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282 18 “I Don’t Want to Be Nobody nor Nothink except a Chicago Shyster” Ex–Secretary of War Lincoln and his family returned to Chicago in May 1885 to resume the private life that had been put on hiatus in 1881. They did not return to their old house on Wabash Avenue (which Robert continued to lease out) but rented a house at 25 Walton Place while construction began for a new home on the north shore of Lake Michigan. The Lincolns all were pleased to be back in the city they loved, closer to family and friends. Robert was glad to escape public life; Mary and the children—who by 1885 were ages sixteen, thirteen, and ten—especially were happy to be so much nearer to the Harlans in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, whom they visited constantly during the year. Robert stayed in Chicago to work when his family was away but usually went to Mount Pleasant for weekends. It is a strange circumstance that as Robert, at age forty-one, returned from Washington eager to focus on his law practice, he paralleled his father at the same stage of life. When Abraham Lincoln was forty-one in 1850, he had recently returned from Washington and his one-term stint as congressman and decided to put all his energy into his law practice. While Abraham decided to abandon politics at that point because he felt himself a failure, Robert’s similar decision was for completely different reasons. He simply disliked public life. “My short deviation from a purely professional career has shown me the necessity of not again doing anything which does not belong to it,” he wrote shortly after his return to Chicago. “And for the future my only appearances will be in professional matters, and not in any public or political character.”1 Still, Robert Lincoln was continually approached about public-service opportunities . In early 1886, he was offered the presidency of the new American Protective Tariff League, a solidly Republican notion and organization dedicated chapter eighteen 283 to protect American labor and products from foreign competition by advocating a high tariff on imports.2 The group wanted its first president to be a man “possessing a national character” yet not so conspicuous in politics “as to be likely to bring any adverse criticism or jealousy upon the organization .”3 Although Robert agreed with the group’s public policy positions, he declined the appointment. He told the head of the invitation committee, “I am exceedingly anxious to ‘live down,’ if I may use the words, an impression which has been made known to me . . . that I consider my private occupation as subordinate to calls of a public character.”4 As he more whimsically, yet no less seriously, explained to John Hay, “I don’t want to be nobody nor nothink except a Chicago Shyster.” But more specifically, Robert still, despite having been secretary of war for four years, did not want anything offered that he felt he did not deserve on his own merits. I won’t attempt to write you as I am going to do to the Committee but for your own private ears here are two good reasons against my accepting. There is no good reason why I should be selected as the formal head of such a League and to anyone who gives it a thought the inquiry is at once suggested what has he done to entitle him to such a place and why does he take it? There is no good answer to either question. I am pretty happy just now. I am let alone in the papers and I don’t want my name in them again until I am assured of the regular complimentary notes written by some member of my afflicted family with “no flowers” attached. Like Nanki Pooh, I won’t be there to see it, but I don’t mind that. God willing I will never again be in the jaws of that damning hyena the public at large and no man of my profession could enter the place suggested without being charged with having his lightning rod up as they say.5 Another reason Robert disliked being a public figure was because of the petty annoyances and newspaper-contrived controversies continually manufactured. One such irritation concerned Robert’s May 14, 1885, sale of two horses to the quartermaster general’s department for $850. This was done as the ex-secretary prepared to leave Washington for...

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