Why honest abe

Reynolds updates Lincoln by doing what scholars do now: he makes biography secondary to the cultural history of the country. Lincoln is seen as a man whose skin bears the tattoos of his time. Instead of rising from one episode of strenuous self-making to another, he passes from one frame to the next, a man subsumed.

Lincoln spent February 27, , the day he delivered his Cooper Union speech—the speech that made him President, as he later said—at a hotel across from P. He even hosted a reception at the White House for Tom Thumb and his wife. Lincoln was usually pictured not as a polished neoclassical man, like his political rivals, but as rough and frontier-made. Americans like a craggy guy in times of crisis.

Humphrey Bogart offered a similar look in the Second World War. Even his decision to grow a beard seemed meant to evoke a log-cabin hygiene that was then seen as a sign of sincerity. Lincoln knew how to use the expressive forms of his time as a frame for his mythology. Emerson and Whitman, Reynolds demonstrates, understood Lincoln better, as a national figure, than most journalists could.

Emerson saw in him the model self-reliant man and Whitman the ideal democratic leader. When, for instance, he proposes a parallel between Mary Lincoln locked up in the White House and Emily Dickinson isolated in her home, in Amherst, we feel that we are in the presence of a similitude without a real shape: Emily was a Yankee poet of matchless genius, Mary a bewildered Southern woman in an unmanageable role.

All they shared was being alone in a big house. Elsewhere, Reynolds expresses perplexity that the pro-Lincoln satirist David Locke persisted in writing sketches in the voice of Petroleum V. Nasby, his impersonation of a Copperhead—an anti-Lincoln, pro-slavery Northerner.

Sticking to the joke is what comedians do. Actors know overacting when they see it. Not having enough words means not seeing enough types. Culture is a diffuse thing. Reading a book, choosing a costume, adapting a rhetorical style, transferring a code of conduct from one forum to another, just laughing at a joke—each of these forms of cultural transmission has its own vibration, its own dynamic, and its own web of associations.

What counts is a sense of what counts. Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

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Search for:. Monitor Daily Current Issue. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photos of the Week. New Salem, Ill. You've read of free articles. From working hard, working to negotiate, to not demand whole fees in advance, etc. He wanted new lawyers to be honest, plain and simple. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won. He earned a reputation for honesty while working the circuit as a lawyer.

This reputation spilled into the political arena, where he was widely perceived as just and fair-minded in debate, and adverse to gaining an advantage by foul means. S territory, was a subject of contention and conspiracy stories. Lincoln, a member of the U. On two occasions, Lincoln pointedly asked Polk about the necessity to go to war. Let him answer with facts and not with arguments. Let him remember, he sits where Washington sat; and so remembering, let him answer as Washington would answer…so let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation.

But at times, Honest Abe walks a fine line. A poor boy growing up in what was then a remote area, enduring the tragic death of his mother at an early age, confronting the realization that he had no inclination to become a farmer like his father.

Abe was a thoughtful boy, independent but not rebellious, tall and strong but not a bully, sensitive but not a sissy. We like the story of a poor boy who made good. But I wonder how much longer his story will seem comprehensible to young Americans. The means by which he achieved his goals may seem foreign to twenty-first century Americans. Lincoln did not get ahead by going to the right schools, or by cultivating the right patrons, by achieving high standardized test scores, or by seizing upon a popular fad.

He did not seek celebrity. The revolutions in transportation, commerce, and industry that the United States underwent during the nineteenth century multiplied the occupational options available.

Of his sixty subjects, very few were newly rich entrepreneurs. Instead, most of them were scientists, inventors, and statesmen. They represented the kind of individuals, Seymour believed, who were making the world anew during the era of industrial revolution, geographical expansion, and knowledge explosion.

They had been able to remake their world because they had first made themselves. Better remembered than Seymour as an author is Horatio Alger, Jr. Where Seymour wrote biographies of real people, Alger wrote inspirational fiction about poor boys who made good. But these turns of fortune are not what the stories are really about.

This is why young people read the stories for generations—until comparatively recently.