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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780809337774 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Southern Illinois University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2019 |
| Series: | Concise Lincoln Library |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 188 |
| Sales rank: | 314,768 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction His flow of humor was a sparkling spring gushing out of a rock—the flashing water had a somber background which made it all the brighter. —David Ross Locke There may be no more fitting an introduction to a book on Lincoln’s sense of humor than a story at his own expense, one that he thought the best he had ever heard. It involved two Quaker women who, traveling in a railroad car, were discussing the likely outcome of the war. “I think,” one declared, “that Jefferson Davis will succeed.” “And why does thee think so?” asked the other. “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes; but the Lord will think Abraham is joking!” The episode highlights several themes central to this study of Lincoln’s humor. It delivers a reminder not only of his great relish for the telling of anecdotes and jokes but also of his appetite for repeating them even when—particularly when—they were at his own expense: self-mockery was a familiar part of his repertoire. The story equally points to the more or less universal reputation he had acquired over the course of his life as an unsurpassed fount of jocular tales. Yet it shows, too, a conviction among some of his compatriots that this was no proper way for a public figure to behave: how was it possible for ordinary folk to take the nation’s commander in earnest if the Al-mighty himself was unable to do so? Finally, that this much-repeated tale continues to circulate a century and a half after his death reveals how Lincoln’s special standing in the pantheon of humorous political leaders continues to inhabit the popular imagination Lincoln’s contemporaries universally noted his delight in humor; so, too, have his subsequent biographers. In his own time, he was a mold breaker: the first president overtly and consistently to make storytelling and laughter tools of the office. At the Chicago Sanitary Fair in 1864, busts titled The Two American Humoristswere exhibited: Dan Rice, the blackface minstrel, and Abraham Lincoln. No occupant of the White House has since matched his talent, tactical skill, and openness in this respect, not least because a reputation for too much jocularity has, in more recent times, been deemed politically damaging. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s lightheartedness was judged even by his admirers to be undignified; John F. Kennedy, one of the most wry and amusing men to hold the highest office, and who was widely admired as a humorist, still held back in press conferences for fear of appearing unstatesmanlike in the newspaper reports; even Ronald Reagan, who came closest to Lincoln in his skill as a raconteur and readiness to make himself the butt of a joke, was open to the charge that his humor was a substitute for thought and—since he was willing to do “anything for a laugh”—risked becoming “a vaudeville routine.” Lincoln by contrast suffered few of the inhibitions felt by later presidents. In part, this difference was because, as several historians have observed, humor was core to Lincoln’s being, a “way of life” and a “habit of mind.” It expressed his essential humanity, insofar as humor connotes “an intimate acquaintance with human nature and life, a sense of proportion, and thus of disproportion, a realization of the petty conceits, the affectations, the foibles and weaknesses of men.” Those who watched him closely perceived three predominant, separate, but interdependent moods: high-spirited jollity, self-absorbed contemplation, and melancholy. Laughter and sadness were two sides of the same coin. William H. Herndon described his law partner as a “sad-looking man” whose “melancholy dripped from him as he walked.” His long-time associate Judge David Davis offered a vivid image: “Mr. Lincoln was not a social man by any means: his Stories—jokes &c. . . were done to whistle off sadness.” This was Lincoln’s self-diagnosis, too. He told an Iowa congressman that his recourse to humor was an essential relief from his “hours of depression.” Using a bow and arrow as a boy, he said, he had learned that “one must let up on the bow if the arrow is to have force.” He added, “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer, and don’t know a cloud from a star. I am of another temperament.’ The image of Lincoln as a stoic figure—isolated and ground down by the cares of office, personal tragedy, and spiritual crises—is commonplace in both scholarly and popular renderings of the sixteenth president. This perception makes it all the more understandable that his humor and frivolity should be judged an expression of deep psychological need. To read Lincoln’s humor in this way, as a reflexive outgrowth of his personality, is beyond reasonable dispute. But this view should not obscure the extent to which Lincoln worked throughout his life to develop the humorist’s craft and hone the art of storytelling. As an appreciative reader of Sydney Smith’s essays, he would have taken to heart the droll but depressive clergyman’s instrumentalist advice on the importance of practical efforts to remedy low spirits: reading amusing books, watching comic drama, and seeking light-hearted company. Lincoln admired resourcefulness; he was as enterprising in his use of humor as he was in political management and leadership. It is true, as James G. Randall stated, that Lincoln’s “humor was no mere technique, but a habit of his mind.” Yet that technique was an essential and embedded reality, the result of choice and adaptation through practice and experience. The evolution of Lincoln’s uses of humor—how he profoundly altered its style and tone to fit the changing needs of his career—merits its own narrative. It forms the subject of chapter 1. Collections of Lincoln’s stories began to appear during his lifetime. They were symptomatic of the boisterous political landscape of mid-nineteenth century America, with its male drinking, singing, gambling, and joke telling. Old Abe’s Joker, or Wit at the White House (1863), Old Abe’s Jokes, Fresh from Abraham’s Bosom (1864), and Uncle Abe’s Comic Almanac (1865) were cheap productions that took commercial advantage of the public’s