“Gabor Boritt was a towering figure in Civil War and Lincoln scholarship. He had a profound influence on my understanding of that period and that man, as well as my work. And he was a good friend—for decades. His loss is immeasurable.” – Ken Burns, documentarian
Gabor as a boy in 1945.
Gabor was born on January 26, 1940, in Budapest, Hungary, to Rozsa and Pal Roth-Szappanos (in the United States, their surname would be changed to Boritt). Gabor was the youngest of three children in a Jewish family that included his brother, Adam, and sister, Judy. For the first four years of his life, the family lived in a stone house in the wealthy Rózsadomb area in the hills of Buda as World War II engulfed Europe. In March 1944, Nazi forces took over Hungary, and Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the aim of which was the systemic eradication of the Jewish people, began to be implemented across the country. Gabor’s grandfather’s family was deported from rural Transylvania and murdered at Auschwitz.
Gabor’s immediate family of five was forced from their home. They found refuge in the janitor’s closet of 44 Wesselényi utca, a school that had been converted into a makeshift hospital on the edge of the Budapest ghetto. Gabor’s father, Pal, helped lead resistance efforts against the Nazis by rescuing potential deportees from train platforms. While their father was away, the family was once threatened by a Nazi thug waving a pistol. It was an exceptionally cold winter, and the frozen bodies of the dead were stacked in the courtyard of the makeshift hospital, eventually reaching beyond the first-floor windows. The Soviet army began a siege of Budapest in December 1944. Allied planes dropped bombs on the city. Gabor recalled to his son a shell striking the floor of the building near where his family had been sitting.
By the end of the war, Budapest was in ruins and Hungary was firmly in Stalin’s grip. Soon thereafter, after Gabor’s mother died suddenly—an emotional wound he carried with him for the rest of his life—and his father and brother were imprisoned, he was sent to an orphanage. He remembered that it was a tough place and he was a small guy, but here he learned that when he got knocked down, he had to get back up.
In 1956, 16-year-old Gabor joined the Hungarian Revolution. He participated in protests on October 23. Riding on vehicles through the city, they shouted “Ruszkik, haza!”—“Russians, go home!” He joined a group that was attempting to pull down a massive statue of Jozef Stalin. Gabor helped fetch ropes and, by the time he returned, the statue had been toppled, and the crowd had broken off pieces. Gabor took a piece of the statue as a memento. Later, he described the euphoria of the revolution in his son Jake’s documentary, Budapest to Gettysburg: “We thought it was a whole new world. Anything was possible.”
Just days later, 3,000 Soviet tanks crushed those possibilities. Gabor’s father, Pal had helped get supplies to the revolution, but realized his family must flee. The family apartment building on Teréz körút was bombarded by Russian tanks while they sheltered in the basement. As the building partially collapsed, Gabor and his family escaped. While his elder brother, Adam, left immediately, their father told Gabor and his sister Judith to go to an English-speaking country. They headed for the Austrian border and, in darkness, hiked through wooded hills until they came to a no-man’s-land guarded by watchtowers and soldiers with machine guns. Freedom lay on the other side. Together, they started running.
Upon reaching Austria, Gabor got his first taste of a free society. The first thing he wanted was the drink forbidden to him behind the iron curtain: Coca-Cola. When he finally tasted a Coke, he was disappointed. After spending months at an Austrian refugee camp, Gabor came to America—President Dwight Eisenhower had welcomed 40,000 Hungarian refugees to the United States—with just one dollar in his pocket, sent to him by his brother.
Gabor arrived in the “dirtiest city” he had ever seen: New York. He worked in a hat factory. Here, he was told that America is “out west,” so he headed to South Dakota. Gabor wanted to learn English, so, in 1959, he picked up a free booklet of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. Captivated by Lincoln’s mastery of the language and his rise from poverty to the presidency, he began studying American history and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yankton College in 1962, followed by a master’s degree from the University of South Dakota the next year. Soon after, Gabor decided to continue his studies, eventually earning a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968.
As an immigrant, he felt obliged to go to Vietnam, where he taught soldiers about the American Civil War in Phuket and Danang, as well as at other military bases in Asia.
Boritt poses with his 1978 book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream.
In 1978, he published his first book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. The opening lines of the book read: “In the beginning were the land and the dream. The land, Robert Frost has written, was ‘vaguely realizing westward, but still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.’ The dream was as old as mankind, of the ‘city upon a hill,’ a light to the world, where men were endowed with the right to rise in life.” The book constituted an original and groundbreaking study of Lincoln’s beliefs and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A survey of leading experts by Civil War Times lists the book among the ten most important books ever written about the 16th president.
Gabor loved teaching. A dedicated professor, Gabor had academic appointments at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, and Memphis State, before arriving at Gettysburg College, mere blocks from where Lincoln had delivered his most famous address, in 1981.
As a professor at Gettysburg College, Gabor taught American history to students over many decades. He founded the Civil War Institute and, with the help of philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, established the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, which is widely considered the most coveted award for the study of American history. He also helped create the Gilder Lehrman Institute, a leader in improving the teaching of history in schools, and served on the board of the Gettysburg Foundation, helping to build a new visitor center for Gettysburg National Military Park.
Boritt on tour with President Bush on September 5th, 2008.
Beyond this, Gabor was a renowned and highly sought-after guide on the Gettysburg battlefield. He guided luminaries such as Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, actor Charlton Heston, author Elie Wiesel, and General Colin Powell, along with foreign leaders, including Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Velez and Israeli Chief of Defense Moshe Levy. In September 2008, Gabor gave a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield to President George W. Bush, Laura Bush, and a group that included White House Advisor Karl Rove, Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
Among his other books are The Lincoln Image, The Confederate Image, The Gettysburg Nobody Knows, and The Lincoln Enigma.
In 2006, he published The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows. It was featured on the cover of U.S. News and World Report and described as “fascinating” by The New York Times. Gabor wrote of the speech Lincoln delivered in the midst of the buried Union dead at Gettysburg: “Gettysburg, after the battle, is the site of the greatest man-made disaster in American history. This is where the president came to explain why a bloody war had to go on. ‘Gospel’ suggests spiritual rebirth. When Lincoln’s words are best understood, they bring that potential to Americans, indeed to people everywhere. His words pointing to rebirth went even deeper than the Christian message, if that was possible, reaching the primeval longing for a new birth that humankind has yearned for and celebrated with every spring since time immemorial.”
Boritt poses with a cannon on the Gettysburg Battlefield.
At the White House in 2008, President George W. Bush honored Gabor with the National Humanities Medal for a distinguished career of scholarship on Lincoln and the Civil War era, commenting, “His life’s work and his life’s story stand as testaments to our Nation’s precious legacy of liberty.”
The film Budapest to Gettysburg, a documentary by his son Jake Boritt, chronicles Gabor’s history in Hungary and his work on Lincoln and the Civil War. It follows Gabor’s return to Hungary to explore the epic history of his youth that he had heretofore refused to study, and how it had contributed to his important work on Lincoln, the Civil War, and American freedom.
