Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present

4. The Self-Pity of the Defeated: Contesting “Lincolnolatry,” 1918–1945

148 4 THE SELF-PITY OF THE DEFEATED Contesting “Lincolnolatry,” 1918–1945 in 1917, the same year the United states entered the Great War in europe at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson, H. l. mencken (1880–1956) published an essay excoriating the south in the New York Evening Mail, entitled “The sahara of the Bozart.” The south, mencken lamented, had once been a great civilization, but “if the whole of the late confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow,” he exclaimed, “the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. it would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.”1 mencken’s piece did not garner immediate attention in the region. But by 1920, with the war over and Americans returning to a supposed “normalcy” during Warren G. Harding’s presidency, the essay reappeared in mencken’s collection Prejudices: A Second Series, and many southerners reacted with shock and horror to his characterization of their beloved south.2 mencken was one of the most important and influential journalists in America in the 1920s. Yet despite being a fierce and witty critic of southern intellectual culture, he perpetuated on a national scale some of the earlier criticism of Abraham lincoln leveled by Albert Taylor Bledsoe, William Hand Browne, elizabeth meriwether, charles l. c. minor, Kate mason rowland, mildred lewis rutherford, and lyon Gardiner Tyler. mencken genuinely admired lincoln’s political and oratorical gifts, but he thought the president had become “the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality” and “a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the Y.m.c.A.’s.”3 As for lincoln’s handling of the slavery question, mencken averred that he had dealt with it like “a politi- 149 Contesting “Lincolnolatry,” 1918–1945 cian, not a messiah” and that “an Abolitionist would have published the emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull run. But lincoln waited until time was more favorable.”4 Although the Gettysburg Address was “genuinely stupendous,” mencken believed lincoln’s rhetoric obscured the truth that it was the confederates, not the Union, who “fought for the right of the people to govern themselves.” confederate defeat at Gettysburg, according to a later essay of mencken’s, unfortunately led to “The calamity of Appomattox.”5 Perhaps enthused by mencken’s stance, mary carter of virginia, a fervent lincoln detractor and member of the United daughters of the confederacy (Udc), penned a two-page, singlespaced letter in 1924 to the Baltimore journalist virtually begging him to debunk the lincoln myth. “Where are we at, mr. editor, on this great American myth? surely, here is a myth worthy of your doughty pen, and i am hoping you will take a tilt at it, and give the readers of your magazine [the American Mercury] the benefit of your clinical skill.”6 regrettably, at least from carter’s perspective, mencken never found the time to accede to her request, although he contemplated doing so.7 equally important, in 1917 W. e. B. du Bois declared, like Archibald Grimké (1849–1930) years earlier, that what had actually concerned lincoln during the civil War was not the freedom of the slave but saving the Union.8 Five years later du Bois penned a brief description of the president in the July 1922 issue of the magazine he edited for the nAAcP, the Crisis. His depiction of lincoln, although it demonstrated a large measure of admiration, was similar in language to that of previous critics. The piece appeared soon after the lincoln memorial had been dedicated in Washington, d.c., a commemoration of the Great emancipator at which African Americans were denied equal inclusion: “Abraham lincoln was a southern poor white, of illegitimate birth, poorly educated and unusually ugly, awkward, ill-dressed. He liked smutty stories and was a politician down to his toes. Aristocrats—Jeff davis, seward, and their ilk—despised him, and indeed he had little outwardly that compelled respect. . . . at the crisis [civil War] he was big enough to be inconsistent—cruel, merciful; peaceloving, a fighter; despising negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man—a big, inconsistent , brave man.”9 There was also a story in the Crisis claiming that John Brown “had more to do with the emancipation of the...