Roosevelt's Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol (review)

92CIVIL WAR HISTORY And yet, Quarles thinks, Brown may not have misjudged the militancy of slaves as much as some historians suppose. Because of bad timing the revolt was suppressed too quickly to really test black militancy. Certainly northern blacks were not unresponsive as the aftermath of Harper 's Ferry shows. And, despite a lavish display by the southern press of loyal slaves professing hatred for Brown, these same journals report a wave of arson attempts, suggesting a different response than the one being featured on their front pages. Of course the chief impact of Brown has been the legend rather than the man. For blacks his image has proved more enduring than that of other whites whose noble words are often belied by self-serving deeds. Even for those frustrated black nationalists of the 1960s, the division of the world along the lines of color was never complete. Because they remembered that there had been one white man who cared enough to become a martyr to their cause. John Brown was evidence that mankind is one. W. McKee Evans California Polytechnic University Roosevelt's Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights, and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol. By Alfred Haworth Jones. (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974. Pp. 134. $8.95.) Alfred Haworth Jones's title imperfectly suggests the central theme of this provocative study: Franklin Roosevelt's discovery and use of Abraham Lincoln, with the help of Carl Sandburg, Stephen Vincent Benêt and Robert Sherwood, to strengthen Roosevelt's leadership as America prepared for World War Two. Through Sandburg's The Prairie Years ( 1926) and The War Years ( 1939), Benét's John Brown's Body ( 1928) and Sherwood's "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (1939), these spiritual descendants of Walt Whitman demonstrated the symbolic importance of legitimizing American democracy by rediscovering for their generation Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg began almost immediately after Roosevelt's inauguration in 1933 to note the parallels between the aristocrat of Hyde Park and the prairie lawyer from Illinois. In 1935, Sandburg, known as the Washington correspondent for the Lincoln administration, wrote F.D.R. that "as with Lincoln there has been a response of the People to you: they have done something to you and made you what you could not have been without them, this interplay operating steadily in your growth." With publication of Sandburg's Tlie War Years in 1939, Max Lerner hailed the new Lincoln image as "almost providentially made for our present national crisis." During the 1940 presidential campaign, Sandburg delivered his "What Lincoln Would Have Done" speech in which he concluded that Lincoln would have been a New Dealer. Benêt and Raymond Massey also lent their Lincoln magic to the Roosevelt cause. BOOK REVIEWS93 With Sherwood writing his speeches, F.D.R. himself more frequently compared his striving for national unity with that of Lincoln in 1864. Jones's title emphasizes for a media-conscious public the manipulation of the electorate involved in securing and retaining the presidency. His study, however, deals more fundamentally with the process by which in a democracy such as ours poets as well as politicians engage in legitimizing their roles and their generation by interpreting and identifying with our great historical figures. Finally, Jones suggests why Franklin Roosevelt as president could kneel with more apparent conviction at the Lincoln altar in time of war than could Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Unlike his two successors, F.D.R. led the nation's worship with the support of some of its foremost poets and playwrights. The liturgy was more convincing, the political self-serving more concealed , and the nation united to face what was widely regarded to be a just war. Christopher N. Breiseth Sangamon State University ...