer of Richard Nixon (who presented him with the Medal of Freedom in 1973), and was a diehard supporter of the Vietnam War. Contrary to his leftist politics in the Depression decade, he was a founder member in 1944 of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing organisation that supplied information about suspected communists to investigative bodies during the Hollywood Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s (a period when he served as executive committee member). Paradoxically, Ford made some of his most racially progressive movies – Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) – at a time when his political views were reaching their conservative peak.