appetite for Lincoln’s wit, but they mostly repackaged old and hackneyed tales that had never passed his lips. More likely to be authentically Lincolnian were the attributed anecdotes that peppered the wartime newspaper columns and contributed to posthumous compilations. Distinguishing between the genuine and the inauthentic instances of “Lincoln’s” humor is as much an art as a science, but Paul M. Zall’s recent encyclopedic col-lections have come closer than any to establishing what are canonical and what are not. What remains surprising is how rarely the sheer richness of Lincoln’s humor has been addressed and its complexity analyzed. Contemporaries, even hostile ones, recognized his versatility. “With the caustic wit of Diogenes he combines the best qualities of all the other celebrated jokers of the world,” concluded the dyspeptic New York Herald. “He is more poetical than Horace, more spicy than Juvenal, more anecdotal than Aesop, more juicy than Boccaccio, more mellow than rollicking Rabelais, and more often quoted than the veteran Joe Miller.” Exploring the many-sided character and multiple sources of Lincoln’s humor—notably, its western tall tales, morality stories, bawdy jokes, linguistic tricks, absurdities, political satire, and sharp wit—is the purpose of chapter 2. The third chapter examines one particular dimension of Lincoln’s ecumenical taste in humor: his special appetite for satirical work lampooning hypocrisy and ethical double standards. His own satirical compositions enjoyed at best only limited success and in at least one case had troubling consequences. This experience made him all the more appreciative of the razor-sharp satire of a young Ohio newspaperman, David Ross Locke, who shredded the politics and values of the antiadministration Peace Democrats (“Copperheads”) through a monstrous creation, the bigoted Petroleum V. Nasby. Lincoln did not use superlatives lightly; when he declared that Locke was a genius for whose satiric gift he would “gladly” relinquish his office, he was making a very special statement. Yet historians have largely ignored the significance of Lincoln’s admiration. One explanation for this neglect may be that Nasby’s Copperhead theology and the political universe it served are much less accessible to modern readers than they were to Lincoln and his contemporaries. Additionally, there are evident sensitivities in dissecting a text whose intentionally coarse, offensive, and racist language touches a raw nerve in the reader. As one commentator has remarked, in Nasby there is little “softening of vulgarity in deference to public taste.” To remedy this neglect, chapter 3 describes Nasby’s dubious ethical universe and Locke’s purposes in sufficient detail to explain the nuances of Lincoln’s plea-sure and show the moral springs of his own humor. Certain kinds of levity—satire, above all—can yield insights into the values of those who fashion and appreciate them. Humor in the pursuit of justice has great power. It was Plato who reflected, “Serious things cannot be grasped without ridiculous ones,” and it was Aristotle who said, quoting Anacharsis, “Be merry, so you can be serious.” The final chapter addresses the purposes and effects of Lincoln’s humor, and illuminates two themes. One is commonly but not systematically addressed in the Lincoln literature: the rich variety of the ends he had in mind with his jokes and stories. His use of humor in speeches and private conversations was rarely for its own sake. Mostly it was designed to secure political or personal advantage, sometimes by frontal assault on opponents, but much more commonly—with both friend and foe—by a mixture of approaches that included lucid exposition through parable, obfuscation through hilarity, refusal through wit, and diversion through cunning. The discussion here aims to provide a more methodical and comprehensive analysis of Lincoln’s intent. The other theme of this chapter—popular reactions to Lincoln’s jocularity, particularly the waves of criticism it elicited during his presidency—has largely eluded mainstream scholarly attention. With the passage of time his humor has come to be regarded with a sentimental fondness that was far from universal among his contemporaries. Those who warmed to the wit and wisdom of a storytelling president were matched by others—both radicals and conservatives—who dismissed him as an inadequate, a “Simple Susan,” a “smutty joker,” and, in Wendell Phillips’s derisory words, a “first rate second rate man.” “President Lincoln is a joke incarnated,” sniffed the New York Herald, and “has nothing but his jokes to recommend him.” These charges were forceful, threatening, and damaging. Some saw him as “a trifling Nero”: the “blundering trifler” who jokingly fiddled as the republic burned. The political assault reached its climax during the election of 1864, when the opposition press subverted the popular image of Lincoln the rail-splitter. Now he became the side-splitter and Union-splitter, driving a wedge between North and South. Lincoln’s sense of humor, then, has to be taken seriously. It was an essential element in the thought and practice of both man and president. Appraising its full significance means seeing it within the cultural and political framework of his own time, recognizing its rich variety and complexity of purpose, understanding its ethical dimension, and remaining aware of the political risks that Lincoln ran in “retailing” jokes while the nation—“this republic of suffering”—was engaged in an existential struggle costing at least three-quarters of a million lives. As the nation suffered, so of course did the president. Humor was his lifeline. He found no story more apt than the rueful joke of Justin Butterfield of Chicago, who had been asked at the start of the Mexican-American War whether he opposed it and replied, “no, I opposed one War” (in 1812): “That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.” Such dark levity acted as a tonic, giving Lincoln the strength to pursue more constructive purposes. As the war drew to an end he told a close friend, “die when I may I want it said of me by those who know me best . . . that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” In this strenuous nurturing of the republic, he drew on his strategic wisdom, clarity of principle, skill in political management and communication, grasp of human psychology, and physical and mental strength. This study makes the case that to these ingredients we should add his remarkable and celebrated sense of humor.