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Even though Vice President Cheney blew his stack with Senator Leahy the other
day, to this point the election this year hasn’t really heated up. For
instance no one has referred to Senator Kerry as looking like a “dishonest Abe
Lincoln ” yet. That will come later. After all there are, what is it, eighteen
months to go until the actual day. At least it seems that way. Plenty of
time left before people really get hot under the collar.
The “Lincoln” crack was first used, I think, against Harold Ross, who used
to be editor of the New Yorker magazine. Any tall, gaunt, gloomy fellow who
gets himself nominated for office is immediately presumed to be trading on his
resemblance to Lincoln and is made to suffer for it. The next thing we’ll hear
is that Kerry has been so carried away by his identification with Honest Abe
that he won’t be satisfied until he’s been assassinated. That’s been said
before too.
You don’t necessarily have to look like Lincoln to run for office on his
coattails. I have a memento of the 1940 Presidential campaign in the form of a
Republican poster advertising the resemblance of their candidate Wendell Willkie
to the Great Emancipator. You had to be a true believer to .spot it. Wendell
no more looked like Lincoln than Danny DeVito does. Well, he was taller than
that, but all the same much too heavy. He most Lincoln-like thing about him
was that he came from Indiana, and after all Lincoln came from Illinois and
that was only a state or two away. He had come out of nowhere to get the
nomination, which was no prize anyway, considering that President Franklin D.
Roosevelt was the opposition, and the party knew he was going to be tough to sell,
so they fell back on Lincoln.
The poster showed eighteen snapshot-type Lincoln scenes with captions
advising that WILLKIE was following in the footsteps of Lincoln. It was all there,
the log cabin, poling a flatboat on the Mississippi, the country lawyer on his
horse, rail-splitting of course, debating Douglas, winning the war, nothing
was omitted. The resemblance between the two men remained elusive however.
Willkie had certainly never lived in a log cabin, or flatboated, or for that
matter ridden a horse, although he was rumored to have a good seat on a bar stool.
The closest he had come to rail-splitting was splitting fees with other Wall
Street lawyers. So much for the effort to convince the public that a new
Lincoln had arrived on the scene. Willkie lost the election.
I’ve seen the Lincoln magic crop up elsewhere, though. In fact I used to
work for the Lincoln Savings Bank. That name was no accident. The bank had
started out after the Civil War as the Deutschesbank, founded in Williamsburg, New
York, then a German community. It continued German until 1917, when America
entered World War I against Germany. Overnight it became the Lincoln. The
impact of this change came home to me sixty-plus years later, when I explored
the cellars in the headquarters building. Lincoln statuary took up all
available space. We had Lincoln standing, sitting, reading, writing, everything
except roller-skating. Apparently the items had been bought in panic and later
sidelined when the war hysteria had passed.
This column wasn’t intended to be all about Lincoln, but I see now that he
has kind of taken over. A writer that I link to from the Drudge Report, Joseph
Sobran, is very down on Lincoln. He contends that the U.S. was organized as a
league of individual states that retained the right to stay in the Union or
leave it as they chose. He produces a great deal of historical evidence to
support this. To him Lincoln was a tyrant who replaced the existing United
States government with a new United State one, a monolithic centralized type with
all possible power concentrated in the federal government, thereby gutting the
rights of the states.
He may be right by the letter of the Constitution, but what I suspect is that
people were no longer looking at the letter of the law by the time of
secession, but were already thinking federally and assuming the existence of an
indissoluble union. That is the way they reacted to secession in any case. Firing
on the flag at Fort Sumter constituted an intolerable insult which galvanized
the North and raised an army up out of the void. The only nod to Sobran’s
point of view came when the war was over, and in spite of a lot of loose talk,
not one Confederate was tried for treason. They hadn’t violated the letter of
the law, but the spirit of it had changed on them.
Lincoln stands vindicated, in other words, and he can continue to run for
reelection by proxy. Like Willkie, the most unlikely candidates will be linked
to him and campaign in his name. The next one may be Governor Pataki. He has
the two main qualifications required. He is tall, and he is a Republican. A
tall Republican. What more could anyone want? He doesn’t come from Illinois,
but he has been there. He looks like he could split a rail if he had to.
The man is obviously ready for the job.
More about Abe. He still gets lots of space in print and books about him
continue to pour out. A publisher once studied his market and concluded that
when it came to selling books there were three can’t-miss subjects which always
sold. These were Lincoln, doctors, and dogs. The obvious thing to do was to
publish a book with the title Doctor Lincoln’s Dog. It didn’t sell.
Lincoln also does pretty well on the Antiques Roadshow, of which I’m a fan. I
’m waiting for one of his pictures to arrive on it, just to exacerbate my
feelings. This is a head of Lincoln painted by Thomas Buchanan Read, a
19th-Century artist better known as a poet. It was one of the artifacts stored in the
bank, stored and ignored, that is. I came across it and told management that
I didn’t know the price of it, but it was clear that it had been painted from
the life and had historical value aside from its artistic value. One of the
vice-presidents disputed this. He brought out a photograph of Lincoln with
all the lines and wrinkles showing and asked how I could compare it with the
glamour-boy painting in my hands. I told him that flattery wasn’t unknown in
Lincoln’s day and Read clearly knew how to apply it. This was beyond argument
because there was no way Abe could have looked that good at any point in his
life. The portrait was placed in the board room without being appraised and I
have lost track of it since, as the bank no longer exists. I wouldn’t be at all
surprised for it to show up on the Roadshow while I watch and grind my teeth.
It has happened to me before. More about that some other time.
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